Fruit of the Heat Lamp

Last night's tweets;

Necromancers kill any thief they find.
Their kitchens are stocked with some skull shaped peas.
But undead Johnny Appleseed is kind.
Apples burn with the dust of their old trees.

I played some World of Warcraft last night, that makes two times in the past three months. My undead warrior's at level 54. I probably don't play enough to justify 15 dollars a month, but it's an excellent thing to do while drinking, which is what I was doing last night, a glass of Bombay Sapphire.

I got to thinking to-day about how it's actually a bit disturbing that our culture buys into really painless, fantasy wars like WoW and Avatar while our country is actually engaged in two wars. The sense I get is that the masses are surreptitiously trying to re-conceptualise the nature of war into something more innocent than movies about Vietnam and World War II of the 90s. People could afford to acknowledge the despair in those days, but to-day there's a reflexive need for denial and escape. Someone to wake us up and say, "Hey, it's not as bad as all that, really."

I'm still watching Angel, and I'm only five episodes away from finishing the fifth season. Maybe I haven't been writing about it because I've been enjoying it so much--I really feel the last season of Angel is the most perfect work of the Buffyverse--I think the makers of the show had learned by that point what worked and what didn't and were able to optimise everything. So far, there've only been two episodes I consider at all weak, the awkward Buffy related episode "Damage" and the David Boreanaz directed "Soul Purpose". But these are vastly overshadowed by great comedy episodes like "Smile Time" and "Harm's Way", mythic episodes like "Why We Fight" and "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco", and the rather nice meditations on death presented by "You're Welcome", "A Hole in the World", and "Shells".

None of the season long character conflicts are bad--Angel and Spike's fractious relationship is funny and has an interesting arc, perfectly playing off the similarities and differences of the two characters. The premiere episode, in which director Joss Whedon put a lot of somewhat odd (but enjoyable) fanservice shots of Fred is followed by a cool werewolf episode written and directed by women that successful turns Fred into a female POV character. And Wesley's dialogues with Illyria, thoughtful and melancholy, are excellent. This show really was killed too soon. I suspect I'll be looking for the comic book continuation when I'm done watching it.