scotchneat.ca

Lorne: Back in Pylea, they used to call me ’sweet potato’.

Connor: Really?

Lorne: Yeah, well, the exact translation was ‘fragrant tuber’, but…

He was only 33 years old.

I finally made it to the dentist. The mission was to replace 2 fillings that were about 35 years old or so – the old “it’s gonna kill you” lead or aluminum things or something. I got the young turk who nattered on about his niece and nephew while he got the needle, the big frakkin’ needle, ready to put in my MOUTH.

I think I’ve noted before that I’m not BFF with dentists at the best of times (*cough* I might have hit one one time *cough*).

He said that the one on my right side “is a big sucker”, so there was no way I could do it without freezing. So I had the needle. Correction. THREE needles. And they hurt; I’m not even gonna lie.

The little one went okay, other than the smell of burning lead as he was drilling. That was really palatable. But then on the other side, with the “big one”, he needed some extra tools, like a freakin’ Borg instrument to prop open my mouth or clamp my tooth to my jaw or something, that I looked like this:

Marilyn/scotchneat at the dentist

Okay, maybe not quite that, but it was pretty close, and I had on those bigass glasses that you have to wear so that you don’t get your own spit and/or lead fillings in your eyes.

The damn freezing didn’t wear off until about 8pm, which is about 5 hours of feeling like my teeth were stones and my lips were the size of a peach.

This has done nothing to improve my relationship with dentists.

My father and uncle went at the bathroom again this weekend. The good news is that there are now walls. However, my shower area is currently encased in 6 mil plastic and I have to turn on the shower by reaching behind it. It’ll be a little like taking a shower in a rather large prophylatic for the next few weeks.

The new vent/light is pretty awesome. Very classy and far less noisy than the old vent.

I still don’t have a sink. Some day. Some day.

If you haven’t yet watched Dollhouse Ep 6 or the finale of BSG, stop reading.

——–

Wow wow wow. “Man On The Street” was freakin’ amazing. The people on the street think the Dollhouse, if it exists, is everything from slavery to a welcome party with rich people to a chance for risk-free fantasy, or even a way to ease the ache of being human, or being alone. Point is that it’s all of these things.

This episode was brilliantly directed–a point & counterpoint of healthy sex and rape, and real feeling and the illusion, and whether or not that makes a difference. What Joel Mynor says to Ballard is true, but in ways much deeper in the psyche than what Ballard or anyone else realizes. And holy crap: a) the fight scene between Echo and Ballard and b) enough Tahmoh nudity to keep this girl happy for a long while.

And then Echo’s speaking in tongues and frames Ballard with shooting an officer, and was that really the imprint or Alpha or what?? Need to know!

While I was watching, the particular juxtaposition of the equal-footed fight between Echo and Ballard and then the attack on Mellie by Hearn really stood out. In the former, there was no holding back on either side, and you could see in their facial expressions that there was no acknowledgment of gender; in the latter, there’s an immediate sense of discomfort in watching it, with so clear a victim and so vile an attacker. Given how much violence and gender has been in the news lately, it gave me pause. And then you throw the Mellie twist on top of that, and that’s just discombobulating in a very good way. A way that should lead to discussion and thought. Which, btw, is exactly where Joss wants us to go.

Then the closing where Mynor finally gets his anniversary undercuts whatever black & white judgement we may have been making about the ethics of the dolls. For the first time, I can’t wait to see what happens next. Oh Joss, what juicy dilemmas you have wrought!

—–

Now BSG is less unmitigated in the w00t. I will say that I came away from the end feeling like it was time for the end. No anxiety that there will be no more. The characters were played out. Now, I’m not quite at the Jacob end of the scale, but I was not blown away. I was completely annoyed by the Kara Thrace arc. Or, I should say, I was with her when she programmed the jump, got her feeling it was the last of her journey, but then the disappearing act at the end–just stupid. An easy way out – I felt like I stumbled into an episode of Touched by an Angel, and there’s no way that’s a good thing.

On the other hand, the flashback of Kara & Lee was gorgeously frought. We could see the seed and the death of it all at the same time. And also brilliant was that the deck of Galatica was the Opera House and was the dream. That part, I thought, was some excellent continuity and visually very striking. Also liked the way they got to kill Kavil, but not the mystery of the week way that he got hold of Hera again.

There was enough that was not so great. Gotta say as much as I loved her in her prime, dying Laura was plain boring. As was the whole “Earth is beautiful” montage, as was the fact that there was another Earth. And since that’s a big part of this whole shebang, that’s a big hole in my suspension of disbelief.

Interesting choice to have the last focus on Caprica & Gaius, I thought (or at least the backs of their heads), as “Angels” no less. Though, I guess they helped the genocide to happen so seeing them skip off into Manhattan intercut with images of our own poor attempts at toasters closes the loop so to speak.

It was a show that wasn’t sci-fi, wasn’t genre tv, wasn’t drama nor comedy nor dramady and it was pretty frakkin’ good. Thanks for the ride.

Your Animal is the Salmon

You are both clever and wise. You are a keen observer, and you tend to notice everything. You have amazing reasoning skills, and you grasp difficult concepts. You are an abstract thinker. You seek wisdom in its many forms. You are interested in art, literature, history, philosophy, and science. You are driven to make your own mark on the world. You put your creativity and brilliance to work.

Do they even have salmon anywhere near Ireland???

Sometimes life imitates art, or at least shares an interesting concurrence.

If you watched the last ep of Dollhouse, “True Believer”, Echo is sent in to a Kareshian compound in advance of the ATF. The trick is that before she goes, Dr Fredyria impants cameras in her eyes. Echo is physically blind but she is transmitting everything she sees back to the monitors in the surveillance shed. Topher is all keen on the technology but Dr Fred is worried that there could be additional damage or an aneurysm or something.

Here’s where it gets weird. There’s a Canadian man named Rob Spence who is planning to replace with prosthetic eye with …a camera. And then make a documentary out of what he records, about the culture of surveillance. Though his reasoning seems a bit cavelier: “If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?”

In the fictional case, what Echo sees allows the ATF to get a warrant to enter the compound (never mind the ATF guy is crooked and cooked up the original evidence). Dollhouse’s services are engaged because they can get a person in without alerting the compound members–she has no idea that she is doing the surveillance and she is truly blind and has no knowledge of the implants, of course. You can imagine that real law enforcement agencies would quickly wet their pants and deploy if this kind of “technology” were available. Then, I wonder if they aren’t already doing it or trying it because I’m a bit of a conspiracy nutter like that.

Cut back to our Robo-eye guy. Will he be telling everyone he meets that they are being filmed? He says he’ll “turn the camera off” in sensitive situations, like the locker room at the gym. But I’m thinking that if he’s filming a conversation with you and he doesn’t let you know, then he’s commiting a greater invasion of privacy than the CCTV cameras he wants to expose. At least you have a fair chance of seeing those.

Friday, March 20th. Night of The Frakkin’ End and the Episode That Changes Everything. And they’re on at the same time! I know there are PVR options and recording options and downloading options, but there are some things that need to be seen in real-time and it is absolutely not nice to have these things on at the same time. Sure, Dollhouse hasn’t been the show we were hoping for, but the loyalty to Joss runs strong in my veins, and yet I need to see how the Old Girl is gonna jump into the rim of a black hole and save Hera, or not.

On top of that, it’s the weekend that my Dad and my Uncle are coming to (hopefully) complete whatever they are doing to my bathroom so that I can finally get the tile guy to finish things off, and dreaming the big dream, maybe have a working sink. I don’t care what they are doing Friday night, as long as I have some alone time with the television.

But what will I watch?

This is the kind of thing that makes Canadians jump out of their Snuggies and prance about the living room. Holy crap, what a shot.

Me: Hello, I need to reschedule my dental appointment that was supposed to be tomorrow. I have a head cold.

Receptionist: Oh, we don’t worry about that. The dentist has gloves on.

Me: Yeah, except I can’t breathe through my nose.

Receptionist: Like I said, the dentist has gloves on.

Me: Right. But I can’t breathe through my nose, and let’s say the dentist has his hands in my mouth, so how exactly am I getting air in? Besides, if there’s freezing, then there could be an incident and I wouldn’t know about it.

Receptionist: Like what kind of incident?

Me: Um, well, like snot dripping down or something.

Receptionist: We can reschedule to 2 weeks from now – will that work?

Me: Yes. That will be fine.