Tyrants in Elevators

Twitter Sonnet #77

Nordic disguises dwarf Roman costumes.
Somewhere there is a viral Robin Hood.
The wasting wax blight idea was Brit Hume's.
It was to know where candle elves stood.
Hardened sugar shapes pummel the stomach.
Bottle missiles wage war with sucking void.
The berserker Pop Rocks tear through tonic.
Organic train stations have been destroyed.
The friendly vampire's tongue is hot pink.
Energy finds him just moments from dawn.
Heedless fun flows freely from the bad sink.
In the morning, Errol Flynn's on the lawn.
Radios broadcast from underground pools.
A tall building houses much better schools.

One of the things I like about the Middle Ages is that, no matter how bad someone was, there was no possibility of them destroying the world. Mass murder, rape, pillage, sure. But nothing really that could send the planet into an irreversible downward spiral that would cause pain to billions of people for generations. It sucks bigger toys got in the hands of the same petty warlords. Or maybe the worse thing is that less courageous assholes can wreak more havoc without having the guts to show their faces, as with the pustule of the pharmaceutical companies blocking the universal healthcare the country overwhelmingly wants.

For days now, I've had the urge to watch the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, and I kind of avoided it because I always get indecisive when it comes to watching a movie I've already seen before. I talk myself out of my first instincts, asking myself, "Am I really in the mood?"

I finally watched about half of Robin Hood last night before I had to eat dinner and, yes, it turned out, I was in the mood. I still love how the first group of scenes manages to throw in a lot of details in an interesting way. They're not totally historically accurate, though they're a lot more accurate than I think a lot of people would suspect. But in any case, it helps establish a world around Robin Hood--Saxons oppressed by Normans, headed by the cruel Prince John (Claude Rains), who in the middle of one of his movie villain speeches still cautions that they not hang every Saxon, lest there be no-one to tax or to till the land. You can sense how things function, and how John wresting the regency from Longchamp threw things out of wack.

With lunch yesterday, I watched the first episode of Mad Men, which I found to be extraordinarily well written for a cable series, for the most part going just over the line of realism with its blatantly sexist and greedy characters to be a nicely funny commentary.

One of the guys on the show, Vincent Kartheiser (whose name I always seem to pronounce as "Karthesiser") seemed incredibly familiar to me, but I didn't remember from where until he showed up as Conner on the episode of Angel I watched last night. He seems to have made niche for himself playing baby faced pricks.

In spite of all I watched, and in spite of the caffeine deprivation, I actually got a lot done yesterday, finishing the next Venia's Travels script, doing rough drawings for the pages, and I pencilled and inked a page for the winner of Moira's auction.

And speaking of whom--Happy birthday, Moira. And happy birthday, Trisa.

It's also Kevin Murphy's birthday to-day. I'm dying to hear the new Rifftrax of Titanic. I'm going to have to see if I can borrow a copy of the movie from someone . . .