THE SCANNER!!!!! 🙂
Why I didn’t look there in the first place is completely beyond me 🙂
Well, once again it’s been a while between entries. This is down to me being sick, depressed, and busy at work trying to make up for the time I’ve spent being sick and or depressed. Worked ten hours yesterday, just plain brutal it was. And I’ve got a GURPS campaign to run *sigh*.
But anyway I’m back, with lots to write about. And lots of emails to write to people, which I should get done tomorrow. I hope 🙂
So, to start off with, the season finale of Charmed. Concerning which I have only one question…
WHAT!?!?!!?
They broke up Leo and Piper? Then KILLED Leo? What kind of drugs are the writers on? I mean the whole second half of the episode was like a bad fanfic! Even down to the dialogue! I dunno, maybe they’ve started raiding fanfic for plot ideas. It’s a real shame too, because up to that point things were going pretty well for a late series episode. Cataclysmic end-of-the-world stuff, lots of references to classical mythology, and a villain played by…. whatsisname, Eddie Fiori/Alien Bounty Hunter/Stupid Terminator Street Punk number Three – yeah him, Yahoots Magoondi. And then they go and do that to us. Bastards!
Mind you there was one slightly off note in part one, the name of that female Titan. Anyone who knows even a little Latin does not want to watch some guy snogging a girl and then calling her “Mater”*At least outside of a David Lynch film 😉. I mean, urrgh! OK, the ancient Greeks had some weird approaches (by our standards) to family relationships, but that’s no excuse. That character definitely should have had a different name! Urrgh!
But yeah. They killed Leo. Boo!!!!
In other TV news though I happened to discover that Stargate is back on. Hooray!*It’s best if you imagine this in the voice of the little man driving the multi-axeled car in the Whacking Day episode of The Simpsons
Homer: Woo-hoo!
Man: Hooray!
Yeah, like that 😉. Of course, Channel 7 (in their infinite wisdom) have put it on at 9:30 on Thursday night, meaning that I can either watch it, or be sufficiently awake to go to work on Friday. So, obviously I’m taping it. I watched it last night after work, completely forgetting that there were new episodes of Jonathan Creek on the ABC – I was rather annoyed about that 😐
Anyway, after Stargate it turned out that there was an episode of Angel -you know, the Buffy spin off? Since I didn’t feel particularly like going to bed once Stargate was over I decided to watch a bit of it. Needless to say (never having seen an episode before in my life) I had no idea who anyone was or what was going on (some previously decapitated woman had come back from hell to inform Angel and his associates that they were inheriting an evil law firm as a reward for inadvertently destroying world peace, huh?) so got bored and turned off after about 15 minutes. But I was struck by two things.
Firstly – Does that theme music rock or what? I mean, this eerily moaning gothic violin (with cello backbeat in the best tradition of Bach) followed up by a semi-techno remix and finished up with a desolate, fading piano scale. It’s as good as the theme from Kindred.
Secondly – One of the guys Angel hangs around with appears to be some kind of demon. Green, scaly skin, little horns, bad eighties suits, the works (there was a shot of him in the credits performing on a stage – an obvious rip-off of Blake’s Ghost of a Flea ;-). Now I don’t have a problem with that (you see stranger things on Charmed each week), but this guy seems to be wandering around in broad daylight with no-one noticing. C’mon, what would your reaction be if you say a scaly green demon in a Tom Cruise Cocktail style combo walking down the street? You’d run off screaming, or at least grab for the holy water. I presume there’s some kind of magical explanation, but still.
Anyway, speaking of denizens of the underworld it turns out that my ten year high school reunion is tonight. I would have written about this sooner, except I only found out on Monday when Fabian called to say he’d been given the invites for our group. He would have had them earlier, except the girl responsible had delivered them to the wrong address. Hmmmmm.
I have to admit that I’m suspicious about this. The Geeks only get their invitations a week out from the event? Sounds almost like some kind of deliberate plot… 😉
But seriously. I don’t really mind the possibly of missing the reunion. I can honestly say that at no point in the last ten years have I actually thought about it without either snorting in derision or shuddering with horror. No, what I’m annoyed about is missing the opportunity to send an RSVP.
Call it symptomatic of an unhealthy obsession with high school*C’mon, you show me a geek who hasn’t got an unhealthy obsession with highschool 🙂, but for the last few years I’ve been entertaining myself (from time to time) with thoughts of exactly how I’d reply when the invitation to the ten year reunion plonked down on my doorstep. I could ignore it of course, but I figured it would be much more fun to send back some kind of bitter diatribe. You know, really confuse and freak out the person responsible for compiling the guest list. Something like this…
Dear Whoever*I expect that the invites were organised by one of those really enthusiastic types, the kind of people who were always up the front leading the chants at the swimming carnivals, and joined the ex-students association as soon as they set foot outside the gate on graduation day,
Thank you for your kind invitation to the ten year reunion. Thank you also for reminding me that this is a great opportunity to catch up with old friends, and find out what everyone has been up to for the last decade. I’m quite sure that without your gracious assistance there is no way I could have figured this out on my own.
Sadly however over the last ten years I have kept in contact with most of the people from high school that I actually wished to keep in contact with. Now, while I freely admit that there are some people I would like to catch up with, there are also a lot of people I wouldn’t particularly like to catch up with, and my not wanting to catch up with the people that I wouldn’t want to catch up with more than outweighs my wanting to catch up with the people I do want to catch up with. All clear?
In fact – may I be blunt – if given the choice of attending the reunion or lying dead in a ditch by the side of the road, Saturday night would find me dressed in black from head to foot and playing on the freeway.
So, I hope you will understand if I do not attend this event, and instead spend the evening ritually burning your invitation while muttering obscure curses over the photos of my enemies in the 1993 yearbook.
Yours with vague and undirected malice,
D.P.Wyrm
Now that would be classic! 🙂 But once again cruel fate has denied me the opportunity to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting minds of my former associates. Oh well, I’ll just have to wait until the 20 year reunion. Roll on 2013!
Who knows, I might have a life then and actually attend 😉
So, tonight I’ll be playing around with my brand new Raster 250k CD (the entire Australian 1:250000 scale topographic map series on CD – hey, I don’t give you grief about your weird interests 🙂 and reading my brand new signed copy of Terry Dowling’s Rynosseros (thanks for the tipoff Ryan).
Geek Central over and out!
