You are All My Children

I was more or less born watching All My Children. I stopped watching regularly several years ago, although it's like the mob (wrong soap, but I also watch that one): You're never really out. I used to write the Tuesday AMC recaps for rec.arts.tv.soaps.abc (remember USENET? Then you are old, as am I). I'll be giving the show a send-off with friends I made on RATSA, some of my very first imaginary internet friends. I think I'll have more to say on the slow death of the genre when I'm slightly less over-committed than I am right now. But for now, here's what was happening in Pine Valley on 9/23/1997. WE HAVE AN OPENING FOR A MISTRESS Skye toodles around Weirdwynd hummingly and grabs a nostril-full of some garment of Ed's. He pops in and watches her. She spies him and he tells her not to stop as it happily reminds her of Maria. They discuss the kids in a very couple-like manner. Ed wants to pitch the shirt of her olfactory dreams because it's covered with paint. She urges him to save it. He agrees, saying it's another nice memory. Ed wants to take her out to dinner for all her help. She tries to plead work. Ed urges her, she accepts. They opt for Holidays over the Valley Inn. Ed calls Mary in to brief her. She asks if he's up to it and asks about his hand. He urges her to call if the kids wake up. She agrees. They bail, she picks up the phone and reaches out to the Count to deliver the bad news: Ed is better. Ed walks in and catches her in the act. I haven't seen him glower like that in ages. He rips the phone from her hand, but Dimp is so upset that he's broken the connection. Ed harangues Mary who claims Dimp was concerned for his health. Mary admits she told him about Sea City et al. Skye gets in on the act. Mary weeps and wails. Ed kicks her out, telling her she betrayed him and his wife and is out of there tonight. Skye and Ed discuss damage control. Ed is irate that Mary turned on Maria who was good to her when she was ill. Ed wonders who else Dimp has bought. Skye is astonished that loyalty means nothing to Dimp. Ed says Loyalty, love, trust and any other human emotion is just a word to Dimp. He'll stop at nothing to get what he wants. Skye comes in with an apron and a cookbook with flour all over her face. She's going to make dinner. Ed tries not to be giggle as Skye mulls over the cookbook. They look up how to fold and egg. Ed takes the book from her, and says he knows what she's up to and it won't work. Skye looks incredibly guilty. Ed says she can't distract him from the Dimp/Mary/ Maddie debacle. He appreciates it, and wants to repay her. He's letting her go. Skye is stricken and begs for her job at Tempo. He tells her to go forth, be fruitful and multiply. Skye grits her teeth and insists she's having fun. Ed doesn't want her her to give up her life for him. Skye refuses to let him go through the fight of his life alone. She tells him that armed forces won't remove her from Wildwind. Ed relents and is shocked to find that he just laughed. He feels like it's a sign: if he can laugh, he can win. Skye runs out to deal with the souffle. Ed and Skye are finishing the dinner. Ed refuses more. They joke about her cooking abilities. He asks about the tune she was humming. Sky reminisces about Althea getting ready to go out as she watched when she was a little girl. She had repressed the memory before tonight. The bell rings. Ed goes to answer. It's a cop serving Edmund papers to appear in court re: Maddy's custody. SHE HAS AN OPENING, SHE'S A PRINCESS Rewind to Laura interrupting Scott's slipping virginity. Gillian scolds her for not knocking and then for her guttersnipe language in explaining that she knows what's going on. All the blood has clearly abandoned Scott's brain as he defends Gillian from Laura who tells him she's oh so sorry that she thought sex should mean something. Gillian burbles something about it being fun. Laura seems primed to scratch her eyes out, but settles for calling trash trash regardless of which side of the tracks it's from. Scott lackidaisically berates her for such language. He yells at her for barging in. Laura suggests closing the door next time. Scott rather irrelevantly tells her that Gillian's performance is a command one and wonders why Laura is there. She claims Stu offered bad info and urges them to pick up where they left off. Gillian tells her it's not th th that seempew. Laura wonders how many men of different nationalities have fallen for the faux party girl act. Gillian wonders why Laura doesn't like games. Laura goes off on phonies. Gillian throws it back saying Laura lied to Scott for months. Scott doesnt like that either. Gillian urges Laura to admit she's jealous and hangs on Scott. Scott tells her to back off. Her voice leaps several octaves as she sneers that she didn't realize Scott was only interested in her mind. More unintelligible stuff and she flounces out after some advice to Laura about not starving? Laura apologizes and humbly admits she had no right to barge in on them. She says he has the right to bed whomever he wants. Scott is either the quintessential tease or suffering from Alzheimer's. In spite of the fact that he was playing down comforter to the princess in the bra, he claims he wouldn't do that when Stu might walk in. The long and the short of it is, it's none of Laura's business, he's a guy with needs and Gillian is a veritable Galaxy of Mailbox Fulfillments. Scott, with no trace of irony, is indignant that she should think him so cheap. Scott tells her again that sex was not the issue and can't believe she really thinks that's why they broke up. Scott says that Gillian's assets help him forget what he misses most: Laura. The Luuuv doctor has prescribed defunct royalty for what ails him. Laura doesn't trust him and therefore doesn't love him and that's the bottom line. He tells her to look him up if she decides to trust him. THE MAGICAL MELTDOWN TOUR At WRCW Liza looks on as Tad is in the throes of another successful interview with Jane and her magazine. Pitch pitch pitch, verbal spar verbal spar verbal spar and yes . . . ladies and germs . . . I do believe there's a ratty orange haze on the meadow. Brooke rushes the set and tells Tad that they have to tell the public together. She raves, she rambles, Tad tries to reason and Liza orders the crew to catch every minute of the breakdown. Liza directs the camera crew. Tad continues to try to talk her down. Jane Pratt comes over for no particular reason and reminds Brooke that they met the month before at the Women in Media (snicker) conference. Brooke alternates for a few moments between apologizing and continuing to rave at Tad. Jane slowly backs away and Tad asks her to reschedule. My heart about stops as Brooke utters the words that strike fear into the hearts of BABES around the world: I want to do it here. I wanna do it here for the cameras. She assures him that this could happen to anyone! (Don't you threaten me, woman) They tried to put her in jail for telling the truth. Tad, at long last, is the first person, including hospital personnel, to ask her for a blow by blow of the plane incident. She says she tried to warn innocent people. Tad tries to ask sensible questions and she barks that they don't want to deal with her (no one does, Brooke, no one does). She explains that she took a big scary flying thingy, but it was ok because Jim was with heranitwasokuntilthebigbadnoiseandthepressureandthethingand the oh Ladyyyeeeee. She makes weird hamster noises when she comes to the part about the flight attendant restraining her from opening the Emergency exit. She says Jim defended her, apparently having sublimated ths slap. Tad gently suggests a short sharp trip to hospital land. Brooke promises us all that she isn't going to go away and Tad has to help her. Jim creeps in on little cat feet. Tad tries to reassure Brooke that if the airline is hiding something it will come to light. He tells her it was natural for her to panic so soon after the crash. She screeches that the threat was real, not her panic. Tad tries to present the possibility that she'll never have a satisfactory answer. Brooke whines that Jim is the only one who understands, knows etc. Tad suggests that she talk to someone. Brooke spies Jim and gets positively banshee-like demanding that Jim explain things. Tad finally clues in that they're being taped and tells everyone to knock off. Liza slinks around taking notes as Tad demands Brooke go back to the hospital if the police are involved. Derrick shows up to escort her back to rubber land. Jim get sin his face . Liza looks pleased as punch. She watches the back of Brooke's head through a monitor. Jim tells Derrick this doesn't have to get ugly. Derrick suggests it already has. JT winds down and asks for a private word with his detectiveness. JT points out that this could be a double-edged PR nightmare. Derrick can't let her walk, but JT isn't suggesting that. He promises to take Brooke on a date down to HQ on the morrow. Derrick caves, but still tries to sound threatening as he promises an APB if she's a no show. Brooke throws looks of death at Brooke, then rolls over to have her belly-scratched as JT approaches. As they bail, she babbles about having won Tad over to their side. Liza smiles. She hands the tape off to a lackey instructing him to rush it to editing and suggesting that problems be addressed to her, not to Tad. He re-enters. She plays innocent when he asks after the tape. She flat out lies that it has probably been erased. Tad plays the baby card: is she gonna teach Coco to lie in utero? Liza says it was fascinating and he's too close to the issue. He begs her as a friend to give the tape up. She says she has sympathy but she can't back off every big name loony who throws herself in camera range for him. Tad begs again, for her to do it for him. Doing the right thing is more important than a 30 share. Liza says responsibility to audience out ways responsibility to the mother of his child and she will report the meltdown. Tad blames this coldness on Adam hurting her. Liza appears to consider this. Back at Casa Destiny Brooke tries to thank Jim. He assures her it's nothing. Brooke wants to make a list and check it twice. Jack tops the list of pressure folk. Jim rips the pen and paper from her hand. She whinges to him to back off. She turns on him, telling him he sold out and asking the dollar amount. He denies taking a dime (hmmm . . . didn't they discuss him taking a settlement earlier? Wasn't Brooke sure he could do no wrong?) Brooke says that the concern everyone is playing at is a smoke screen. JT tells her she's hiding behind her anger so she doesn't have to deal with the crash. He kneels in front of her and urges her to let what is inside of her out. I predict the CDC is all over his pornographing butt in minutes. Brooke stares at him, fiddles with her ear. Then her chin. Hauls herself to her feet and vows not to give into fear because it's what THEY want. She won't be trapped in the past. She will face each day head on, she squeaks. No body is the boss of her or her feelings. She trounces to the stairs, looks back over her shoulder at him, then heads up. JT looks put out.

Re-Seduced: Minnesota Fringe Festival, Day 2.

On Sunday, we once again rearranged dinner plans slightly to accommodate our theatre schedule. Also, Saturday was just a leeettle overindulgent on the food and booze front, so a later dinner was not a bad idea.

First up, Steampunk! Anyone who knows anything about me knows that a show called Robot Lincoln: The Revengeance (The Musical) is like crack tailored to my specific nerd receptors, so that was our first show on Saturday, back at the Thrust (STOLL!) stage at the Rarig Center. (See previous entry for bitching about the building, but liking the actual space.) As we waited in the traditional second of 2 lines, I tweeted gleefully about the warning sign outside the theatre (guns, strobe lights, adult language, and violence), and broke the rules about no photography (only realized that I was breaking a rule in retrospect; also I'm not sure taking a picture of my program counts as rule breaking, even though I was in the theatre) to capture the Best. Dramatis. Personae. Evar.



Sadly, the show itself was pretty disappointing. The "plot" was convoluted and there wasn't much in the way of fun dialogue. The performers were singing to taped music, which led to a lot of problems. (I feel like an utter shit mentioning that—my homeless, underfunded theatre group had to do the same with a production of Mother Courage and Her Children, and it was a nightmare.) On the plus side, the group seems to have paid a lot of attention to the design, and that paid off. Robot Lincoln's costume was terrific, and there were a number of other great visual touches.

The "love duet" between Booth and Robot Lincoln was everything I think the show could have been with more time and stability for the production. Jason Garton was terrific as Booth, and Libby Slater was hilarious as Mary Todd Lincoln (less so as "Uncle Samantha," but that character was a very sketchy).

From the Rarig Center we were off to the Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul for The Duties and Responsibilities of Being a Sidekick by The Barkada Theatre Project. Other than being a sucker for superhero stuff, we hadn't chosen this show for any particular reason, but I'm so glad we did. The show was really well written (an interesting, compact story—no mean feat with a maximum of 60 minutes), had great fight choreography, and the cast (featuring Randy Reyes, whom we'd loved in Brain Fighters on Saturday) was just great from top to bottom. Also, great pre-show and entr'acte music, even if they DID cut us off on the theme from The Greatest American Hero just when we were taking it to the bridge.

From the Gremlin back to Theatre Garage for Those Were the Days by Blue Umbrella Productions. TV themes arranged swing-choir style with a minimal, but well-done framing story? Yes please! Really great arrangements, great ensemble and solo work from the whole cast (I forgive the mishap with the Jem theme, though it is dear to my heart), fun choreography. I'm not sure I would have done the whole Eight is Enough theme, but it's not my show, now is it? Shutting up, sir.

And finally, back to the Thrust at the Rarig Center for The Smothers Brothers Grimm., by Comedy Suitcase. This was the show we'd rearranged our dinner plans for. It had some great highlights, especially the closing "silent film," but the whole show was uneven.

The framing premise involves Milton, a young boy (wonderful work by Andrew Moy) who has recently lost his comedy-obsessed grandfather, and whose parents are convinced that he is not dealing with the loss. The parents try to get him to sleep by telling fairy tales, but Milton insists on "punching them up like grandpa would." We get Hansel & Gretel as told by Laurel & Hardy. Our group was divided on this. I mostly liked it, but felt it went on a bit long (then again, it's Laurel & Hardy . . .). Next was Rapunzel a la I Love Lucy, which just felt awkward and as if there weren't a lot of there there. Bob Newhart responding to the 911 call from the Three Bears, suffered from not enough Bob Newharty goodness. Some of the interstitial stuff with the parents and lovable drunk uncle were really good, and some fell a bit flat. The epic silent Sleeping Beauty segment was epic.

I was hit really hard by the realization that my fun at Fringe was over. I'm still trying to talk myself off the ledge of crazy renewal of my involvement in theatre.

So Say . . . Well, I . . . Because "We All" Said So Some TIme Ago

A handful of thoughts on the ending of Battlestar Galactica. 5p01l3rz, obviously!

I really liked Battlestar Galctica a lot, although I don't think I ever loved it. Just when I might've gotten to that point, the first season ended with the "1 Year Later" bullshit. I never quite got over that, which is unlike me. (I am, generally speaking, a very adaptable TV viewer.)

We were well behind in BSG viewing pretty much all season. I don't think I got spoiled for much of anything, which has a lot more to do with being out of the fandom than good behavior on anyone's part.

My interest really dipped to a low in "Revelations," as the nuked Earth seemed so very obvious. The byzantine explanation of the final five and their place in human–cylon history was not helping. When we picked back up "Sometimes a Great Notion," I was frustrated with all the shortcuts taken to Dee's end.

It isn't that I find a suicide at that time unbelievable. It isn't even that I didn't buy that Dee would take her own life. In fact, I pretty much knew from the moment we saw Dee's reaction shot on Earth that she was done for (didn't necessarily know it would be such an overt suicide). But her whole story line takes place against a kind of emotional green screen. By the time we have the bizarre scene with her romping with Hera, Helo, and Athena, I wondered if the problem wasn't Dee, but that everyone else in the main cast had suffered some kind of head injury that prevented them from seeing that she'd snapped. And, well, the best thing I can say about that episode is that Lucy freakin' Lawless and her nightmare hair finally got left behind.

I liked "The Oath" and "Blood on the Scales." It was good to have Gaeta finally do something—some culmination of behavior that had been bizarre and erratic since he served as President frakking Baltar's aide de camp. There was plenty of fury to go around on both sides. Zarek's slaughter of the quorum could be viewed as annoyingly directive (LOOK! LOOK! HE'S THE BAD GUY! DON'T ROOT FOR HIM!), but that gun was on the mantel when Zarek was introduced: Whether he's a guerrilla or a freedom fighter in today's paper, his tactics will always be brutal and uncompromising. Oh, and I loved the return of Starbuck—MY Starbuck, devoid of emo and bubblegum.

Unfortunately, "No Exit" killed any momentum that had been built, at least for me. Talky, talky. Obvious. Boring. Stale metaphors. Yes, I have couch trauma related to No Exit, specifically, but I don't think it was all in my head. "Deadlock" didn't do a great deal to pick up the pace, either. Part of the problem was poor Ellen's schizophrenia.

I've no idea when they decided that she was the final cylon, but boy was that decision covered in phlebotenum. I don't fault Kate Vernon, who did very well occupying an entirely new character we'd never seen before. I fault the whipsaw writing that tried to reconcile her as the real brains of the five with her long-running, completely-toxic-but-somehow-a-great-love relationship with Tigh.

But then I loved almost all of "Someone to Watch Over Me." Ok, I loved about half of "StWOM." Ok, I loved the Starbuck parts. The crushing monotony of the briefings. The sudden memory that the more fucked up things get, the funnier she gets.

But then there's Chief. What. the. Fuck? In addition to not buying for a frakking second that he is so completely undone by Boomer's reappearance that he can't think straight, I found it staggering that the script for the episode barely acknowledges the fact that Chief presumably beats another 8 unconscious to make the substitution in Boomer's cell. When we then add in the torture porn of inherent in juxtaposing the Boomer/Helo sex to the bruised, bloody, and bound Athena in the closet . . . UGH. Please, writers, work out your own mommy/woman-who-done-you-wrong issues on your own time.

I'm just going to skip "Islanded in a Stream of Stars." Honestly, I can't remember much about it, and the Boomer Beating/Beat Off material of "StWOM" leads pretty well into what I liked and disliked about "Daybreak."

The flashbacks to before the fall could have gone wrong, but on balance, I liked them and appreciated the pieces of characters that they slotted into place. On a technical note, using long shots in most of these flashbacks caused me a lot of "Is that Lee or is that Anders?" confusion.

I know there's a lot of dissatisfaction with the Kara/Lee nookie close encounter, and I appreciate and get the criticisms. However, it kind of worked for me. I buy the fact that Kara loved Zak in her fucked up, damaged way. But I also buy that Kara is and always has been exceptional, in both positive and negative ways, and so is Lee. In contrast, Zak is a nice guy, but plodding. Ordinary. Mediocre.

It's not particularly admirable in either Kara or Lee that in the moment, they'd forget about the little people (and it's a pretty tired, ethically suspect convention) but I believed it. Anders' monologue about perfection shed more light on both Kara and Lee than it did on him. (That's my bias, certainly. Michael Trucco's performance never elevated Anders to anything more than a Lee also-ran as far as I'm concerned.) Plus, I'm sorry, but no one's chemistry comes close to rivaling that off Bamber/Sackoff. I am shallow.

Beyond that, most of my likes/dislikes are bullet-pointable, and so I shall bullet-point:

• Nice of the writers to leave Chief completely out of "Islanded in a Stream of Stars," and then casually reveal, "Oh yeah, Chief's complicity with Boomer? We knew about that." Um, what?
  
• Hated Kara-as-Angel. Hated the Angels in general. Hate hate hate the tired SciFi (SyFy, syphilitic) trope of postcorporeality being the ultimate stage in unilinear human evolution.
  
• Poor Cally's kid! (Does he even have a name?) Everyone forgets until the last moment that his mom got airlocked My Two Dads both go off on the suicide mission.
  
• And speaking of our belated recall that Cally got airlocked. . . . I've been hating on Tory for a good long while for a variety of reasons, Cally's quickly forgotten death being chief amongst them, but I hate that her end came Tyrol's hands, given the events of "StWOM." Nice that Boomer buys it for her sins, Tory buys it for her sins, Dee buys it for . . . well, I don't especially know why Dee drew the suicide card, and Tyrol gets to finish the series with a manly act of violence against his former lover. In general, the clumsy inattention to gender in the last few episodes really annoyed me.
  
• WTF? on Cavil deep throating his own gun.
  
• Yes, I know that President Badger made no sense whatsofrakkin' ever, but it made me laugh. Plus the dog makes it, which means I don't have to hunt down and kill every last person associated with the show. A domesticated dog in the mix 150,000 years ago probably shouldn't screw with the timeline of animal domestication TOO much, and dogs do come first.
  
• Not that anyone but me cares, but the setting of the fleet's arrival on Earth 150,000 years ago means that we might attribute the successful diaspora of anatomically modern humans at the expense of archaic Homo sapiens to interbreeding with the fleet. That's a pretty punk-ass unifactorial explanation. The ZK, at 1:26 into "Daybreak," paused the TiVo, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "This may be hard for you." It's fortunate that the script didn't go too far down that road.
  
• Mary McDonnell is such a star. I just loved her performance at every single moment in the series, even when the writing for her was shit. Like everyone else, I was completely undone by her scene with Cottle, and I just love her.
  
• I'm glad that Helo survived, even though I'm not sure how he did. Helo may be the one character whose moral compass remained more or less intact through the whole series.
  

And that's about the it.

The Rock Loves Pie: Alton Brown's "Super Apple Pie"

Well who doesn't, right? But "love" is probably an inadequate term to describe the M's feelings about apple pie. Several years ago, he watched in awe as the Penis Lady decided on a slice-by-slice basis whether a particular apple was good enough for the pie she was making (making in an extremely old school and temperamental oven, I might add). So when the "Apple of My Pie" episode of Good Eats aired . . .

eing dewey-eyed optimists, we'd gotten esoteric software like Applejack, tapioca flour, and grains of paradise a while back, thinking we'd be able to saunter out to a Blood, Bath, & Beyond for other necessities. However, in an unusual turn for AB, the Super Apple Pie requires hardware not necessarily found by default in the standard American kitchen. Or in a standard (or nonstandard) American kitchen store. Specifically, one needs:

1. Not just any old apple corer/slicer, but the jumbo kind. By reducing the forbidden fruit to no fewer than 12 uniform slices, the jumbo corer unlocks the secrets of uniformly delicious filling.
   
2. A 2-part tart pan. Ok, I'm absolutely willing to own up to the fact that the number of tart pans in my kitchen is (was) zero, but had I had a tart pan, it certainly would not have been the right kind, as AB demands a tart pan that is 2 inches deep. Trips to several up-scale cooking stores and one cake-decorating store (hey, it's around the corner from my local yarn store, and I scored an awesome set of H. P. Lovecraft-themed cookie cutters for Chicagowench, what do you want from my life?) later, I can tell you that's not easy to find. But it was the Swedes (via Amazon) to the rescue.
   
3. And, of course, you'll need a pie bird. What's that? You're neither a spinster aunt nor a character in an Agatha Christie mystery and you've never heard of a pie bird? Fear not, once you're over your ceramic/glass hen dish obsession Amazon is there for you.
   

The hardware did all arrive eventually, and I decided that today was my day. I braved the positively disgusting weather to hit the local grocery store for the apples, apple jam, and a few other items not specifically devoted to this project.

I began with the dough and encountered my first hurdle: lack of a real food processor. We have one of those multi-attachment hand blenders, and it works just fine for many things. Blending pastry dough is not one of them, as the only real food-processor like arrangement with any appreciable capacity is a tall, narrow blender pitcher with the blade whirring very close to its bottom. I should've just done the dough by hand, but I was trying to adhere as closely to the recipe as possible. Anyway, I did eventually have two discs of dough WRAPPED IN PLASTIC in the fridge.

On to apple duty. I'd gotten braeburns, golden delicious, granny smiths, and in the absence of honeycrisps, something from New Zealand that sounded likely. In the process of peeling and coring/slicing those bad boys, I rediscovered that using those corer/slicer really takes some forearm strength that I haven't got. Also, I really hate peeling shit. Oh, and I managed to find a parallelogram-shaped apple. Seriously, the core of that bad boy was at a 45-degree angle to the horizon and took a left turn at Albuquerque. I was so disturbed by this freak of nature that I then forgot to peel the last golden delicious, meaning that I got to shave the peel off each individual slice. Aces!

Once the dough is chilling and the sugared apples are draining, there's kind of a lull in the proceedings, so I decided to try to get some things ready for dinner. This would prove unwise, but it seemed so simple at the time: Soak some corn in the husk for grilling; peel (grrrr, but I did it with my orange monkey peeler, and the orange-on-orange amused me inordinately) and parboil sweet potatoes, also for grilling; mix up some marinade for chicken and vegetables to be kebabbed.

So the sweet potatoes were ready to be drained just before I was ready to roll out the bottom disc of dough, except that they WEREN'T quite ready, so decided to set the timer for 3 more minutes for them. No problem, I thought, I can roll out the dough in 3 minutes! HEY, YOU! TROUBLEMAKER IN THE BACK! I CAN SEE YOU TWITTERING THAT!

The fact of the matter is, I COULD have rolled that dough out in under 3 minutes if (a) I'd checked before starting things to see that I had wax paper, (b) if my Oxo rolling pin—a rolling pin by a company that makes many, many fine kitchen products, and by those products I usually swear—if my Oxo rolling pin did not suck the testicles of the donkey ridden by Lucifer himself in hell, and (c) if I had not been attacked by peppercorns.

You see, the wax paper doesn't get a lot of use in my household (AB's chocolate chip cookies, of course, call for parchment paper). As stated above, I wasn't even sure I had wax paper, so when I spied wax paper at the back of the pantry, I was so innocently pleased at not having my baking project derailed, I failed to spot the peppercorn ambush.

Those peppercorns, I would also like to make clear, have been missing for at least 3 weeks. I was being stubborn and holding out on buying more because I knew, I knew that I had container filled to the brim with them. I did indeed, at least when they weren't away berry terrorist training camp. So, yes, just as I reached for the waxed paper, the container reappeared, lid loosened, and tipped over into the box of zip lock bags, on to the shelf, on to the shelf below that shelf, and the shelf below the shelf below the shelf, and so on. Naturally, a healthy amount made it on to the floor just in case I wanted to reenact the fight in the arcade from Thunderbolt. (I cannot believe that Google Image Search is letting me down on the pachinko front here.) I swept the floor. There are still roly poly peppercorns all over the pantry. They will be cleaned up, but today is not that day.

So after the peppercorn attack, I spent some time overhandling my already overhandled dough, as the dread hell-forged rolling pin kept tearing it up. But eventually I did get it into the pan. Sort of. I had a whole arc along which there wasn't enough dough to be pressed up and into the flutes, but I told myself I'd compensate with the top dough.

Now those of you who have been reading along with Og for a while might notice that all of this surely took a lot more than three minutes, and yet nowhere in the midst of the peppercorn onslaught did I mention the timer going off. It turns out that hitting start is crucial to timer use. Ah well, in a perhaps prescient moment earlier at the grocery store I'd bought some chipotles in adobo, so I figured I'd punt and make—you guessed it, AB's—chipotle-smashed sweet potatoes.

So, bottom dough is in, apples have drained for their required amount of time, drained liquid is transferred to a sauce pan for reduction purposes. It's time to turn my attention to the filling. Having tossed the apples once with just sugar, it's now time to toss them with a mixture of more sugar, tapioca flour, lime juice, apple jelly, apple cider (I just went with another TBS of applejack, as suggested in the episode), an eensy bit of salt, and those grains of paradise.

We'd found this in one of those built-in grinder jars at Whole Foods. Convenient enough, I suppose, unless the plastic neckband is impossible to get off. I struggled and struggled with it, finally ending by taking my paring knife to it. And with a sense of triumph, I pulled the neckband free! And the entire top of the fucking grinder came off, dumping easily a quarter cup of them into my mixture (the recipe calls for a quarter teaspoon). Fortunately, mixture take 2 was more successful, and it was time to layer in the apples.

Except I've completely forgotten how he did that in the episode and the recipe directions are not winding up with me having a heap that's higher in the center than at the edges. But eventually, I come up with a workable set of concentric circles and appropriate heaping. After another round of being cruelly used by the evil rolling pin, I got the top dough on and even managed to get a really good seal all the way around, even where my bottom dough had come up short.


For once, my somewhat temperature-twitchy (but much beloved) vintage oven had not wildly overshot its mark. It was sitting patiently at 425, waiting for my most beauteous pie. Cooking was completely uneventful. Pulling away the sides of the tart pan with the aid of my oatmeal can was completely uneventful. Cutting the first piece, sadly, resulted in all-too-eventful and unwanted tectonic activity (not catastrophic, but it wasn't the two pretty pieces I'd been hoping for). It also almost resulted in some quality spouse stabbing as M said, while I was still holding the damn serrated knife in my hand, "You're supposed to use a serrated knife."

Diagnosis? That is, excuse me, some damned fine pie.

Mixing it up, Toughing it out: Webb Wilder @ Fitzgerald's

So, M has a little bit of a Kristen Schaal problem. And by "problem," I mean a part of him retired permanently to his bunk when she did the Wonder Woman bit on the Daily Show. So when we learned that she was performing at the Lakeshore Theater (a venue that brings joy into my simple heart regularly by sending me e-mails addressed to "Dear Jonathan Coulton [REAL LAST NAME],[REAL FIRST NAME]"), we thought to pick us up some tickets. Do you sense a plan gone wrong?

She was performing on both Friday and Saturday. I decided to go with tickets for Saturday on the grounds that M wouldn't then have to rush up there by public transit, hauling his stuff from work. Of course, as soon as I bought the tickets for Saturday, Webb Wilder came out of his quantum state and scheduled a gig for Saturday at Fitzgerald's. Aggravating! But what're you gonna do, right?

Well, what I was going to do was hitch my Saturday wagon ever more firmly to Kristen Schaal's star. When I was volunteering at the resource center on Thursday night, my cov-olunteer confessed that he'd basically done an Og: He'd off-handedly volunteered to do Saturday shifts if no one else signed up, and Colby took him at his word. This meant that on the 2nd, he was scheduled to work from 1-5 in the resource center, then from 5:30-10:30 at Teen Open Mic. He also went for full points on difficulty by being triple booked: His son was also supposed to be spending the weekend with him.

So, being the kind-hearted soul I sometimes pretend to be, I offered to take his resource center shift. He demurred on the grounds that I live so far away, etc., until I finally said, "Look, I'm not actually a nice person. If it was an imposition, I wouldn't have offered. I'm going to be up here anyway for a show. I'll have my husband come up and meet me, we'll have dinner before it. It's all good." He laughed and asked if I would just come in from 3-5, figuring that he'd send his son and son's friend to see a movie at the Davis, and then they could grab some food or whatever before heading over to Armitage.

As soon as that part of the plan was settled, Kristen Schaal's health came out of its quantum state, and by morning I had an e-mail that she had to cancel both shows. (But they're offering a free ticket for every ticket already bought for when she reschedules; I'm not sure how that math works. It may really be quantum.)

So there were to be no underoos, no poison, no garbage bags filled with testicles, and no fighting of injustice for us on Saturday. However, there was really no reason not to have a visit with the last of the full-grown men. The decision to go see Webb on Saturday finished off the quantum cascade: I still went up to Lincoln Square, even though my evening was ending up in Berwyn, and it turned out that J's son didn't come to spend the weekend after all.

But now that this lengthy prologue is behind us, how was the show? Excellent, Pinky. We had dinner at Wishbone and were seated at a table just behind Tom Comet, Jimmy Lester, and Bob Williams. Of course, we didn't know it was Bob Williams at the time, as we've never seen him play with Webb before (and, frankly, I knew as soon as Webb introduced him that I was going to have a hard time with the name, because of its Will Roberts potential). Also, there was another guy with them, but I have no idea who he was.

The opening band, Not Without, was a mixed bag. Their lead singer has a gorgeous voice (although she's going to kill it with the overuse of the yodel technique), and their violinist was great. At least what we could hear of her was great, given that the drums and guitar were about 8 million times too loud. That unfortunately prevents me from saying much about their songs (beyond "far too much drawn-out guitar wanking" and "set was overburdened with drawn-out instrumentals") as I could almost never hear the lyrics or what the songs were supposed to sound like as a whole.

Also, they started quite late, at least partly because band members were still milling around socializing long after the designated start time. Furthermore, many of the people that were there to see them were extremely discourteous during Webb's set. One guy (and I think he was their "roadie") would go to the big table crowded with "their people" at the front of the club, take one person to the back, and then stand there talking extremely, EXTREMELY loudly, paying no attention whatever to the band on stage. This process was repeated, and I am not exaggerating, about 20 times. Rude. This did not leave me with a warm fuzzy about them.

Annnnnyyyway. Webb and the boys got on late, but they seemed relaxed, rested, and in fine form. They opened with "One Taste of the Bait," then went into "She's the Only One." Other selections from the early part of the set included "Human Cannonball," "Horror Hayride," "Poolside," and "Looking for a Fool." I'm sure there were a couple others in there before the first, much-anticipated patter break, which was devoted to Jim Ford. Webb said he'd come across two songs separately, decided he really wanted to learn them, and only then realized that they were both Jim Ford creations: "Changing Colors" and "Juju Man." Really nice choices demonstrating just how far and wide his songwriting ranged, and terrific versions of them, of course.

Later in the set, they did some more from About Time, including "Lonely for a Reason," and "I Had to Laugh." Also, the most soul-wrenching version of "Jimmy Reed (Is the King of Rock and Roll)" yet. (I realize that you all think I'm obsessed with that song, but it's not just me, man.) These were interspersed with older favorites that have often appeared at the end of the set, including a performance of "Baby Please Don't Go," with extended storytelling in the middle (storytelling that included the term "Dumbass," which clearly indicates that Webb has not escaped unscathed from multiple performances with me and JRH in the audience). Webb explained that they'd moved stuff around so that they could approach these numbers "with renewed vigor." I'm for it.

"Louisiana Hannah," made an appearance, too, and just as I was thinking that I hadn't heard that performed in a while, Webb explained that Hybrid Vigor, which had been out of print for a while, was now available on iTunes. That's the first Webb CD I ever had, and it's a bit alarming to realize that it's gone out of print and resurrected in digital form since I've been a fan. I mean, I know it's been a while (in fact, M, who thinks he's a funny, funny guy, tried to argue that seeing Webb at Fitzgerald's could arguably be construed as our first "date"), but sheesh!

Bill only held them to two encores. Apparently, he reserves the dread triple encore for the badly behaved Robbie Fulks. I find that I didn't blog that, but at Robbie's New Year's Eve Eve show, which is now the official New Year's Eve show, rather than its dress rehearsal, Bill didn't bring up the lights or start the background music until he'd rung three encores out of them. That in itself makes not blogging that show a hanging offense, so I probably shouldn't disclose that my failing to blog that show deprived you all of the (second hand) experience of the Possum Hollow Boys (formerly the Possum Holler Boys, but not these Possum Holler Boys, hence the name change) doing performing "Darling Nicky."

But I digress. Webb's encores included "Meet Your New Landlord," apparently at Jimmy's request, and "Stay Out of Automobiles." "The Rest (will take care of itself)" appeared earlier in the set, as did "Tough it Out." If they'd done "Big Time," (which, as far as I'm concerned, they're contractually obligated to do; M foolishly disagrees and claims that Webb is not my monkey), I would have been wholly content with the known and new content (there were several more new songs he did, but my dumb cracker mind has lost them in a sea of Guinness).

Oh, who am I kidding? I was more than content. It was a great, energetic show. We got to see a terrific new addition to the band (and fortunately Webb introduced him early, so we only had a few minutes to consider the possibility—unlikely in the extreme, but disturbing nonetheless—that the new guy was actually Tony Bowles with a hair cut). There was a (nearly) perfect blend of stuff we love and stuff we will love in the future. Also, Webb-a-palooza beats the impostor palooza with a stick.

Farewell, Papa General

Just found out that Don S. Davis died yesterday. I loved him as an actor going back to Twin Peaks, and of course he was the absolute rock of Stargate SG-1. He was also a tremendously talented artist. I was lucky enough to obtain two prints of his work a few years back: Appropriately enough The Gate II and Lighthouse. I will forever regret that I didn't buy Moon Flowers at the time.

He was too young and too wonderful to go so suddenly and so soon.

Satyrnalia? Manos: The Rock Opera of Fate by the New Millennium Theatre Company

I am tragically behind in . . . well, being a human being. One could argue that this is partly attributable to the fact that we were quite the social butterflies last weekend. Instead, I like to blame the mountain of grading. But your gratification shall be delayed no longer! You will hear of Manos: The Rock Opera of Fate. It is the only plan of action of which the Master will approve.

Unfortunately, our story begins sadly. The National Pastime Theater in the old speakeasy is more or less at Irving Park and Broadway. It's not in Boys Town, it's not quite in Edgewater, and whatever some Chicago city sites claim, it's not in Wrigleyville. So it's this area of the city that I just don't know a ton about, but the job of choosing the restaurant fell to me.

The cast list for the evening included my Pal M, the FD, mi esposo M (natch), and our friends B the lovely G, who were driving a long, long way for some lumpy knees. The assembled company requested something not too expensive and not too loud. Tragically, Rick's Cafe on Sheridan and Irving Park seemed to meet our needs and not much else in the neighborhood did. We had what was one of the worst restaurant experiences of my life. It was certainly one of the most protracted restaurant experiences of my life, as we got there at 7:30 and very nearly had to leave before we got any food at all so that we could make our 10:30 show. Add in a passive-aggressive douche bag of a manager and, well, it seemed like the whole evening was going to be a kind of anxiety dream.

But! All was forgiven when we got to the show. The lobby of the NPT was quite crowded, first of all because the first show was being cleared and the set for M:TROOF was being assembled, and second of all because Torgo's knees were in the house. This would turn out to be confusing because this Torgo-about-town, jauntily sipping drinks among his public, would turn out not to be the Torgo, but merely a Torgo.

There were nonalcoholic beverages for sale in the lobby, and the helpful house manager pointed us toward alcoholic beverages in every direction. Given that we'd just had the dinner lasting longer than the Donner Party's journey, we were more in coffee mode. M and B thus headed to 7-Eleven to procure stimulants. I took the opportunity to peruse the wall of show art and head shots. The latter included one of Hal Warren, actor, director, writer, producer, fertilizer salesman, denture wearer.

In seeing the poster for Boomstick!, I was reminded that (a) Ooh! I really want that soundtrack if I can get it; (b) I'm very old and thus have already gone through two separate periods of Evil Dead love—one when I thought the first two movies were the scariest thing EVAH (special thanks to the FD for her baleful look and reassurance that I'm well and truly old when I made this admission to her) and a second when I learned to stop worrying and love Bruce Campbell faithfully and ironically; and (c) that I'm a FOOL for having already missed so many of New Millennium Theatre Company's highly delicious offerings.

Soon enough, our boys were back with coffee, soda, etc., and we were filing into the theater itself. There's no stage in the space (at least for this production), which is pretty large. There are chairs on risers along the east and north walls. There's one narrow exit from the "stage" on the west side of the north seats, and the main door to the space is in the south east corner.

The stage, such as it was for this production, was a black-draped proscenium about 15-feet high. This was set up at a NW-SW angle in about the middle of the floor, and all the props and costumes were set behind it. Flats were moved out to form the stage right vertical of this to suggest different interiors within "The Place, and various pieces of "furniture, were pushed through the center curtain. The "cars" for both the family and the "Make-Out Couple" were hinged plywood frames with rope handles on the inside so that they actors could carry them around.

The ceiling in the space is high, and there is a loft atop the south wall that is divided up into niches. Our story began with a spot illuminating one of these to reveal The Narrator. The Narrator, played by Chris Hauser, was a magnificent collision of 80s hair band awesomeness and every John Hughes character ever played by either Anthony Michael Hall or Jon Cryer. He had beautiful rock hair entirely held together by the bandana encircling his head and was, of course, shirtless beneath his black vest. He was also stringy and pasty and impressively weanie and pathetic looking, especially for someone who seems, in reality, to be a perfectly attractive, normal-looking person. His opening song was very much in the spirit of the off-the-rails DVDA version of "What Would Brian Boitano Do?", assuring us that we should have our fast-acting inhalers handy if we were allergic to awesome.

The Narrator started out as a very good idea, very well executed. The focus returned to him at random intervals throughout the show as he powers his way through his Bears-themed case of Miller Light. Toward the end, the business with him did get a little drawn out and worn, but his balladeer bacon was saved during the big group medley ("One Day More" from Les Misérables brilliantly rewritten for one dysfunctional family, 2 Brides of Manos, one Torgo, one cop, and the Master) when the spot found him completely passed out during his bit.

Still, even if the gag got a little drawn out, this was a clever way of giving the rest of the cast and crew time to accomplish set and costume changes, etc. Furthermore, if any story needed some built-in coffee breaks for the purposes of sharing a group WTF?, it's Manos, and Hauser is a gem of a performer, gamely dismantling his costume while whaling away on an acoustic guitar (which is so totally a telecaster in his mind's eye) and improvising (at least I assume a lot of what he's doing is improvising) like a champ.

Other than these welcome interruptions by the narrator, the opera follows the plot storyline action stuff that happens in Manos pretty faithfully. There's a screen on top of the proscenium (a nice nod to the opera part) that serves a multitude of functions: When our family makes their first appearance, exciting driving!footage! from Manos itself plays across it giving a new twist on terrible rear projection; elsewhere it bears exciting fonts! and exclamation points! no doubt stealing jobs from the PAs who normally incite the live studio audience to frenzy. By the end, when the opera has wisely abandoned all pretense of following the movie in favor of one of what the literature assures is a dozen different endings, the Karaoke lyrics for the finale of Les Miz are projected.

In my meandering way of covering the musical content of the show, I may have inadvertently given the impression that M:TROOF is slapped together and improvised. Not so! The musical numbers range from mixtures of bouncy, recitative-adjacent trios for our family to "window songs" for Torgo, a flashy Andrew Lloyd Webber/Parker & Stone-worthy rock anthem for the Master himself, and a complex, beautifully executed harmony-heavy trio ("Great Manos, Hear My Prayers" for the wives.

The performance of the 2 parts of "Family Time" was a little rough, but the incredibly dark lyrics set against music that evokes the demented, teeth-grittingly cheerful theme from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians renders the performance almost irrelevant. The main issue with how "Family Time" came off is that Tory Crowe (who is unspeakably, jaw-droppingly brilliant as "Maggie") has a powerful, lovely voice, whereas Sean Harklerode (who clearly landed Hal Warren's plum role on the strength of his creepy, plasticine, Herb Putterman impression [this is a high compliment, in case my gentle reader has just fallen off the turnip truck]) isn't much of a singer. The actors and director wisely came to the conclusion that he should smarmily sing-talk his lines and embrace a kind of Thurston-Howell-on-Ecstasy style of delivery. This worked beautifully in the bigger group numbers, but the road was a little rough and rocky earlier on.

To be honest, the "Torgo Inside of Me," wasn't quite up to the snuff of some of the other material in the show. I suppose that's appropriate, though. The window song always snatches the Oscar from more deserving competitors, often within the same movie. In this case, "TIoM" is decidedly overshadowed by "I Said Manos, HEY HEY Manos" (aka "Manos! Fuck Yeah!") and "You Have Failed as Torgo." Really, it's dirty pool to compare the latter to anything else, because (a) it is brilliantly set to "Lily's Eyes," from The Secret Garden (Torgo is ZOMG eleventy funny if you're picturing him played by Mandy Patinkin) and (b) it takes place in Torgo's room, which is the most brilliant set ever devised. (I am torn between wanting to avoid spoilers and needing to share about this, so I will simply say KITTEN CALENDAR!)

The mix of originality and parody, silly and serious in the music is reflective of what makes M:TROOF so terrific. Writer/Directors Andy Grigg & Steven Attanasie not only get Manos, they get that real parody takes work and love and maybe the tiniest bit of pixie dust. This isn't some craptastic assembly of sight gags, it's a deft mixture of homage and satire much more akin to the original Airplane than to its degenerate (supposed) descendants.

That approach centers on Tory Crowe's 100% earnest, 1000% spot on performance as Maggie, the be-kerchiefed wife. Crowe can do no wrong. Her body language, her tone of voice, her jerky, eerily hinged movements are funny. every. time. I could listen to her begin every sentence "MuhIIIIKe!" until the last trumpet sounds.

But Manos wouldn't be Manos without Torgo, and again, Adam Rosowicz plays it relatively straight Torgo-y. His advanced TV Parkinson's is perfect, and he does not overplay the relentless toRgO VibRaTo. Some of the business of him trying to get up from the floor got a little protracted, but otherwise, he is magnificently pathetic and off putting.

Although most of the show avoids any fourth-wall shenanigans, the decision to have Nathan Sanford (the cop) embody the collective despair of the cast of the original movie was a good one. He enters his scenes with one leaden footstep after the other, barely able to summon the energy to hold aloft the tiny, flashing keychain that represents his squad car. By the time he arrives on the scene to disrupt the hilarious, obscenely loud and smacky make-out session for a third time, he is in tears over the violent death of his career. As he runs off stage, a spot travels up to the narrator who tearfully salutes him and says, "May we all find that kind of courage." Funny stuff, adroitly played.

The three wives, played by Leslie Kerrigan, Rebecca Gallagher, and Lisa Adams (who bravely doubles as "make-out girl") play extremely well off one another with Kerrigan as the straight woman (we cannot kill the child!), Gallagher as the grasping youngest wife (uh, yes, we can!), and Adams finding the schizophrenic happy medium. They're strong singers and, really, their number is damnably hummable. We were all gratified to see the nightgown fight so expertly enacted, too.

Adam Mack is a pleasingly imposing, strutting, porn-star-moustache-sporting Manos himself, and he's got a great bass-baritone voice that's put to excellent use. By the time the story gets to the master, he's rather an anticlimax, which I'm sure is deliberate, but there might have been a touch more characterization for him beyond terrific off-foley slapping of everyone in sight. As it is, there's a tendency for him to be upstaged by his magnificent Hell Hound, which sits in a glass case next to the flat for Torgo's room in the Set and Props Hall of Fame. I sooooo wish they were auctioning off the Hell Hound at the end of the production, because he would be mine. Oh yes, he would be mine.

I cannot in good conscience close this entry without bowing down before Matt Russell (at a considerable distance for reasons that will become clear momentarily). In the program, he is credited only as Make-Out Guy. That would surely be enough, because he wears his cardigan with style and his open-mouthed, tongue-standing-proud attacks on Adams will be featured in my nightmares for decades to come. However, we lucked into the surprise Labyrinth ending that featured him doing his David-Bowie-IS-Jareth-King-of-Goblins impression. This was a truly unspeakable privilege. No, I mean, really, I cannot speak of his outrageously stuffed dance belt without a lawyer present and a medical professional on hand.

Speaking of the end of things, the show's run ends tragically soon, so if are within a 500-mile radius and haven't yet seen this, run, do not walk, to the national pastime theatre. Seriously. I'm not above coercion.

Boys' Happy Time: Transformers, Reviewed

So Michael Bay, Christopher Guest, John Hughes, and David Cronenberg decide that they want to make a movie, and they hire on Timothy Leary to provide Craft Services. My review could stop there, but how likely is that?

It's not like I've seen a lot of porn movies. Even so, me saying that Transformers is the porniest damn movie I've ever seen is not to be taken in the same spirit as, say, "The best martial arts movie ever to come out of France," or "The best pinot noir to come out of Michigan." It is shameless, relentless, gratuitous boy!porn from minute one. It's also incredibly baked—baked on the level of Crank baked. It also pretty much rocks.

The wafer thin plot centers around both sets of Transformers—the Autobots, who stand for truth, autonomy, Christmas, and puppies, and the Decepticons, who disrespect the common worker, have glowing red eyes, consist entirely of sharp, pokey things, and don't think much of humans—searching for the Hellraiser cube Allspark.

At the beginning of his monologue (and, as it turns out, the whole movie, from Blackout's opening money shot to the disturbing, cross-species voyeurism, is a flashback monologue), Optimus Prime —leader of the Autobots and a "good guy" despite the outrageously Orwellian name—implies that they are looking for the cube so that they can revitalize the world that they've irretrievably fucked up. The Decepticons want the cube to . . . well, I actually have no idea why they want the cube, but its life-giving powers never really come up again anyway, so do you want to know the terrifying truth, or do you want to see Frenzy pull off Shia LeBeouf's pants?

From the human side, the plot is divided for much of the movie. On the one hand, the government is scrambling in the wake of a physical attack on an Air Force base in Qatar and repeated attempts to hack our 5up3r 533kr1t databases. On the other, Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf, panted, for the time being) is funding his Porky's Vision Quest by eBay auctioning off the tchotckes inherited from his arctic-circle-exploring, "iceman"-finding, crazy-dying grandfather.

The government cannot hope to fight off this (probably North Korean, or possibly Chinese) attack without the help of infant computer analysts ranging from Tom Lenk (really! And he could have been playing Andrew, but he totally wasn't!) to some kind of refugee from the set of a particularly low-budget porno movie. (And for the record, I think her voice was the real weapon of annihilation.)

Neither the nerds nor the pr0n refugee can get the job done by themselves. There's another attack that can be laid directly at the feet of ding dongs, both the putatively edible ones and the type that don't think it's odd to find the odd boombox in Air Force 1's elevator. After pausing for an extended Air Force recruitment porno video and a lot of running around at the Pentagon, none of it related to the fact that Tom Lenk just up and disappears after far too few lines, they call in the m@d35t h@ckz0rz of all. Tragically, this gentlemen happens to be Black and he's introduced amid a flurry of comic relief that pretty much borders on an Amos & Andy routine. Cultural sensitivity is not in the core competency suite of the baked.

Sam, meanwhile, must defeat the reverse-aging incarnation of Robert Z'Dar (RAIRZ) if he hopes to get in the pants of The Girl (not that she wears pants, mind you, or anything that even mimics a lower body covering of any kind). RAIRZ is a covert Sam ally, though: After manfully deciding to cede the beach to Sam and his prehensile-toed stoner friend (who gets left at the beach and is never seen again), he tries (noneuphemistically) to relegate Mikaela to the back of his external penis.

Despite the fact that, as M put it "It seems unlikely that this is a sudden heel turn." Mikaela decides that nobody puts not!bunny in the rumble seat and resolves to walk the 10 miles home in her wedges and pudendum-revealing skirt. Sam takes the advice of his possessed car's radio and gives chase. The car breaks down. Mikaela thrusts her breasts at it and "tightens its distributor cap," and refuses to start. She seems to blame Sam for this and teeters off again. But the car starts! And she gets in again! And there's more painful pr0n-movie dialogue! (I had not yet clued into the fact that a la Baron Christopher, anything having to do with personal interactions was completely improvised; the Guest-esque improvisation in the scenes with Sam, his parents [Kevin Dunn and Julie White], and the chihuahua while the Autobots are "hiding" in the yard was absolutely top notch.)

And then John Turturro shows up. No, really! I thought I was making it up, too, especially when Sam, Mikaela, and the Autobots force him to rip off his clip-on tie and strip down to his boxers and wife beater (which bears the "Sector 7 logo," and I think someone owes a certain man of steel some royalties). And when Bumblebee uncorks his . . . whatever a corvette would uncork . . . and takes a whiz on one of Turturro's men. (Seriously, I'm really really not making that up. Optimus Prime sternly orders him to stop "lubricating" the individual.)

Optimus really shouldn't be so hard on Bumbleebee, though, because during the obligatory Kong-fettering scene, it's quite clear that Bumblebee is the Rainman of the group. When you get this group of directors together, what are the odds that it will have escaped their collective attention that movie-going audiences love crazy or otherwise mentally and physically disabled people? Bumblebee has plenty of footage of him blinking big, sad, empty blue eyes to fill up his Oscar reel.

Eventually the script gets impatient with these stupid people on opposite sides of a big continent (and those stupid Air Force people lost in the dumb desert), and it scoops up all and sundry and brings them to the Hoover Dam. Which is good, because then we can get to the part where it is all giant, transforming robots fighting other giant, transforming robots all the time.

Oh, why Hoover Dam, though? Because Hoover Dam was actually built to hide: (1) the giant, be-sigiled alien cube and (2) the giant frozen robot-y thing. The four football fields' worth of concrete disguises the "unique energy signature" (everybody do a Stargate shot!) of the cube from any hostile aliens that might be looking for it. EXCEPT FOR THE GIANT HOSTILE ALIEN THAT YOU'RE STORING IN THE DAMNED THING'S UPPER BUNK! Ahem.

For a while at the Hoover Dam, it seems as if we might be robbed of precious giant, transforming robot kung fu fighting by John Turturro's need to show us how to make a monster out of a cell phone. (As much as I wanted to rip out Rachael Taylor's throat so she could never, ever inflict her voice on anyone ever again, I have to give her bit with Jon Voight about Nokias being from Finland two Nigel Tufnels up.)

Fortunately, Josh Duhamel (have I mentioned that he's very pretty and very charming) is strongly if inexplicably moved by a boy's love for his robot. When things start to go Tango Uniform at the Dam, he and his fellow Air Force-y types turn their guns on their counterparts and demand air support as they rush Sam and the conveniently ensmallened cube to a nearby city for maximum anarchy during the huge, inevitable, and hot giant-transforming-robot-on-giant-transforming-robot action.

And, oh, it is so very hot, if very strangely edited. And surprisingly . . . well, not bloody, but . . . automotively effluvial: Bumblebee secures his Oscar nod by losing both his legs; Jazz (the lone Brother Autobot) is ripped the fuck in half, not that anyone notices for a good 25 minutes. And where is our fearless leader during the first 25 minutes or so? Well, you see, Optimus is quite the diva, and his ass is not on screen unless his goddamned theme music is cued up. And if you delay his theme music for too long, he forgets almost every useful feature he has. And his stabby, stabby swordfist was sorely missed.

But seriously, this is the dumbest, most entertaining, most fabulously true-to-the-80s movie I've ever seen. The 'bot FX are supercool, especially the on-the-fly transforming. The editing of the fights was a little frenetic, to the point that it was sometimes hard to tell who was fighting (Bumblebee and Ratchet, for example, are both yellow, and you know how those yellow giant robots all look alike).

I have to imagine that the staff and writers' meetings involved a lot of running around while pretending to be an airplane, finger pistols, and Patchoo Patchoo, NEeeeeEEEEERRRRRBBBBBBBKOOOOOOW! kind of business, but there's not a thing wrong with that. At least not a thing that a giant, transforming robot rumble can't fix.

Sucktion

I've carrying around in a corner of my head a half-formed post in my head about what I've been reading lately. This happens to be mostly light and fluffy urban fantasy stuff, almost exclusively by female authors. Much of it is pretty good for entertainment purposes, and they've all been books from series, meaning I've got several reasonable go-to sources for when I need plane reading or what have you. But then . . . THEN I made the grave error of plucking a Buffy tie-in novel, Queen of the Slayers off my shelf.

And poof! My happy, cautiously pro-girl-power-light-lit post goes up in smoke.


It did not begin in promising fashion. It picks up immediately post-"Chosen," with Buffy et al. on the bus to Anywhere But Here. The escape from Sunnydale segues, for some demented reason, into an interlude that seems to take place on the canvas of the Richard Lynch/Joe Estevez vehicle Werewolf. In it, Buffy mistakes a Wolfwere (more wolf than human, bad at maintaining human form) for a newly minted, freshly insane Slayer. The gang spend some time with characters clad only obtrusive dialogue that screams I-Represent-Trashy-Local-Color-in-the-American-Southwest. Buffy kills the Wolfwere. And then we move on to England.

England is BAD. From the smoldering ashes of the Watchers Council rises a retro-1950s Watchers Council. (That's American 1950s, where new Slayers are forced to vacuum in heels and pearls.) Except, wait! New Slayers are flocking to The Immortal in Rome! Why? No one knows, but it's damnably plucky of them, given that he vants to be alooohn. Oh! And there's a Hellmouth in Cleveland! Better send Faith there. And while you're at it, Faith, take my Kennedy, please! (I am all for throwing Kennedy in a Hellmouth, believe you me, but Kennedy's Midwestern Adventure is precipitated by her break-up with Willow [something else I'm in favor of] on the grounds that Tara is a goddess now, and Willow saw her while she was doing the Slayer-Catch-and-Release Spell. Um, what?)

Because I love, I share with you some of Kennedy's thoughts during the break-up scene:

She had to stay strong because her sweet, dear girl wouldn't be able to stand that much pain. Dear, sweet, beautiful Willow, with a heart as big as the moon.

And as she contemplates the wedding vows (for the handfasting they'd planned to have with Willow's coven, of course) she'll never get to make:

She made her vow to Willow. Not the one she had written over and over in her head: I, Kennedy, take you Willow, as my spouse . . . except in certain states and many countries of the world . . . but in the country of my heart, you are my beloved, always.

Buffy, always one to trust world-critical tasks to a rival/enemy, takes off for Rome to investigate The Immortal's Slayer farm and spends the better part of . . . a year? . . . it's hard to tell, as the book is not exactly concerned with the Aristotelian unities . . . accepting ball gowns, private schooling for the persistently alive and eternally irritating Dawn, and personalized tours of Pompeii from The Immortal. Oh, and enslaving the Slayers she's rescued from the patriarchy to train other Slayers.

Meanwhile the only surviving relative of Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia is worried about losing the shop girl he's magically roofied into a supermodel. He has good reason to worry, because she's turned into a Slayer! Not that he knows this. Despite the fact that he is a sorcerer in the employ of The Immortal, he is still unable to put two and two together, even to get a wrong answer as to why his skinny bitch girlfriend suddenly has superpowers and a thirst for killing bulls. (Seriously, she rides off into the night, on a bull, waving a sword, in a fit of bloodlust at some point.)

But let's give Antonio a break. He has a lot on his mind, what with his mission to engineer a cellphone (a purple, jungle-print cell phone, as we are repeatedly told) that will allow Lucrezia and Cesare, who have long been ruling a Hell dimension, (oh, and did I mention that they're vampires?) to work their bad mojo in the human world. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, not content to simply communicate through a rip-off of one of Gregory Maguire's less stellar fairytale novels, Lucrezia and Cesare, in all their Renaissance-wearin', demon-sire' mournin', permanently-disfigured-for-some-logic-forsaken-reason glory chat with our dimension on a purple cell phone.

But you see, they need the cell phone to try to bewitch Faith into retrieving their Orb of Mass Transit from the Hellmouth. Sort of. They also need to have it so that there can be wacky mix ups when Buffy takes Antonio's purple cell phone thinking it's The Immortal's purple cell phone. And, well, then Faith buries the bewitched cell phone in the snow and tries to accumulate all other cell phones in Cleveland, except she misses one, and L&C bewitch some runaway punk who gets the orb, then Kennedy gets her and feels all good about herself until roughly 2 seconds later when the purple-haired (the author's cleverly disguised Red Shirt) punk dies. And Kennedy is sad. But it's ok! Because the phones start working again! And Buffy tells them to come to Rome! So they can go the Amazon! Because Dawn is dying!

Sorry for the ejaculatory outburst up there. I remain a dewey-eyed optimist and still get excited every time it looks like Dawn. Might. Just. Fucking. Die. Already. Oh, before we go to the Amazon, I should tell you about Xander, who sometimes has two eyes, and sometimes doesn't. Xander goes to Africa (because Willow had the presence of mind to ship Nikki's shadowcaster out of town before the Apocalypse) to try to find out about the Slayer's power from the Shadowmen. But Willow's rusty Sumerian (and again, I quote because I love,

"I winged it a little on the Sumerian. Assyrian, I'm there. But Sumerian . . . Dawn actually speaks it better than I do. We probably should have called her in."
Buffy's nod was noncommittal. She was feeling very protective of Dawn these days. but Willow had a point.
"It's no big," Buffy assured her, although it kind of really was.

)
has landed Xander somewhere that is not where the Cave of the Shadowmen was. (Frankly, I never understood the Cave to be in Africa in this dimension anyway.) So, I guess it is kind of "a big" for Xander, who has to walk around saying "Je te touche," to get to the cave, but I'm unclear on why it kind of really is a big for Buffy.

Anyway, while in Africa, Xander learns that there's not enough good in the world and Dawn is dying!!!! (There I go again.) And there are Sand!Zombies! And The First Slayer (whose name, Willow reminds us nigh incessantly, is Senaya) helps him kill them. And maybe makes him a Slayer temporarily. And Xander may have killed the Shadowmen, which is a pity, because he spent several pages describing and admiring their hats. And then he's kind of dead or at least Warriors of Death (but not the Image of Death, who is working with Janus and not!Kali for some nonspecific anti-Buffy purpose) are after him. Tara saves him, damn her divine eyes, so that he can save Dawn by sending Buffy and a cadre of purple hairs to the Amazon. She also gives him a kiss for Willow, who lapses into a coma on one page and then is not mentioned again until he kisses her 40 pages later and the kiss fails to do anything. Except then Kennedy, freshly arrived from the abandoned Cleveland Hellmouth, kisses Willow a page later and she wakes up! Whew! I was so tense during that entirely-off-screen coma!

So Buffy, Willow, and some purple hairs do, indeed, go the Amazon in search of the Death Orchid, which blooms only once a century for the purposes of keeping a surfeit of yappy, whiny, developmentally stunted girl!harpies walking the Earth. But as if the Amazon doesn't suck enough, they're attacked by a group of ain't-gonna-be-no-purple-hairs who think Buffy is a bitch. Yes, that's right, not every new Slayer is rarin' to be tossed into the Cleveland Hellmouth or to accept Queen Buffy (my tooth enamel will never be the same after gritting my teeth each and every time someone used this term). So the bull-riding, Borgia-doing supermodel has been recruiting defectors in the guise of "Queen Regina." I wish I could believe that this was a sly, intentional funny on the author's part, but she even has Giles explain to Buffy that Regina is Latin for Queen. You may, nonetheless, forevermore address me as Queen Queenie.

Now, you might think that Q^2 might not need much motivation beyond her innate psychosis and attention-whoring ways, but she's really gathering a counter-army of Slayers because Lucrezia wants to distill the essence of Slayer, an experiment that lost her her goddamned Orb and Sire (who was killed by The Immortal, incidentally, dooming Lucrezia and Cesare to a life in black) in the first fucking place. And so the proliferation of arms commences and the canvas gets to looking like Europe, circa 1914, with the Borgias, Q^2, and Defector Slayers on one side, Buffy, The Immortal (kinda), the Watchers Council (kinda), Slayers loyal to QB (the ones she hasn't gotten killed, anyway), and the Scoobs on the other.

Except I forgot to tell you that waaaaaaaaaay back at the beginning of the book, we got a 40-page digression on the history of Janus (short version: not-very-bright hellgod gets jealous of Neptune [who seems to be a Greek god in this, the intermittently alternate universe of the author], leaves for hell dimension, hoping to nip back in a few moments, only to find the Athens hellmouth sealed. His crankiness grows over the years and he blames his exile on Buffy.), who forms an alliance with not!Kali and some personification of Death to take over the human world. The three keep appearing as giant shadow puppets over Cleveland, thus befuddling the dumb cracker minds of Team B right up until the moment in which they (the hellgods, not team B) leap into the enchanted cell phone, which takes them to the Borgias' hell dimension about 75 pages later.

So now, it's the Borgias, Q^2 and the Q^2ettes, plus hellgods vs. Buffy. Could her terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad day get ANY WORSE? Of course it can! Because The Golden One, an ancient Tibetan sorcerer of supreme goodness and a key player in keeping the human world's shit together in these desperate times of magickal (Oh, I and my tooth enamel began to long for the Queen Buffy chorus every time the "ck" spelling showed up) global warming, gets killed on Buffy's watch. Worse still, he gets killed while trying to make a potion from the Death Orchid to save Dawn. Nice, Buffy, why don't you take a giant dump on the old man's corpse?

But when you really think about it, isn't it really Oz's fault that something unspecified burned the Golden One and his Monks into the Crispy Holy Men We Had Before the War?It is. Because Oz now belongs to a pack of werewolves who retain their human consciousness while in wolf form, and the Golden One had hired them as body guards. Time for a new HR manager, GO.

Ever-resilient, Oz accompanies Buffy and Co. through the time-space continuum, which dumps them out in Rome, several months down the line. Magickal Global Warming has worsened dramatically, but it's ok, because they're all living in The Immortal's magickal bubble while Mt. Etna erupts. Seriously.

And then The Immortal, who has been patiently hot for Buffy all along, is revealed to be a Bad Guy who recruited Andrew (who is thus a Bad Guy by proxy for the low, low price of 30 pieces of supermodel ass) to help keep Buffy from knowing that Spike and Angel were in town. Except, I'm not really sure when or how that happened, because I swear, she's getting dressed to go dancing with him one minute, then being slightly miffed at him and hoping to power-walk it off the next.

And it is then that we find out that everyone on Earth is smarter than Buffy. Faith has followed her on the walk, sensing she'll need back up. The two are waylaid by a Q^2ette who leads them into Q^2's trap, but that's ok, because they know it's a trap. They get a small smackerel of useful information about the Orb of Mass Transit before Q^2 is distracted by needing to kill the last Borgia heir (and again with the off-screen killing-off of a character on whom you wasted 60 pages of my time roughly 6 eons ago). Buffy and Faith are right in time with one another and hack their ways out of the cavern:

They started swinging. No one hacked like Faith and Buffy, together again. Heads flew, guts spewed. It was like being inside a horror movie, only it wasn't horrible at all, as far as Faith was concerned.

.
Don't worry, gentle reader, they make it out to a field covered with snow and demon parts. Why there are demon parts on the surface, given that all the fighting happened under ground, is anyone's guess.

When they return to the palazzo, Buffy is just on the verge of telling Giles all about he Orb of Mass Transit when The Immortal reveals that he already has it, and he's giving it to Lucrezia and Cesare in exchange for rule over a hell dimension. Why, yes, this would be the same Lucrezia and Cesare who have been nursing a serious Oediptal/Elektrical grudge against The Immortal for the last 700 years! Why do you ask? Everyone is clapped in irons and dumped in separate dungeons in different positions that are described at length.

Oh! Except not Willow, Kennedy, and Oz! Because, as Buffy remembers during a Whistler-inspired fugue state/teleportation/multidimension-spanning dream, they left the palazzo right before she went for a walk. Um, what? I guess there was some confusing dialogue about everyone not going to Cleveland, but I missed the subtext that implied that those three were just popping out to pick up some gold armor, Queen Buffy Banners (the word Buffy, topped with a crown), and weaponry for the army of Slayers that is suddenly facing off against the other Army of Slayers. I guess Whistler likes the slow pace, because all of this arming and mounting of great battles happens while Buffy is knocked out and astrally projecting into the last few minutes of Angel: The Series.

Whistler tells Buffy that Angel, Spike, Ilyria, and Gunn are about to die and Wesley is already dead (newsflash, Whistler: Wesley died 'round about Season 3). Buffy takes some time to prove that she's still the shallow Californian she's always been and is thus still pissy that Spike didn't call her immediately upon rematerialization (and not being able to work a phone until Fred built a Stargate on her office floor does not count, bitches). But she finally Gets Over Herself and has a mystical glowing threesome with Angel and Spike. Just in case you think I would ever, EVER make that shit up:

To her right: Angel
To her left: Spike
Themselves, and yet . . . not themselves. When she looked at each of them in turn, she saw them, but not with her eyes.
She saw them with her heart.
Felt them with her soul.
Champions. The words came into her mind. [Uh, that would be just the one word. A plural, to be sure, but still one word. HTH.—Ed.] She had no idea who spoke them. She wasn't even certain that she heard them.
She simply knew them.
She extended her hand. Spike took it.
Angel took her other hand.
Then the glowing figure took Spike's and Angel's free hands, completing the circle.
Buffy floated in love, and honor, and it was no longer about earthly yearnings and joys and despairs. It was not about choices.
It was about soul mates.
There are other, better places for those who do good.
There are other, better ways to love. [AhemthreesometoldyasoAhem—Ed.]

She emerges from her lectric-kool-aid funky-goodness groove:

A warmth suffused her, moving from the top of her head through her face, into her chest and spreading out through her abdomen. She felt as if she were glowing inside.

When she's fully awake, Buffy sees a glowing 4-year-old with Angel's eyes and Spike's smile in her cell. Ok, who wants to volunteer to tell this woman how babies get made? Not I.

Apparently the child is also highly acidic (which might explain her emergence through the abdomen. Ouch!), because she starts ridding everyone of their chains. She then hops up on Buffy's shoulders and controls her by touching her hair. Buffy leaps into the fray like a willing, pony reformed by motherhood (as so many she-ponies are!) and dies, but wins. Well, kind of. There's some verbose dimensional hokey-pokeying and all the major bad guys seem to escape from the human world unscathed, leaving behind their scraps of demons and monsters who kill Buffy during the throes of a self-sacrifice-derived orgasm. Kind of. Because she's only mostly dead, which could have been really awkward, because her nearest and dearest have wasted no time at all building a funeral pyre for her. Apparently, they are not exactly anxious for the third coming.

And just in case you have retained any will to live at all, the author cannot resist an Epilogue:

Willow took Buffy's hands in hers. "I saw her," she said. "Your child."
Buffy swallowed hard. "I think you were the only one who could."
"Matick user," Willow said, "Plus I had an ascended moment when we did the slayer spell. When I saw Tara." She took a breath. "Your little girl was beautiful."
"She was theirs. And mine," Buffy said wonderingly. "We gave her life, and she tipped the balance. Our daughter saved the world."

And the, before you even have time to rip out your own eyes, begging for sweet mercy:

She touched her lower abdomen, closed her eyes, and communed with heroes.

I guess I should have known better. I did, after all,dip into the world of tie-in fiction once before. But no Stargate novel, not even one that has Jack repeatedly calling Daniel "Jackson" could have prepared me for the horror that is Queen of Slayers.

Mutual Masturbation

So I've had Elizabeth I languishing on the TiVo for some time now. I'd started to watch it a few weeks ago, finished it up tonight, and started it right over from the beginning again. And only partly for Hugh-Dancy-stalking purposes.

It has many things to recommend it. But the highest honor I can bestow upon it is to say that I'm pretty sure that Helen Mirren made a study of Miranda Richardson's Queenie to get the Mad Queen Bess bits down just right. And I'm completely serious about that.

This version of the Virgin-Adjacent Queen centers on her relationships with the two Robins (Dudley, Earl of Leicester and Devereaux, Earl of Essex). Given that much potential for bawdy French Farce, Mirren is faced with Liz's 19th nervous breakdown about 10 minutes in. And apparently neither Mirren nor Tom Hooper (who, I see, also directed Daniel Deronda; methinks I'm not the only Dancy stalker) shied from making her as thoroughly ridiculous in her moments of human weakness as she is awe inspiring in her moments of political greatness. It's an interesting choice and the right one to keep the story from descending completely into soap opera territory.

And does it even need to be noted that the entire cast is stellar? Jeremy Irons, Emperor Palpatine, hosts of folks from Cracker, and MI-5, etc. Hugh holds his own with some powerhouses of acting and hardly ever has to fall back on his fundamental cuteness in tights. And shallow as I am, I couldn't help thinking that I wouldn't mind shagging Hugh Dancy (or Jeremy Irons, for that matter) at Helen Mirren's age, nor would I mind shagging Helen Mirren at Hugh Dancy's age.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Stargate Spotting: Snakes on a Plane Edition

We're egregiously behind the sinuous curve and only just tonight got to see Snakes on a Plane, which is surely the film that will define a generation.


This is a MOTHERFUCKING SPOILER LINE to protect you from MOTHERFUCKING SPOILERS


I'd like to start with the trailers. The trailers that time forgot. The trailers that say to each and every actor in each and every film: You'll never work in this town again. They were:

1. Jackass Number 2
   
2. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
   
3. Let's Go to Prison (aka the world's longest prison rape joke, starring Chi McBride)
   
4. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Gunny! Where did we go wrong?
   
5. Tenacious D in 'The Pick of Destiny
   

Yeah, soak in that for a moment.

Next, I need to cover the "There are 100 working actors in Vancouver, BC" beat. My Stargate count was already at 1 before I walked into the theater.

1. Those of you catching up on Stargate: SG-1 Season 1 episodes know him as High Councilor Tuplo ("Broca Divide" and you can look forward to seeing him again in "Enigma"), the passengers on flight South Pacific Flight 121 might have called him "Hair Plug Man" or "Savior from the Dog," or possibly "Asshole Most Justly Constricted," but his family calls him Gerard Plunkett.
   
2. I've got to bow my head in shame here, because I did not identify the Heroic and Most Decidedly Straight Kickboxer as the Monk from Keb in Season 3's "Maternal Instinct" (at least not before I saw his IMDB head shot, at which point I upped the counter). Let's have a big hand and healthy bicep appreciation for Terry Chen. (Although I am shamed by my weak SG-1-spotting fu, this at least puts to rest my suspicions that they descended the character to appear in Season 4's "Absolute Power".)
   
3. Next up is Jonas Quinn's girlfriend from Season 7's "Failsafe," she of the dubious lace camisole under a marching band jacket all topped up with a cut identical to Jonas's Hair Don't. We'd feel worse about her untimely death so soon after her wedding if we didn't know that her relationship was already doomed because she married a guy and did not know he was terrified of flying. It's not romantic, people, it's just poor communication. Nonetheless, let's give a big hand to Emily Holmes.
   
4. The sacrificial pilot lamb is better known to me as . . . oh, well, I don't know his name, actually, but he's the head of the facility in which the team wakes up in the Season 2 Finale "Into the Fire" and gets to deal with in the Season 3 premiere "Out of Mind." (IMDB helpfully points out that the character's name is Major General Trofsky, but his mama named him Tom Butler [unless he was required by the equivalent of SAG rules to change his name].)
   
5. She's only credited as "Driver" (that'd be the blonde chyck who drives "Ground" Agent Harris around and has about 4 lines), but on Stargate SG-1, she's that Thorn in the Side from the Fourth Estate, Tracy Donovan in Season 6's "Prometheus," Season 8's "Covenant," and Season 9's "Ex Deus Machina." She's also probably grateful that the SoaP people were much kinder to her in the way of hair and makeup (seriously, she looks like a stand-in for Ferris Beuller's mom in all her clashing plaid 80s glory on SG-1): Let's all tell Kendall Cross that we never knew she could look so fabulous.
   
6. His mad skills as Dr. Warner in the SGC infirmary in Season 1's "The Enemy Within" and "Legacy," Season 2's "Spirits," and Season 3's "Legacy," clearly qualified him to handle things in the control tower and nearly incite a last-minute race riot. He's Kevin McNulty, and he's Canadian.
   
7. I'm really proud of spotting Nya from Season 1's stinker "Emancipation," as a ho in search of an autograph. Crystal Lowe, may I suggest a new agent?
   
8. The world's least memorable Gate Technician? I remembered him. Even if he was the Gate Technician from the future that never happened. And he's one hell of a fictional dad. Please claim your unruly children, David Neale.
   

And the SG-1 Bush League, ladies and gentlemen.

1. Another miss for me, but I'm giving myself a pass on this one: this guy wasn't just in season 9 episodes, he's a fucking prior. It's a scientifically proven fact that no one can pay attention when priors are on the screen. All the same, he's the motherfuckin' redshirt partner who dies so that Samuel L. Jackson may live, he's Mark Houghton.
   
2. I regret to inform this actor that I do not know who Vosh was in Season 9's "The Ties that Bind," and I had to cheat to learn that he was Mr. Mullet: Snake Provider to the Ambigiously Asian Mafia in SoaP. Better luck next time, Darren Moore.
   
3. Anonymous stuntman in countless episodes of SG-1. Is there any nobler calling than to serve as Siler's Minion? Congratulations on having lines this time, even if you were upside down and unrecognizable, even before your head got bashed in, Scott Nicholson. Do you suppose that your cow-orker Darryl Quon resents your comparative success and will rat you out to Dan Shea for every little thing you do?
   
4. She's cheating. She's a real news anchor, and she she's a fake reporter in Season 6's "Smoke and Mirrors" as well as in SoAP. Isn't everyone tired of seeing Mi-Jung Lee?
   
5. I'm counting our friendly neighborhood snake expert among the honorary Stargate people, because, let's face it: He looks like the love child of Tom Lenk and David Hewlett. Todd Louiso, you will be assimilated.
   

Man the economy of the acting community in Vancouver is so stimulated it must be approaching orgasm by now.

This is long enough. I'll do my review in a separate post.

Short-Attention-Span Cable Network

(NB:There are spoilers for the Season 2 finale of !Huff below)

Cable television has totally wanted me for many years, but I've played it coy. Yes, in the past I've needed cable for my Mystery Science Theatre 3000 habit. And then when Macgyver felt the need to be my TV boyfriend, and he brought his friend Maj. (now Lt. Col.) Man!Ho along, and then told me that I'd probably enjoy watching a slow-moving trainwreck involving the 50,000 surviving humans of the robot Holocaust, I'll admit that I was grateful to have cable. Cable certainly brought me hours of fashion, entertainment, the peoples' ovation, and fame forever when I had to see Iron Chef every week.

But did I really NEED cable?

I've seen about 15 seconds of Sex in the City and decided that if I need the inside of my skull scooped out, I'll go the trephination route in loyalty to my geographical area of specialization. I have never---and please have something soft nearby for when you inevitably pass out from the shock of this revelation---seen even that much of The Sopranos. (In fact, I only realized about 2 months ago that one of the A3 songs provided to me by my friend A is the theme song to The Sopranos.) Other than noting from commercials that The L Word seems to follow a standard butch/femme lesbian dichotomy, I couldn't tell you anything else about it. I've seen a handful of Six Feet Under episodes, and although there were times when it piqued my interest, I never tuned in regularly, set up a season pass, or did anyting that could be construed as committment.

Other than with Sex in the City, this hasn't been conscious too-cool-for-school avoidance. I just never felt the yen to check out most of the big shows, and when I did see some of them, they just didn't grab me and make me nervous that the satellite would go out when the next episode was scheduled.

And then things changed. I blame my spouse. I believe we got Showtime first, because it had (or was about to have) Penn & Teller's Bullshit!, and pal M had made Dead Like Me sound intriguing. And it was intriguing. Not in a grab-you-by-the-balls-and-make-you-pay-attention way, but in a raised-eyebrow-tap-on-the-shoulder-jerk-of-the-thumb-in-the-general-direction-of-weirdness way. Throughout the show there were things that frustrated me about it, but there were other things that completely fascinated me and had me slack-jawed as I watched.

When Laura Harris debuted as Daisy, I'd have never predicted that a character, who seemed to be there to do nothing but talk about all the guys she blew way back when, could deliver such a subtle, layered, truly moving performance. And don't even talk to me about Callum Blue. In my mind, Mason was Angel's Doyle unleashed---darker, infinitely more fucked up (and, sadly, with a lot more of Glenn Quinn's real-life tragedy mixed in), and yet fundamentally appealing. In particular, the course of the relationship between Mason and Daisy had me glued to the set. Never seeing how low they could go and how artfully they could, from time to time, transcend their own self-destructive tendencies to be excellent to one another was my biggest heartbreak about the show's cancellation.

But let's face it: Dead Like Me was always Showtime's also-ran. When your award nominations are limited to Saturns, Image Awards, and the insult-to-injury Emmys in music and visual effects, you're not long for this world. And given the flaws in the show, its cancellation was a bittersweet break up, particularly because DLM introduced me to what I've only just learned is my rebound guy: !Huff. But I'll get back to that, because it's really the source of my intense rage of the moment.

Let's turn to HBO for a moment. If Showtime is your 90s dot.com start-up in terms of cable network addiction, HBO is supposed to be your blue-chip company. Am I right? I mean, any time someone from Showtime DOES get an Emmy nomination, the snarky scuttlebutt is that someone checked the wrong box on the ballot. Being a bit backwards, we didn't get HBO until after we had Showtime, and you can thank the Carnies for that. My spouse cannot resist Carnies.

So, slowly but surely, we get drawn into the incredibly complex dust bowl dimension of Carnivale. We marvel that we have actors ranging from the Little Man from Another Place on Twin Peaks to Jupiter, the wrestling promoter, on Nikki acting the fuck out of their roles on the same canvas. We go a little funny in our heads because casting Clancy Brown as a satanic depression-era preacher should have a very extensive warning label that emphasizes the inevitable night terrors. We come to the realization that Nick Stahl is one of the most brilliant young actors out there. We wonder if Joss Whedon kept his invisible girl alive and well and sheltered by the CIA because he KNEW about Clea Duvall. But all the while, we have a false sense of security. THIS is HBO. These characters will be around for some time to come. This storyline has years in which to get so much more fucked up than it is right now. Except not so fucking much.

And then there's Deadwood. Ok, I am so very not ready to talk about Deadwood, but you should all prepare yourselves for the wailing that will rise up from the Windy City when the last episodes air.

So that leaves this week's suckerpunch: !Huff. On paper, !Huff had an easy time of it with the denizens of Telecommuniculturey. Hank Azaria? What could not be good about the man who brings you Apu AND Moe? Paget Brewster? The cancellation of Andy Richter Controls the Universe is one of the greatest pop culture crimes of our time, and when the pop cultural revolution comes, there will be a reckoning. In short, Paget Brewster getting excellent roles is a big score for the good guys. Oliver Platt? Is it possible not to love Oliver Platt? Don't answer that. I don't have time to weep for you sad, sad people.

That said, !Huff, didn't take immediately. It took a couple of episodes to find its feet, but I can pinpoint the moment when it did: Beth finds lipstick on the crotch of her 14-year-old son's underwear. The family wackiness that ensues was just brilliantly done, from Beth's (possibly willful) maternal cluelessness to Byrd's teenage inability to see the hammer coming, to Huff's own "Ooooh, she's gonna kill you for that." At that moment, every single one of those characters became my peeps, and I came to crave the unflinching determination on the part of the writers to show me the absolute rock-bottom, scum-sucking aspects of these characters side-by-side with their ability to transcend it all from time to time.

I knew that "Which Lip Is the Cervical Lip?" was the finale of season 2, because, well, it had been advertised as the finale of season 2. It was brutal, and it was wonderful. Over and over again, I was struck by the performances in the episode. Everyone was ON. Everything was clicking.

Although the entire show is (and has been from episode 1) fundamentally about point of view, this episode really showcased that take and technique. Throughout, the camera literally tricks us into jumping between perspectives as, for example, !Huff walking down the hallway of the Four Seasons ends as he passes a curtained window and the perspective cuts over to Russell being marched to a holding cell.

But lest those kinds of techniques seem like "look what I can do" tricks, they're really working the metaphor to a purpose in the finale. Over the last few episodes, Rachel Style has been playing Kate, a young patient of Huff's who is going blind from retinitis pigmentosa. She's a tremendous actress who doesn't seem to have all the extensive a resume. In the opening shot of the episode, we see !Huff from her perspective (a startlingly realistic representation of what someone at her stage of the disease would see). Huff, who is probably at his most narcissistic in this episode, gives into her desire for a bit of personal information about him, more out of boredom than because he is moved by her plea. (And I've got to tell you, it's a testament to Hank Azaria as an actor that he was able to maintain the bored, distracted facade throughout, because this young woman was riveting.)

I have a son, he says. And out of this scrap of information, Kate spins a tale of his perfect life, one that couldn't be farther from the truth. As she finishes, Huff looks like he might give into the temptation to make the session into his own by correcting her, and she orders him not to, because that's "How she wants to see it."

On the flip side of the narratives that demand cogency and linearity (no matter how wrong those turn out to be), we have the dynamic, fractured, piecemeal, perspective of Teddy, Huff's schizophrenic brother. All season long, Teddy has grasped little bits of success and normalcy for himself while the audience waited for it all to come crashing down in a spectacular, hideous way. Only because I know that the writers of this show are complete and utter bastards with some kind of sick need to actually challenge the audience did the tension creep up several notches just when Teddy made a move that could have defused the situation, coming clean with his girlfriend about his illness and the lie he'd been living since he met her.

Rather than the relationship resolving itself in network television, absolutist, flowchart, choose-your-own-adventure fashion (To break up with Teddy, turn to page 87; To prove yourself to be the good-hearted woman who will cure him of his schizophrenia with the mighty healing power of your vagina and self-destructive nature, turn to page 113), things linger and fester. Alyssa doesn't leave Teddy, and yet Teddy's condition quite realistically continues to deteriorate. When he hatches a plan for them to run off to Mexico, she stands him up. And until the last horrible moment before his complete break, the audience has no way of anticipating what his reaction will be (or of preparing for its naked brutality) when she shows up out of guilt later that night.

If I had to pick my "weak link" in the cast, it would have been Anton Yechin as Byrd, Beth's and Huff's son. (And, shit, how fair is that? The kid was actually 15 when the show started.) Until the finale, that is. His breakdown and palpable connection with his father---its obvious parallels to Huff's hopelessness in his relationship with Teddy---great googly moogly, that's excellent, no matter what the medium. And, well, it goes on and on. I haven't even talked about Blythe Danner as Izzy, which is an essay all on its own.

So I emerged from the finale, exhausted, tantalized, and filled with the mixture of gloom and anticipation that comes with the end of a season I've really loved. And M drops the bomb: It's not the end of the season, it's the end of the series.

I can't really blame the writers, I guess, because the season finale was well in the can when the network announced cancellation two days before it aired. However, given this incredibly unpleasant reality, I can't say strongly enough what a complete disservice it is to the series to have ended it that way. I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ! Russell starts the episode with a dead hooker in his apartment (a black hooker, and a recurring character, dead of a coke overdose), and ends by delivering his own son. Just an episode or so ago, Huff spent a squid-juice-fueled night with a Korean hooker, and he ends looking like the good guy as he deals with Byrd when Beth can't, then tries to do the "right thing" by asking to come home and gets shut down by Beth, who isn't ready. Izzy, after 20 years of ignoring Teddy, is suddenly the one to bring him out of his break.

On the one hand, there are a million maddening loose ends and roads not taken. On the other, as a series finale, "Which Lip Is the Cervical Lip?" makes the entire run seem shallow and pat, complete with a number of unsavory racist, misogynist, motherhood-is-ultimately-magical-by-default overtones. I've got no doubt whatever that all of those pretenses of closure were intended as all-too-temporary respite before the world got blowed up real good again. And yet . . . goddamn, it's frustrating. It's almost enough to make me mention 7th Heaven, if I didn't know that it would make my bud C cry.

Dude. Seriously. W. T. F? Isn't this cable? Isn't this where we're supposed to be freed from the whims of advertisers and the Parents Television Council? Aren't we supposed to focus less on ratings and more on quality? Guess not. I am SO going to have to choke a bitch.