Archive for: October, 2007

Halloween Tips for People Who Believe in Jesus

Oct 31 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Speechifying

  • Start planning your costume ahead of time. Really, a month out isn’t too far.
  • Stock up on candy. What you don’t pass out, you can eat.
  • If some jackhole at church tells you not to celebrate Halloween because it’s Satan worship, tell him to keep right on fucking off.
  • Repentance of f-word use optional at this point.

Most importantly, have fun. Help little kids have fun. Get them good and spooked up and then take them home and help them choose a pile of candy to eat (just big enough to really knock them for a loop without giving them a stomachache) while they watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Then totally take their minds of it with a nice, non-scary story before bedtime. Encourage candy hoarding. Maximize Halloween fun by going to your church’s “fall festival,” explaining all the while that you are subverting the fundie ethos of no fun ever by celebrating all over the place.

Meanwhile, what’s the best Halloween costume you ever wore? In college, I dressed up as Hester Prynne, complete with large red A and a cape!

10 responses so far

Save New York Again? Fuckers.

Oct 30 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom

I was going to write this whole big thing, inspired completely by other people, about how Heroes is fixin to take a serious nosedive and how they don’t need a whole other new character and how they need to get back to their comic book roots and just tell the damn story already. And also some stuff about excessive commercials, which was all me. But then Doc got on Gchat with the title as his tagline and we had the following exchange:

Doc: i couldn’t believe it when they showed up in new york.
Sarah: And again, Captain Emo has to convince everyone to help him out. I hope Milo Ventimiglia gets some sort of non-fatal wasting disease and has to take a leave of absence.
Doc: i hope the ratings plummet and part of the contract is that sub 6 million all the producers and writers get kicked in the crotch.

And that about summed it up for me. So instead of that, I’m going to wander off and write smutty Sylar/Maya fanfiction, because the Sylar in my head still has a lot of Gabriel Gray in him and is just not going to put the moves on a woman. He’ll have no idea what he’s doing and need to be totally jumped by said woman, espesh a woman as hot as Maya. This situation calls for porn, and I am just the woman to write it.

5 responses so far

Call Me!

Oct 29 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Never Off the Record

Last week or two weeks ago or something, I can’t remember, I told you about how I was having a terrible time with my phone. And so I tried to get a used BlackJack off Ebay and that didn’t go so well, on account of it being a piece of crap. So I send it back and continued to be phoneless for a while. Meanwhile, my partner-in-crime Doc was on the case, exhorting me to try Craigslist to see if I could find a deal on a used phone there. I told him several times that Birmingham’s Craiglist is just not where you want to be. I’ve explored it a little bit, and always been put off by how much people want for crap couches from the 80s.

Seattle’s Craigslist though, is a rollicking good time, and before I knew it, Doc had bought me a phone– a BlackJack, to be precise. And started sending me emails from it. And dropping hints about the media he was installing on it. And I had to goggle a bit– he bought me a phone. I am paying him back, obviously, but still. Mark another one down in the list of Amazing Things Doc Has Done for Me. I can’t imagine what I did to deserve a friend like him.

The phone came. I couldn’t wait for someone to call me to hear my surprise ringtone. I was the theme song from Wonderfalls. I about cried with joy at that. And my text message sound is, “You Tiger Now!” cos I’m trying to be more like C. He then told me he nearly set the text message notification to a file called “mal.mp3″ but decided against it, because he didn’t want to embarrass me if I got a text in front of a coworker. I thought, “What could Mal have said that would be that bad?” Something about whore’s probably. Turns out “mal.mp3″ is me personally saying, “Mal is the star of the fucking show, not River. Jackass.“*

And the media! Oh the media! Both volumes of the Traveling Wilbury’s greatest hits, two albums by The Supersuckers, lots of dinner funny little songs to use as tones. And the entirety of my second favorite Firefly episode, “Our Mrs. Reynolds.”

I have the best phone in the world. Mostly I use it to call Christopher and ask if he wants anything from the store, and to text Honu Girl with variations on Dr. Who and Battlestar Galactica errata. And I’m well into hatching a plot about what I can send him back, to convey how incredibly grateful I am. We’ll see if he blogs about it.

* Why yes, I do need to record more Math Girl. Thanks for noticing.

4 responses so far

Adventures in Philology!

Oct 26 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Lexpionage

It’s been a big week or week and a half for new words at or around me. And this week I even found a word I’d never even seen before! How awesome is that? I don’t know where it’s been all my life. Probably just mind it’s own adjectivish business, waiting for me to notice it. Plus a couple words that I thought I really should have known, but then didn’t. And all of them with extensive history that I cannot help but adore.

First, there was lapidate, found on National Review. I could’ve sworn it was used in a Jonah Goldberg column, but I can’t find it for quoting, so ah well. Regardless, this word was so incredibly familiar, probably obvious to everybody else, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on with it. It’s a verb meaning “to pelt with stones” or “stone to death,” and snatched almost whole from the Latin lapidare, infinitive: “to stone.” It’s familiar because it’s the root of dilapidated—something fallen into disrepair, possibly as a result of having rocks thrown at it. In Latin, dilapidare means to squander, but it comes back to the lapidare root. In this case, the “di-” prefix is a variant of the Latin prefix “dis” meaning “apart, away” or having a generally negative connotation, rather than the Greek “di-” prefix meaning “two.” Nothing quite like big, specific verbs, huh?

Then there was tmesis, which I read in A Certain Chemistry, by Mil Millington. Cana sent me the book out of the blue, because she believes in paperback swapping. I have spent the last several months trying to think of what I could send her back. And obviously I can’t say now or it would give away the surprise. Nevertheless! It’s a good book, very funny, very Scots, and in the middle of a seduction, the protagonist lays down the word tmesis and correctly defines it for his paramour. He tells her:

“Hu-fucking-mongous,” I replied. “Nothing can touch your tmesis-grade celebrity.”
“Your what-grade celebrity?”
“Tmesis—when you split a compound word with another word.”
“Tmesis?”
“Tmesis.”
“Did you use that word just so you’d sound clever?”
“Did it work?”
“Yeah.”

And that’s absofuckinlutely what it is: the interpolation of one or more words between the parts of a compound word.

Then, angels sang and light rained from heaven and I first laid eyes on contumacious. I don’t even remember where, except that I was (as usual) chatting with Honu Girl and there it was and I got all quivery and OMG at her. Then I read its definition, “stubbornly perverse or willfully disobedient” and loved it desperately. Here is a word after my own heart. People have accused me of incorrigibility my whole life, but now I’m going to tell them no, I’m not incorrigible. I’m contumacious. Take that! Its etymology is incredibly long and uncertain, though the likely explanation is English from Middle English from a Latin hybrid of contumax meaning “unyielding” which came from tumere meaning “to swell” with con and ax tacked on as prefix for “with” and the adjective suffix. Wow!

And lastly, cynosure. It was hard to follow in the footsteps of contumacious, but I’d been thinking about “cy” and its root meaning and wanted to check to see if it could be connected to words like “cyanotic.” Turns out no. A cynosure is something brilliant, that draws all eyes, and possibly serves as a direction—like a constellation, which is the root of the word. Greek kynosoura is the word for the constellation Ursa Minor and breaks down in to two words kyon, “dog” and oura, “tail.” Cyanotic, on the other than, just means blue and comes from the Greek root kyanosis meaning “dark blue.” Cynosure has notably been a part of the lexicon for almost 300 more years than cyanotic.

That was all very historical, wasn’t it?

2 responses so far

Snape Goggles Firmly in Place

Oct 25 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom

Had a quick email this morning from Matt, with this illustration, one of the greatest ever. Dumbledore gay! Also enjoys chamber music and ten pin bowling, if you'll recall. I had seen it just a few minutes previous on a newsletter I subscribe to, but and was still sorta laughing about it. And I had laid out my thoughts about this no another journal, but then decided that all y’all really deserve a space in which to rant, so I’ll reprint those thoughts, almost in their entirety here, based on what I’d been talking about with friends this past Saturday night:

The revelation got the cogs turning. The Dumbledore we learned about in Half-Blood Prince and moreso in Deathly Hallows seemed to me to be sort of omnisexual. As a young man, brilliant beyond the telling of it, perhaps the most powerful wizard since Merlin, world at his feet, it seems that there should be no experience he wouldn’t be interested in. But okay, I have before and I will again set aside personal canon for actual canon. The Dumbledore of the first five books, though, just too old to be a sexual being. Perhaps it’s terribly ageist of me, but I have to think that after you turn 120, the sex drive just drops right off.

Regardless, I don’t think this revelation is as much about Dumbledore as it is about Rowling, and more to the point, Rowling’s irrational hatred for Snape. She said, when ovations at the revelation brought the house down, “If I’d have know it would make you this happy, I’d have told you sooner.” And that gives me pause. The thought goes, “She didn’t say anything sooner, because it wasn’t relevant to the plot.” But oh, it could have been! This is Rowling’s habit of telling, not showing, at its absolute worst. If Dumbledore was in love with Grindlewald, requited or not, that would make a huge impact on his world view, don’t you think? To have fallen in love with what we’re supposed to understand is serious evil, and to be tempted by malevolent beauty– that’s going to change a person. You’d think it would give you an extra level of insight when others, say your future Potions Master, prostrate themselves at your feet and admit to being seduced by evil in order to pursue love. And you’d think your first reaction, having been in that love, would not be, “You disgust me.”

And yet it was. Of course, Rowling’s Point of View machine gives us only Snape’s perspective here and certainly he must have been disgusted at himself at that point. So who knows what Dumbledore was really thinking. I’d like to think he was seeing a shade of himself as a young man, deceived by love and in utter anguish, his entire world falling apart. Because I can see that.

But moreso, I think Rowling just doesn’t want to talk about Snape anymore. She’s sick of him dominating her interviews, sick of repeating over and over again that he’s disgusting and awful and vindictive and horrible and should be left on the floor of the Shrieking Shack to rot. She’s sick of Snape fans being the most vocal and the most passionate. She’s pulling out the big guns to get people to focus on something, anything else already. She even mentioned Dumbledore’s orientation in relation to fanfiction, which immediately reminded me of one of the best pieces of Dumbledore fic I’ve ever read and who was his lover? SNAPE.

The other bits and pieces she released were that James and Lily Potter had no jobs as they lived off James’s wealth and were full-time fighters for the Order of the Phoenix. Sirius Black: idle rich, attempted murderer, torturer par excellence, emotionally stunted at age 18 (and still in a murderin’ mood). James Potter: semi-idle rich, torturer, prejudiced, paternalistic as all get out. Lily Evans: the world’s greatest grudge-holder. These are Rowling’s ideas of good people that we should admire. Brave, brave, brave, courageous, irrational, and intensely cruel.

And then there’s Severus Snape: poor, frightened, abused, tortured, ambitious and unfortunately seduced by the lure of Dark, as would anybody be who’d spent their life being beaten and denigrated by everyone. Snape, who didn’t have the luxury of dying young and had to confront his flaws and errors and his culpability in killing the woman he loved; who repented and crawled back to the side of Light, even though they despised and distrusted him; who did everything in his not inconsiderable power to revenge is love and care for her son, who hated and reviled him; who died still trying to do the right thing, still trying to be the good person he knew he was. That’s the character we don’t want to talk about because of how evil he was, how vindictive, how terrible.

And her straw castle of Gryffindors is falling down with each and every reread, so she has nothing to do but scream, “Pay no attention to the author behind the wizard!” Except that’s what the great and powerful really want, isn’t it. The second great perspective on this I’ve read is Harry Potter and the Author Who Wouldn’t Shut Up. Weiss makes a great point there. Because we couldn’t read any of this in the books, we had to invent our own ideas about Dumbledore’s past, which may or may not have included his loves and affairs and heartbreaks. It’s a great author who recognizes that readers do most of the work of storytelling and trusts readers enough to leave their imaginations alone and intact, rather than chipping away at them, as Rowling has started to do. With that in mind, she could have said that Dumbledore was a stamp collector or expert in haute cuisine or loved water skiing and had about the exact impact on the narrative.

4 responses so far

‘Tis a Silly Place

Oct 24 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery

Nicole sent me this video last week. I can guarantee it’s pretty well the funniest thing you’ll see all week:

Now I’d really like someone to do this with Buffy the Vampire Slayer– just imagine the footage you could get from Xander and Anya.

4 responses so far

How to Make Heroes Not Suck out Loud

Oct 23 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom

Advertise that it’s going to be a whole big Captain Emo-centric episode and then actually thread it through with real live plot development! And very little Hiro. And bringing on Kristen Bell doesn’t hurt even a little bit.

I thought the best of last night’s plot developments were Micah’s connection with Monica, and her realization about what she could do and how she could train herself. It’s refreshing to see a hero that’s not Hiro, that’s not extremely put out by having a super power. She’s got concerns, but that’s not going to stop her from learning double dutch or kung-fu or tomato rosettes. If I can’t have a Gabriel-Sylar episode, I’ll take Monica.

And let’s talk about Miss Kristen Bell and what’s she’s going to be about. Wikipedia says her character’s name is Elle, but gives no last name and nothing was confirmed last night. The phone call she received in the car, in the rain, was from, “Daddy.” And since she seemed to be acting in the interests of The Company, what do you want to bet daddy is Bob the Alchemist? Bob’s getting to be a fairly interesting guy. And I really hope he’s onto Mohinder trying to double cross him, cos Mohinder’s getting far to estrogen-induced-self-righteous.

The original team story is getting very interesting. We know now about Bob, Angela Petrelli, Kaito Nakamura, Linderman, Deveaux, and Nighmare Man Parkman. I’m so hopeful to learn about all their powers and see how they worked together and why they broke off into factions for whatever reason. Bob obviously has the midas touch. Elder Parkman manipulates dreams. Linderman’s a healer. That leaves Deveaux, Angela, and Kaito. I was talking with a friend– the man that got me started calling Peter Captain Emo, in fact– this weekend and he said that Kaito’s power was teaching. He can teach anybody, anything. He taught Bennet to think in Japanese, and he taught Hiro mad samurai skills in about half an hour. I can’t think of a good reason to disagree (except that fluency in any language gives you the ability to think in it). He also said that Angela can see potentialities and influence people to take certain paths that lead to certain outcomes. That makes her sort of a Fate. She weaves the threads of everyone she comes in contact with to ensure things happen the way she wants them to. So what of Deveaux? And of the rest? Who else’s parents are we looking at? Everybody’s What did Gabriel’s father do?

What do you all think of those explanations? What of the powers of the originals? Is that what they’re going to cover during Heroes: Origins this winter? Cos if so, that would rule.

6 responses so far

From Here to the Eyes and the Ears of the Verse

Oct 22 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom

Honestly, does Serenity need a sequel? You all know I don’t think it does, mostly because the focus of my thousands-of-blue-suns-worth of passion got all harpooned forever. But that hasn’t stopped Alan Tudyk from publicly saying that there’s certainly a shot that Universal would be up for a sequel.

And since then, predictably, a bunch of people have decided that yet another postcard writing campaign is in order. To let Universal know that Firefly fans are willing to spend even more money on any tidbit they give us, like mangy, kicked dogs who inexplicably desire space opera. Universal could never understand mere sales figures, or how the special edition DVD, which contains not a whole lot that the original already doesn’t, is inexplicably selling like hotcakes. But if they got some postcards, surely they’d sit down and seriously ask themselves whether or not another feature length film would make them as much money as the first feature length film didn’t.

I was talking with friends Saturday night about how I just want it to be over. I want to be left alone about it already so I can finish grieving in peace. I don’t want any more stupid rumors or half-assed campaigns or the idea that if we just want it enough, it’ll happen.

Do I have to turn in my Browncoat card if I think that having already done the impossible, couple times, that we should all just sit down and shut up in our mightiness already? Would I love for there to be more story? Yes and no. Yes in the general sense. No in that my favorite part of that story is under a holographic cairn on Mr. Universe’s planet. It hurts too much to have hope anymore. It hurts too much to keep loving this thing, when I know I shouldn’t, when all I have to look forward to might be five minutes of flashbacks and stock footage in any sequel. I don’t care that he’s Joss Whedon and he’s brought deader people back from the grave. Just leave me in peace with my memories and my fanfiction.

And my motherfucking postcards. If it happens, I want to be able to say I was in on it.

4 responses so far

Fanfiction Improves My Vocabulary II

Oct 19 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom, Lexpionage

I haven’t slacked off my intensive reading fanfiction in every free moment schedule at all, but there’s been a dearth of new words lately, when for ahwile, it seemed that every new story gave me something to work with. For the time being, I’m going to attribute that to the big-producing Snape/Hermione writers trusting their audience for once, and not having to cash in every buck fifty word out there to prove they can play in that particular sandbox. And I am still reading Firefly fanfiction, though most of the new words there are totally made-up names for spaceship parts. While they made me giddy, I can’t imagine anyone would like a list of them with my love letters to each. I mean, Professor Snape doing Miss Granger is hot, but Wash talking to Serenity is hotter. Nevertheless! All the words lately have come from Snape/Hermione fic, except for the one from the Snape-meta, of which there is a ton lately.

Poteen is Irish moonshine, or unlawfully distilled Irish whiskey. Snape was using it as a password to his personal rooms and it made a fine choice as it’s not pronounced phonetically. It’s Irish, and so pronounced puh-cheen. Only someone so swotty as Hermione would know how to pronounce it at age 18. Its etymology is notably pedestrian, from the Irish poitin literally meaning “small pot.” And before that, the plain old English word “pot.” The most precise definition is the first distillation of fermented mash when making whiskey. I’d like to say there was another level of meaning here, that the word itself was part of the metaphor for the relationship in the story, but it’s not. Everything was on the up and up. And by “up and up” I mean that everybody was thoroughly grown up and everything after page 650 or so of Deathly Hallows had been completely disregarded.

Ceilidh comes from the same story. So we either have an Irish author, or one that’s fascinated with Gaelic culture. Pronounced key-lee, it’s a party, with music and dancing, and sometimes storytelling. The word itself comes from Scots Gaelic ceilidh which came from Middle Irish and Old Irish words boiling down to ceile meaning “companion.” It’s company-keeping, a social gathering. Used in the story though, the simple definition doesn’t begin to cover what’s going on. The wiki entry goes on to say that this particular type of dance or social has a specific type of band (instrumentation including a fiddle, flute, tin whistle, accordian, and a bodhran or traditional Irish drum), and also a “caller” who tells couples what steps come next in the dancing. It seems that there are several common dances for groups of four couples and up, all with basic steps, that are then used with variants. Understanding that much of the Scots and Irish settlement of America happened in Appalachia, I’m wondering to what extent a ceilidh is the forerunner of a hoedown.

A Palimpsest is a manuscript (usually written on parchment or vellum or some medium sturdier than paper) where one set of writing has been incompletely scraped away and a new manuscript written over it so that both are legible. It’s like two hard to read stories for the price of one. A palimpsest is a pretty common HP-fic deus-ex-machina (We had the parchment the whole time!), but very, very few authors ever call it by name, so props to this one, though I’ve still got my eye on her for big-word-cred-profiteering. Palimpsest evolved from through Latin from Greek, where palimpsestos meant “scraped again.” The root of that particular word is palin meaning “again”– the same root that gives us the word “palindrome.” Palin is the adjective form of the Greek word psen meaning “to rub smooth.” A long history for a word that seems very nearly obsolete, yet never will be obselete because of it’s very meaning. Interesting, that.

And finally, I read an essay, excoriating JK Rowling for her recent comments on Snape and Snape’s character, using the word Persiflage, meaning light and/or flippant banter. On her current tour, she always takes quite a bit of time to talk about how horrible Snape was and how he never deserved anything good, and how petty he was, and how cruel and how abjectly awful, going so far as to call him, “a small man.”* There’s a certain segment of Snape fandom out there who thinks she should be tarred and feathered, but there’s another who are still holding on to an irriational hope, still thinking she’s sowing the seeds of doubt so that in years and years and years she can come back and drop great bombs of Snape information, which will forever prove how wonderful and noble he is, and how we die-hard Snape fans were right all along. It’s a particularly appropriate word for that bit of delusion, too, as it comes from Old French persifler, which came from Latin sibilare, “to hiss.” And regardless of what Albus “Machiavelli” Dumbledore ever said, Snape was the consumate, ultimate Slytherin, living and dying by the snake.

So, from lots of Irish to lots of interesting metanarratives on the nature of ambition and salvation by grace and why there are so many of us who take Snape so seriously, that’s more fanficiton lexpionage. If you’d like to read part one, it discusses kissing, jewelry and dirty, dirty Rowling liars.

*And she thinks Sirius Black hung the moon. What the fuck, lady? What sort of fucked up morality says that Snape is irredeemable but Sirius Black and James Potter are, were, and have always been paragons of virtue?

5 responses so far

The Power of the Hairstyle Panacea

Oct 18 2007 Published by Sarah, etc. under Surgically Altered

Right now I’m chatting with Honu Girl. I’m talking about how I can’t stop thinking about getting my hair cut like Paris Hilton’s. She’s valiantly trying to talk me out of it without saying things like, “Fuck no!” and “Christ, you’re an idiot.” She’s moved into reminding me of past hairstyle disaster. She’s good people.

But what I’m really doing is dreaming about changing my hair so that I don’t have to cope with a bunch of feelings. Feelings are hard. Before surgery I really thought that I didn’t eat my problems. Turns out I did. Or at least, I did to an extent. I have a nutritionist appointment on Friday to follow up from surgery, to make sure I’m getting enough protein and nutrients from what little food I’m eating.

And I’m so anxious about it I can hardly see straight. Obviously, as I think something about Paris Hilton isn’t one hundred and ten percent on another planet. I’ve never had a good nutritionist experience and every single one of them has said something different to me. The last time I saw one I brought meticulous records of everything I’d eaten for the last three days and she took them and started crossing things out and rewriting. The 12 ounce coke I’d had became 20. The seven ounce filet mignon became 14. I asked her what she was doing and she said, “You obviously have no way to determine how much you’re eating.” And I stared at her, with my mouth hanging open, letting her tell me I was wrong, and stupid, and reprehensible. I should’ve said, “Except for reading labels. And that’s what those labels said.” And then added, “bitch,” as an afterthought.

Since surgery, I’ve averaged a bit less than 400 calories a day– fewer since I’ve started adding regular foods back in and am not just subsisting on protein shakes. Most mornings I wake up and thinking, “How can I eat fewer calories today?” Just like I did before surgery.

I don’t want to go tomorrow, albeit to an entirely different nutritionist, and listen to her tell me how I’m doing everything wrong. I’m following the instructions I was given as meticulously as possible, to the best of my ability, and I know she’s going to look at my records and say that I’m not. And I’m also afraid that this time, I’m not going to be able to stop myself from calling her a bitch, or worse, or possibly from telling her to get her empty packet of low fat cheese slices out of my face before I shove it up her ass. Or from yelling, “I’m starving! I was under the impression that was the point!” Or from breaking down into hysterical sobbing, because if I’m not good enough now, I never will be and that leads to massively catastrophic thoughts.

So I’m trying to pull the catastrophe back to the imitating Paris Hilton’s hair level.

9 responses so far

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