Catchy Name Needed

 

*sneeze* *cough*

Yeah, I'm still sick. I didn't go to bed until like 9am (again) - I woke up and it was getting dark (I'm nearly always confused when that happens because I think for a minute it's dawn, not dusk). Then I went back to sleep for another hour. Rob let me sleep until 6 and we were going to see the 6:45 Bumblebee, but by the time I threw some clothes on & got out the door I was pretty sure we weren't going to make it - it takes pretty much a solid 30 minutes to get to the theater and get Rob his Diet Coke, etc.. At that moment I wasn't sure I cared, either. (I know it has good reviews and everything, but it's a Transformers movie. I suspect I'll like it in the end but it's hard to work up much enthusiasm.) Rob was going, "We can make it," and we got down the road to where our favorite Chinese restaurant is and I said "Are you sure you don't just want to eat?" and we got even further down the road before I talked him out of the movie and into Chinese. It was already time for the movie to start by then and we were still 10 minutes away, and I hate missing the beginning of movies. Plus, I was hungry.

So we had Chinese for dinner, and I ordered what I always order (sweet & sour chicken) before it occurred to me that I talked to the doctor's office first thing yesterday morning (or last thing before bed, for me) - and my A1C was kind of high and so I'm supposed to be eating low-carb, low sugar for the next few months. But oh well, I ate my damn chicken anyway. I was expecting the low-sugar part but the carb thing took me by surprise. I honestly don't know what to eat - lots of chicken salads? I think cutting down on bread will be harder than cutting out sugar, for me. (In case anybody's wondering if they missed something on the diagnosis front, I have not officially been diagnosed with diabetes so far - or at least the nurse I talked to never mentioned it. But obviously I'm right on the borderline.)

And meanwhile I'm sneezing my way through dinner. Luckily they had seated us in a corner. Rob seems better today but I'm worse. I hope that means I'll be better by tomorrow. I looked and "Vice" is showing at the Cinemark, so I'm thinking that I should send Rob off to see that because he wanted to see it and I don't, and that will give me another recovery day. I watched plenty of news all through the Bush administration, I feel like I've seen that movie already.

Oh, and I have been watching Doctor Who for the last few hours - I watched almost all of the last several Capaldi episodes, which for some reason I missed at the time. I think I've watched everything now except the one that comes between "World Enough and Time" and "Twice Upon a Time". (And I still haven't watched the last new episode, either - the Battle of something, I think? - so I guess I should do that before the New Year's Day one! I think that one recorded, but for some reason the 12th doctor one didn't, even though all the others did. What's up with that?)

 I made a list of what I've been reading lately, and I was going to talk about several different series that I've been reading. But I'm in the middle of the latest Shadowhunters book, and I seem to have Feelings about it. So I don't figure I'll get much further than this tonight.

I used to say "I'm reading a Cassie Clare book" or "I'm reading a Mortal Instruments book" but Shadowhunters is the name of the TV series (on Disney, switching to Netflix, I hear) so I figure they're all Shadowhunters books now. I'm sure not everybody has read these books and not everybody even knows about that series, either. (it's on Disney, after all - if you don't have kids you don't necessarily follow what's on Disney channels, at least I don't.)

"The Mortal Instruments" was the name of the first six books - or was it only the first three? I forget. I can't keep all the series names straight, anyway, which is why I'm perfectly happy to switch to a nice simple(-ish) name like Shadowhunters. I can remember The Mortal Instruments for some reason but I can't ever remember the name of the series that was set in the 1800s or the one I'm reading now. It's "The Dark Artifices" but I only know that because I looked earlier today, and who knows if I'll remember by tomorrow. Maybe I will, because I was thinking about why it's called that. This is the set of books that's set (generally) in California - although really only the first book stayed put in California, and since then they have bopped around and large parts of it have taken place in Europe and some in Faerie, too. I decided that Dark Artifices makes sense because it has running plot-lines about necromancy and there's a physical Book of the Dead that everybody keeps looking for. (And also a xeroxed copy of it, which I was amused to find that the Fairy Queen doesn't know what to make of.)

(I just took a detour of an hour or so over to my old Livejournal because I was pretty sure I remembered talking about Shadowhunters, and I found it. It was at the time - almost three years ago - when the Shadowhunters series was starting up, and I went on at some length about the casting with reference to the book and also the very bad feature film (City of Bones) from a few years back. That's here, and also a little bit in the entry before that, here.)

Well, so anyway, the third book of the fourth trilogy about Shadowhunters has just come out (Queen of Air and Darkness). So there's an actual dozen books - not even counting the short story collections about Magnus and Simon and the one reference book. I'm about a third of the way through, I think, so nobody tell me any spoilers. (I was thinking that the one thing I really miss about reading physical books is that you can look at where you are and make a good ballpark estimate of how much is left and how long it might take you to finish. "34%" tells you that you're a third of the way through but not how long the damn thing is.) I re-read the two previous books plus the last Jace-and-Clary book (City of Heavenly Fire) because that's where these characters were introduced. I realized that I found the previous book (Lord of Shadows) a long slog, in particular. It's very talky. I enjoy the plot, when it finally happens, and it's not that I hate the rest of it, but I think it could have stood some editing down. I'm kind of impatient generally with the whole Emma-and-Julian doomed lovers business. Maybe it's partly because Cassie Clare has kind of worn that trope out, really. We were in the car the other day and for some reason I started trying to explain the whole thing to Rob about how Jace has had about three or four different last names and he was Clary's brother - no, he's not! - and all of that stuff. (I never believed that he would turn out to be Clary's brother for a minute.) Anyway, I like the characters of Emma and Julian aside from the whole romance thing but man, is that one plot that I'm bored with. (The romance that I'm really feeling is the whole Mark-and-Christina-and-hot-fairy-prince threesome thing.)

I think I intended to talk about baseball tonight. Or about television - I think that was because I talked about movies last night and television seemed like the next progression or something. My brain is kind of pinging all over tonight, though, so I don't know what you're gonna get.

If you read the entry from yesterday, but didn't read the comment that was added late in the day, MissMeliss reminded me that the actual title of the book that I was talking about at the end of that entry (although it's not the original title) is normally And Then There Were None, not Ten Little Indians as I was thinking. I think I just had the name for that poem - as I think I must have learned it - stuck in my head. And I read the Wikipedia entry and she is also correct that there's no Poirot, but I won't say any more than that about the plot. It's summarized at that link if you want to know. I can't believe I forgot, actually, now that I have been reminded, but in my defense I think it was somewhere in the range of 30-40 years ago that I last read it.


What I was going to say about television, really, is that I don't seem to be any good at binge-watching. I can watch maybe two or three episodes of something and that's usually where I'm ready to stop. And then I don't come back to them for weeks or months or sometimes more. (I'm still on season two of Agents of SHIELD, for example.) I'm trying to finish Iron Fist, even though it's not all that good, just to be completist, I guess, so I can eventually watch The Defenders. But I also haven't finished season two of Daredevil so if I'm really being completist I need to go finish that also. (I was watching Daredevil with Rob, but I think he's lost interest and I should give up on that part.)

I had watched one episode of Victoria and one episode of The Crown, and I liked them both a lot, but I had never gotten back to watching either of those. But last month when Rob went to Ohio to see his brother, I went to see my aunt for the weekend - she's always telling me to come visit more and I hardly ever do - and she and I bonded over The Crown. She is apparently a big watcher of Masterpiece Theater, and so she had seen Victoria (season 1, I mean) but she somehow had not heard about The Crown even though she has Netflix and when we looked it popped up on her recommendations. So we watched the first episode - I'd already seen it but I figured I could use reminding anyway - and then went on and watched a couple more. And I did watch some more of Victoria since then and I need to go ahead and watch some more of both of those because they're really good.

I really don't watch much series TV, when it comes down to it. The Netflix Marvel shows are probably the most of anything I've watched in ages. (Rob & I both watched one season of Daredevil and then Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and part of season 2 of Daredevil before we played out on that.) We watch a lot of MSNBC and a lot of baseball for six months a year - or seven, this year. (I'll probably come back to that subject another day. It's all I can do not to start typing about it in all caps, shall we say. If you read my Twitter you've undoubtedly already seen that once or twice.) ...And so those two between them take up a lot of TV time. We both work the evening shift and when we get home we typically watch Rachel Maddow and then Rob goes for a walk and I usually start watching baseball, if it's that time of year. (Sometimes I watch the whole game and sometimes I don't. Since I generally know already whether they won or lost that plays into how much I watch, quite often - if it was a blowout and they lost, for example, I sometimes don't bother at all! But this year that didn't happen much.)

Anyway, Rob watches stuff that I don't - I stay up much later than he does, and he gets up much earlier and watches a lot of TV then, I think. (Our bedroom walls are thick so we don't hear each other doing this unless the TV is turned up very very loud.) Rob also watches The Walking Dead (and now Fear the Walking Dead also) on Sundays but I gave up on that after season 2 - it wasn't really the violence per se, it was the worrying about who was gonna die next - and so now I go in the bedroom and let him watch and come out for Talking Dead afterwards. I can deal with Talking Dead just fine, a nice nerdy show that I know what to do with.

Let's just start right out with this: no, Beauty and the Beast didn't really need to be remade. I adored the old cartoon version. What I read about that was that Disney is apparently making tons of money overseas on all these live-action remakes of the old cartoons, so these movies aren't really being made for American audiences at all. It's the best explanation I've heard, anyway.

I guess this one was the first of those remakes I've seen - what else is there so far, just Cinderella and Jungle Book? but there was nothing else we wanted to see last weekend, and I thought if we were going to see it, seeing it while it's still in the big theater seemed like a good idea. Rob hadn't been dying to see it but he liked the old one too so he didn't gripe.

(My mother and I also went to see the Broadway-bound musical way back in 1993, I guess that was. See here. I know I saw it but it didn't make a big impact, to tell you the truth. The most famous person in it, at least then, was Tom Bosley, and I remember being slightly impressed by that part. And it had pretty impressive staging but that's really about all I remember.)

And I have to say that I liked the new movie more than I expected to. I didn't love love love it like I did the older one, but it was still pretty good. The love story works, and a lot of the changes worked at least reasonably well, and... it was pretty good. I do have a tendency to compare it to all those retellings I've read in the interim, like both of Robin McKinley's versions, in one of which the Beast does stay a Beast at the end. But I don't really feel like that would have worked here. This Beast wanted to be a boy again.

I ended up watching a bunch of interviews and stuff on YouTube when I got home, and a bunch of interviews with Dan Stevens (I didn't watch Downton Abbey so I didn't particularly know who he was) and the upshot of that was, that I watched the beginning of Legion - he stars in that also, in case you're not getting the connection there - and I liked it. So then I made Rob watch part of the first episode also, and I'm not sure if he saw enough of it to get hooked but I definitely did. It's interestingly trippy and not at all like what I'd think "Uncanny X-men" would be like even though that's what it's based on. (I haven't read any of those comics but I guess I would expect something more like Doctor Strange, to the extent that I'd thought about it at all.)

(But we also are still watching Daredevil Season 2 and Iron Fist, etc, so we are getting more and more backed up with the TV stuff, and now baseball season has started so there's another thing to compete for our time. So I don't know when we'll get around to that.)

Well, the junk first of all: If you went to movies a lot in the '80s, like we did, this is a stupendously easy quiz. (A 50-question quiz that 11% of people get 100% right can't be too difficult, after all.) (I did have to guess on a couple, but they don't even make guessing terribly hard. I am kinda the queen of the educated guess.)

We went to see Rogue One again (still love it) and ate lasagne and watched the first episode of Stranger Things. That was our Christmas Eve. Honestly, it beats most Christmas Eves cold, at least the ones of recent years. Tomorrow we have to do the family stuff. I've washed my hair and I need to do my nails and I'm sure I'll think of ten other highly-important things I have to do before bedtime. I can't much make myself care, though.

Stranger Things was pretty awesome, although more of you probably know much more about it than I do. (Does that sentence make any sense at all? I'm not sure, but I'm leaving it like that anyway.) We finished Jessica Jones yesterday (also awesome) and I told Rob that we could watch Stranger Things next if he wanted before we go on to Luke Cage. I don't know that Rob knew anything at all about it, but *I* knew that he would love Stranger Things, it's totally right up his alley. (Speaking of '80s.) It's very, um, early Steven Spielberg crossed with Stand By Me. Or something like that.

Col and I played Marvel Heroes for a while. He is playing Luke Cage and is surprised that he likes it. I liked Luke too (not to mention that he's stupendously hot in Jessica Jones, but I hadn't seen that yet when I was playing him) so I'm not too surprised. Oh, having seen Jessica Jones TV now, I realized suddenly what she's wearing in the game, the other day - it's the "Jewel" superhero outfit that Trish is seen in the series trying to get her to wear. She's been standing talking to Ben Urich in Avengers Tower since I've been playing, and I always wondered what the hell that was she was wearing. (I believe you can also play Jessica as a team-up but I haven't tried it; I'm pretty sure she's wearing something else in that incarnation. And Ben Urich in this game is a younger-looking white guy, in contrast to the older black guy who's in the first season of Daredevil. Reconciling all this now that I've watched half - exactly half - of the existing Marvel Netflix stuff is kind of weird.)

Also (still on the Marvel Heroes track) I spent some money on costumes last week and I now have the girl version of Thor and a couple of Christmas costumes (Daredevil and Squirrel Girl). I'm probably going to feel like I wasted my money on Christmas costumes later but I really like the female Thor. There are actually two female Thors; the other one is Jane Foster (who I think becomes Thor for a while in the comics?) but the one I'm using is the Earth X version, which I really know nothing at all about. She says something about Loki having tricked her into the new body (but she also says she kind of likes it.) Either I read somewhere or Col told me (I have no idea which) that this version, or maybe both versions, won't let anybody call her Lady Thor or anything like that; she's just Thor, still. That's about all I know about that, although I'm interested that they bothered to do two different female voices for Thor. He has a buttload of costumes, too (although not as many as Iron Man) - some of the male ones might have "enhanced" (aka different, rerecorded) voices, too, for all I know. I haven't paid much attention. But I tried playing regular Thor with the default costume and I stalled out about level 30-something. So I was hoping that the different take on Thor would propel me along, and it has - well, I'm still not all that far along in story progression but she hit level 60 tonight, so that's definitely an improvement. I'm not sure why it makes that much difference, exactly, but apparently it does.

OK, that's enough for tonight. I need to go do my nails. Happy Hannukah, Merry Christmas, or other holiday/nonholiday of your choice. Or Christmas Eve Gift, as my grandma used to say. (Family phrase of unknown origin; I think I end up explaining that one pretty much every year.)

A couple of people have written entries about coffee for Holidailies in the last few days. I started to write one yesterday and it only got as far as how my parents both drank their coffee black before veering off to talk about the other things I drank over the years (large quantities of iced tea, Diet Coke, and Shiner Bock, at various stages of my life). So instead I'm still going to start with coffee but I'm not going to pretend that I'm going to write a whole entry about it. I do have a serious Starbucks habit these days, but it's a relatively recent thing and really has nothing to do with my parents and their (really revolting, as far as I'm concerned) black coffee habit. I only drink my coffee with large quantities of milk and artificial sweeteners, and I don't care how bad Equal is for me, so don't try to tell me. (I'm pretty sure that the Starbucks drive-through people at two different locations in two different towns know it's me just from my order.)

When I was trying to write about this yesterday, I also tried to look up "supertaster" because I've been told several times that I probably am one, but what I got from that search is that the only people who claim to know what a supertaster really is are people who are trying to sell you testing kits. It's definitely true that I'm sensitive to bitter foods, especially, and I basically can only tolerate them if they're highly watered-down in some way. But I'm also generally a picky eater in a number of other ways. I'm super-sensitive about texture - which is why I don't eat shellfish, because ugh, rubber - and I'm far too fond of the kind of traditional Texas diet that's heavy on grease and starch and meat. So I don't really know where all that gets you.


Let's see, what else - we're still watching Jessica Jones, and we're now maybe about halfway through the season. (I haven't looked to see how many episodes there actually are. Daredevil had 13 but I don't know if J.Jones is the same.) We did two episodes today and one yesterday, which is about as fast as we ever manage to go with shows like this. We don't have Netflix set up on our TV, for one thing - our regular (U-verse) television feed is still hooked up to my mom's old TV, which is a large and incredibly heavy old CRT. We keep saying we'll get a flat-screen when that one goes out, and it hasn't so far. It's got to be something like 13 or 14 years old because my mom died in early 2007, coming right up on 10 years ago, now, and I know she had it for a good while before that. So when we want to watch Netflix I have to pry myself off the computer so we can watch it there. It's all very out-of-date, I know, but it's worked for us so far.

I would like to cut the cord and not have regular TV at all, but Rob is a TV addict. One reason our crazy schedule works for us is that he goes to bed a lot earlier than I do (at which point I generally turn the TV off) and then he gets up much earlier than I do, of course, and he spends his mornings (the part when he's not working out, that is) watching old re-runs, which I can't stand. He loves Andy Griffith and Gunsmoke and all that kind of old stuff, which I can tolerate in small doses but generally got sick of years ago. (I got up to pee one morning this week and could hear Edith Bunker's voice from the bathroom - I didn't even know he'd been watching All in the Family.) I have my old Dell computer; I'd like to just buy another monitor like this one (20" Samsung, I see it's less than $100 on Amazon) and hook it up to that for TV-viewing. I don't think Rob would let me cut off the "real" TV, still, though.

Anyway, we both really like Jessica Jones a lot, and I was really happy when we got to this last episode where Luke reappears, which probably means I'll be ready for one of those Luke & Jessica icons by the time we finish. (Is there a cutesy name for Luke/Jessica? Lessica? surely not...)

(I think I'll post this and then go play Marvel Heroes some more. I really need to get Storm through chapter 4.)

Okay, I said I was sort of "meh" about Shadowhunters the TV series, but I actually watched it again and I was still (mostly) interested, so I guess I liked it more than I thought, really. So I have Thoughts, which are not going to be really deep or anything, most likely. I was thinking about the cast of the movie vs the cast of the TV series (vs maybe also the books), so let's see...

and oh, right, SPOILERS (if you haven't seen Shadowhunters pilot, or y'know, read the books - I guess I'll put the rest it behind a cut, just to be polite)

( Read more... )

If anybody's interested, iTunes has that new Kelly Clarkson Christmas song for free as the Single of the Week. I don't know how to link directly to it, but it should be easy enough to find. "Underneath the Tree" is the name of it.

I was poking around iTunes mostly because of X-Factor, which I don't talk about much because nobody I know online ever seems to be watching. But somebody is watching, because one group (Alex and Sierra) has the #1 and #7 singles on iTunes and one of the two solo guys is #4. There were 4 acts left before tonight, and I haven't seen the results show from tonight, so somebody is already gone by now. (And we just fast-forwarded through the results show to see, and it was the boy-band - who did not have singles in the top 10 - who got sent home. They're a country band, which isn't our thing, so they would have been our pick for who to send home, although neither one of us actually voted.) I have downloaded songs by both of the two who are in the top 10, because I do like both of them. The guy's name is Jeff Gutt, and he's kind of a bog-standard rocker, but he's a really good singer. Alex and Sierra are a little more funky and out of the ordinary, and I'm guessing that they are going to win, especially because of the iTunes thing. But it's hard to be sure on these shows. iTunes sales don't count towards the vote.

We have been watching X-Factor since the beginning - three years now, I think? We have been watching American Idol for a number of years, too, although not from the very beginning. I think we picked up maybe with season 5, which was a good many years ago - seven or something like that? Hmm, actually, according to Wikipedia, the upcoming season is #13, so this will be the ninth year we've been watching. Good lord. -- Really, I was following it, more or less, even before that, because those were the years when it was fabulously popular and everybody talked about it endlessly at work. But I only actually started watching when Rob got interested - and I'm not sure why he did, actually. I forget to watch TV on my own half the time, which means I tend to watch what Rob watches - unless it's something that actively annoys me, in which case I retreat to the bedroom or, more often nowadays, he watches recorded shows in the mornings before I get up, since he works during prime time anyway.

(And no, we don't watch The Voice, or Dancing With the Stars, or any of the other talent shows that have come through in recent years. I'm sure we'd get interested in them if we ever started watching them, but we haven't.)


holidailies.org

(Look! Texans icon! I made it myself!)

More Houston-Galveston stuff, some of which refers to yesterday's entry:

• Aw man, I knew it was probably coming, but Jim Deshaies is leaving us for the Cubs. I adore that man. (But I'm not sure I adore him enough that I'll go watch Cubs games just for him. Of course, if the Astros are bad enough this next year, that may start to look like a more attractive option.)
• In other (ex-)Astros news, Brad Lidge is probably retiring. Also, bonus footage there of the Astros clinching in 2005. (Rob and I were watching the faces and in some cases the jerseys during the scrum, and going, "Berkman! Biggio! Clemens!" Damn, that was a good team, even if they couldn't win a WS game.)
• I had to go to Galveston today for a doctor's appointment, and the other Carnival ship was in today. I got out of my appointment right at 4:30, which I have learned over the past couple of years is about the time that the ships usually depart. You could tell that anyway, because when I got back downtown, half the passengers were lined up looking over the railings. To me this always brings to mind old black-and-white movies where the passengers line up to wave at their loved ones who are waving back from below. But nobody is going to stand around to watch you leave when you're just going sailing around the Gulf of Mexico for five days or whatever it is. Plus most of the passengers arrive on buses or park remotely, so there's nobody to watch, in any case. (I'm sure the passengers aren't really lining up for that at all, they're just watching the ship pull out. Still amuses me just the same.)
• I said confidently yesterday that the Texans game was taping (by which I actually meant DV-R'ing, of course, but that just doesn't have the same ring to it) so of course when I got home it hadn't worked properly, and I only got the last hour or so. I didn't really care that much, anyway, but I really should probably investigate what happened there. It seems to have switched on at three o'clock or something, and our games are nearly always at noon. Honestly, U-verse, you're supposed to just read my mind! (And often it seems to. I'm terribly spoiled, really.)
• Also, the Texans have serious injury problems. They coped with it pretty well, yesterday, but that was just the Titans. New England may be another story.

Note to self: 45 minutes is too long of a drive for a routine doctor appointment. (As the university knows full well, it's why they have about a zillion clinics scattered all over the north half of the county.)

(I was going to add a picture of the rather excessive holiday decorations around our apartment complex, but my phone isn't cooperating. Sorry.)

I talked Rob into going out to eat with me tonight, and going to Half Price Books afterwards. I can't ever get him to go anywhere on work nights - I don't even try any more - but since he doesn't have to work tomorrow, I kidnapped him as soon as we got home and we went and ate Italian (just for fun, we went to a different Italian restaurant than the one we normally go to!) and then went book shopping. I completely forgot to buy anything for my father - that tells you how disconnected I've been from my normal Christmas preparations this year, 'cause normally I think of things like that a lot earlier in the process than December 23rd. I almost always buy my dad books, thus the trip to Half Price - they always have a good selection of the kind of thing he's interested in. Don't ask me the name of the book I bought - something about the days leading up to Pearl Harbor. My dad says himself that I have a good track record for picking books he'll like, so hopefully this one will work.

Jay Thomas is on Letterman right now, telling a story that I've heard before, I'm pretty sure. Maybe it's part of the Christmas tradition, along with throwing footballs. (Letterman seems to have a lot of Christmas traditions, after all these years. Wonder if Paul has done his Cher imitation yet.)

I mentioned something about nail polish and small children's gifts, or something to that effect, yesterday. I meant to talk about the highly important subject of my Christmas-green nail polish, I think, which I am now going to have to re-do, or at least touch up, because my nails have pink and purple paint stuck to them, from said small children's gifts. I had to go and buy something that needs painting. (I am still working on this. I'll try to remember to take a picture when I get done. I hope to god these gifts are not totally embarrassing in the end. Of course the kids in question, who are quite small, will probably think they're great no matter what.)

( Stuff about A Game of Thrones, with one fairly mild spoiler. )