Yoinked from mrs_picard

Name a fandom, and I'll give you the scoop on at least three of my unpopular opinions related to that fandom.

( Some from my main fandoms to keep you going )

Have had a few 'proper' (ie both crampy & achey) contractions this evening - will they stay? Will they go? That's the beauty of childbirth - we just don't know! Hope I pop soon though - it's so bloody hot!

My Showbiz Chum Off The Telly (and I think I can now happily refer to him as My Showbiz Chum - he has recently enquired as to my wellbeing, and called me 'a very funny lady', so suck on that!) David Schneider appears to want me to LiveTweet the Labour. To which there is only one suitable reply -


I have Pralines & Cream Icecream in the freezer, and ISIHAC to listen to. These are good things.

Oh, and I highly recommend renting out 'If You See God, Tell Him', if you can - 4 parter black comedy drama by David Renwick from back in 1993. Very of-its-time, but considering that the main things it satirises are over-commercialisation, dumbing down and the then-Government's handling of Recession and mass unemployment, it's still very current. Wonderful performances from Richard Briers and Imelda Staunton as well as lots of great cameos, but the one who really shines is Ade Edminson, very much against type as a Meldrew-esque put-upon suburban everyman. Gloriously dark & surreal - touches of Gilliam, especially 'Brazil', which it seems to directly reference in certain shots.

Still here. Still not popped.

You know what? I'm going to see if I can't start a Meme, just for shits & giggles. It's an idea I came up with the other night...

Female characters tend not to have as much love in Fandom as males as a whole. It's most likely an outcome that results from a number of factors - I'm not just going to blame it on institutional misogyny, I don't think it's that simple. But I still don't like it. So, why not give the women and girls in your fandom/s a bit of love - Post with some of your favourite fictional females, and tell us why you like them. And pass it on!
( Trot out the ladies! )

I caught a little bit of Britain's Got 'Talent' tonight - I mean, I know I don't watch much telly these days, but is it me, or has TV recently gone completely surreal? The Semi Final lineup appeared to include a toothless zombie, an obese prostitute/Dawn French playing Madonna (couldn't quite tell), the ubiquitous Mad Woman and her Yappy Type Dog, an elderly paedophile with his child bride and Mowgli. Seriously, what the who and the where and the why?

Also, at some point since Byker Grove, Ant McPartlin has been replaced, Stepford Stylee, with a robot. He looked as though he were covered in a thin plastic sheen, or was fabricated out of Lego.

Instead, I watched something about people with Tourettes. A teenaged lad walking down the street screaming 'Chicken fucker' was actually less weird because at least he had a reason why he was doing it.

Lost - The Variable

( This is Lost we're talking about. Of course there's Spoilers. )

Oh Susan Boyle, you have AMAZED AND ASTOUNDED US! It is literally, physically gobsmacking that a woman, over 30, who is tubby and has mad hair and eyebrows could possibly have any worth, any merit whatsoever in our society. When you opened your mouth and sang reasonably well you BLEW OUR MINDS, destroying all stereotypes we hold about what kind of person should be publicly seen doing something artistically competent, and what kind of person should only be wheeled out on the telly as a modern day freakshow... y'know, the stereotypes that shows like 'Britain's Got Talent' generally spend week after horrible week reinforcing.

When you stepped on stage the faces in the audience and judging panel said it all, and rightly so - what made a plain, older woman think you had the right to have your merits judged? You were not under 25, not under size 12, you hadn't waxed, bleached, moussed and ironed every hair on your person to perfection and you weren't plastered in so much make-up that you looked like you'd just lost a fight with Dame Barbara Cartland's ghost, so everybody naturally expected you to be worthless. I mean, that is what we're told day in, day out, isn't it? What gave you the temerity to stand in front of Piers Morgan, Amanda Holden and Simon Cowell to receive their glorious judgement? Let's really think about that panel there... Piers Morgan - a failed Tabloid editor with a pile of part-congealed cat sick where his soul should be; Amanda Holden - a woman who is only famous for courageously allowing not just Les Dennis but also Neil Morrissey within spitting distance of her sideways smile; and Simon Cowell - who apparently was once of some use as a music producer or something, but for the last decade or so has reinvented himself a the world's best paid pantomime villain, who sells himself as the new Oscar Wilde but in fact does nothing but come out with lame, obvious catty putdowns, like a bad Drag Queen trying to warm up a middle aged Hen Party. Less than that, actually - he's like a man who wanted to be be a Drag Queen but doesn't get enough work so has to do a day job at an office as an IT Support Technician, where he skulks behind his desk groaning, sneering and sniping every time somebody in the company with less technological knowhow than him asks him to do his bloody job. That's what he's like.

But you impressed those Gods Amongst Mortals! You sang a Musical Number rather well, and set their radiant faces to 'Patronising Pseudo Amazement'. Humbled. Humbled, that's what we were, having cast a million little sneering glances at our mates like background characters in Saved By The Bell whenever Screech came on and did something crazy, we are now queuing up on the youtubes to say how wonderful you are for showing us that women who don't look like Abi Fucking Titmuss are sometimes not shuffling, meaningless human detritus and are occasionally even worth celebrating.

But only if you step up in front of thousands of bitchfaced twats, TV Producers and the Unholy Trinity and turn their giggling into patronising applause through the medium of song.

And only if you go ahead with that makeover that I bet every Women's Magazine and Daytime TV Show is fighting over doing for you right now.

And we'll still all giggle about you being ugly, old and fat anyway.

Modern life is rubbish.

Oooh! Also, I saw Lost 'What Happened, Happened' and 'Dead Is Dead'.

( It's turned into the Ben Linus Show! YAAAAYYY!!! )

Something that I’ve meant to start doing for a while now, but haven’t got round to recently, is to start up a series of reviews for the new, weird world into which I have become indoctrinated over the last couple of years – the world of Pre School TV. Now, I haven’t had much time or energy to blog over the last 10 days or so due to my and Vi’s illness, but something I have done a lot of during time has been crashing out on the sofa watching said programmes. Due more to terrible reception in Canterbury than any sort of snobbery it’s an almost exclusive diet of CBeebies with us – CITV and Five just don’t have strong enough signals to fight through the static – but still there is the most amazing mixed bag of programmes, ranging from sublime through dull and weird all the way to just plain awful, aka ‘Finley The Fire Engine’. It often ends up being the genre of TV we end up watching most these days, so I thought I might as well let you kids in on this weird world of the primary coloured.

I’ll probably dip into these as and when they take my fancy. As to where I should start, well… there’s only one place that I can start if I’m talking about modern toddler telly – with Violet’s – and almost every child her age’s - perennial favourite…
( In The Night Garden )

Thanks to my friend who probably isn't that secret if you look hard enough, I have now caught up on Lost.

( Spoilers for Lost up to S5 Ep10 )

*Sigh*

Today has been SUCH a Thursday. Arthur Dent would be proud. And it's not necessarily over despite Vi having gone to bed some time ago. She's already woken up, very upset, with a pooey bum once tonight.

I have done a lot of laundry. I am very tired. Vi has pretty much put herself on nil by mouth since this morning, bar half a piece of pitta and a few slurps of very diluted juice. I can tell that she's thirsty, but I think she's too frightened of throwing up again to drink anything now. I hate it when she's ill so very much - she's usually such a cheerful little girl, it's horrible to see her so miserable.

A few things have made me smile today, though. One was 'OMFG Magazine' (*points to earlier post*) and the other is the preview of the Family Guy TNG episode as posted by Mrs P and little Willy Wheaton, and as seen here. If any TNG fans haven't seen it yet, I advise that you do. It's brilliant. 'I'll have a hamburger. No! A cheeseburger. And a...' 'YOU'LL HAVE NOTHING AND YOU'LL LIKE IT!!!'

Ugh. Was tired and stressed by the time I went to bed anyway last night. The Parade Of Twats at God-Knows-What -Time in the night really didn't help - it was like an unending river of honking, braying, bawling, drunken fucks. Went on for about half an hour, and I slept very oddly after that. Then Violet was sick, at about 6.30 in the morning, so I spent a lot of the early morning cleaning that up. Decided to take her to playgroup for a bit to stop her just moping in front of the telly, but that was, of course, when whatever's upset her tummy went from being vacated from the front end to coming out of the back. Spent the majority of playgroup changing her nappy. She then passed out in the pushchair. She's in bed now, hopefully she'll have a nice, long doze and wake up feeling better. Nothing else we need to do today, thankfully, and I've bought a new desk fan in the hope of the white noise drowning out any more 2am crocodiles of fuckwits.

Oh, and we got rained on, too.

Not a great day, so far.

Due to lots of little jobs that needed to be done last night, plus various interruptions, we only managed to watch Monday's Stewart Lee last night and didn't get round to Charlie Brooker's new show. However, this clip gives me the feeling that it's going to be well worth catching up on.



I'm starting to wonder whether young Charlton might actually be the Second Coming. He's always right. ALWAYS!

On the rare offchance that any TNG Fans on my FList might have missed it...




Can I get a 'Fuck, Yeah'?!?

(Thanks to mrs_picard for posting originally)

I'll admit to having gone off Family Guy more and more in recent years - I think it's really gone off the boil since it got de-cancelled. Got very lazy. And yes, I know, the concept of Stewie kidnapping the TNG cast is ripped pretty much wholesale from Futurama's 'Where No Fan Has Been Before' and yes, this won't be the first time it's nicked an idea from Groening's shows and won't be the last.

But still, I am Geekily delighted and shall be trawling the naughty youtubes after it has aired for some highly illegal watching action.

Denise Crosby's supposed to be in this too, although she's not in that picture. Maybe she gets killed right at the start before she gets chance to do anything cool and then comes back a while later as Alternate!Denise, then gets killed again, then comes back once more as Alternate!Denise's evil daughter. Also - if that's TV's Wil Wheaton with the teddy bear, wha' happen to his beard? Hmm? Riddle me that, Mr McFarlane, if that is your real name, which I doubt!

You may have noticed I've signed up to have my Tweets LoudTwittered on my LJ. Since starting on Twitter I've not posted as many short, random things on this blog, due to having already Tweeted them, which I think is a shame. So now you get my inane stream-of-conciousness ramblings on here as well, you lucky people.

Gave £4 to Comic Relief today in order to play Peter Sarah-funny-witch's latest Twitter game - Vegetable/Pop Star amalgamations. Came up with Pomme De Terrorvision and The Zucchini Sisters. He didn't retweet me, but Bobby Llewellyn did, with my lame assed coriander joke. That's two Sleb Retweets so far. TWO! I'm going to go for the Hat Trick, guys and dolls. I wonder who I can mildly impress next?

Really good episode of Mad Men this week. This moment may be one of the finest ways to end a conversation I've ever seen.

Got to watch 'The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham' thanks to my mysterious Lost benefactor today... ( Twists ahoy, as usual )

Got chance this avo to watch Lost Eps 'The Little Prince' and 'This Place is Death'. Epi 6 is lined up for tonight, but I thought I'd jot down thoughts and theories so far
( Lost spoilers up to S5Ep5 )

Ugh. I feel rotten today, with no real reason why - tired, dizzy, nauseas and emotional. Poot. The constant downpour hasn't helped. Neither did the fact that I needed to wrangle with the computer for about an hour this afternoon in order to get the tracks I bought off iTunes onto my non-Apple MP3 player. Stupid fucking 'file protection'. I bought the fucking album, all you're 'protecting' it from is me! Memo to self - never use iTunes again. It's too annoying.

The album in question, BTW, is the Dr Who S4 soundtrack. Just finished watching S4 on LoveFilm and I'm happy to admit I was completely wrong about Donna - she was brilliant, once she's stopped just being Catherine Tate and did some proper actin'. But I really thought that the music made this series - it was so very pretty, especially the Ood's song and that weird backwardsy music in Turn Left. Often helped me ignore that many of the plots were just fucking stupid.

Haven't commented on the Baftas yet - basically, although I really enjoyed Slumdog and thought it was a very good movie, I don't think it was worthy of sweeping the board last night. Frost/Nixon and Milk were better films in my opinion. And I reckon Kate Winslet got the wrong Bafta. She acted circles round Little Leo in Revolutionary Road, whereas I felt that pretty much every aspect of The Reader was just phoning in for a multitude of gongs. As Kate herself said in Extras, 'that's the only way you get an Oscar - play someone who was in the War or a Mental.' She hedges her bets in The Reader and plays both. Glad Noel Clarke won the rising star award, though (I'm still not over Chiwitel Ejiofor losing out in 2006) although I hope that the General Public didn't vote for him just because he's That Bloke Of Dr Who. The bloke's a budding auteur, for the love of Jeff. If only Kidulthood hadn't put the fear of God into me.

Anyhoo, let's see what the Oscars bring! Come on, Frost/Nixon!

1 - Today has been a good day for presents! I received a very late birthday card and pressie (The Orphanage, which I've wanted to see but we didn't get from Bafta) from my friends Kev & Leah, which was a nice surprise. Also, thanks to my mysterious benefactor I have been able to watch the first two episodes of Lost. ( spoilerish thoughts )

2 - My daughter can now say 'cucumber', 'pitta bread' and, of all the lengthy words to learn, 'gazebo'. She also enjoys repeatedly reminding me that aeroplanes are fast.

3 - Today is DaddyDeath Anniversary mark five, as my mother decided to remind me with an early morning text. Doing my usual trick of keeping too busy to dwell on it.

4 - I still have a cold and a vague, lingering headache. Boo.