Vacation all I ever wanted

I am 99% of the way finished with my socks, and I will absolutely NOT have to take them with me on vacation. I’ll be able to start blocking them before I leave for the airport, and I trust my mom enough to send them off after they’re dry. I’m bringing another pair of socks to work on while I’m away, but I’m not sure how much knitting I’ll get around to once I’m off the plane.

I’m going to be suffering at work for a few more hours (hey, I’m happy to have a job, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t find it annoying every now and then), and then I go home to take one more look at my suitcase (why do I feel the need to pack so many shirts? I will not appreciate that when I’m the one hauling that suitcase all over Ireland and the UK), and then I go the airport to make my way across the Atlantic. I’m so stoked!!! I haven’t been on a long-ish vacation since August, and this time I’m going by myself, so I’ll definitely get a chance to recharge my batteries.

I’m bringing my computer because I am a hopeless geek, but I’m not sure that I’ll be posting stuff to this site.

What is wrong with people?

Ann Coulter likes to say that liberals have no sense of humor and can’t take a joke, but I love how she is so thick that she didn’t realize that this Car and Driver article about President Obama ordering Chevy and Dodge to stop supplying vehicles for NASCAR was a joke? Is this more ammunition for the theory that Ann Coulter is secretly a liberal who is mocking conservatives?

In other WTF news, what was going on in the president’s head when he decided that giving the Queen of England an iPod that contained, amongst other things, his own speeches and photos of himself. Arrogant much?

Auf wiedersehen, Bravo!

Finally, after months of legal wrangling between NBC Universal, The Weinstein Co., and Lifetime Network, the sixth season of Project Runway is clear to air this summer on Lifetime. The Weinstein Co. had to pay an unspecified amount of money to NBC Universal, but the case is now settled and we are free to watch the first Los Angeles-based season of the original fashion design reality show (what ever happened to that knockoff that Bravo was hoping to air??). I wonder how good it will be, knowing that it was taped to air almost 6 months ago, and the fashion week that it surrounds has been over for months.

We’ll see, I guess, but I hope that the move to the West Coast energized this show, or maybe just that they had a more talented, less unnecessarily-obnoxious people this time.

On the QT

I’ve been really busy for the last couple of days, getting ready for my grand Irish adventure. I’m leaving tomorrow night, so it’s really crunch time. I’m ALMOST finished with these socks, which are coming out well. I’m actually knitting now, so chances seem good that I will not have to finish them and then mail them back from Belfast. All before, my “knitting” consisted of doing a couple of rows while watching a lot of tv, so now I’m actually knitting more than anything else and seeing the results really quickly. If I didn’t have to work right now, I’d probably be finished by 9:30. I have to do as much as I can here, though, because I still have to pack once I get home. Good thing I already finished my laundry!

What?

I usually pride myself on my English comprehension, but I cannot for the life of me figure out the point of this article. I can’t believe that this anecdote by a first-time author was deemed to be interesting enough to publish. I wouldn’t even have told it at a dinner party.

Dollhouse is finally worth watching

I’ve been watching Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s new show, since its pilot. I wanted for so many reasons to like it:

• It was created by Joss Whedon, who I will always love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• It stars Eliza Dushku, who played the complicated and interesting Faith on Buffy
• The premise sounded really interesting
• …

Okay, so maybe there were just three reasons that I wanted to like it. But when the show premiered, it became clear to me that maybe these things were actually liabilities. Joss Whedon is a god to a certain subset of television and movie watchers, but Buffy and Angel were a long time ago, and Firefly didn’t even last an entire season. Sure, he did well with Dr. Horrible (although I believe I made my feelings on that one pretty clear), but you’re only as good as your last show, and I’m not sure that Internet sensations count.

Second, Eliza Dushku is not a great actress. She was the perfect person to play the tough, conflicted Faith, but she’s much less convincing on Dollhouse when she’s supposed to be nice and harmless. It’s gotten to the point where casting her conveys the same message as casting Lucy Lawless: watch out for this one, she’ll hurt you bad. I never quite buy it when other characters look at Echo’s Persona of the Week and fail to notice the danger. For example, on tonight’s episode, “Echoes”, they had her running around a college campus in an outfit that screams “late 90s” (complete with a miniscule skirt and almost thigh-high socks!) and wearing high-heeled Mary Janes. Who else but a freakishly tough woman could withstand hours of kinky sex, motorcycle-riding, and sneaking around in those things? I know that I probably would have only had the fortitude to get around to the first two things on that list.

Third, the premise seems more ridiculous each week. The idea is that there is a group of beautiful people who are essentially blank slates and for incredible sums of money (usually), individuals, corporations, the government, etc. can have these blank slates imprinted with any set of memories or skill set they desire. So Echo the Doll can become sex-kitten Alice, and then go back to being Echo when the engagement is over. And aside from the fact that the technology seems to keep finding newer and more spectacular ways of failing (no spoilers, but if you’ve seen next week’s preview, you know what I’m talking about), some of the assignments just don’t make sense. Why would a couple use a Doll as a midwife? Why pay a boatload of money when a real midwife could be had for considerably less? Or as a hostage negotiator? Why shell out a lot of money on a fake negotiator when one would presumably soon also be paying a ransom? The given excuse of the need for privacy seemed pretty flimsy. I can’t imagine many negotiators make it a practice to blab about their assignments once they’re completed. And, anyway, what value did Echo add in that situation? Due to the way she was programmed, she actually kind of arsed it up before damage control and more Dolls helped save the day.

And why is Echo working in LA, when that’s where she became a Doll? Episode 6 revealed that there are 20 Dollhouses around the world (why is the LA house the only one that seems to have reached the status of urban legend?), so what sense does it make to have her stay in the city where she started out? She’s already been recognized while on an engagement, and the more assignments she does, the more likely this is to happen again. This 20 Dollhouse thing feels to me like Joss is already tweaking the established mythology, although I am glad that he did not wait six seasons to reveal that there are a lot of other Dollhouses, so this main Dollhouse is less special. It seems that I may be harboring a little residual bitterness about the Slayerettes that popped up in season 7. My bad.

I’ve said more about this than I thought I would, and this post is already excessively wordy, so I will save my thoughts on the Dollhouse staff and other Dolls for some other time.

I knew all that tv watching would eventually pay off

I asked Alan Sepinwall, tv critic for the Newark Star-Ledger and blogger, a question for his mailbag column, and he answered it for me! Maybe he answered my question first because it was the best (yay!), the worst (boo!), or possibly because I am from the state the paper is based in. Whatever, I found out what I wanted to know. It’s nice to be the one asking questions, for a change.

A thorough ribbing, not necessarily undeserved

I like to read the Food section of the New York Times when I have a few minutes and find myself in front of the computer. I bake and cook when I get the mood, and I’m always looking for good recipes. This week’s Frank Bruni column focused on a challenge given to two food writers: feed a party of 8 for less than $50. I thought the article was interesting, and liked the ideas that I got from it, even though I know that it’s not at all difficult to serve 6 people a complete meal for $50 or less.

Still, I got a kick out of the way that the Jezebel community reacted to the story. In addition to being up in arms and making fun of stupid food reporters, chefs, the New York Times, and printed media in general, the Jezzies added something of even more value than humor: recipes. Most of them were in the vein of “tostitos, dip, coffee, etc” but a few (including Sadie’s recipe that she posted along with her reaction to the article) looked like something I’d in all seriousness make and eat. Thank you, Jezebel! I shall be eating cheaply for ages, now!

Tragic

I find it interesting how following seemingly random links on the internet can teach you something you’d never have any reason to know otherwise. I started out looking at this Metafilter thread about the web site dead.atyourage.com. You enter your exact date of birth and find out about famous/infamous/interesting people who died at your age or thereabouts.

The first person on my list was Lyman Bostock, a baseball player I’d never heard of. Apparently, he is still the only MLB player to have been murdered during the baseball season. That’s sad enough, but I went to the Wikipedia article about him and read the story of his death; it’s heartbreaking. He was a great hitter on his way to being a pretty big star, and was murdered by Leonard Smith, the jealous, estranged husband of a woman he’d only just met. Even worse, Smith was found guilty in his second trial (the first ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury), was committed for psychiatric treatment, and was released after seven months when he was deemed to be no longer mentally ill. Including that time and the time he was in jail awaiting trial, he served less than two years for Bostock’s murder. ESPN Outside the Lines also did a story on Bostock’s murder. It seems like a slap in the face of Bostock’s family that Smith has been free for nearly thirty years, even though he was found guilty of murder. As a direct result of this case, the state of Indiana changed the way that the sentences of those found guilty by reason of insanity are handles, so that people found guilty and then deemed no longer insane would go to jail, instead of be released.

Where do you go from here?

There are a lot of shows whose premises make them seem like they’d make decent tv movies, but which don’t seem supportable over the course of a season. Amanda Bynes’s new show sounds like such a program. It’s called Canned, and it’s about a bunch of young friends who are all fired on the same day. Hilarious, right? Okay, not really. But still: how do you drag that out across a season (I say one season because, let’s be honest, right now nothing about this premise screams renewal)? I guess there must be more to it than that, right? Because otherwise, it’s pretty lame. Sounds like it may last as long Jerry O’Connell’s hotel show.