Wesley Crusher and the Magic Banana Clip!

~ lobablanca

Holy rainbow-striped sweaters, Batman! Is Loba at all capable of refraining from her dorky sci-fi blather? Or are visitors to the den destined to have to wade through the Trek flotsam that burbles up through her clickety-clackety typing more times than the acid reflux from Neelix’s attempt at “Beefy Bean Burrito Wednesday”?

For the love of all things interstellar, I just can’t stop myself. My Angry BloggerTM days are well behind me. I realize now that I spent way too much time reading and writing about things that angered me rather than things that amused or delighted me. As I’m sure many of you can tell (especially those of you who have followed me here to my new den [yes, my tracking software has pinpointed you numerous times now]), I’m making up for lost time and I’m all about living in the garden of geeky delights. Yes, it’s now time for my Geeky BloggerTM days, biatches…so glue on your nose ridges, strap on your phasers, and let’s get to it!

What’s got me all in a frothy nerd lather today? Wil Wheaton, of course. Our Man Crusher is at it again, in the literary sense. I know I’ve raved before about his book Just a Geek. This time I’m here to rave about his latest endeavor, Memories of the Future: Volume One. The book, priced at $19.87 (oh, come on now, tell Loba that you get why this book is set at precisely this price!), is all about Wil’s take on the first season of TNG. The upcoming second volume (salaciously subtitled “Volume Two”), will be all about…the second season. the second half of the first season.

Post-Purchase Edit

Yeah, so the first volume is only about Encounter at Farpoint through Datalore. Really? Almost 20 smackers for only half the first season? These all better be damned funny, Mr. Wheaton. DAMN FUNNY.

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Blogging

Gather ’round, geeklings, while Loba lays some sad truth upon your possibly non-Trekkie ears: The first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation were generally quite craptastic. Seriously, they were abysmal. We TNG Trekkies know this. And, as Wil Wheaton proves through some damned fine (and HI-larious) storytelling, everyone else knew it, too. Well, he did. And that’s all that matters right now!

Yes, this book drops some spectacular stories, summaries, and silliness about all the craptacular episodes from TNG’s first season, as only our nerd hero can do. Wil takes the piss out of everyone and everything, including himself and his boy wonder alter-ego, Wesley Crusher.

I can’t say enough times how awesome I think Wil Wheaton is…he definitely growed up good, y’all. Don’t believe me? Amble on over to his blog and listen to the podcasts he’s done of excerpts from the first MotF. This link will take you to a blog post about the release of the book through Lulu as well as links to the first six podcasts he’s recorded. I dare you to listen to them and then report back that you didn’t almost wet yourself at least once. And if you do, I’ll call you a flat-out liar…or a soulless demon who must be banished from my den.

If you do like what you hear, I strongly encourage you to pony up and buy a copy of the book. I’m willing to bet there’s a goldmine of information there, even better than what Wil includes in his readings. I’m dropping the fundage for my own copy. And maybe one day, I’ll be lucky enough to get it signed by the Boy Wonder himself. And maybe he’ll even get me in to see his mom…I mean, Gates McFadden. Who played his mom. On the show. Which in no way resembles reality.

Yeah.

And if all this wasn’t enticement enough, here’s an image from Wil’s Flickr account that cracks me up each and every time I read it. Someone who really loves…and really gets Wesley Crusher put a lot of time and effort into this one. Never mind that the fonts make my eyes want to jump out of their sockets, never were truer words written about that GQ mofo, Wesley Crusher.

awesomecrusher

Bouncy Sunday

~ lobablanca

No real explanation or reason for this one, denizens. October has been a pretty Trek-less month so far, and so I thought a little Janeway bounce would do the trick. I also wouldn’t mind some of that coffee she’s bogarting…

Flashback Friday: Gage Creed

~ lobablanca

gage

Want to know what horrible secret fear I hide deep in the darkest recesses of my horror-blackened soul? I’m terrified of anyone touching the area of my leg near my Achilles tendon. Even the thought sends shivers through me and makes my tendons ache with some sort of strange phantom pain…like right now. Just typing this makes me want to wrap my hands around my Achilles heels and rock back and forth while I keen pitifully to myself.

Where does this big heap of personal crazy come from? The 1989 movie Pet Sematary. No kidding. There’s a scene in that movie that depicts a highly traumatic moment involving an Achilles tendon and little Gage Creed and his scalpel, seen in this lovely photo. I’m not saying any more than that because I’m sure you can piece that much together…and I simply can’t talk about it anymore. I’ve got this horrible ache throbbing straight up my legs right now. Not even my trusty Docs are protecting me from this panic.

Have I been toting this around with me for 20 years? I’m afraid so. Yes, the fear has dulled since I first saw this movie. It used to be that I couldn’t even get too close to a bed without jumping up onto the mattress as quickly as I could. You know, to keep away from errant scalpels being wielded by a little dead/undead boy under the bed. Rational? Oh, hell to the no. No more rational than the unshakable anxiety I felt every time I opened a closet door for several weeks after seeing the remake of The Ring. That flash image of the girl in the closet just refused to stay out of my mind whenever that happened. Stupid overactive imagination…

Gage Creed creeped me out for several other reasons, least of which was his Snoopy-like laugh, his “pimpin’ ain’t easy” costume he was in when he appeared to his mom post-resurrection, and that effing phone call he made to his dad after he finished “playing” with his mom and Jud. That child most assuredly wasn’t right. Miko Hughes, the actor who played Gage, also gets additional “creepy horror movie kid” credits for playing Heather Langenkamp’s son in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.

Pet Sematary is one of those King book-to-movie conversions that I would consider to be a success for the most part. It’s pretty close to the original book, and while it’s quite dated by today’s standards, it’s a nice enough balance of schlocky 80s cheese-horror and good, solid fear. Gage’s moments rank high among the “solid fear” sections, as do the creepy appearances of the jacked-up sister. EEK. Shiver.

It’s also a movie that walks well the fine line between truly horrible reality-anchored events and over-the-top King-style terror (I think that’s one of King’s greatest strengths anyway…how well he can plant some of his worst tales right smack in the center of believable and benign settings and events). As much as I hate the scalpel to the Achilles tendon moment, I have to admit that I have quite the warm, fuzzy spot in my heart for this movie. It’s got some great quotable moments, most from Fred Gwynne as Jud Crandall, some good scares, a bit of a moral lesson if you look for it and, for solid geek street cred, a post-Tasha Yar Denise Crosby sporting an oozing eyeball effect toward the end. AND, its theme song was sung by the Ramones! Bonus!

Of course, Hollywood is remaking this movie, slated for a 2010 release. Yippy. Another movie I’m not going to bother seeing. But I’m all for people watching the original…it’s either going to give you a few good scares, or it’s going to make you laugh a whole hell of a lot. Who doesn’t want to watch a movie like that? And to tempt you along, here’s the Ramones video for their song, “Pet Sematary.” Enjoy!

Why Did We Ever Break Up?

~ lobablanca

Dear Amazon.com,
Hi. How have you been? I’ve been watching you on the Internet…no, wait! Not like that. I just wanted to make sure that you were okay since I left you. And it seems that you’re doing fine without me…great, even.

Me? I’m not so good. See, it’s taken me a while to realize how stupid it was for me to break up with you. We worked well together, Amazon…and I was too stupid to see that before I went and made the decision to end the best thing I had going for me. I’m slow like that. Guess that’s why people who do business with just me find that they’re stuck waiting WAY THE HELL TOO LONG for their stuff to reach them. Kind of like that whiny hater LobaBlanca, who is still waiting for an order she placed more than a week ago. I’m afraid she might do something drastic, like try to make me look bad on her blog.

Remember how quickly my orders would get out when I was with you? Because, baby, you were on top of it all back then, and I didn’t have a worry in the world. Your trusted name was getting me more play than Paris Hilton’s sex tape at a frat party. But those days are obviously over. I’m trying to do it on my own, and, baby, it’s hard! On top of my shitty shipping service, you know how overpriced my inventory is, especially in comparison with yours…

I need you, Amazon! Baby, I never should have left you two years ago. It’s taken me all this time to realize this (see? I really am slow!). I wish I could change that decision, that we could go back to the way things used to be. But it is what it is, right? I just wanted you to know that I realize now how good I had it once, when I was sailing along down the Amazon.

Take care of yourself, Babe.
Love always,
Borders Books, Music and Movies

The Psychology of Anthropomorphism

~ lobablanca

Anyone who knows me, knows Sammy. He’s my car. Yes, not only did I name my car, but I also gave him a gender. I even decided to go against the grain of “normalcy” in this instance and make him male rather than the traditional female gender, assigned most often to seafaring vessels but probably applicable across the transportation board.

I love Sammy. Not in the way that most people today love their cars, as extensions of massive yet vacuous egos. He’s not “tricked out” in any way other than floormats imprinted with my favorite cartoon canine and a radio I bought for him 8 years ago to replace the standard one that had no CD player. He’s got several dings and scratches in his paint job, and each one pains me…not because of any vanity on my part, but simply because he received them while under my care. I failed to take care of him in those instances, and now he wears the scars as reminders of my inability to be everywhere at once, much to my own personal chagrin.

Does all this sound a bit crazy? Of course it does. It’s He’s a car. But he’s a car I have owned for almost 9 years. Sammy has taken me thousands of miles in that time, but the “life distance” is measured in quite different terms. In terms of laughs, tears, confusion, heartbreak, giddiness, loss, anger…all carried within his sleek silver frame. It amazes me how much life takes place inside a car when you live in this area. They become our own little microcosm for hours at a time, conveying us and those we love to whatever destination we can reach on four wheels. I’ve conducted business and pleasure in that car, laughed and cried, sung unrepentantly off-key as miles ticked by on his odometer, sought solace in his silence when sound was just too much to bear.

Is it any wonder we ascribe human attributes to inanimate objects? Sammy is just as much a part of my life as any “real” person, has played just as important a role. This mesh of metal and mechanized motion has treated me very well, taken me places both wonderful and difficult, but has always protected me as we’ve gone along. More happiness is wrapped around him than I’d ever considered until today. And I considered all this while commuting home…in Sammy. He is my favorite location to get lost in the strangest thoughts.

Now I sit typing all this up on another inanimate object into which I have imbued a sense of anthropomorphic love: my home computer. This is the last computer that my uncle ever built for me. It was one of the last things we ever discussed on the last time I ever saw him. Every single time I turn this computer on, I think of him…of how much he loved building computers, how much he loved to talk about technology, to tell me about the latest new techie toy he had his eye on. I think of how he passed that love on to me. I think of how we would talk about things like how beautiful my latest computer case looked. I’ve had non-techie people laugh at me when I say something like that around them, but it’s true. My computer is beautiful, with its silver sheen, see-through side panel, and neon blue glow. It’s even more beautiful because my uncle built it specifically for me.

And now he’s gone while this beautiful silver machine keeps on running, because of him.

I don’t know why I’m so pensive about these things today. No, that’s not true. Yesterday would have been my grandmother’s birthday. What pains me most is that I forgot until this morning that yesterday was her birthday. It caused a bit of an existential shudder as I then began to panic that I would forget about her, about all the people I have loved and lost. Jumping to the worst case scenario is one of the exercises at which I completely excel, as I’m sure you can tell.

I know this won’t happen. I think about her all the time. I’ve gone out of my way, in fact, to surround myself with things that will serve as mnemonics for the wonderful memories of all these people whose paths I was lucky enough to share for such a short, bittersweet time.

I’m not really sure how to end this entry, so I’ll just slip away silently. Maybe I’ll go take a drive. I’m sure Sammy will be up for the adventure…

Hail to the Racists!

~ lobablanca

redskins

I’ll start right out by stating the obvious: This is not going to be an objective post. I hate professional sports. Ergo, I hate football. I find it deplorable that more people in this country can name the starting line-up of their favorite sports team than can name their senators or representatives. The latter are people who have a real and significant impact on the lives of every American, whereas the former are just people trying to make as many bucks as they can before they blow out a knee and have to go on to doing commentary or hawking projection screen TVs during Rhonda Shear’s Up All Night. Or something like that…

My hatred for football, however, is even deeper based on the fact that I live in the D.C. metropolitan area. Therefore, each football season I’m subjected to constant yammering about the Redskins. And each year I wonder if this is going to be the year that TPTB finally make a long-overdue decision. What decision? To stop calling the football team of the nation’s effing capital city one of the most racist names still in use by any sports team in any league.

Seriously, are we really living in the 21st century? Or are we still living in a time when it was cool to have Uncle Remus tell us about his syrup, “dis sho’ am good!”

I’d argue that even that is less offensive than calling D.C.’s home team a name that American Indians have repeatedly said is as offensive to them as “the N word” is to Black people. Yet the Indian groups are continuously ignored or overruled while “the N word” has been given so much power that even the implication of its use can ruin a person. Don’t believe me? Ask David Howard, one of former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams’ top aides, who resigned his post due to community protest after a coworker heard him use the word “niggardly” in a conversation and accused him of using a racial epithet.

So why do we continue to have a team with an actual epithet for a name? I’ll give you one guess. It’s long and green and while it’s not Kermit’s finger, lots of people still get off on it. Yes! Yes! YES!! That’s right…it’s the Almighty Dollar!!

So stated Redskins attorney Bob Raskopf this past May, in response to the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in favor of the Redskins keeping their name. Raskopf put it in clear enough terms by pointing out that “millions have been spent on the Redskins brand and the team would have suffered great economic loss if they lost the trademark registrations.”

“Great economic loss.”

I Googled “most profitable professional football teams” and I found two lists, one from 2003 and one from 2007, that listed the Redskins in the number 1 or 2 spots of the professional football teams in this country making the most profits. The 2007 report showed that the Redskins team value exceeded $1 billion that season.

Why, then, would Redskins owner Dan Snyder choose to waste any of those profits by doing something that would only appease the laments of less than one percent of the U.S. population? It’s not like American Indians have been getting the shaft by this country on anything else.

So hail to the Redskins. May they never win another Super Bowl until they fix what they should have fixed a long time ago.

Losers.

Flashback Friday: Freddy Krueger

~ lobablanca
Isn't it funny how my face is so burned, but my wrist is perfectly fine?
Isn't it funny how my face is so burned, but my wrist is perfectly fine?

So since it’s the month of Halloween, one of my favorite holidays of the year, I’ve decided to dedicate all of October’s Flashback Fridays to celebrating some of my favorite scary things. And to kick this special month off, I’m going with my all-time favorite “snappy comeback” horror movie villain: Freddy K.

I love Freddy Krueger. The original A Nightmare on Elm Street remains one of my favorite scary movies and one of Wes Craven’s greatest contributions to the horror genre. I’d even argue that all the Elm Street movies are worth watching at least once, if only for the sheer enjoyment of watching Robert Englund camp it up as our favorite razor-clawed burned baddy. Okay, so you might want to skip Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. When the special guest appearances are Tom and Roseanne Arnold, you know you’re not witnessing great cinema.

Even at the worst moments of the series, Englund’s portrayal of Freddy kept me coming back. I remember the first time I watched the Elm Street series. I’d saved up a couple weeks’ allowance and rented all the current movies at the time, which were 1-5. I watched them all back to back to back…to back to back. Even as cheesy as they were, that’s a little too much Freddy Fright at one time. It was a jumpy evening for me. But it also got me hooked on Krueger.

I’ve seen all the original series of movies at least five times each, and I own movies 1, 3, and New Nightmare, which I still think was a pretty cool re-imagining of the Freddy Krueger mythology (geek tangent: I also own a replica of Freddy’s glove as well as the Todd McFarlane “Movie Maniacs” figure). I’ve yet to see Freddy vs. Jason though. There’s a bit of a hurdle there, but I’m not sure what it is exactly. Maybe it’s Jason Voorhees. I’ve never really been a big Friday the 13th fan, although I do dig the first one.

As for the upcoming Nightmare on Elm Street remake? It’s already dead to me. Maybe Jackie Earle Haley will do a spectacular job as the new Freddy Krueger, but I don’t care. He’s not Robert Englund…and Robert Englund was the reason that I kept coming back, sequel after sequel after sequel. How else can you explain the endurance and popularity of a character who was burned to death by angry parents for being a child murderer? It was a good deal in part to Englund and his ability to chew scenery to a sloppy pulp and spit it at you with a campy bon mot and a laugh right before he gutted you like a fish.

So GenY can have Haley’s Freddy. I’m sure they’ll love him. Obviously, there truly is no accounting for taste 😉

As for me, I’m sticking with the original. Here’s a little run-down of all the killings Freddy did during his reign over Elm Street, along with some of his snappier accompanying commentary. There are some classics in this bunch, I tell ya. Remember Johnny Depp’s “fountain of blood” death from the first movie? Yumm-o! The one that always makes me cringe is the “puppet master” death from the third movie, while the “cockroach” death from the fourth movie always makes me laugh. All in all, not a bad run.

CS…Why?

~ lobablanca

Yes, I have categorized this one as both happy and surly. It’s happy because I used to love CSI. I started watching reruns on SpikeTV almost 6 years ago. I’ve seen all the episodes since then, purchased several seasons on DVD, and continue to watch new episodes today.

The surliness comes from the noticeable deterioration of the show. What made me love it was the plot focus. It reminded me in so many ways of the “Freak of the Week” formula used with such success by early seasons of The X-Files. Each week we got to watch the team solve a different case, learning a little about them along the way as the opportunities arose to reveal such information.

Now, it’s all about the characters…or, more precisely, character drama, which I find so very boring. Yet I continue to watch the show. It’s kind of like how I continue to read post-Nemesis TNG novels, even though they only serve to irritate and disappoint me. I’m too much a creature of habit in this regard. But I did like CSI once, and I guess I’m holding out hope that I’ll like it again.

So far, it’s not happening that way with Season 10. I find this truth even more disappointing based on the absolutely awesome way the 10th season started. The pre-credits teaser for this episode was one of the most spectacular I think they have ever done for this show. Check it out:

Pretty spiffy for regular television, eh? I liked it so much that I watched it twice that night…and several times since. I laughed when I saw Laurence Fishburne doing his Matrix shtick with the Agent Smith-looking character, complete with Matrix bullet effects around him. I also dug how the sequence ends with two characters in frame, one of whom is the surprise guest return of Sara Sidle. So, cool opening and pleasant surprise ending. Left me feeling quite hopeful about what was to come.

Too bad the rest of the show in no way lived up to that opening. Petty bickering, bruised egos, the disappearance of a regular character from the previous season explained away by the revelation of even more discord. Plus, the story was meh. The stories from early CSI were never meh.

Same thing for last night’s new episode. Sara Sidle is still with the team, which makes me happy…but what didn’t make me happy was the dredging up of a storyline they started way back in the very first episode as one of the stupidest red herrings I think they’ve ever pulled. Also, it seems that they might be launching another serial killer story arc. Because the Miniature Killer was SO awesome.

Disappointed.

So, should I just stop watching? Give up and abandon ship before it sinks beneath the weight of its increasing mediocrity? Or should I continue to hold out hope that they’ll find that miracle fix that will get the show back on track to awesomeness? Is that even possible?

I’ll probably keep checking in, especially since our cable company makes it so easy to catch up on missed episodes through their On Demand feature. What can I say? I really am a hopeless optimist. How else can I explain the fact that I still watch a show that stopped being great at least three seasons ago…or why I recently ordered the follow-up to a TNG book that I rated only 1.5 out of 5?

Hopeless.