I have managed to upgrade to the newest WordPress and finally get the newly compatible version of my theme. But why should you care? Because I now have the ability to post these nonsense little sidebar posts (look to the right, under the TV picture) and there is one there now in which I seek your opinion. Go! Opine! Opine, I ask you!
Monthly Archive for April, 2008
I am getting ready to do another film review for ladies — lately I’ve seen Lars and the Real Girl, The Golden Compass, and 27 Dresses. Next in line to see, I have Cloverfield and The Savages. What say you for a Ladies’ Review? Please to advise.
Yeah, yeah, I know it is not even nighttime, so I probably shouldn’t be posting a “What I’m Listening to Tonight” entry, but let’s face it: it is my office hours and I am stuck on campus, so I might as well be doing something productive. Rather than research or grading, I think my time could better be spent telling you all about how much I have been loving some Camper Van Beethoven lately and giving you a few tracks to listen to. This is what I have been listening to for the past several days — ever since my friend S. and I decided to put on an album of theirs on the way home from the local music show on Saturday.
I started listening to Camper Van Beethoven in high school and have loved them ever since. I like them oodles better than Cracker, by the way, for their sort of quiet-but-unabashed weirdness. Here are a few tracks from the album Camper Vantiquities, a rarities collection that has some truly wonderful songs not heard elsewhere, including the song my heart dedicates to my students each and every day, “(We Workers Do Not Understand Postmodern Art).” Here are my favorites (try to guess which one was my predictable angsty teenage anthem*):
My favorite regular Camper Van album was always Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, the title of which is a reference to Patty Hearst. Here’s the Hearst-related song plus two other favorites (the last one is the best of all):
*Which was not, ironically, Cracker’s “Teen Angst.” Heh.
This weekend, my friend S. dragged me out to the country, in spite of my grouchy and anti-social end-of-semester funk, to see a bunch of local bands. I am quite happy that she succeeded in getting my cranky ass up off the couch, because we had a great time!
It’s the first time I have gone to see any local music on purpose since moving to New Wye — many times I’ve caught a local band or two at the bar when happy hour wound up lasting into the later parts of the evening, but in those cases the bands were just a noisy nuisance, too loud in a too-empty bar, preventing us from gossiping with the ease we ladies normally require.
This time, we drove out to the country (The country, people! Way out in that country!) to a little warehouse in the middle of nowhere. Well, they call it a warehouse, but basically it was a barn. There were lots of dogs, and the refreshments were a brown-bag affair. We brought some sangria, and other people were passing around cases of PBR and selling ribs out front. Like I said, country.
The music was really, really good, though. There was (in my opinion) an over-abundance of washboards, but there were also more useful traditional instruments, like mandolins, banjos, washtub basses, harmonicas, accordions, and many guitars.
Do I also need to mention the cute boys? Well, I guess I just mentioned them. I now have a raging crush on a washtub bass player who had his hair done up in a bun with chopsticks. Normally those three things (washtub bass! long hair! chopsticks in a bun!) would be mercilessly mocked by me, but let me tell you this dude was working it. My friend said his singing was “like a New Orleans ghost,” which strikes me as about right.
The whole evening was rather rejuvenating, in that way that happens whenever I find a local bar where no one is wearing khaki, or, say, when I see a person with a mohawk. These things lift my spirits. Needless to say, a whole barn full of weirdos getting down to hillbilly-punk music* pretty much made my week.
*Dude, I have no idea how to describe this music. I would just call it what the one band calls it, but it involves a description that’s a little too geographically specific for this anonymous blog. If you know me and are interested, email me and I’ll send you the band’s link.
Okay, so, I had a whole post in mind about Cylons and their beauty routines, kind of a TV Reviews for Ladies kind of thing, but then the last five minutes of tonight’s episode of Battlestar Galactica completely rocked my world, blew my mind, and shook my face all off and shit. So I shall continue with my Important Questions About Cylons, but I may digress a little bit. Don’t worry, there will be NO SPOILERS AHEAD! If you have any basic concept of the show, you’re safe.
So! One of the iconic images of Battlestar Galactica is the Cylon Number Six, ably (and hotly) played by Tricia Helfer. She, as a Cylon, has “many copies,” and when she gets killed, she is reincarnated in the creepy Cylon Bathtub of Mystery. This is all well and good, and is a part of the show that we all accept as the mythology. La la la, etc. But!
The main Number Six, aka Caprica, plays a crucial part in the pilot (and thus the set up for the whole show), and is a key figure in the imagination (?) of one Gaius Baltar. She always looks pretty much like this, all platinum blonde and scantily clad:
The hair, of course, is a cunning bit of artifice from the kind people of L’Oreal — because she’s worth it! The normal Tricia Helfer looks decidedly less platinum bottle blonde and more natural. Still hot, of course:
[Incidentally, it is really hard to find a picture of Helfer in her normal hair, wearing clothes -- especially as Six, but even as her own self. All the pictures of her tend to be either Platinum-Blonde Six or her own self in a super-suggestive, men's-magazine type pose. EW.]
Generally, though, I was accepting of the fact that her many copies of her Cylon body were all platinum blonde-ified, even though there have always been other copies of Number Six who were sporting Helfer’s natural, medium blonde shade of hair. In last week’s episode, though, the newest Number Six iteration was revealed. She’s apparently (according to TWOP, but I don’t remember this being revealed in the show itself) called Natalie, and she has an important part to play in the Cylon society, related to the status of the Raiders and Centurions. [According to some sources these are called Centaurions? Could that be true? I call them Centurions, and I am used to being right, so whatever.]
Here is a picture of her from last week’s episode, “Six of One”:
Not so much with the platinum blonde, see? It was in looking at her that I began to wonder about Cylon Hair Care, a Crucial Issue. And here is my problem: The Cylons are an army of, basically, clones. All of the copies of each model look alike, and when each one dies and is re-embodied, he/she is given an exact copy of the original body. Right? I mean, is that right? Because they do not seem to carry over the acquired characteristics from one incarnation to the next. Boomer, for example, a Number Eight, shoots herself in the face, but when she later dies and is re-embodied [question: am I remembering this right?], she doesn’t have a gaping wound, or even a scar, on her face. She is all fresh and new.
This brings up the question: how does Caprica Six retain her platinum-blonde hair, clearly an artificial, acquired characteristic, when she dies and is re-embodied? We have seen this when she emerges from the Bathtub of Mystery, she has her platinum-blonde hair. It is not as if she scampers off to the Resurrection Ship branch of Walgreens for a bottle of L’Oreal’s “Whispersoft Blonde.” She just has it, like magic! Like the Cylon’s God gives it to her — but only to her particular version of that model! Is it like cars, where each model comes in different color schemes? And if so, why do none of the other models have versions with different hair colors, facial hair, etc.?
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT QUESTION! Because, see, if I could get God to take care of my fashion and beauty concerns for me, with no effort (and no trips to the local Resurrection Ship Walgreen’s), I might consider converting!
Do you have any thoughts on this crucial mystery? Please to tell me.
So! About this week’s episode:
This episode was one of those that reminds me (as needs to happen, occasionally), that this show owns a little piece of my soul. I mean, damn! The last five minutes had me constantly wavering between “Oh, SHIT, that’s going to happen?!” to “Oh, no okay, THAT’S going to happen!” to “OH NO, MOTHERFUCKING SHIT THAT IS WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN, OMFG!1!!!11!!”
Also: GAHHH! and NOOO! And so forth.
MAN THIS SHOW!
Latest Comments
RSS