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Thursday, February 28, 2002

Heard on the radio this morning, while struggling to waken, that it was 18 degrees in Atlanta--which is to say, one degree colder than it was here in Minneapolis. Golly.

Way back in the olden days, before Prairie Home Companion became popular, Garrison Keillor used to host the 6-9 a.m. daily shift on the local public radio station. Then, as now, he had various wacky imaginary sponsors for the show, and the one I remember most fondly is Jack's Warm Car Service. The concept was, you signed up for the service, and then on bitter mornings, at an appointed time, the Warm Car would pull up in front of your house, and Raoul the chauffeur would come inside, wrap you up in a down comforter, carry you out to the Warm Car, and drive you to your destination, while spoon-feeding you hot oatmeal the whole way.

So I send all my friends in the southeastern quadrant of the US a virtual Warm Car this morning (and the Raoul of your fondest imagination).

Posted @ 09:11 AM CST [Link]3 comments

Wednesday, February 27, 2002

Re-opened this to add: OK, I don't really comment here on Smallville, because I don't have much to say about it, but I am watching it (hell, if I didn't I'd lose the drift of half of what my friends are gabbing about). And one thing I realized, after last night's episode--

Fanfiction, as some have noted over the years, is bung-full to the rafters with characters "smirking." Usually characters who seldom if ever actually do so, by my rather strict definition. Mulder, Scully, Methos, Duncan--they're constantly smirking in fiction, whereas in actuality I only see them snark and snipe, which are very different things. It appears to be writerly shorthand, a rather lazy way of vaguely trowelling sarcastic intent onto a character's remark, when such intent wasn't clear from the remark itself.

But Lex ... Lex smirks! Oh yes he does! And a glorious smirk it is, worthy of fanfictional enshrinement!

So Smallville fan-writers -- you are hereby given a free exemption from my usual "No Damn Smirking" policy. Use it wisely.

Posted @ 07:28 AM CST [Link]11 comments

Heee. Anna's rant on last night's Buffy is a wonderful thing to behold. I realize I didn't feel the same level of righteous ass-kicking rage simply because I'm not as emotionally invested in the show, and because most of the episode (mercifully) blanked out of my head about two minutes after it ended. What stays with me is Spike, and as much as I dislike much of what they did with him this episode (for reasons Anna's articulated much better than I could), I continue to be just taken by the way James Marsters can sell me this character. I realize that if he weren't around, I pretty much would bail on the show, just as I've largely bailed on Angel. (Though I did catch this week's Angel episode, and would second the props others have given to Denisof for his work there.)

And anent Angel, I have one query: Just what is it that Gunn and Fred are supposed to see in each other? What's the supposed basis of their relationship? This is an honest question--I mean, having missed some episodes, I realize there may have been a moment I didn't see when we were given some clues about this. As it is, the relationship strikes me as utterly arbitrary; it's as if the writers have given up on finding any genuine role for either of them in the show, and so they just send them off at random intervals to make goo-goo eyes at each other over breakfast. I've always liked Gunn, but I'm bored with him now--they appear to have removed his brain at some point when I wasn't watching--and while I've always tried to be fair to Fred, although disliking her, I now want to fling stuff at the screen every time she appears. And together, they have, to my eyes, all the chemistry of damp balsa wood. Feh.

Posted @ 07:01 AM CST [Link]5 comments

Tuesday, February 26, 2002

A quick just-before-staggering-into-bed note --

LiveJournal, I loathe thee. The entire system seems to go crashing to the ground after 7 p.m., like a cheap villain's pony in a bad Western, and I can't get into anyone's LJ's. This vexes me.

A very interesting article on weblogging, in the latest MIT Technology Review, by Henry Jenkins. Yes, our Henry Jenkins, Textual-Poachers guy! Heh. I have made a mental note to revisit this article, and the new light it casts in my fuddled brain on the overlaps between weblogging and fanfiction and democratic (small d) political theory, at some point when my brain is less fuddled, assuming such ever comes to pass.

Also, it appears that Son of Blog Panel: The East Coast Remix may appear on the schedule for Connexions. Because clearly I feel some bent need to stand up and referee another melee on this topic. Heh again.

Want to hear Anna's thoughts on tonight's Buffy. Ohhh, the Spike-pain ... oh oh ohhhh ...

Posted @ 10:16 PM CST [Link]8 comments

Gah. Cold morning. And the hell of it is, it's not really a cold morning, not seriously cold, just normal February-in-Minnesota, about 11 degrees and snowing gently. But after the bizarrely tropical winter we've been having--on our way to warmest winter on record--it feels painful and oppressive, and like the gods are out to get me. And I'm pondering once again that seditious line of thought I blabbed incessantly to everyone at Escapade, that one about pulling roots and relocating to a more temperate clime, like, say, the Pacific Northwest.

I remember the last time I felt this way, the winter before S. and I moved to California. It was '78-'79, one of a series of brutal winters in the late '70s. In particular, I recall an early morning in deep January, sun not yet up, around twenty below zero, when I was trying to start the car to go to work. There was some juice in the battery, but nothing was turning over in the engine, so I popped the hood and attempted the arcane Quick-Start Ritual, a relic of the pre-fuel-injection days. This involved (a) unscrewing the wing nut on top of the air filter (which meant, of course, taking one's mittens off and instant finger-freeze on contact with frigid metal); (b) taking off the air filter; (c) lifting up one of the winged flange-thingies on top of the carburetor, and propping it open with a screwdriver or some such; and (d) soaking down the interior of the carburetor with a good blast of Quick Start--an aerosolized toxic-smelling insanely flammable solvent, which (by some mechanism I never fully grasped) would, at least in theory, loosen the frozen gunk within and encourage the car to start up.

I went through all the steps, fumbling and whimpering softly from the cold, and managing to drop the wing nut in a snowbank (not a fatal error, since I figured I could always wire the air filter back on temporarily). When I got back in the driver's seat, reeking with the chemical stench of Quick Start blow-back, and turned the key, the car (a crappy old Dodge) did its usual I-don't-wanna-start shudder, and I heard an odd clunk from the engine regions. I shut everything off, went to investigate, and found that the shudder had dislodged the golf pencil I'd used (unable to find anything more appropriate) to prop open the flange-thingie, and it had fallen down into the depths of the carburetor. I just stood there for a moment, in a cloud of frozen breath and ether-fumes, feet numb up to the knees, fingers burning with cold, nose running and freezing on my upper lip, knowing that I would now be very late to work and that I was well on the way to re-frostbiting my left little toe, and the thought suddenly came to me, as though writ in letters of fire on the sky: You Don't Have to Live This Way. There's no law saying you have to stay here; there are plenty of places on the planet where no one's even heard of Quick Start.

And thus was planted the seed that eventually blossomed into three and a half lunatic years in California, and my eventual return to the tundra, with what I thought at the time were a much sounder array of values and priorities. But now, twenty years on ... I don't know. It's a much different thing to pull up stakes and move across country when one's approaching fifty than it is in one's mid-twenties, that much I know. And really, this winter hasn't been that hard. But historians and sociologists will tell you that social revolutions often begin when conditions start to improve, when people begin to see the radical prospect of you don't have to live this way, to believe change is possible. So this keeps shimmering around in the back of my mind now, as I look out at the falling snow, and start assembling the boots/scarf/hat/gloves/overcoat ensemble, to head off to work.

Posted @ 08:16 AM CST [Link]7 comments