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Ice Capades
Looks like a perfectly normal day at Casa Green, aside from what looks like at least an inch of snow all over everything. But wait…it isn’t snow.… Read more
Month: February 2006
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Closing the book of G’Kar.
I think I’ve been failing spectacularly to explain to anyone who isn’t already a fan of Babylon 5 why the death of Andreas Katsulas, who played Narn nemesis-turned-nobleman G’Kar, has hit me like a kidney punch. Of course, I sometimes have a hard time explaining to non-fans why I dug B5 so much in the first place, so maybe it’s more indicative that my powers of persuasion, or communication on the whole, are somehow diminished at a quarter of four in the morning. (Y’think?)
Every character on Babylon 5 underwent sweeping, far-reaching changes over the course of the show, and every one of them was played by actors who were up to the task. But where adventures on the “early” end of the show’s spectrum – the pilot movie The Gathering and the prequel movie In The Beginning – were narrated or introduced by Londo Mollari (Peter Jurasik), the “voice” of Babylon 5 became that of G’Kar. Tragi-comic Londo rode just a few too many handbaskets to Hell over the course of the show to stand any chance of being accepted as an impartial observer of events. As he rose from antagonist to leader of an entire embattled race to spiritual leader, G’Kar was a far more inspirational character to follow, and he consistently wound up with magnificent monologues such as his pledge to free Narn in The Long, Twilight Struggle, or the epilogue of season 3’s Z’Ha’Dum, or the reading of the Interstellar Alliance’s declaration of principles.
To have anything less than a classically trained actor in that role, especially with the unique requirement of translating real emotion through a rubber face mask, would’ve been a disaster. And not even every classically trained actor could’ve pulled off the sheer range of that character. The flipside of that, however, is that actor and character gradually became one: in his appearance as his other fan 
favorite SF character, Commander Tomalok in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s series finale (filmed around the same time as the end of B5’s first season), the previously stoic and menacing Romulan became markedly more G’Kar-esque. (Though to give him credit, it’s not beyond the realm of imagination that someone asked him to play it that way, having watched his work on B5. Though I’m sure no one on the Paramount lot would ever admit to that.)
Whether fan hype or the computer effects or just the lure of Something Good That Wasn’t Star Trek drew you to sample Babylon 5, chances are pretty good that Andreas Katsulas had a heck of a lot to do with you sticking around for the rest of the story.… Read more
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LISA RINNA!!!??
Celebrity crushes are few and far between for me. I don’t have many of ’em, and most of the time, I keep ’em to myself, because I’m just not sure it does anyone any good to know these things. It’s just a little bit creepy to me. But I do have a few.
When my first future wife and I became an item, actually before we did, she knew I had a “thing” for Nicole de Boer on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. She’d tease me about it endlessly – i.e. “Yeah, yeah, you only have eyes for me and Nicole de Boer.” I think she was a bit stunned when I wasn’t that keen to watch The Dead Zone, which offered to bring a weekly dose of Nicole de Boer back into my life. I guess I’d gotten over it. And she didn’t have the Trill spots anymore.
I hate reality TV with a white-hot passion. It’s filler material to me, more useless than the most superfluous album track on any CD I own. I could handle live sports, but reality TV? It just doesn’t say anything to me. I’ve heard plenty of flowery stuff about ordinary people rising to the occasion in extradordinary situations…when more often, I guess I just see ordinary people being bitchy and taking up an hour of airtime doing it that’s putting writers, directors, actors and crew out of work. For me to take notice of any reality show is a remarkable thing.
ABC’s managed to do it, though, by putting Lisa Rinna in skimpy outfits and having her learn ballroom dancing. If you’re wondering what disparate threads could possibly be tightening here to make some sort of cohesive statement, you guessed it – I’ve had a “thing” for Lisa Rinna too. For a long, long time, back to her soap opera days. Before Lisa wound up on Dancing With The Stars, I’d been making cracks about how ABC could combine that show and Extreme Makeover into one hour and call it Dancing With The Scars. “But,” my wife protested, “ballroom dancing is very sexy. Didn’t you know that?”
Well, I know it now that Lisa Rinna’s prancing around in these little outfits that seem like they’re just begging for a wardrobe malfunction. When I mentioned that to my wife…oh. my. God. There certainly wasn’t anything about “just her and Nicole de Boer” now.
“LISA RINNA!!??”
“Uh…yes,” I said nervously. Mere seconds into the anti-Lisa Rinna tirade that immediately followed that response, I began to realize that maybe I’d said Something Wrong here. The problem is that I still haven’t quite figured out what it was.
It’s a good thing Sara Rue’s sitcom is off the air. Given how much trouble the Lisa Rinna revelation caused, I certainly don’t need my wife to found about me and Sara. 😯… Read more
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Fire and ice.
I think it’s time to get our money back from the groundhog.
It’s two days after Valentine’s Day, and it’s about 80 degrees outside here. But! The weather is going to change drastically in the next 24 hours. We are, at this very moment, simultaneously under a tornado watch and a winter storm watch. And a red flag fire warning because of the incredibly high winds. Dark clouds are showing up to the northwest, red blotches are starting to show up on the radar in eastern Oklahoma, the wind is blowing like crazy, and in 24 hours we might have sleet coming down. I’ve seen strange weather, but I’m not sure it gets more bizarre than this. I’m starting to envision the “snow tornado” from the beginning of the Michael Jackson/Diana Ross flick The Wiz.
In other news: I’m ready for February sweeps to be over right now. I’ve had one of those weeks that makes me think that while there’s still much left for me to do in the audiovisual media, I’m not long for the world of news promotion. You’ve heard the expression “firing on all cylinders”? This has been one of those weeks where, much to the contrary, it seems like all available cylinders are aggressively seeking any way to avoid firing.… Read more
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Can’t…stop…watching.
Why I’m giving up game collecting for 2006.
And so it begins. That’s all I’m gonna say. 😆 With a new wave of 2-3 figures arriving every couple of months, I think this pretty much nails the coffin shut for any game collecting in 2006.
I finally managed to play a complete game of Dune 2000 all the way through last, and even with the Winamp/alternate music mix, it worked fine – and I’ve gotta brag on this one: after wiping two of my three enemies off the map, I took the final, and best-built, enemy base with…50 unarmed engineers. Again, I was playing Ordos, and this last enemy standing was Harkonnen; they stupidly had their construction yard, heavy factory, Ix research tower and two power plants built side-by-side with an unprotected bridge behind them. I just massed 50 engineers there, pre-built a gun turret, took those buildings, sold off the power plants in a big hurry, dropped the gun turret right in front of the construction yard and heavy factory (and started building more) and sent the rest of my engineers pouring into their base, taking over their buildings in rapid succession. Once I had their factory, I could start turning out Devastator tanks, and that was pretty much all she wrote. That battle was over fairly quickly and I once again ruled the world. As it should be.
But the best part had to be when the action got fast and furious, and all of a sudden, whatever soundtrack it was from, Winamp starts blasting almost polka-like Jewish music at me. I almost wanted to alt-tab away from the game to see what the heck that was from (it was something, somewhere, in my soundtrack directory), but (A) I wanted to make sure I could finish the game, and (B) I was laughing too hard. Even if I do ever figure out what track that was, and from what soundtrack, it shall henceforth be known as the Harkonnen Bar Mitzvah Jam of Doom. It was just so incongruous because everything that had been on before – some Firefly, some Babylon 5, some Stargate, Nixon, JFK, The Innocent Sleep, had all been so perfect, almost like a well-spotted movie soundtrack.
Man, I’ve gotta find a human to play that game against soon, provided that there’s a day this month that I’m not called in early. (This, by the way, is why I don’t take up any more destructive habits – you can see how hard I’ve fallen off the wagon here, and this is just a computer game…)… Read more
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Doesn’t get much cuter than this.
I took this one day last week while recording some game video for the site (hence the wireless PS2 controller), and busted my setup just to capture this photo of a couple of my best friends being very sleepy.
… Read more
Good feedback: Maorimusic.com
When an internet vendor I haven’t dealt with before does right by me, I like to say a word about ’em for all to hear, to alert folks to their existence. The recipient of my first “Good feedback” here is Maorimusic.com, naturally based in New Zealand. Not only do they have a great selection of traditional and modernized Maori tunes on CD at surprisingly low prices (even when one takes the currency conversion into account), but they’ve just shown me, hands-down, the fastest shipping I’ve ever seen for a shipment from NZ to the States (just under two weeks). What’s more, my order was packed incredibly well, with not even so much as a spidery crack anywhere on the jewel case (when I would’ve fully expected that, as it’s nigh-impossible for some vendors to get a CD from coast to coast in America without damaging the case). So a big thumbs-up to Maorimusic.com – I heartily endorse them and will probably be placing another order before too long.… Read more
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Messiah entertainment (or, Weird Dreams Part II)
I swear to God, my subconscious takes things it’s had no choice but to hear about in the news, redigests them and burps them up in my dreams to amuse itself, regardless of the consequences to my rational mind. Follow me on this one. If you can. I had this dream yesterday afternoon.
Basically, I had a dream/nightmare that a new global religion had taken seed overnight from what had originally been intended as a humorous Hollywood marketing campaign. The basic tenets of this religion were as follows:
- Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are supposedly the most perfect specimens of the human being ever conceived. (I don’t actually believe this, by the way.)
- Ergo, the “Brangelina Baby” is the perfect combination of the most perfect DNA the species has yet produced.
- Ergo, the child will be perfect, and ergo, this must mean that the child is Messiah.
I did warn you that this was weird, didn’t I? If not, here, have your money back, because I bloody well should have. I don’t know from what twisted depth of my subconscious this idea came, but I’d really like to send it back for a full refund. I could write eighteen paragraphs on what makes this just conceptually disturbing, what with the celebrity-obsessed society and all, but…y’know? I think it pretty much stands as-is and makes its own statement in that department. I can see where it could also be conceptually hilarious – the thought of an entire religion whose Defining Moment is the arrival of a celebrity baby – and maybe if one changes the names there’s a good comedy sketch in there, if not a longer-form story. But still…sheesh. Where do I get this stuff? I learned this information in the dream via media coverage (pretty sad when I’m watching TV while I’m asleep, eh?), and there were whole channels and shows devoted to the wait for the arrival of this baby.
Oh wait. We have that here and now, already. Only we have the good sense to marginalize it a bit and call it Access Hollywood.… Read more
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Surely this is the best spam ever.
Just in from my inbox:
Former President Bill Klinton uses Voagra!
Everybody knows the great sexual scandal known as “Klinton-Levinsky”.
After the relations like this Klintons popularity raised a lot!
It is a natural phenomenon, because Bill as a real man in order not to
shame himself when he was with Monica regularly used Voagra.
What happened you see. His political figure became more bright and more attractive.
It is very important for a man to be respected as a man!
See our Voagra shop to enter upon the new phase of your life.
Doesn’t this just make you want to go get some “Voagra” and be just like “Klinton”? Maybe find your own “Levinsky”? 😆… Read more
