Introducing PERTILDOW: a brand new part of my brand new blog. PERTILDOW is my excuse to take a break from my more literary-ish main posts, which take a lot of time and thought, and to ramble on about things that I’m interested in or love or hate or, as the very title of this series suggests, whatever, in plain English.
So here, in no particular order are things I like right now:
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As a long-term nerd, it’s a real admission of inadequacy to say that I have not yet seen Buffy in part or as a whole. We’ve just finished season one and are a few episodes into season two. Let me just say that there’s nothing finer than watching photogenic young teenagers kill demons, slay vampires, and snap witty comments at each other for an hour. I won’t say yet that the show is as brilliant as I’ve been led to believe, but it’s the most fun I’ve had with a show since the Doctor Who relaunch.
- These webcomics: Hark, A Vagrant!, Questionable Content, Dinosaur Comics, MS Paint Adventures. I’m especially in love with the art on Hark, A Vagrant. I am intensely jealous of Kate Beaton, and will forever be so.
- The Prisoner on AMC. The critics panned this, unfairly, I think. Okay, maybe the whole idea of constant, Foucauldian surveillance is a little played out these days, but I thought this was great. It’s trippy, episodic, bewildering, majestically paced (slow, if you’re a reviewer), and had an ending that really payed off.
Here are things I’m less thrilled about:
- Swine flu. This thing is way overrated. While it’s the MacGuffin in my current imitative epic, “A Voyage to Allalamna,” it really was not near as rough on me as I was led to believe. Kids and old people should probably still watch out, though.
- Disney’s latest shot at doing Dickens. This was an amazing disappointment. There was room for coolness here. Jim Carrey was Scrooge and all the ghosts. Gary Oldman was Cratchit, Tiny Tim, and Jacob Marley. This could have been interesting. Think about the implications those pairings have for Scrooge’s exclamation about there being “more of gravy than of grave about you” to Marley’s ghost. This casting could have been used to suggest cool things about the relationship of Scrooge’s ghosts to his own psyche. Instead, the movie boils down to useless roller-coaster sequences strung together in a frame vaguely resembling A Christmas Carol. Robert Zemeckis really needs to get off this mo-cap 3-d adaptation kick. He hasn’t made a decent movie since Castaway. Well… I like Beowulf, but it had a lot of problems.
And finally, things I hate:
- Stomach viruses. These, unlike Swine Flu, are actually quite unpleasant. Here’s hoping things don’t get rapidly worse.
The Distracted Student 