Sunday, January 31, 2010



This lizard on the back porch to-day let me get really close to him. I thought he was dead until I started lining up for a shot in front of his face and he scrambled away. I think he was a little cold and, looking at the photos later, I saw his leg's kind of mangled;



I think he's been through quite a lot. Looks like he dropped his tail at some point and has been growing it back for a while;



I wonder if someone could harness this power to treat human amputees. Brilliant idea that would be, I don't see how anything could go wrong with it.





I watched the first proper episode of Being Human last night. See Bri Run had told me the series cast had much better chemistry than the pilot cast and, boy, was he right, particularly in the case of the vampire Mitchell. They swapped out the guy who looked sort of like Vincent Gallo for a guy who looks sort of like Gavin Rossdale and, more importantly, who gives a much warmer performance. He and the werewolf, George, actually seem like legitimate friends now instead of people forced to live together for some mysterious reason.

I still like the original ghost girl better, but the new Annie is at least nicely vivacious, though I got a little worried when the characters used the word "relapse" when referring to something about her being a ghost. I find it silly to use fantasy monsters and entities as allegory for real life issues that can be dealt with directly. Humanoid monsters ought to be about addressing the unexplored territory of the human mind, things that we can't articulate directly. But, luckily, there hasn't been much of the former so far in Being Human. This one looks like a keeper--I really like the characters now.

I watched the final episode of Dollhouse with breakfast to-day. I went in expecting to be disappointed and my expectation was met. It was a few kinds of cynical--coasting on the great Epitaph 1 finale of season 1 for its premise and much of its drama, adding an awkward "Oscar clip" furniture breaking scene for Eliza Dushku that probably exists because she's a producer on the show, and one senseless plot development after another in the name of cheap melodrama, most notably in the form of Topher's martyrdom because this technical genius can't make a remote trigger for the explosion that somehow saves the world. There were a lot of little moments that seemed like ideas in need of fleshing out, particularly Felicia Day's crew--her relationship with the Asian Mad Max bandit, the kid Caroline, and the landscaper guy. All kinds of things introduced only to go nowhere.

All in all, a disappointing end to a series I'd still argue has a lot of great moments, especially in the latter portion of the first season and the beginning of the second. Oh, well. Better luck next time, Joss Whedon.

Last night's tweets;

Fast bipeds with tails fall prey to footpads.
Some cat monsters always have big noses.
Plastic kid octopi have absent dads.
And nowhere to go when Sea World closes.

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