Listening: Here Come the Irish by Cathy Richardson
Reading: AfroAsian Encounters, eds Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen
News of the Day:
- Nutt-y woman's house invaded by squirrels.
- Speaking of nuts, Glenn Beck is crazy in every language.
- Pay for your tv shows. (But please let me keep watching Comedy Central for free!)
- Dominic West says UK tv sucks. But you guys gave us The Office and Life on Mars!
- Chicago doesn't want the Olympics. Which makes sense because they already have Barack Obama.
TVLand:
Despite having largely given up television for Lent (read: youtube and youku), I managed to sneak a peek at a few shows. Two more weeks of swearing off the hard stuff in the name of God, many more months in the name of my still sparse thesis.
The Wire starts its BBC run this week. Television snobs turn up their noses at the plebs who are just now discovering this masterpiece of corruption, violence, addiction, and general ineptitude. An American tragedy, indeed. **Okay, I confess I have not seen it. But I've also been abroad and HBO-less. (For the record, Dominic West has been on my radar since that odious Midsummer Night's Dream adaptation, an effort sullied by those occasional American 'actors'.)
Horne and Corden - shitteous!!! A opus of inanity. The penis on the roof is funnier, and more mature, than this assault on the eyeballs. All you need to know is that James Corden is fat and Mathew Horne is slightly effeminate. I forced myself to laugh one time because of my now very residual affection for James Corden from History Boys. Lesbian Vampire Killers, their new flick? I'd rather watch Tom Cruise. Happy Lent, boys - I will absolve them of their sin if they watch their own show 100x and promise never to venture into sketch again.
Robin Hood returns not so merrily. When we left them in the Holy Land, Guy of Gisbourne had just plunged a broadsword into Maid Marian's tum. Ouch. But she still hung on long enough to cough up some marriage vows and sweet nothings. But now Robin is pissed and Guy needs to get himself to an AA meeting, and a barbershop. Basically, Locksley sucks. Will the arrival of a few hot chicks and a black Friar Tuck liven things up?? 12 more episodes to find out. Re the criticisms over our improbably kick-ass Friar Tuck - get over it because y'all didn't complain when the Holy Land looked like Tatooine. It's a bloody tv show about a guy who, in past incarnations, wore green tights and was a FOX (the animal, not the woman).
The Great Sperm Race is the first show I've watched narrated by Richard Armitage (see above, Guy of Gisbourne). What can you say about a documentary that inflates the Gherkin (the bullet building in London) into a giant testical, casts thousands of actors in white sweats as human-size sperm, and compares the female reproductive parts to various natural terrain? Entertaining, but not quite as romantic as say Richard Armitage expounding on trade and production in North and South.
I'm not a vampire-werewolf-ghost fan, so Being Human appears on my radar only because of Russell Tovey (the werewolf), another History Boys alum. I'll offer some cerebral praise. Spot-on acting, engaging characters, wide appeal bereft of obvious pandering and appeals. There are enough plot twists (episode and series) to push the story forward but never in ways that compromise the organic growth of the characters.
