Non-PR Heroes reaction

Prison Break: WHY!?!

( Spoiler )

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Heroes at least did not hurt as much. ( ABOUT GODDAMNED TIME! )

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Listening to Dexter in the Dark is just not going to happen. Jeff Lindsay isn't the best writer in the world, but his prose moves along snappily enough that I'm always breezing through it. Listening to the audiobook of the third in the Dexter series is just painful. There is no acting to it. I'm totally spoiled by the voice-over work by Michael C. Hall on the show, I do realize that; I'm so used to his interpretation of how Dexter's inner monologue runs, the cadences and dryness and wryness of it that anything else has a jarring falseness to it. Even so, this audiobook performance is barely more animated than someone reading the lines off the page into a microphone. Dexter isn't an animated character, I realize, but there are ways to bring even his flat cynicism to life and whoever it is doing the reading is just not trying.

Also, this book starts off with more negativity about Rita than the other two books combined had throughout their pages. I get that Book-Dexter is a lot less adorably human and dependent in his relationship than Show-Dexter, but there's no need for the meanness to Rita because she's been snowed under by Book-Dexter. He literally loathes her, and there's this unnecessary, unsuccessful attempt to make her look a moron so that his loathing is justified. Instead of the more natural progression which would be having him admit there's only as much stupid and inane about her as there is to the rest of humanity in his opinion. It just feels needlessly mean to harp on her quite so much.

This is not going to be the security blanket to keep me until the next new episode that I'd hoped it would be, I guess.

(no subject)

First off: my Pink Raygun review of last night's Heroes. Spoilers!

Second: we just had a fire drill at work. The guy made some joke about a Seinfeld episode that apparently did no favors for the character of George. He was used as an example of what not to do in case of fire. "We don't want to be George," yuck yuck. Only someone didn't find it so funny. When he allowed us to disband after the standard lecture and stayed behind to take questions, one of the only ones he got was someone getting up in his grill about why he hates Jews.

Ex-squeeze me? Dude, no one in New York is dumb enough to say that out loud even if they do believe it. Also, he said "No one wants to be GEORGE" not "No one wants to be Jewish." My boss misheard him, too, so okay, maybe you thought you heard that, but why would anyone say that?

Third: I am the master of the intertubes! The lady in the office couldn't find a catalogue number of something we'd asked her to order. I come in and watch her look it up on the company's website, and, lo! There it is! I fixed the internet!

(no subject)

Watch what you take away from this Tierney article.

The wrong impression to walk away with is to think that this in some way proves that whatever scientific consensus you take issue with might be the result of this false "cascade" theory. The cascade phenomenom preys upon human opinion. As you will read in the article, anyone who applied science to the low-fat diet thinking found it was full of shit.

Pay close attention to this line in particular:
[Dr. Ahrens] pointed out that most of the doctors in the survey were relying on secondhand knowledge because they didn’t work in this field themselves.

That is how you get your faulty, cascading popular theory masquerading as fact. When you turn to physicists and psychologists and other people who've somehow thrown a "Dr." before their name instead of relying on the experts working in the field being questioned, you open the door to bias. So congratulate yourselves, creationists: it's not your fault; you're just aping what smarter people would admit are only their own ignorant opinions (they don't actually have hard evidence to back it up, so it remains the biological equivalent of an objection of heresay).

If it weren't for these people lending their credentials to the opposite conclusion of evidence, we'd be having a very different conversation about a lot of biology today in this friggin' country.

I really hope this isn't true...

...or I have some DVDs to break when I get home.

Forget even the feminism angle on this stupidity. How many different times have we, the audience, been told what we are or are not tired of? Too many super-hero movies! No one wants to see biographical films any more! Nobody watches things with subtitles! Too many people are paid to analyze what must be statistically insignificant deviations in movie-theater attendance. That, coupled with the general decline in theater attendance warrants this level of freak out and reactionary response? Hog shit.

And now I get mad like a good feminist. Let's name the thiry-billion or so movies that tanked this summer or opened to less than stellar box office that featured male leads. There was one just last week--The Kingdom. Or is the fact that even one female was in that mean that that failure was the fault of the womyns? This shit annoys me all over the place--when something doesn't work well for you, chances are 100-to-1 against that it was the fault of this one thing. In this case: the women. As if actresses in Hollywood didn't have enough shit to worry about with their all being required to be anorexic and nude as often as possible to even get any play. Fuck this shit, man.