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Thursday, February 04, 2010 / 8:49 PM
Orientation is just one of the many painful ways to begin a school year. I really do not see how yelling in large groups, getting corn flour and water in one's hair, dancing to a song that's really just elaborate, barely disguised sexual metaphor, or- for that matter- doing anything involving the basically meaningless word "bonding" can be construed as a possible source of 'fun'. Would it be that unbearably quotidian to start the school year with actual school? I think not. I'd rather write an essay discussing "Shut Up And Drive" (aforementioned song of horror) and its euphemistic treatment of motor vehicles. Alternatively I might prefer to parse bad poetry, or give Teddybears' "Cobrastyle" the 5/7/5 haiku treatment.
But, hey, on the slightly brighter side, it's all over now.
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An aside, re Chuck: Writers, is it really necessary to put Sarah in some really tight and/or revealing outfit in every single episode? True, Yvonne Strahovski is incredibly good-looking, rules about fictional spies dictate distractingly hot agents in tight clothing, half the male viewership probably watches in anticipation of these (unfortunately frequent) scenes. But really, this objectification is getting ridiculous. It's not like there are equivalent scenes with male objectification. (Not that I'm asking for any, thanks. Adam Baldwin and Zachary Levi are both awesome, and I'd like it to stay that way.)
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Monday, January 25, 2010 / 10:15 AM
Chuck is on TIME's "Short List of Things to Do"!
This just made my week-- two of my favourite things in the world in the best possible combination. The only drawback is that Casey isn't in the pop-arty picture TIME commissioned. Instead there's two of Chuck. Still, it's a step.
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Sunday, January 24, 2010 / 2:58 PM
 The Lost Room, a deftly written sci-fi miniseries, will be showing on Channel 5 at 10pm tonight. Don't write it off based on the terrible blurb they have in the perennially terrible Straits Times, or the fact that they're only showing a 2006 series now (Ch. 5 generally only broadcasts anything if it's at least a) two years old, b) hilariously bad, or c) obscenely popular. Often all of the above apply, but this show- thankfully- only meets the first).
Here, I'll try to condense the series into a couple of sentences: a detective discovers a hotel room key to one Sunshine Motel's Room 10. The catch-- the room doesn't exist, and the key itself has very strange abilities: used on a door with a pin tumbler lock, it opens onto the Room, a motel room from the '60s. When his daughter disappears into the room, he is compelled to search for a way to bring her back, a task which entails the use of equally strange Objects, ordinary items from the Room with special properties. (As it is, the first half of the episode should do all that in expositing, and the second part of it is when things really get going.)
Please don't read the entire Wikipedia article before watching the whole miniseries-- the article's really informative and therefore is full of spoilers, and 'spoilers' are called exactly that for a very good reason. The Lost Room is brilliant sci-fi; it has all the things that make up Lost's intrigue and none of the long-windedness.
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Thursday, January 21, 2010 / 10:15 AM
Most of the books I've been reading lately have been ones that do unabashed agenda-pushing-- Michael Pollan's In Defence Of Food, Jonathan Safran-Foer's Eating Animals--and I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with that. Sure, admirable agenda-pushing (Pollan for the return of 'real food', and Safran-Foer for less cruelty in meat-processing), but there's always something about their manner that's disconcerting. There are parts of these books that I read and go 'hell yes, that's exactly it'; in others, my response is more than a little skeptical, and maybe a tad more cautious, which may be exactly why instruction manuals are the reading material of choice. They always tell you what to do, but at least they're likely to be right.
(the Mac ones, anyway.)
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Wednesday, January 13, 2010 / 4:05 PM
So I've got to write an essay for the first time in two months- a real essay containing annoyingly pretentious jargon, needing maddeningly precise information (instead of the date-fudging I usually do), and requiring the use of a font other than 10-point Trebuchet MS 1. I've got a handful of books on international migration and one of those essay writing guides (the style of which makes me want to sock the author in the face, but I've really no choice); I think I'm ready to try some new and interesting methods of torture.
Wish me luck. 1 A quick run-down on the various fonts: 12-point Times New Roman makes me weep, but it's standard. Papyrus, Comic Sans MS, and Impact in any size make me want to throw things.
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Monday, January 11, 2010 / 9:05 AM
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
(Nothing like a gratuitous TS Eliot reference before meeting one's doom.)
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Friday, January 08, 2010 / 8:56 AM
Whoever's been doing transcripts for the government's press release website really needs a vocabulary expansion, and soon. In the transcript of Mark Jacobson's interview of MM Lee, this gem turned up: "Is that a new monkey (?) ranch in there?” A large farm with primates running around in it-- 'monkey ranch'. I pray that one doesn't actually exist. A noun meaning 'obstacle', which should probably be the right phrase here since the interview isn't about canned monkeys-- 'monkey wrench'.
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