( Oh, German, I Hate You, But I Need You So Much )


( Till Lindemann and His Rubber Peen--Oh So NSFW )


I finally watched Sweeney Todd. I wanted to like it; I adore Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman and was thrilled that I was getting two bags of sex for the price of one, but I was disappointed. My flist had hyped the film so much after its release and praised it to the skies, but I found it lackluster.

( Sweeney Todd--SPOILERS )

I'd planned to do a megapost wherein I discussed last night's Fear Itself, the ever-increasing complexity of the German language, Sweeney Todd, the hypocrisy of the American public with regard to the disabled and the cult of the pity vote, ficcing, and The Dark Knight, but after battling the idiot hordes for seven hours, I lack the energy for such a robust rumination, and so, I'll get to what I get to, but first, a pop quiz:

If you are a bus driver who needs to let off a wheelchair-bound rider, do you deploy the lift in:

A)The large, smooth slab of concrete that allows for easy disembarkation and maximum safety and is the designated stop.

B)The narrow sidewalk with the precipitous dropoff on the other side that is fifteen feet behind the safe stop and requires the patron to channel a seasoned Hollywood stuntman by popping a wheelie into the bushes and a chainlink fence, turn, and pop a second wheelie back onto the sidewalk.

If you answered B, you have passed Starmetro's rigorous psychological test and qualifications exam. Please submit your resume to the following address for consideration:

Starmetro Human Resources
080 Dumbfuck Ave.
Jesus Fucking Christ, You Knuckle-Chewing Fuckwit
85540

Thank you for your interest in our company. We are committed to the highest levels of mismanagement, idiocy, and gross incompetence, and we hope to see you as a member of our motorcoach team.

Sincerely,
Jack Offenheir, Human Resources Director and Proud Herder of the Developmentally Impaired


I know some of my friends have yet to see The Dark Knight, and so I'll restrict my comments to general impressions and opine at greater length and in more detail tomorrow. It was a wonderful, sharp film afflicted with a mild and largely forgivable case of Blockbuster Bloat. There were flaws, chief among them a fixation on outlandish geegaws, but what Nolan and company got right far outweighed what they didn't.

Oh, Harvey...

A-

And I'm spent. Stupidity inflicted wearies the soul, but not, unfortunately, of the sadly afflicted.

justspies and lilly_rose!!!!

I found audio of T.S. Eliot reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

http://www.salon.com/audio/2000/10/05/eliot/

Also Burnt Norton, the first part of the Four Quartets.

http://dir.salon.com/story/audio/poetry/2001/03/22/eliot/

Title: Initiation

Author: taylorgibbs

Rating:FRAO

Pairing: Speed/Danny/Mac Flack/Horatio

Spoilers: None

Summary: The New Yorkers initiate Speed.

Warnings:Group sex

Author notes: Written for kinkfest July 16

Special thanks:to slash_srs for the prompt.

( Initiation within! )

Title: Take Us Away

Author: taylorgibbs

Rating:FRM

Pairing: Gibbs/DiNozzo/Abby

Spoilers: Judgment Day

Summary: Gibbs gives the team a special sendoff.

Warnings:Group sex

Author notes: Written for Kinkfest July 15

Special thanks:To Anna, super beta!and kaylashay81 for the prompt.

( Take Us Away! )

I haven't gotten around to what happened during Gaby's 1st grade graduation. He decided he wanted to wear a suit. I set one out, CP's old suit. That morning, when he dressed, he discovered it was far to big. I got out of bed, and set up another pair of suit pants and a vest for him to wear and went back to bed.

Well, he left later that morning in the dim reaches of my mind that morning, I heard Ryk say, "Here Gabe, don't forget your jacket."

I didn't really think about it until I got to his school and Gabe was showing off his suit proudly in front of all the kids.  According to his teachers, he walked over to the Supervisor of the school district and announced. "Hey, we both look like we're going to a wedding!"

Well I saw the boy, lined up when I got to the school and saw this.

Which didn't look too bad when he was sitting down.


And looked real spiffy when you removed the jacket...


All in all, I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry, but it was so Gabe and he was so PROUD of his suit...

It was in the end very cute and something I'll never forget.

Because I'm curious:

When you were little did you have an invisible friend?

I had Elizabeth, who lived in a mirror image world, entered through the mirror in my bedroom. I also had an invisible 'enemy' named (creatively enough) Invizzie. Because I needed someone to beat when I played board games against myself (poor 'vizzie almost always lost.)

What about you?

Title: The Hand That Feeds You
Fandom: FMA
Pairing: Lust!Havoc/Miles
Rating: R
Community: 25_foods
Theme: 22. Writer's Choice - Honey
Warning: Light Bondage, spoilers for chapters 40 and 65, Dubious consent

( Onwards )

I wrote exactly one paragraph of my spn_summergen fic last night and promptly deleted it because it sucked. Sometimes, when I've thrown a dud into the mix, I'll ignore it for a while in the hope that time will mellow the stink like a fine gruyere or at least make me more sanguine about it. If it's still clanging like an iron bell in a woodwind orchestra by the time I've tapped the final keystroke, then I'll bow to the blatantly obvious and either delete the offending passage or rewrite it. Not this time, however. Last night's output was so stilted, dry, and tortured that I nuked it before I went to bed. This is either going to be one of those fics of which I am immensely proud once it's finished, or it'll be a part of my fannish life I'll be eager to forget. Right now, I hate John Winchester, and rue the day I ever decided signing up for a closed-deadline exchange would be "fun."


I watched CSI:NY's S1 episode "The Dove Commission" last night and noticed a plot absurdity that had heretofore escaped my notice, mayhap because I was too enthralled with fantasies involving Flack and his leather trenchcoat to care about such fripperies as plot cohesion.

Flack triumphantly presents his doggedly pursued news footage to Mac and Stella. Now, I was led to believe that this footage came from a news camera either inside the ballroom to record the swanky shindig or just outside the building. What a camera jockey would be doing pointing his glass eye at the 65th floor from the ground like a lovelorn stalker peering wistfully at his lost quarry, I don't know, but this is a trifling problem compared to the one that attracted my attention, and so we will set it aside.

Regardless of where the camera was supposed to be, how did it manage to record TARU-copter POV footage? What, the NYPD outfitted its multi-million-dollar tactical chopper with a separate camera that transmitted itself to story-hungry media outlets throughout the city, a fame-whoring HAL sending audition tapes to any set of eyes that would watch its peepshow? I realize that the NYPD is one of the most media-conscious and media-savvy police departments in the world, but that's too gaudy for credulity. Christ. I realize that TV is a largely fictive medium, and as such, should be granted poetic license. But there is a difference--or there should be, goddammit--between poetry and patent absurdity. When one professional wrestler purportedly crushing another's head between two cars on national television is very nearly the second most ridiculous thing you've seen on the boob tube that week, something is, as Lewis Black would so pungently say, askew. At the very least, the script editor needs a refresher course in logic, continuity, and verisimilitude.

CSI:NY: Less Ludicrous than the WWE. Yeah, there's a motto of which to be proud.

Dear Doctor Who fandom:

Do we really need 20 new communities based on one episode? Can we stop already?

Me.

PS - A cannon is a piece of artillery. It has nothing to do with your favorite pairing unless your OTP is Captain Jack/Black Pearl.


Dear Dad Boss:

Having both you and M gone for a week without being reachable is less fun than it sounds. If I'm not here when you return I've run off to Tonga.

Me

PS - In case I haven't mentioned it lately, your dad is cracked.


Dear Beard Papa -

I love you. I want to have your children. Putting cookie crumbs on top of a cream puff made something brilliant even better.

Me


Dear Jim Henson -

I love you.



( Jim Henson pic!spam )

This morning, I took the Unit 2 test in my German lessons. I'm still having a spot of pronoun trouble in the dative case, but I hope to eradicate that bogey with liberal amounts of table copying until the truth is indelibly etched into my brain.

To wit:

( Handy German Pronoun Tables for When You Want to Talk Dirty to Your Weed Eater )

I'll keep pounding at it until I get it right. I ended up with an 86.5 on the unit test, which isn't bad for someone who hasn't cracked a German textbook since 2001, but it's not an A, either. Oh, well, on to Unit 3, where I'll be bludgeoned with more past tenses and irregular verb conjugations(I know English isn't innocent of verb irregularity, and is, in fact, a prolific perpetrator of this heinous crime, but oh, God, the irregularities auf Deutsch make my ass hurt).

Eventually, I'll get to relative pronouns, and that is when I will most likely commit suicide by ripping out my teeth with a pair of rusty pliers and jabbing the tiny calcium chicklets into my weeping eyeballs. If German prepositions killed my love of the language, then relative pronouns sodomized its corpse with a soldering iron. Oh, fuck you, "dessen" and "wessen", you vicious bastards.


My spn_summergen contribution continues to coalesce. It's turned into something far different than I'd originally envisioned; normally, this isn't a cause for alarm. Since most of fic is written because I wanted to write it, my worries about its reception or indifference by the fandom at large is confined to a general hope that someone will enjoy it or, at the very least, not consider it an affront to the fandom. But when I'm writing in accordance to a prompt for a specific someone else, I'm confronted with a completely different set of worries. I can't simply say, "Fuck 'em if they don't like it," because I didn't write it for myself. I undertook the task of writing said fic with the understanding that it was meant to please someone else. My tastes are irrelevant. While I might find unexpected bounces interesting, my recipient might find them boring, outlandish, or worse, antithetical to their request. And there's nothing worse than dropping hints to your honey for months about the sexy negligee at Fredrick's only to wake up on your anniversary and find out that he took your comment about "something to get the juices flowing" as a plea to buy that new riding mower he's been eyeing at Sears.

So, I fret. But there's nothing for it but to press onward and hope I won't end up sleeping on the fandom couch.

I am a sobbing. Seriously. A medley of Jim Henson's favorite songs, sung at his funeral. the last minute and a half had me bawling.



( And in case that doesn't have the tears rolling down your cheeks... )

OMFG

Has another ear infection. She is on meds.

And well I think I do too.  Well, we will see how bad it gets I might wait to see if it's just me. I could just be having sinus issues.

does this not happen to all fella-mates out there?

this is me; the real me that sprouts type that is 'commercially unacceptable'; like you dont say this to your client do you? unless you are out to fire them

just hit my blast point, am fuckin pissed now by everything thats around
commercially i should be professional but dont put me down with something thats outta my field; cause i do whats in my field
if i have to learn every single fuckin subject in this world i better live for centuries; but hey, even the greatest civilizations worldwide didnt manage to do it

people who think they know better: do it yourself and save the $

i have much to learn, much to go on, much fuck to deal with
period

AOL is having conniptions in my neck of the woods. When I tried to log in, it immediately booted me and said, "The System is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in 15 minutes." Joy. So now I'm on Netzero, which after the Toyota Corolla of AOL is a Dodge Dart with rusty rocker panels. Does anyone know if AOL is under siege, or is it just another case of their stellar customer service?

I tackled more German irregular past tense as well as dative case last night. One of the exercises was to rewrite sentences, replacing nouns with pronouns. Oh, joy hardy ha. When all those pronouns get involved, I end up with sentences like, "The clothes bought the men." or "We bought the men clothes," instead of "We bought the clothes from the men." Another interesting facet of German is that when you replace nouns with their pronoun equivalent, it sounds like you are having a grossly inappropriate relationship with the tailpipe of your car. "Ich gab ihm die Kleider." "Ich gab ihnen ihm." I'm sure there are such porno movies floating around the seamy underworld of Berlin. Maybe they come in a combo pack with a snuff film and two scheisse videos featuring Helmut der Zwitter.

On the ficcing front spn_summergen grinds along. I've yet to reach my desired daily quota because every time I find my mojo, the storms roll in. But it's something.

I'm sitting here watching my puppy dig in the back yard. It's something she's only just started to do in the past week or so, and it's funny to watch. Since she'd minus the back left leg she digs with her front right paw and carefully balances on the other two. She can only get in a couple of scratches before she has to put the paw down to keep from falling. SHe makes these little tiny holes. So cute! Then she gets bored and goes off to lay in the sun or eat the grass.

Jen and I are having a blast with the Wii! OMG, the Wii fit thing is so cool. There's boxing and skiing and this step exercise thing that looks like DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) And this little piggy bank keeps track of how much you exercise each day, and your weight, and makes graphs and things. On the sports games thing that came with the machine there's bowling and tennis and baseball, boxing and golf. You really get a work out.

Tonight Jen and I and our friend Jonathan are going to see Shakespeare in the park. Every summer the San Francisco Shakespeare Company does a free play in four different towns, one being mine. This years it's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which I meant to read before tonight, but didn't. It's always fun - we go to the store before hand and buy fruit and wine and sourdough bread and chocolate, and take a blanket. Last summer it was Midsummer's Night Dream.

My spn_summergen fic makes me want to cry tears of blood. It's going so damned slowly; between the inclement weather, my giddy immersion in German, and a case of tertiary-stage dragass, I've managed a whopping 1,730 words in a week of staring at the screen in desultory impatience.

Gah. Why does this happen every time I'm on a deadline? If I have an academic deadline, I suddenly fic like I've never ficced before(she's a maniac, maniac on the keyboard). If, on the other hand, I have a ficcing deadline, I will suddenly find myself hopelessly enamored of the footnotes to Linguistics Today and dizzy with the joy of diagramming sentences in complex Christmas trees of carefully parsed phrases. I will have sweaty, rigorous brain sex with German past tense and irregular present tense, stem-changing verbs. I will delete seven years' worth of ancient emails from my filing cabinet. I will re-watch episodes of CSI:NY, even the fetid, steaming dung piles from S3, when the show garnered the subtitle of How to Lose a Viewer in Ten Days and Beat Your Drama Llama to Death While Doing It.

What I won't do is write.

Take right now, for instance. It's ten-thirty in the morning, and it's gorgeous. I could write for hours, and I want to. But not what I should write. It's maddening, and why I usually avoid fic exchanges.

What kills me is that the minute the deadline passes into Too Late, the idea that wouldn't budge will suddenly burst into full and gorgeous flower.

Okay, so I have this fantasy where I learn German through my rigorous study, and, through a confluence of miraculous events, I meet Till Lindemann of Rammstein and so impress him with my multilingual prowess that we have a long conversation outside the tour bus. Not only do I get autographs and photos, but I get a hug, a manly, totally sexy hug while that German basso profundo rumbles deep inside his rippling chest.

Yes, I know it's an impossible daydream; in reality, I'd be so star-struck and nervous about the possibility of mangling his native tongue and looking like a retarded, twitching assmunch mouth-breather in the process that I'd get spastic and kick him in the shins while doing my best Shamu-being-sodomized-with-an-electric-pole imitation. My every attempt to look smooth has ended in humiliating disaster. But it's my fantasy, dammit, and besides, stranger things have happened to me. I struck up a friendship with Metallica's Kirk Hammett after I posted on the band's AOL boards in '94. Kirk found me "eloquent" and "compelling", and for several years, I was given free passes to any Metallica show it struck my fancy to attend, and I was cosseted with t-shirts, posters, and Kirk mother-henning me at every turn.

If only my "eloquence" had been on view when my stupid mouth opened of its own volition and told Jason Newsted that I had to pee. I was backstage in the wings of Lollapalooza '95(I think; it may have been '94).

Jason looked around, dismayed, and offered me a plastic cup. Well, he tried.

Because of my friendship and correspondence with Kirk, lyrics to several of my Metallica song parodies hung in the recording studio during Reload sessions. I lost touch with Kirk in '97 after he left AOL. He got busy, or maybe the horrifying encounter with my bedraggled, witch-haired, crazy mother backstage scared him off(I'd dared to go on a roadtrip with two male friends to see Kirk and Metallica, you see, and my mother was convinced that my friends were merrily gang-raping me all the way down I-75....) But I still have fond memories of Kirk scolding me to drink more water, dammit. All because I wrote a letter on a fanboard.

I've also met Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Audioslave(who detached himself from a bevy of boob-baring crab vectors to talk with me for a bit. Lovely man), Megadeth(Dave let me and my peg-legged friend sit on the side of the stage, and Marty Friedman hopped down mid-set to give me a pick and a panty-combusting view of his sweaty, bare chest. Guh.), and Gloria Cavelera, manager of Sepultura, Soulfly, and the Cavelera Conspiracy. I've been touched by more rock gods than most folks meet, so anything is possible. I could meet Herr Lindemann and wow him with my l33t Deutsch skills.

And it would wow him, because for some reason, everyone assumes that rollers are potted plants with wheels under their asses, and certainly incapable of English, much less a foreign language. Whenever I bust out my Spanish fu and start chatting with the waiters at a Mexican restaurant, the entire kitchen grinds to a halt because everyone just has to see the amazing bilingual cripple for themselves. It's a miracle, like the Virgin Mary's face on a tortilla.

So, he'd be impressed, like as not.

But no matter how smooth I was, it would all be ruined when my mother pulled up in her used, bronze Pontiac, stuck her head out the window with her decrepit poodles in her arms, and screamed at one hundred and fifty decibels, "Are you ready to go, Miss Boober Shannywan?"

Sigh. Coolness. The impossible dream.

But maybe, just maybe, one day, for one shining moment, I'll be cool.

Until I realize I'm talking to Till fucking Lindemann in German and vomit on his leather Doc Martens.

So, I decided to do an icon from each episode from season one. I tried using more textures, so let me know what you think.

18 Gossip Girl Icons

TEASERS:



icons are here