Clinton and Palin on SNL

I’m a few days late to the party on this one, but this SNL sketch was just too good not to post. I loved Amy Poehler’s impersonations of Hillary during the primaries and was delighted to see the role reprised, but Tina Fey just kills me as Sarah Palin. So good!

From Buffy to Juno: A Series of Loosely Connected Tangents

In the absence of Netflix, I’ve recently been downloading a fair amount of television shows and movies via bittorrent to keep myself and Bronwyn entertained. Catching up with Weeds was our latest endeavor, but now that the season’s over I’ve started hunting around for other diversions. I’ve never been much of a comic book reader, but ever since Buffy and Angel took to the page I had been making monthly pilgrimages to Golden Apple in L.A. to read about my heroes’ latest exploits. Of course, that was interrupted by my move to Japan but through the magic that is the internet I can download scans of the issues. The first part of this week I spent my time getting myself up to date with Buffy Season Eight, Angel: After the Fall, and Spike: After the Fall.

Finishing the latest issues of those titles, I continued indulging myself in Whedon-y goodness by reading Joss’s run writing The Astonishing X-Men. Being a Whedon fan, I had purchased the trade paperback of the Astonishing X-Men a long time ago when buying my usual Buffy and Angel comics, but had never cracked so much as the shrink wrapping. What a shame. I’m not a huge follower of the X-Men oeuvre - I’m familiar with the major characters, watched the animated series back in the ’90s, and watched the first two live-action movies - but I still found The Astonishing X-Men very accessible, and, more importantly, entirely awesome. The story was rich and engaging, the writing was witty, fun, and full of self-referential humory goodness that is signature Whedon, and the characters textured and complex. This lead me to watch the third X-Men movie, X-Men 3: The Last Stand. Not nearly as… uh… rich, but a fun action and special effects fest nonetheless. I was surprised to see that the character Shadowcat, who had only a token appearance in the previous two films, played a principle role in the movie. Similarly, in The Astonishing X-Men she was the central figure.

Shadowcat’s super power is the ability to “phase” herself and anything with which she comes into contact, making her intangible and allowing her to pass through solid objects. It seems a very passive power. That is to say, it’s unlike many of the more aggressive powers that allow one to blow things up or shoot fireballs or move things with one’s mind. Most often, her power is used self-defensively - protecting herself from physical attacks as the assailant passes right through her - or for reconnaissance, or for search and rescue.

If we wanted to apply a gender to Shadowcat’s power, it would certainly fall on the feminine end of the specturm. On the flip side, you have characters like Wolverine, probably the most famous of all X-Men, who rips and shreds in a berserker rage and whose tenuously tamed aggression seems always on the brink of unbridling. While Shadowcat’s power is undeniably useful, she’s not really a “front-liner” (though correct me if I’m wrong, because again I haven’t really read any of the other X-Men comics). Even in The Astonishing X-Men, one of the super villains labels Shadowcat a “non-combatant.” So knowing Joss Whedon’s most common theme in his works (strong female characters, duh) it’s completely appropriate that he would opt to focus on Shadowcat and feature her powers front-and-center. I wouldn’t want to give up any spoilers, but it should be fairly obvious by the close-up framing of her face in the first frame after the title in issue one that Joss is going to turn the whole “passive, non-combatant” thing on its head and Shadowcat’s going to be the hero at the end of all this.

Anyways, that was kind of a tangent that I didn’t entirely mean to get in to. The point is, more or less, that I really like Shadowcat now. And who should play Shadowcat in X-Men 3 but Ellen Page. I didn’t expect that, because later that evening Bronwyn and I had planned to FINALLY watch Juno. We had yet to see the movie despite the fact that a couple of songs off the soundtrack played a very prominent role in our wedding ceremony music. At any rate, it made for a very Ellen Page-y day, which is not a bad thing because I think she’s friggin’ awesome. We first saw her in Hard Candy and her performance in that was remarkably mature and frighteningly intelligent. Her role in Juno was no less satisfying. She may not have won an Oscar this time around, but give it a couple of years and I think she’s going to be an absolute superstar.

So that’s what I’ve been watching and reading. Anything worth recommending? I suppose having gone the six-degrees-of-separation route of:

• Buffy comics
• Joss Whedon also wrote Astonishing X-Men
• X-Men 3 and Astonishing X-Men featured Shadowcat
• Shadowcat was played by Ellen Page
• Ellen Page was the star of Juno

The next logical step would then be… watching Arrested Development again?

I <3 xkcd

I <3 Alyson Hannigan

From the Onion:

FCC Okays Nudity On TV If It�s Alyson Hannigan

Donkey Lips Pushes It

On a lighter note, this was my favorite Super Bowl commercial.

Modern Nostaliga

While still on the subject of Pete and Pete, check out this video from The XYZ Affair for their song “All My Friends” and see how many ’90s Nickelodeon cameos you can spot.

From their web page, they write:

In this video an epic battle rages between ourselves and our nefarious neighbor, Marc Summers. We call on a few friends (some of whom you might recognize from early 90s Nickelodeon shows such as “Pete & Pete,” “Clarissa Explains It All,” and “Salute Your Shorts”) to help us clean house. But all goes delightfully awry. AYE DIOS MIO!

Christmas Recap

Things are finally getting settled back home. Having been away for a week and a half visiting the future in-laws in Memphis for Christmas and New Year’s as well as going to Knoxville and celebrating the wedding of Bronwyn’s cousin, we got back last Tuesday meaning last week was a short one at work and this is the first “normal” work week I’ve had in a while.

Anyways, vacation was great. It consisted primarily of sitting around in pajamas watching the Discovery Channel in high definition. If you haven’t experienced that yet, get thyself to a Best Buy and tell the salesman you want to see some grizzly bears.

I also spent a lot of time acquainting myself with one of my Christmas presents, a shiny new PSP. When we weren’t watching the mating rituals of Galapagos iguanas, one of the things we would do whilst exploring Memphis was drop into the local Gamestops from which I quickly put together a core collection of PSP games. Most notable of those acquisitions are two peculiar games. One is Loco Roco, a game in which you roll a singing blob around a maze, all the while munching on bugs and berries to plumpify your Loco Roco. The hypnotic experience is akin to playing with one of those ink hourglass things that were so popular back in the ’90s, except that this sings and won’t break and stain your carpet. The second game is called Puzzle Quest, which is an unlikely pairing of a puzzle game and RPG. At first the concept seemed a bit too quirky, but the game appeared on the top of 2007 lists of quite a few sites, like Gamasutra’s Top 10 Games of the Year and Gamespot’s Best Game No One Played, so I thought I’d give it a try. Basically, you move around a map completing quests, collecting treasure, conquering undead hordes, and laying seige to cities, except that all manner of “combat” is determined in a puzzle game match up. As odd and dorky as it sounds, Puzzle Quest is ridiculously addictive. I had to give it a few hours of gameplay before the mechanics actually started to click and I figured out why I couldn’t beat the stupid giant bat (it’s his shriek spell, duh! Like Officer Michaels’ coitus interuptus of McLovin, I’ve got to block his mana collection).

At any rate, as great as my shiny white PSP is, it pails in comparison to Bronwyn’s other gift to me: the gift of bacon. It’s a collection of five of the top bacons of 2007 according to The Grateful Palate, which offers a bacon of the month subscription service, so they should know their bacon. We cooked up the first of the bacon this last Saturday morning for breakfast, opting for the Jim Oliver’s Hickory Smoked Country Bacon.

Alls I can say is, “Oh, Glory!”

BSG: Razor

This came in the mail yesterday:

Holy frak it was good times! I miss this show. Bronwyn and I don’t have cable so we weren’t able to watch Razor when it aired a few weeks back. We watched the unrated extended version last night and I think I just may want to watch the broadcast version very soon to see what was different.

I can’t believe I have to wait until April to see Season 4. That’s madness. That means that, not counting Razor, the show will have been off the air more than a year. What is the Sci-Fi channel thinking? That’s a serious test of patience for fans. Maybe by the time they get Season 3 out on DVD and I can sit down and rewatch the whole series it’ll be April. I need something, especially since Bionic Woman has proven to be a poor replacement for my Katee Sackhoff fix.

UPDATE: Apparently the Season 3 DVDs also aren’t coming out until April because the studio wants the DVD release to coincide with the season premier. The problem is I probably won’t even remember what the frak was going on by that time.

Star Wars Gangsta Rap

Not the first Star Wars rap video, but probably the best.

Possibly My Next Guilty Pleasure?

Tonight, my fiancée and I are looking forward to the premiere of Bionic Woman. Honestly, I don’t know what to expect. From the trailers and preview clips floating around on the web, I have to say that the script seems horrifically written.

For instance, there’s one scene where a mother and daughter are driving in a car and the Bionic Woman is running in the woods alongside them. The girl exclaims that she, “just thinks it’s cool that a girl can do that.” Now I’m all for strong female characters, but that gem of dialog is a bit much.

Then there’s the performance by Michelle Ryan, who plays the Bionic Woman herself. From what I’ve seen, she’s doesn’t seem to be commanding or confident enough to take the lead role. In fact, I suspect she may be upstaged by her character’s rival, played by the actress who is the primary reason my fiancée and I are looking forward to the show - Katee Sackhoff.

I mean really. How hot is that?

I’m hoping I like the show. I’m hoping it transcends its weak writing and ends up being just a lot of fun to watch, and I’m hoping Ryan grows into her part. I mean this is essentially what happened with Buffy. The show was pretty bad its first season, but still so much fun to watch and it got better and better ever season after that. Most of all, since I’m guessing Battlestar Galactica isn’t going to last past season four, I’m hoping Bionic Woman stays on for a little while so we can get more of Katee Sackhoff.