Serene of the Oakland Serenes

Reading:

1) Just began reading The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader. The intro is thoughtful, as you can imagine, and I look forward to reading the rest.

2) I often ask the kids to recommend books to me (partly because I like YA and partly as something to talk about with them). Right now, I'm in the middle of City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare. I have some vague notion that there was some dust-up about her in fannish communities, but I don't remember details. Anyway, the book is fine. The kind of recreational reading I enjoy, but so far, there's nothing exceptional about it.

3) And speaking of what I usually read, I'm reading Chronos, which appears to be a monster-movie-ish thing, aout a gigantic sea creature that's threatening to gobble up everyone. Not my usual thing, and that would have made me put it down sooner, but the writing is decent and I'm almost out of books that aren't packed away, so I'll stick with it for now.

4) Next up will be Hour of the Rat, by Lisa Brackmann.

Watching:

James and I cycle through (mostly) old TV series for our evening hangout time. We did Columbo, most of the Star Trek series (we couldn't bear Enterprise, so we quit), Farscape, Murder She Wrote, Miss Marple, the Suchet Poirot, Miss Fisher, and now we're re-re-watching Columbo, which is probably our favorite.

On my own, I have been binge-watching some series:

1) caught up on Orange Is the New Black, which I find to be troubling in terms of how it handles race, but also terribly good television.

2) Also watched all that Netlix has of Last Tango in Halifax, which is quiet and beautiful and soap-opera-ish. The acting is really good and the characters are complicated and engaging.

3) Then I switched to Happy Valley, which is an intense crime drama with one of the lead actors from Halifax (she also played Miss Foster in the adipose episode of Doctor Who).

4) And I've just started Awake, which I'll need to watch more of before deciding. It's got an odd premise, but it may be fun to see how they handle it.

[Alert: there may be spoilers for the TV show "Merlin" in the comments]

So, I've seen maybe six or eight minutes of the first episode of the first season.

Magic = Queerness, yes/no?

Because I've had little or no energy to do actual stuff lately, I've been watching a lot of videos and reading a lot, so I thought I'd share. It gets quite long, and in reading it over, I realize I mostly review stuff based on how much fun I found it. Fortunately, I'm okay with being that shallow.

Things I've been reading, with mild spoilers:

( The Second Book of Fritz Lieber )

( Scarpetta )

( Alice's Adventures in Wonderland )

( The Outline of Science, Volume 1 )

( The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes )


Things I've been watching, with spoilers

( Robin Hood (BBC) )

( MI-5 (Spooks) (BBC) )

( Farscape )

( Heroes )

( Lost (oops!) )


( The Oscar-nominated animated shorts )

( The Hurt Locker )

Of the other nominees, I saw Up a while back (I liked it fine; nothing special) and District 9 in the theater (I disliked it). I also got A Serious Man and Inglourious Basterds from Netflix and will do my best to see them before the Oscars this weekend. Doesn't look like I'll get around to seeing the live-action shorts.

This year, we're just going to have a quiet Oscar viewing at stonebender's. We haven't invited anyone who's bored by the whole Oscar thing (which includes everyone I live with), because they tend to harsh on our mellow. So popcorn and soda and Oscars with my boy and a movie-loving friend, pure and simple, is the plan.

You get stuck with my newly found pop culture knowledge, which just now is that Judy Gold, whom I've always loved, is a lesbian, and she and her partner have two kids. ("My partner had a C-section, and I had a vaginal birth, because I'm the guy.")

1) Seems I'm among many people whose weekend plans turned into "Oops, sick. Staying in bed." Ah, well. Glad I don't have to be at work early tomorrow.

2) mommaduck bought me this! I'll let you know tomorrow if it means I can now sleep through the night.

3) simplykimberly is a better source for pet-related cuteness than Cute Overload and LOLcats put together (youtube video; sound makes it MUCH cuter)

4) Evil Dead the Musical! [clips]

5) Looks like I'll have two weeks off from work, and wtfpotatoes will probably be visiting her parents for that time. I'm resisting any and all urges to make plans for that time beyond working on the magazine, puttering around my house, and having sex. Never thought I'd have any need to *plan* sex, but that was pre-teenager. :-)

6) Current favorite podcasts: Selected Shorts, Quirks and Quarks, Between the Covers, and This American Life

Forgot to post the answers to the music thing yesterday. Well, actually, I forgot to do anything except sleep. This cold kicked my butt, but ( here they are: )

I think I may have a cold. I don't *want* a cold, but it reinforces my plan to spend the whole weekend resting and puttering around my house.

Used to be I couldn't do the randomize-your-music-player memes, because I had a stack of CDs that weren't on a music player, but now I have my own personal jukebox, so I stole this from micheinnz:

Put your music player on random.
Post the first line from the first 32 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
Let everyone guess what song and artist the lines come from.
Cross out the songs when someone guesses correctly.
Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!

(I'm also leaving out the ones that have the song title as the first line -- too easy.)

( I took 'first line' to mean first coherent clause, unless there wasn't one. :-) And I may have gotten some wrong. )

MI5 ("Spooks" in the UK; understandable why they changed the name for US consumption) sure doesn't fuck around, does it?

No spoilers, but damn.

(there may be spoilers in comments, however)

More brief-with-spoilers reviews of the new fall season:

( Spoilers: Reaper; Cane )