one day i am going to grow wings

So now that Doctor Who is over for awhile and I have to wait till Christmas for a freakin' Cybermen episode, I decided I would get my geek on by Netflixing its spinoff series Torchwood, which stars John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harness and his crack alien-investigating team. (More on teh crack later.) I've just finished disc 5 and I like it okay so far, but it's nowhere near as good as Who.

( My thoughts on Torchwood: Bwhuh? )

Good lord, that is a lot of senseless rambling about sci-fi. So this may not be a complete waste to those of you who aren't interested in that, I will point out that my favorite Etsy seller is having a jewelry sale. She uses a lot of pretty, semi-precious stones like labradorite and chalcedony. I bought me some garnet earrings. WHEE.

Okay, I'm bored and need to write something, anything, but I'm going to do this meme instead.


The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare parts, but no not all
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger The ending of this made me so mad
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams When I die, make sure they throw this one in the coffin with me. (I never go anywhere without something to read)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis This was already listed!
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdi
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton


93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Not much to report on lately, but that I've found region hacks for my dvd player and have been doing nothing but watching Life On Mars episodes for the past few days. It's about a detective who gets hit by a car in 2006 and wakes up back in 1973. It's really good and I love it so far. Although I wish that there would be some happy medium between American shows, where they run forever and jump the shark multiple times, (X-Files, I'm looking at you) and British shows, where they just film 16 episodes and decide to call it a day.

Sadly though, they are making a American remake of it. Blargh! And it looks crappy. There were some other clips of it on YouTube. The scene where Sam gets hit by a car was especially bad. I didn't think the UK-version looked all that realistic to begin with, but at least it was quick and surprising, because the car now just sort of sloowly rolls into him and that kind of made me LOL. Also, American Sam looks about as emotive as a brick wall. This can't end well.

I'm also watching Black Books, which I got through Netflix because it came recommended by some guy at the bookstore. It amuses me greatly. I want to work in a bookshop and yell at customers. And drink lots of wine.

Bought season 2 of No Reservations and am completely impressed by Anthony Bourdain's willingness to eat not only anything, but anything in large quantities. My god, that guy can really put it away. I'm so glad I bought the dvds instead of waiting for it off the Long Wait Netflix queues. I really liked the Korea episode (my mom says she doesn't remember people eating chicken feets and ass.) Watching the Quebec episode right now and omg, foie gras looks so good. ("Give him everything on the foie gras menu and when he dies, stop.") I've only ever had it twice and I want to eat it again badly. The only place I know of in the whole state that serves it though, is La Baguette. Mmm, they have pretty good desserts too.

Granted, Bourdain did lose me at the seal eyeballs.

I made another pinkeep, using a bunny sampler. That's the first thing I stitched on linen fabric, but it's been in a bin for the past couple of years. (I stitch a lot of things and just stick them in a bin, to be honest.)

Re-watching The Forsyte Saga. I'm in a mood to watch repressed Victorians.


Oh! And I went to see Stardust this evening and liked it a lot. Very cute and funny, will definitely buy the dvd of it once it comes out. It wasn't my favorite of Gaiman's novels (that would probably be Neverwhere or Good Omens), but it translated really well to film. I was disappointed that Tori Amos didn't have a cameo as a tree, though.

Today, Sarah and I went to see The Science of Sleep. Parts of it were good and visually I enjoyed it, but yeeeeahh, kind of weird. I'm not sure whether I really liked the movie as whole, similar to how I'm not sure at what point the tone of the movie went from being sweet and kind of fey to sad and creepy.

Also, I went to Walmart and exchanged my broken dvd recorder so now I can record all the new shows on tv and never have to worry about having a life again. Thank Jebus.

Some thoughts:

I'm liking Heroes better than I thought it would. It's definitely comic book geeky, but fun. I think they'd probably do better though if they slowed down and did character-centric episodes, à la Lost, instead of cramming everybody into each episode. I like the Japanese guy and Greg Grunberg's characters best so far, although I'm still convinced that no sane, self-respecting office worker would ever make a clock go backwards.

I'm liking Studio 60 less than I thought I would. I like the actors in it, but the writing seems less than believable so far, which is really distracting. They totally need to stop showing the comedy show bits, because they make it sound like Aaron Sorkin has never even watched a sketch comedy before. For the second episode, they dug up Gilbert & Sullivan and this episode, the characters were pissed off that people weren't gettting commedia dell'arte. Not exactly as hip and edgy as it's supposed to be.

Boston Legal, sanctuary for Star Trek refugees, now more than ever. I wish they would cut down on the other characters and just focus on Spader and Shatner. Denny Crane will end up marrying the dwarf girl, I'm calling it now.

Lost tomorrow! Yays!

Here's a picture of my latest finished cross stitch piece. . .



It's a design by Little House Needleworks called "The Bookshelf". (Sorry about the dimness and camera glare. It was hard to get a good shot of it.) It took about 2 months(? or so) to do. I'm relatively pleased with how it came out. The bottom right corner was supposed to be Wuthering Heights, but I switched it to Jane Eyre and the house became Thornfield Hall instead. I had to take out the trees to make room for the flames, but I let the unconcerned sheep graze where it was. It's probably thinking, "Ah, let the fucker burn. Mmm, grass."

In other news, work continues to kill my soul. If it weren't for the customers, it would otherwise be a great job. With this job, I went from face-to-face customer service to not having to look at them (since it's over the phone.) Now if I could just move to not having to hear their actual voices, I think I'd be okay.

The season (series?) finale of Arrested Development was on tonight. *sigh* I'm going to miss that show. So, so funny. I made my mom watch it and in the course of an hour, she went from, "This is stupid" to "Why the hell are they cancelling this?" See? See? Stupid Fox tv, you ruin all good things. They showed some previews for their new comedy shows and they looked shitty. You couldn't leave a perfectly good schedule alone, could you, Fox? Damn your eyes.

Today I went over to Sarah's house to watch Lost . . .
( babbles about Lost for awhile )

I watched the first dvd for Firefly from my Netflix list and I really liked it. Oddly, I couldn't find the boxed set anywhere around town today.

some comments on the last night's episode of Lost

( cut for spoilers )

Just as I was enjoying the Season 1 dvd set of Joan of Arcadia that I bought yesterday, I go onto the internets, and find out that it's been cancelled! Goddamnit! I was so happy that just as Lost was my new X-Files, Joan was my new Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Stupid CBS! I curse you with an eternity of crap shows like Yes, Dear and Two and a Half Men!