Maddadaelie

When I first saw this story, I was greatly irritated- especially since I saw it on a disreputable redtop, which also carried a cash-value equivalent of what they're doing. For reference, that figure was nine times as much as Oxfam will spend supporting half a million people for a year.

Then I heard that they were going to accompany the video with 80s pop, and I decided that it was a masterful, if very edgy, work of kitsch comedy. Now, I've swung back to seeing it as a damning indictment of humanity's tribalism¹. Go team.


1. You may prefer to see this as a damning indictment of my total lack of human feeling towards toddlers.

Ding dong, the witch is dead

I admit to a certain dark delight.

I should be calculating buckling tensions right now

How is it that I've never seen these before?



Genius.

I'm looking at you, Stealth

OK, so it turns out that my intuitive grasp of the German language is not as good as I had hoped. We're barely past the field-full-of-empty holes stage and I have no clue what's going on.

I have, though, been reminded of one of my favourite things about the original Star Trek. It was so blisteringly progressive in it's day, and so dated now.

1966: "In the future, women will be able to go into space!
2006: "So you have one woman on the crew and she's... the receptionist? Huh."

1966: "Look, we've got a Soviet, a black person, some kind of Asian, plus that dude has hella pointy ears (great job, SFX!)"
2006: "And they're all being commanded by... a blond American male? Huh."

To be fair, we as a society still seem to be able to produce movies with three main protagonists whose names may as well be The Black One, The Woman, and The Normal One.

Anyway, enough outrage: back to Klingons shouting at Vulcans in German.

Ich benötige meine Schmerz

I rent movies and copy them onto my hard-drive. I rationalise to myself that this is OK because they are for personal use, and I consider a five-day obsessive re-viewing cycle to be included in the mandate of the rental. While I'm doing that, other people may as well be enjoying the movie- especially in today's case, where I only got the film to listen to the Riff, I figure i may as well copy it and send it back into circulation. I'm increasing the value of the rental serive, therefore increasing the value of the DVD, therefore helping out the copyright holders. SO.

I have a program, and a darn fine one, to do the job but it has... quirks. Like, you can have a film with subtitles, or without. A mostly English film where folks occaisionally say something in Elvish or Klingon will NOT have helpful one-scene subtitles if you didn't set them to "on" at the get-go.

This what led me to say "Man, Vulcan really sounds a lot like German, doesn't it?"

Yeah. Apparently this DVD's first (and therefore, according to my software, default) audio track isn't the language of first production: it's the first alphabetically. Deutsch.

Time to see how much of The Final Frontier I remember. Does this one have the Crystalline Entity? Or the Genesis device?

Oh well. I guess it's just you and me, Mike. Let's do this thing.

I got the idea from Mildred Taylor

I am a man who walks everywhere, and have consequently worn through my cheap-ass shoes.

Some said it couldn't be done, others that it shouldn't. They said I didn't have the know-how, or any tools.

Well, guess who's stepping out tomorrow in shoes soled with the finest cardboard a man can fish out of a dumpster.

This guy.

Thoughtcrime

I am relatively unmoved by the fate of Madeline McCann.

I mean, yes. Horror. Obviously. The thing is, the world is soggy with horror and the fact that it's happening to a tow-haired tot doesn't seem enough to me to make front-page news for two weeks.

Does this make me a bad person? I have been told as much on two seperate occaisions now.

Um

Did my ex's fiancé just Come Out on facebook dot com? Or perhaps he just isn't clear on the nuances of that particular website?

Some days I am convinced my life would make a good soap opera. It'd be like a cross between Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Beverly Hills 90210.

Behavioural consequences

As a result of watching TV, I have ended up with certain odd habits:

Johnathan Creek: Thinking about my day's schedule in terms of an alibi.
Jeeves and Wooster: Using the word "bally" as an intensifier.
Firefly: Idiom abuse.
Spiderman 3: The finger-guns.
Fellowship of the Ring: Racial prejudice against Uruk-hai.