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lizbee at 11:07am on 24/11/2009
lizbee at 11:07am on 24/11/2009Hello, world! I'm back! It feels like I haven't posted to LJ in a million years, although really it's less than a week. Work has entered the Christmas Rush period of the year, which means I'm there for eight hours, and then I crawl home and curl up on the couch, working on a quilt and watching stuff. Actually typing out words on the computer = far too much effort.
(Random interjection: all over the place, I've been seeing posts (and listening to real people) lamenting that stores start setting up for Christmas in October/November. Apparently that's really early, and the entire world will implode if you even say the word "Christmas" out loud before the US Thanksgiving holiday is passed. Sorry, people, reality is that the sheer quantity of Christmas stock coming in requires that stores put it out on display as soon as it arrives. Or else the store rooms would be overflowing, and staff would be ridiculously overworked trying to get a massive amount of stock out at once. Yes, it's shocking, a retail situation arranged for the convenience of staff, not customers. Please direct your letters of complaint to the Department Of Giving A Damn.)
Sorry. Christmas retail gets me a little on edge.
Anyway, all sorts of things have been read and watched lately!
The Men Who Killed Qantas by Matthew Benns looks at the history of the airline, and its current state of cost-cutting affairs. Along the way, lots of planes crash, and lots of people die. Turns out that whole "Qantas has never had a fatal accident" line was sort of the opposite of true.
This is a good book; the same schadenfreude that leads a person to fandom_wank also makes corporation!fail really entertaining. And it's full of interesting stories, like the development of commercial aviation in Australia, Qantas's role in WW2, rivalries between Qantas staff and staff in the budget airlines it owns. Did you know there was a real Oceanic Airlines back in the '50s? It was a wee start-up competing for the all-important Lord Howe Island route. Unfortunately its corporate stragety involved Blowing Up A Qantas Plane, which never goes down well.
There was a really interesting bit, that is totally unrelated to the book as a whole, but it intrigued me: during WW2, Qantas and other commercial airlines were involved in evacuating refugees from South East Asia. At one point -- or maybe it happened several times; it has been a couple of weeks since I read the book, and I'm totally ignorant of this part of history -- the Japanese followed the refugee planes back to Broome, and bombed hell out of them. Which is, to my mind, just not cricket.
Also, did you know that the bombing of Darwin was achieved by the very same squadron that bombed Pearl Harbour? Maybe it's common knowledge, but I had no idea!
Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour is a straightforward biography of the author of Frankenstein. As such, it is totally depressing. The first third, dealing with her upbringing and her life with Shelley, is quite interesting, aside from the frequent desire to hunt down some Romantic poets and kick their teeth in. Oh, and it's depressing, with children dying all over the place. Then Shelley goes and dies, and Byron follows, and it's quite a relief until you realise that now Mary is at the mercy of equally annoying, but vastly lesser men. So she makes her way, and raises her son, and supports her family, and moderates her opinions because society doesn't look kindly on revolutionary women with questionable backgrounds, and she does need to eat. And meanwhile, all these friends of Shelley's are like, "HOW CAN YOU BETRAY HIS MEMORY LIKE THIS?" because obviously it's easy to be a revolutionary when you have a penis. Male privilege: it is tedious. This was a great book; I had expected to find it a bit dull, but I just ate it up -- right up until the final chapters, after Mary's death. These parts deal with Lady Jane Shelley's attempts to control Mary and Shelley's posthumous reputations; she was continuing Mary's work, but it was less sympathetic. But that's only, like, two chapters out of a millionty.
TV-wise, I finished re-watching season 4 of Babylon 5. Well, I say "finished watching"; for the sake of my sanity, I only skipped through "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars". I'm not completely mad.
I have to admit that in many ways I like the Earth civil war arc better than the Shadow War, although obviously they are closely linked. The Shadow War was quite abstract, and Sheridan gave the instigators a good talking to, and then there was a party. The Earth civil war ends with Sheridan saving the planet, then getting booted out of the military. And he obviously had an idea that the Interstellar Alliance plan was going to go ahead and he'd have a new role to step into, but there's always doubt. It rather saddens me that we don't get a post-civil war party, aside from the slapped-together wedding reception on Babylon 5.
It also saddens me that we never see Caroline Seymour's Senator Crosbie again. I like to think that once the immediate threat against Earth had been dealt with, she said to Luchenko, "No, totally, you have the presidency, with all the problems inherited from the previous regime. I'll just wait over here. In the background. Oh look, is that an election year coming up?" This plan, of course, will fail, as Susannah Luchenko's middle name is "FIERCE BITCH", but it has merits.
...Moar Luchenko might have been nice, too.
Bits that I love because I'm on crack: when Lennier is moping and quotes Ivanova's "all love is unrequited" line at Delenn. She thinks that saying "No it isn't" is reassuring him that there are all kinds of love. He thinks it's a declaration of love, or maybe I just need to stop reading Delenn/Lennier shipper meta. I hear Delenn saying, "Sez you, kid, I'm getting married this week if I have to bust Sheridan out of an EarthGov prison myself." As she bakes a file into a cake and consults Garibaldi's ACME Book of Prison Breaks. (Come on, though, she so would.)
Speaking of Ivanova quotes, does anyone actually believe she said the thing about needing to figure out where her heart belongs to a journalist? Or in the vicinity of a journalist? Or any other living being? I have come to the inevitable conclusion that, in the manner of trashy celebrity mags, the quote actually come from "a source close to Ivanova". Corwin, probably. I like to think that Corwin also moderates OhNoB5Didn't. Of course, for several years the identity of the site's moderator was a complete mystery (Londo and G'Kar suspected each other, although Vir and Na'Toth could tell you exactly how unqualified they were), until Tessa Holloran took over Garibaldi's job as head of ISA Covert Intelligence. Figuring it out, she recruited Corwin for her own purposes, and the running costs were added to her budget as Misc. Communication Expenses. Trufax.
I finished with season four a week ago; I've been sort of putting off season 5. I might watch only "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari" and "Day of the Dead", then skip straight ahead to the bit where Bryon DIES IN A FIRE. Unbearable telepath arcs aside, I really can't stand Delenn's characterisation in the first half of the season; it's a positive relief when she goes back to keeping secrets and breaking fingers.
Then, of course, there was the preview for "The End of Time", the Doctor Who Christmas special. Obviously what we all really care about is that the Doctor married Elizabeth I. Were you thrilled? I was thrilled. I've been secretly shipping Doctor/Elizabeth for about a year now, and now it's CANON, bitches! I bet she got over him when he started inviting all his old incarnations around for parties. Hey, we know that One or Two ended up in the Tower.
I, um, may have spent some time figuring out when the marriage took place. Before she was queen, I assume; hiding a secret marriage from Mary I is hard, but it's even harder to secretly marry the queen herself.
Also, Elizabeth was totally played by Lalla Ward.
I totally need to watch my Crossed Swords DVD now.
ALSO, I confess that I'm a wee bit puzzled by people going, "But ... but how could he marry her, making Elizabeth I not-a-virgin changes history!" Historians have been debating the truthiness of Elizabeth's virginity for longer than Doctor Who has been around. Personally, I favour the "was sensually experienced but still a virgin" side, but still: it's not a new idea.
Just because the universe likes playing tricks on me, I also watched The Virgin Queen, starring Anne-Marie Duff as Elizabeth. I have to confess that I'm sort of cheating here; I haven't seen the last half-hour, which deals with Essex's betrayal and Elizabeth's final days. After Mary Shelley, I just couldn't take any more old age and death. But it's an amazing portrayal of Elizabeth's life, from her time in the Tower to her death. Actually, "amazing" probably goes too far; it concentrates far too much on her love life for my taste, and resorts to historical inaccuracies to make Dudley look better. But those aside, there are several things that make it a bit wonderful:
- Anne-Marie Duff is remarkable. She has the right look (and even bleached her eyelashes for the role), being beautiful but not remotely pretty. And she's powerful, magnetic and brittle.
- The soundtrack, by the Mediaeval Baebes, is amazing. Truth be told, the soundtrack is the entire reason I bought the DVD; having already bought the soundtrack, I desperately wanted to see it in context.
- When Elizabeth is dying of smallpox, she hallucinates her sister and father. Okay, that's a tiny thing, but it was brilliant.
To demonstrate my point about the soundtrack, this is the main theme, based on a poem attributed to Elizabeth herself.
Martin Phipps. feat. The Mediaeval Baebes - The Virgin Queen
In addition to all these Tudor shenanigans, I have watched lots of Pertwee.
"The Ambassadors of Death" seemed infinitely better now than when I tried to watch it three years ago. Then I got three episodes in and gave up out of boredom; this time I inhaled the whole thing in a couple of days. Liz Shaw, man, could she be any more brilliant? Of all the companions the Doctor has ever had, I think she's the one who is least prone to falling into feminine cliches. On the other hand, she was only around for a year.
"Mind of Evil" may have turned me into a Doctor/Master shipper. "You wondered how long I could endure the machine. Well the answer is, I can't." I don't know why that, of all lines, should make me want to smush them, but there you have it. Maybe it's because I love it when they work together, even if they are working to sort out the Master's mess? And there are not one, but two taunting phone calls. "The Sound of Drums" eat your heart out. Delgado is still the best Master.
I also watched the final two stories from SJA's season three. They were all good, but not brilliant; I think the season took a decided slide after "The Wedding of Sarah Jane". If only that had been the finale. Still, I did get an icon out of "Mona Lisa's Revenge", which is really all that matters.
(Random interjection: all over the place, I've been seeing posts (and listening to real people) lamenting that stores start setting up for Christmas in October/November. Apparently that's really early, and the entire world will implode if you even say the word "Christmas" out loud before the US Thanksgiving holiday is passed. Sorry, people, reality is that the sheer quantity of Christmas stock coming in requires that stores put it out on display as soon as it arrives. Or else the store rooms would be overflowing, and staff would be ridiculously overworked trying to get a massive amount of stock out at once. Yes, it's shocking, a retail situation arranged for the convenience of staff, not customers. Please direct your letters of complaint to the Department Of Giving A Damn.)
Sorry. Christmas retail gets me a little on edge.
Anyway, all sorts of things have been read and watched lately!
The Men Who Killed Qantas by Matthew Benns looks at the history of the airline, and its current state of cost-cutting affairs. Along the way, lots of planes crash, and lots of people die. Turns out that whole "Qantas has never had a fatal accident" line was sort of the opposite of true.
This is a good book; the same schadenfreude that leads a person to fandom_wank also makes corporation!fail really entertaining. And it's full of interesting stories, like the development of commercial aviation in Australia, Qantas's role in WW2, rivalries between Qantas staff and staff in the budget airlines it owns. Did you know there was a real Oceanic Airlines back in the '50s? It was a wee start-up competing for the all-important Lord Howe Island route. Unfortunately its corporate stragety involved Blowing Up A Qantas Plane, which never goes down well.
There was a really interesting bit, that is totally unrelated to the book as a whole, but it intrigued me: during WW2, Qantas and other commercial airlines were involved in evacuating refugees from South East Asia. At one point -- or maybe it happened several times; it has been a couple of weeks since I read the book, and I'm totally ignorant of this part of history -- the Japanese followed the refugee planes back to Broome, and bombed hell out of them. Which is, to my mind, just not cricket.
Also, did you know that the bombing of Darwin was achieved by the very same squadron that bombed Pearl Harbour? Maybe it's common knowledge, but I had no idea!
Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour is a straightforward biography of the author of Frankenstein. As such, it is totally depressing. The first third, dealing with her upbringing and her life with Shelley, is quite interesting, aside from the frequent desire to hunt down some Romantic poets and kick their teeth in. Oh, and it's depressing, with children dying all over the place. Then Shelley goes and dies, and Byron follows, and it's quite a relief until you realise that now Mary is at the mercy of equally annoying, but vastly lesser men. So she makes her way, and raises her son, and supports her family, and moderates her opinions because society doesn't look kindly on revolutionary women with questionable backgrounds, and she does need to eat. And meanwhile, all these friends of Shelley's are like, "HOW CAN YOU BETRAY HIS MEMORY LIKE THIS?" because obviously it's easy to be a revolutionary when you have a penis. Male privilege: it is tedious. This was a great book; I had expected to find it a bit dull, but I just ate it up -- right up until the final chapters, after Mary's death. These parts deal with Lady Jane Shelley's attempts to control Mary and Shelley's posthumous reputations; she was continuing Mary's work, but it was less sympathetic. But that's only, like, two chapters out of a millionty.
TV-wise, I finished re-watching season 4 of Babylon 5. Well, I say "finished watching"; for the sake of my sanity, I only skipped through "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars". I'm not completely mad.
I have to admit that in many ways I like the Earth civil war arc better than the Shadow War, although obviously they are closely linked. The Shadow War was quite abstract, and Sheridan gave the instigators a good talking to, and then there was a party. The Earth civil war ends with Sheridan saving the planet, then getting booted out of the military. And he obviously had an idea that the Interstellar Alliance plan was going to go ahead and he'd have a new role to step into, but there's always doubt. It rather saddens me that we don't get a post-civil war party, aside from the slapped-together wedding reception on Babylon 5.
It also saddens me that we never see Caroline Seymour's Senator Crosbie again. I like to think that once the immediate threat against Earth had been dealt with, she said to Luchenko, "No, totally, you have the presidency, with all the problems inherited from the previous regime. I'll just wait over here. In the background. Oh look, is that an election year coming up?" This plan, of course, will fail, as Susannah Luchenko's middle name is "FIERCE BITCH", but it has merits.
...Moar Luchenko might have been nice, too.
Bits that I love because I'm on crack: when Lennier is moping and quotes Ivanova's "all love is unrequited" line at Delenn. She thinks that saying "No it isn't" is reassuring him that there are all kinds of love. He thinks it's a declaration of love, or maybe I just need to stop reading Delenn/Lennier shipper meta. I hear Delenn saying, "Sez you, kid, I'm getting married this week if I have to bust Sheridan out of an EarthGov prison myself." As she bakes a file into a cake and consults Garibaldi's ACME Book of Prison Breaks. (Come on, though, she so would.)
Speaking of Ivanova quotes, does anyone actually believe she said the thing about needing to figure out where her heart belongs to a journalist? Or in the vicinity of a journalist? Or any other living being? I have come to the inevitable conclusion that, in the manner of trashy celebrity mags, the quote actually come from "a source close to Ivanova". Corwin, probably. I like to think that Corwin also moderates OhNoB5Didn't. Of course, for several years the identity of the site's moderator was a complete mystery (Londo and G'Kar suspected each other, although Vir and Na'Toth could tell you exactly how unqualified they were), until Tessa Holloran took over Garibaldi's job as head of ISA Covert Intelligence. Figuring it out, she recruited Corwin for her own purposes, and the running costs were added to her budget as Misc. Communication Expenses. Trufax.
I finished with season four a week ago; I've been sort of putting off season 5. I might watch only "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari" and "Day of the Dead", then skip straight ahead to the bit where Bryon DIES IN A FIRE. Unbearable telepath arcs aside, I really can't stand Delenn's characterisation in the first half of the season; it's a positive relief when she goes back to keeping secrets and breaking fingers.
Then, of course, there was the preview for "The End of Time", the Doctor Who Christmas special. Obviously what we all really care about is that the Doctor married Elizabeth I. Were you thrilled? I was thrilled. I've been secretly shipping Doctor/Elizabeth for about a year now, and now it's CANON, bitches! I bet she got over him when he started inviting all his old incarnations around for parties. Hey, we know that One or Two ended up in the Tower.
I, um, may have spent some time figuring out when the marriage took place. Before she was queen, I assume; hiding a secret marriage from Mary I is hard, but it's even harder to secretly marry the queen herself.
Also, Elizabeth was totally played by Lalla Ward.
I totally need to watch my Crossed Swords DVD now.
ALSO, I confess that I'm a wee bit puzzled by people going, "But ... but how could he marry her, making Elizabeth I not-a-virgin changes history!" Historians have been debating the truthiness of Elizabeth's virginity for longer than Doctor Who has been around. Personally, I favour the "was sensually experienced but still a virgin" side, but still: it's not a new idea.
Just because the universe likes playing tricks on me, I also watched The Virgin Queen, starring Anne-Marie Duff as Elizabeth. I have to confess that I'm sort of cheating here; I haven't seen the last half-hour, which deals with Essex's betrayal and Elizabeth's final days. After Mary Shelley, I just couldn't take any more old age and death. But it's an amazing portrayal of Elizabeth's life, from her time in the Tower to her death. Actually, "amazing" probably goes too far; it concentrates far too much on her love life for my taste, and resorts to historical inaccuracies to make Dudley look better. But those aside, there are several things that make it a bit wonderful:
- Anne-Marie Duff is remarkable. She has the right look (and even bleached her eyelashes for the role), being beautiful but not remotely pretty. And she's powerful, magnetic and brittle.
- The soundtrack, by the Mediaeval Baebes, is amazing. Truth be told, the soundtrack is the entire reason I bought the DVD; having already bought the soundtrack, I desperately wanted to see it in context.
- When Elizabeth is dying of smallpox, she hallucinates her sister and father. Okay, that's a tiny thing, but it was brilliant.
To demonstrate my point about the soundtrack, this is the main theme, based on a poem attributed to Elizabeth herself.
Martin Phipps. feat. The Mediaeval Baebes - The Virgin Queen
In addition to all these Tudor shenanigans, I have watched lots of Pertwee.
"The Ambassadors of Death" seemed infinitely better now than when I tried to watch it three years ago. Then I got three episodes in and gave up out of boredom; this time I inhaled the whole thing in a couple of days. Liz Shaw, man, could she be any more brilliant? Of all the companions the Doctor has ever had, I think she's the one who is least prone to falling into feminine cliches. On the other hand, she was only around for a year.
"Mind of Evil" may have turned me into a Doctor/Master shipper. "You wondered how long I could endure the machine. Well the answer is, I can't." I don't know why that, of all lines, should make me want to smush them, but there you have it. Maybe it's because I love it when they work together, even if they are working to sort out the Master's mess? And there are not one, but two taunting phone calls. "The Sound of Drums" eat your heart out. Delgado is still the best Master.
I also watched the final two stories from SJA's season three. They were all good, but not brilliant; I think the season took a decided slide after "The Wedding of Sarah Jane". If only that had been the finale. Still, I did get an icon out of "Mona Lisa's Revenge", which is really all that matters.
cheerful