Club Diversity

The face of the duck on the left tells the whole story of how I came to them with only one hamburger bun to-day. Part of the mob followed me a little ways back.

After a pretty busy week, I've been kind of a slug to-day. I watched Boardwalk Empire with breakfast, then I took a shower, and afterward had an early lunch while watching Doctor Who. I just watched the last episode of the "Face of Evil" serial, which I thought was a particularly good serial, and I find I rather like Leela, the new companion.



She's certainly a sight for sore eyes after "The Deadly Assassin", the previous serial which featured absolutely no female characters. I like Tom Baker, but I kept thinking of what Katherine Hepburn said about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; "She gave him sex, he gave her class." Without a hot dame around, Baker's kind of sad bumbling about, looking like a plucked Big Bird.

I kept thinking Leela looked intensely Irish somehow, and then I saw the name of the actress playing her is Louise Jameson. As Irish as Irish Whiskey, I guess, yet still with an English accent. Irish blood, English heart? She does kind of look like Morrissey.

The overall look of the serial is even closer to Star Wars then some of the previous particularly Star Wars-ish serials. In fact, I kept thinking this guy looked familiar;



And then I realised he's the, "I've analysed their attack, Sir, and there is a danger," guy on the Death Star. A lot of A New Hope was shot in London--I wonder how many people showed up to set saying, "So we're basically making a Doctor Who movie?" It actually makes me suspicious of George Lucas' claim that he was more inspired by old Hollywood serials. It seems more like he saw how Doctor Who was inspired by old Hollywood serials and decided to do that, too, lifting the basic plot from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, injecting some more mythological elements, and bits of other things. I'm not knocking him for it--the movie has more than enough singular vision. I just wonder why I've never seen him acknowledge a Doctor Who influence, which I'm now completely convinced there was on Star Wars.

Boy, Baker never passed up an opportunity to cop a feel, did he?



Twitter Sonnet #211

God knows important smiling skulls puke wrong.
Christ thinks bikinis have gotten too small.
Pirate warnings only take hold in song.
It's dangerous to make ship masts too tall.
Shy curved styrofoam grips hotter bad milk.
Boiling soy cream bubbles over the top.
Beans trust bundles of the withered string ilk.
Volcanoes of habanero will stop.
Shaking straw hats crown the minds of kelpie.
Bobbing dingoes reward themselves with kids.
Hairless children vainly implore selkie.
The worst auctions give things to the low bids.
Bread breaks out the side of a smiling bill.
Rusty wires recline up a mud hill.

The newest Boardwalk Empire was good, except, like a few of the other episodes, it kind of felt like the writer wanted to rewrite previous episodes. The episode preceding this one ended with the clear implication that Gretchen Mol's character was poisoning the old guy who used to be in charge of the city because he got her pregnant with Jimmy when she was 13. But the new episode started off casually revealing that the black maid was in fact the culprit. Which was odd after the affection she seemed to show to the guy in previous episodes, but not as odd as Nucky paying her off right in front of the old guy and sending her away. They've been trying hard to establish how uncommonly free of racism Nucky was for his time, but this was just a bit too much. She was trying to murder a guy who's supposedly Nucky's friend, and while her situation was certainly not fair, it's not like she was a slave. She was a paid servant. And certainly not in the rich old guy's will. Was her plan to kill him and swipe all the expensive stuff she could from the house?

Then we have Jimmy and Angela making up, him slipping into conversation, "Were you in love with her?" telling us she's revealed to him that it was the wife of the photographer she'd had the affair with, not the photographer himself, as Jimmy had thought. When was this revealed? It seemed like they were giving each other the silent treatment before this newest conversation started, so did she say it in the little letter she'd left on the bed? How did she write it so this 1920 man understood and accepted the nature of her relationship? I think it's been alluded to that he was exposed to a lot of different ways of life in Europe during the war, but was the scene of he and Angela discussing this really so uninteresting and irrelevant that we can skip it?

The scene of Nucky talking about his dead son with Margaret kind of didn't make sense for her to have asked him about it and for him to be telling her, since they were supposed to be broken up, but I can kind of forgive the show for it as it was obviously there to showcase Steve Buscemi's acting chops, and he delivered brilliantly. Though I was less forgiving of the manner in which Margaret learned of the dead child, by happening to see the tombstone for the child and the child's mother, Nucky's first wife. The woman Margaret was with somehow divined that the shocked look on Margaret's face was because she'd not known about the kid, but had known about the dead wife.

Otherwise, it was a decent episode, though.