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stuff about stuff
19 Feb 2014 23:01* Olympics! I am watching next to nothing of them, partially by choice -- I hate the format of 25 minutes of talking heads and sob stories, 15 minutes of competition, and 20 minutes of commercials per hour -- and mostly because I get no television reception. I have gotten to see some of the hockey games, although not the starts of most of them because I'm not getting up at 7:30am on a weekend for any non-medal game. But today was full of excitement, with Team USA winning handily and Team Canada winning not-handily -- that strong cold breeze from the north mid-afternoon was all of Canada exhaling after Weber scored -- and Team Russia imploding while Vlad Putin watched and then turning on each other like sharks in a swimming pool. The Finns are sneaky good, yo. They do this every single Olympics and then four years later, nobody remembers and we're all surprised again.
Thursday is USA-Canada in the women's gold medal game and Friday is USA-Canada in the men's semis and Canada is heavily favored on both sides and they are going to be so unbearably smug if they live up to those expectations. Everyone says that the Canadians are the nicest people and, by and large, they are. But they are also the sorest winners in hockey you will ever see. Which is why everyone not Canadian was rooting for the little Latvian engine that almost did.
* Pitchers and catchers have reported, which means it's the annual reminder that my baseball team looks incredibly promising... until the position players show up. Ah, Mets, what would we do if you were a real baseball team again?
* Watched a bunch of first episodes because there's no NHL:
1) House of Cards. Holy crap, was that good. Everyone is awful, but it the best ways. It's vicious and cold-blooded and I don't even mind Kevin Spacey breaking the fourth wall. I'm not going to stay up all night to watch the rest in one sitting, but I look forward to finishing it at a more stately pace.
2) Political Animals... I didn't really need to see Hillary Clinton fanfic and it was far too soapy for me and I didn't even finish the first episode. It's really well acted, I will admit, but that just makes it a really well cast soap.
3) Black Sails: Apparently, this series is boring all of the critics to tears because it's a pirate show set on land and has board meetings and ship-cleaning as plots. The pilot has pirate-y action and Toby Stephens -- who looks more and more like his mother every year and I don't mean that as a compliment -- but it also has Luke Arnold's John Silver and he bores me to tears and he's not pretty enough to counteract that, although clearly I am supposed to think so. I was hoping this could be Deadwood: the Pirate Years or the flip side of the Master and Commander universe, but it's really, really not.
4) Luther: been meaning to watch this forever and finally did and like it so far, two episodes in.
* Guardians of the Galaxy trailer looked good. They had to take a somewhat different tack with this than the other Marvel movies because nobody knows who they are, but that's fine and it worked. (They might have had me at "Oooga Chaka," but I'm Gen X.) And, as I said in another forum, Marvel will make a couple hundred million dollars over costs with a movie featuring a talking tree and an uncouth raccoon while DC thinks Wonder Woman is too difficult to film.
* Apparently Loki/Winter Soldier is trying to become a thing as a pairing and... good christ, why?
Thursday is USA-Canada in the women's gold medal game and Friday is USA-Canada in the men's semis and Canada is heavily favored on both sides and they are going to be so unbearably smug if they live up to those expectations. Everyone says that the Canadians are the nicest people and, by and large, they are. But they are also the sorest winners in hockey you will ever see. Which is why everyone not Canadian was rooting for the little Latvian engine that almost did.
* Pitchers and catchers have reported, which means it's the annual reminder that my baseball team looks incredibly promising... until the position players show up. Ah, Mets, what would we do if you were a real baseball team again?
* Watched a bunch of first episodes because there's no NHL:
1) House of Cards. Holy crap, was that good. Everyone is awful, but it the best ways. It's vicious and cold-blooded and I don't even mind Kevin Spacey breaking the fourth wall. I'm not going to stay up all night to watch the rest in one sitting, but I look forward to finishing it at a more stately pace.
2) Political Animals... I didn't really need to see Hillary Clinton fanfic and it was far too soapy for me and I didn't even finish the first episode. It's really well acted, I will admit, but that just makes it a really well cast soap.
3) Black Sails: Apparently, this series is boring all of the critics to tears because it's a pirate show set on land and has board meetings and ship-cleaning as plots. The pilot has pirate-y action and Toby Stephens -- who looks more and more like his mother every year and I don't mean that as a compliment -- but it also has Luke Arnold's John Silver and he bores me to tears and he's not pretty enough to counteract that, although clearly I am supposed to think so. I was hoping this could be Deadwood: the Pirate Years or the flip side of the Master and Commander universe, but it's really, really not.
4) Luther: been meaning to watch this forever and finally did and like it so far, two episodes in.
* Guardians of the Galaxy trailer looked good. They had to take a somewhat different tack with this than the other Marvel movies because nobody knows who they are, but that's fine and it worked. (They might have had me at "Oooga Chaka," but I'm Gen X.) And, as I said in another forum, Marvel will make a couple hundred million dollars over costs with a movie featuring a talking tree and an uncouth raccoon while DC thinks Wonder Woman is too difficult to film.
* Apparently Loki/Winter Soldier is trying to become a thing as a pairing and... good christ, why?
