A Tight Circuit Board

Twitter Sonnet #90

You know spinach is hiding everywhere.
Leafy greens coldly observe all your sins.
And Christmas light eyes at packages stare.
Friends and relations stored in labelled bins.
One alien mall wing's always empty.
The best Indian prices for Christ's wood.
Phallic like a long observatory.
A new shadow falls where Bob's Big Boy stood.
Everyone would get doubloons for Christmas.
Brashly boarding a bloated galleon.
Cameras pillaged from Natalie Kalmus.
Technicolours run in rash disunion.
Sweet's swallowed with sour by the throat well.
Red juice separates from the caramel.

Drinking some flash pasteurised apple juice I heated in the microwave. As with orange juice, flash pasteurised turns out to be much better than concentrate.

I watched "Orpheus" last night, a second season episode of Angel I was kind of dreading because I saw from the description that it was one of those episodes, found on many television series, where characters are transported to some magical headspace where they just talk. I usually find that type of episode to be fruitless water treading in the name of character exploration, but, to my surprise, I found "Orpheus" to easily be one of my absolute favourite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel.

For one thing, it's got epic Buffyversity--Willow coming in is one of those nice, comic bookish moments when Spider-Man unexpectedly turns up in Fantastic Four or something and he makes good on all the coolness you know he's capable of when he swings into the panel instead of just being a stunt guest star. Also not misused in the episode is Faith, as this is the last in a group of three episodes where Angel had essentially become Faith the Vampire Slayer, which works for me as I like her a lot more than Buffy. What's more, the short arc actually builds off Faith's already established story, and it's wonderful seeing her immediately take charge, prison and her relationship with Angel apparently having made her into an adult instead of the girl who's always either following or rebelling. It certainly highlighted one of the flaws in Dollhouse when I'm used to seeing Dushku on the newer show but Faith turning up on Angel still gave me a feeling of, "Fuck, yeah, Faith's back!" Dushku really can't do the infinite characters thing, and so the end result is her never really getting a foothold on an arc. But she was Faith.

It's especially satisfying seeing her kick Connor around, who, although I was liking him early on, is on my last nerve now as he too persistently can't figure anything out on his own. Everyone has at least one quality moment in the episode, except maybe Gunn--Wesley has his comparing darkness with Willow, Fred inadvertently flirts with Willow, Lorne singing to unconscious Faith is really sweet and, my favourite, Angel is again an important agent in Faith's rehabilitation when he shows her he fed off a human once after he'd been given his soul back--though, if it'd been me writing it, I'd have had Angel doing something much worse than feeding off a guy who was already dying.

The synchronicity with the Buffy storyline is nice, too, even though the Slayer Army thing makes me cringe with the awesome weight of its lameness, particularly when Giles or Buffy decides to hold forth on how serious everything is and how they shouldn't joke around, ever.

With breakfast to-day, I watched one of the new Dollhouse episodes aired last night, "Meet Jane Doe". Nicely unpredictable, Echo as a rogue do-gooder was surprisingly very satisfying, and I love the pro-immigration propaganda, as a beautiful, innocent young Mexican woman is mistreated by hick American cops. This could be a nice counterweight to the right wing's less honest propaganda, in the long run--a fiction series never claims to be telling you the truth, but most people, in their heart of hearts, can see the things in it that reflect reality.

I really liked Adele turning out to be completely, ruthlessly evil, especially after we're led to feel bad for her in a new role as a sort of high level secretary to an arrogant boy's club. Her betraying her friends was a much more satisfying female empowerment than grabbing Ray Wise' balls. I say, if women aren't allowed to be truly evil, there'll never be equality of the sexes.