Unsolicited Advice

I derive comfort from the oddest things sometimes. When I'm sick and/or miserable for an extended length of time -- which in fact I have been, and they have just given me another  bottle of drugs which does not work correctly , and my next return appointment isn't until next week -- with no clear end in sight, I cope by grabbing onto something, and researching the ever-loving fuck out of it. My brain is the only part of me that keeps working right when I feel lousy. I had the honest-to-God flu once, the kind where you spend a few days wondering if you're going to die and the next two weeks praying that you will, and in those horrible waking hours between one dose of drugs wearing off and my next dose of drugs kicking in, I crammed the entirety of the sci.electronics.repair FAQ into my brain. I now know far more about resuscitating dead VCRs than I will ever conceivably get to use. Another bout of problems coincided with the Doctor Who Restoration Team inventing yet anoth...

Happy Chocolate Sale Eve, everybody! And Valentine's Day, if you celebrate that. I think I've only once actually had a boyfriend on V-Day, and in retrospect I should have dumped him long before that happened.  In honor of couple-dom, however, today's post is about one of the quintessential couples of showbiz, George Burns and Gracie Allen. They were a mixed couple, unusual for the time; George was born Nathan Birnbaum to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Romania, and Gracie was one of four Irish Catholic sisters. They met in 1923, and at first their partnership was strictly business -- Gracie was engaged to someone else at the time. They went on tour first as a traditional vaudeville act, where George played the wacky comedian and Gracie was the straight man, but after noticing that Gracie was getting more laughs on the setup than George was with the punchlines, they flipped the characters around. "And all of a sudden, the audience realized I had a talent....

The more I see of Stéphane Lambiel, the more I like him. He's somewhat less insane out on the ice than, say, Evgeny Plushenko, but he makes up for it by being a kind of cheery snarker in multiple languages. Conveniently, I speak three out of the four he admits to proficiency in -- so far I haven't caught him speaking Portuguese in front of a camera, and last I checked he was sort of casually making inroads on Italian. Weir got him to take a stab at Russian once; it sounded reasonable to me, but Lambiel seemed to think it was appallingly bad. He is definitely francophone , as I was guessing; his French is the only language not accented with something else. He is pleasantly understandable in everything, which endears him to my linguist-y little heart. Sportpanorama seems to be a Swiss program, so good luck with those subtitles. Standard written Schweitzerdeutch  is not as bad as colloquial spoken Schweitzerdeutch , but I'm still sticking with the French on the soundtr...

Argh, dialects. I found Moggie backstage footage of the "Kings on Ice" show ( part 2 , 3 , 4 ) -- she's a theater tech, it's in her blood -- and she apparently adores Evginy Plushenko, so I went nosing around about the other performers in the thing. Brian Joubert does not appear to be having any fun with that show, figure skating, or indeed life in general, but everyone else seems to be enjoying themselves. Stéphane Lambiel looks interesting. I'm shallow, he's pretty, and his self-appointed mission in life seems to be to sit next to Johnny Weir at press conferences and distract him until I start watching for their sixth-grade teacher to come stomping up the center aisle to ask them if that note they've been passing back and forth is anything they'd like to share with the class. The gibbery fan boards were swatting around a rumor that the two of them were involved at one point, and I can honestly say I have no idea. Their main "evidence" ...

I decided I was probably about $5 worth of curious about Johnny Weir, so I headed off to Amazon to find his book. Most of the reviews of this thing make a very big deal about him "coming out" in it. Is this some new definition of "out" that I had not previously been aware of? What do they think "in" looks like? The book came out in 2011, after he'd been to the Olympics twice. What the hell do they think he was doing before ? Self-delusion, as a force of nature, is slightly more pernicious than gravity, so I went looking around to find out if perhaps he was under the impression that this was news to anyone when he published it. Answer: No. Weir rolls his eyes at everyone who says that to him ("I was never in ," he explains, with more patience than I'd have after the first half-dozen interviews -- although he does use that specific phrase every time, so he's probably doing it by rote). It wasn't a case of everyone noticing and pre...

Top Gear is one of those things that's much easier to watch than to describe. You start out telling people, "It's about cars," and twenty minutes later you find yourself trying to explain why the BBC is sending an automotive journalist to the North Pole on a dogsled. They have used cars as a flimsy excuse to go to so many exotic places that Top Gear is now better at being the National Geographic Society than the actual National Geographic Society. The three of them have bickered like children in some of the most gorgeous spots on the face of the planet, usually while Clarkson is trying to fix his car with a very large hammer. Moggie has just finished her physics homework and needs something to stop the weeping, so I'm going to talk about Richard Hammond for a while. The bookseller from whom I attempted to order  On The Edge  somehow managed to be out of copies before they got around to shipping mine, so I'll just be doing my usual semi-baseless speculation...

I'm not a gearhead. Everything I know about cars, I learned from Car Talk and Top Gear -- so it's probably a good thing I don't drive. Both of these programs are nevertheless entertaining, so I keep up with them anyway. I watch Top Gear  mainly because the three presenters -- Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May -- are hilarious. The show is partly scripted and partly edited segments of live camera commentary, which means both a lot of interesting ad-libs and a lot of interesting gag reels. The three of them do play characters, which have a sort of "based on a true story" relationship with their actual personalities; Clarkson is a bit of a curmudgeon, Hammond is a bit of a scrapper, and May is a bit of an obsessive geek, but it's exaggerated quite a lot for comic effect. They spend a lot of time dreaming up creative ways to be total cocks to one another without actually getting anyone killed -- pay attention and you'll notice that, while they ...

The First Doctor: William Hartnell First serial: 100,000 BC Last serial: The Tenth Planet Costume details: A gentleman's day wear from roughly the Victorian era, with an appropriate shoulder-length hairstyle. Frock coat with astrakhan collar and karakul hat, dark cloak, long scarf. Wears an ornate ring on one finger. Companions: Susan , Ian Chesterton , Barbara Wright , Vicki , Steven Taylor , Katarina , Dodo Chaplet , Polly , Ben Jackson At first glance, the First Doctor is egotistical and imperious. At second glance, he's egotistical, imperious, and also flubs his lines a lot. This is because the Doctor was not initially supposed to be the focus character of the show. Originally, the show that we know as Doctor Who  was conceived of as less a science-fiction serial, and more of an edutainment program -- you will notice, if you watch the very early stories, that they're rather heavy on history, and comparatively light on stuntmen in giant rubber suits. The audien...

Before I go on with any more of the SPN stuff, I should probably do the whole listing-of-ye-biases and meta-commentary thing. This is 145% opinion, speculation, and personal orneriness, and should not be taken as the basis of anything. I was sort of aware of Supernatural before I started watching it. I hang out on the internets, after all. I had been told that Dean/Cas was a thing, although I had no idea who the hell they were at the time and I'd heard much more about the infamous "Wincest" people -- that happens to hit one of my personal squick buttons, and I was told it was prevalent, so I read no fanfic before I started prodding Netflix for episodes. I watched the first couple of season 1, then skipped to season 4, since I'd been specifically asked about Misha Collins. I've been a fanficker for a long, long time. I write it (no, you can't see it), I read it (don't ask me for recs unless you want things that are slashy or interesting), and I study it...

So apparently Misha Collins has a really interesting idea of personal space . Moggie tripped over that one on YouTube a while back and ended up laughing so hard she forgot about air and started making the kinds of noises one might expect to get out of an emotionally-distressed pterodactyl. This is not particularly uncommon when he does panels, and most of the cast let him get away with it all . the . time . It is widely agreed to be charming and hilarious, and makes it well worth turning up to basically any event where they let him talk to other people. There's another one where someone asks him if he and Castiel have any character traits in common, and he decides to give her a demonstration of Cas' total obliviousness when it comes to interpersonal distance by getting within about a foot of her while waffling on. I don't think this is the only version of this you can find online, but nobody's got a particularly good vantage point on the other side of the auditorium,...

Been poking around on TV Tropes again. That thing will eat your brain, I swear. Misha Collins has a Creator page, for obvious reasons -- writers/actors who have a huge online following tend to get them first -- but it unfortunately makes him look rather more bonkers than he actually is. Which is saying something. The problem with TV Tropes is that, since the thing is done in a bullet-point format that requires parsimony in examples, you lose a lot of context. Sometimes the intro block puts it back; Noel Fielding's page makes it a point to note that, while he's weird as hell and best known for playing a flashy idiot, he personally is quite bright and knows exactly what he's doing. Collins' page doesn't. It appears to be filled in mainly by the tumblr/Twitter crowd, which means that the writer(s) assume you know which parts are snark and which aren't. The page is generally accurate, plus or minus things that are a matter of opinion, but a lot of them lack cla...

Normally, when I do profiles, I keep my nose the fuck out of everyone's love lives. The farthest I'll go is generally, "They got married, I've seen pictures, they look happy," or "She shares custody with her first husband, she talks about it in this interview, they sound pretty amicable." I consider it very much none of my business, to the point where I get rather uncomfortable reading through trash-mag accounts of who is dating whom and how much of a train wreck they are together. There are a few couples I'll point out on a casual basis, just because they're very public and I think they're wonderfully hilarious together, but by and large it makes me squirmy in the same way paparazzi photos do. On the other hand, sometimes one of them writes a book about it. Mrs. Misha Collins -- Vickie -- is actually Dr. Victoria Vantoch, PhD, University of Southern California. She's a sex and gender historian, and I don't know why I haven't ...

If there's one thing being sick does really really well, it's... well, actually,it's make me an emo, mood-swingy bastard, who has to blow her nose every fifteen seconds. It's like being a raging cokehead, except without all the fun parts. If there are two  things being sick does, however, the other one is fuck up my sleep schedule. The boss-lady is also on vacation right now, so I've no pressing need to be up before noon at any point. I spent a couple days honoring my late rat, and all the pet rats that have gone before, by hiding under the blankets and eating macaroons. Believe me, it's the sort of thing he would have done. Now I'm just sort of tired of being up at 5am, when all the world is dead. Cramming things into my brain helps some. It also helps that Supernatural  is made almost entirely of mood whiplash and plot twists, which means that if I'm watching one of the arc episodes, I can't  tune out mentally, or I miss cool stuff. If I'm wa...