*kof**sneeze**sneeze**kof*

you know what really just sits on all your blogging plans like a bollog with no head and crushes them into tiny smithereens? a head cold.

no, really, it does. sudafed and ibuprofen do not make you smarter. they don't even let you stay awake for very long periods.

so here are some people who are much cleverer than i am at the minute....

a video, courtesy of the guardian, of bill bryson at the hay festival.

another one, still from the guardian, of simon schama.

jo brand, who i used to love when she was part of the team doing the mary whitehouse experience on bbc radio. hilarious stuff, if you ever get a chance to listen to it. i know there was a tv series, too, but i never got to see it and i lost all my (probably totally illegal) downloads of the radio shows in a laptop crash a few years back. very sad.

the doctor/donna

we're going at things a bit differently this week -- since it's memorial day, why not memorialise someone?

want more seduff? of course you do: go here.

friday fun times: "i am rygel XVI, dominar to over 600 billion people. i don't need to talk to you!"

after writing my wednesday post for this week, i was thinking about farscape and about how i didn't have a video for this friday and...well, the two things just came together.

so go forth and enjoy the pilot episode of the series: season 1, episode 1 -- and for those of you who have netflix, the rest of the series up on insty. :) (or at least it was as of the last checking of my insty queue!)

quit while you're ahead

while i was clearing out my rss feeds on google reader this weekend, i came across a post from...well...sometime in the past two weeks? it had been awhile since i cleared everything! anyway, a post from sf signal asking about which series you would like to see end if you could. the original post is talking about books, but i'm not a real diehard fan of any currently going series, so i broadened it a bit.

i did take the liberty of adducing a few book series that i am just tired of seeing about the place -- i don't even have to mention the sparkly vampire thing, do i? good. i didn't think so.

but there're also laurell k. hamilton's anita blake books. i read the first one, guilty pleasures, back in the day when it first came out and loved it. i loved the series right through the third book, gave up because it was too gory for me at the time, came back years later, caught up, got through the gore -- and stubbed my toe on all the damned sex. jeeze -- i'm all for a little light romping about, but god. the books stopped being urban fantasy awhile ago and started being soft-core porn.

george r. r. martin's books i vaguely resent because a) i've never been able to get into them; b) i hear there's a tv mini-series version coming with lots and lots and lots of actors i love in it and i wish they were all doing something i could get more enthusiastic about; and c) my ex thought they were just awesome. so that's just a constellation of things i don't necessarily appreciate.

i rather wish dennis mckiernan would stop writing mithgar books. i'm not quite sure why i feel this -- i still enjoy reading them -- but they don't feel like he's paying as much attention as he used to. despite the fact that, in the most recent one, he brought back my favorite character -- aravan -- and favorite location -- aravan's ship, the eroean -- i'm still not sold on the more recent novels. the earlier ones? i'll recommend those heartily to anyone in need of an epic fantasy fix. i remember reading journey of the fox rider and the dragonstone with my mouth hanging open i was so into it.

and there are a couple of series -- trilogies, really -- that i rather wish had ended at stand-alones. caroline stevermer and patricia wrede's cecilia and kate novels might have been better if they'd stopped at the enchanted chocolate pot; and i'm really afraid that steve cash's meq series isn't going to be much improved by a third or even a fourth entry in the series. but i could be wrong.

as far as other media go -- there are series i got so frustrated with that i gave up, notably buffy the vampire slayer. by the middle of season 6, i really disliked buffy so much that the rest of the scooby crew no longer made it worthwhile to watch the show. i stopped with "gone," just before "doublemeat palace" which had, sadly, been spoilered for me by the blurb on the back of the dvd set! with the prospect of "doublemeat" looming before me, it hardly seemed worthwhile to put up with buffy's bad attitude in the distant hope that spike would come to his senses and suck her dry and not in a fun way. i'm not sure i wish that whedon had stopped before season 6 -- i've been told by those hardier than i who have gone on and finished the series that it really is worth it and i do intend to finish it...one of these days.

i think we could probably all live without another fast & furious movie -- much as i love three out of the existing four! (the one in tokyo is just --- bizarre. it's almost not even fun it's so weird -- i mean, what's with the chick who looks more like michael jackson the more you watch the movie? just watch the initial car "race," enjoy the kid rock song -- then find something else to do would be my advice. if you want a lucas black movie, watch friday night lights -- that has garrett hedlund, too!)

much as i love the underworld franchise as a series which keeps kate beckinsale in latex, vampires toothy, and lots of guns about the place, there are days when i wish they had stopped at a stand-alone. and do i even need to mention the existence of the two sequels to the matrix? the original brilliant stand-alone movie -- ruined by its sequels.

i never finished farscape -- after season 3's two-parter,  "self inflicted wounds," i just couldn't go on.

it wasn't that i didn't love the show; i did. and it wasn't that i wasn't into the plot or the characters any more; i was.

it was more that after going through most of a pack of tissues on that two-parter -- and all the dreadful occurrences of the prior episodes in that season: what was it? kick d'argo month? -- i was a tad bit drained as far as the crew of moya went. like buffy, i fully intend to go back and finish the series someday; how could i ever totally abandon a series with a villain as truly spine-chilling as dear darling old scorpy? (and what makes it even better is that wayne pygram was grand moff tarkin in revenge of the sith -- yeah, yeah, yeah, i know we only saw him for about 25 seconds and he had one line but who cares?!)

but, really, the topper of "series that i can't stand to finish right at the minute" (which is kind of what the end of this post has turned into) has to be torchwood.

i watched "day one" of the "children of earth" mini-season and stuck right there.

i know what happens. i know it's horrible. i know awful things happen to at least one of my favorite characters. and i'm in full wuss-out fangirl mode -- somewhere in the back of my mind i am convinced that if i just hold out on watching "children of earth" for long enough, the bbc will come to its senses and renew the show for a fourth, proper season.

it won't happen. and someday, i will gather together sufficient tissues and chocolate and i will finish "children of earth" -- but not this week.

"deadwood" meets "harry potter"?

i was planning to write about something other than a book on monday but i haven't managed to find time -- or energy -- to watch 44 inch chest or to finish the new rsc production of hamlet from 2009. (although i watched the first two acts -- just about -- last night and i have to say that, biased as i am, i think david tennant deserved pretty much every accolade he got. he's amazing.)

but anyway that's for a later day when it isn't so lovely out and the temptation to go for long (somewhat limping) walks isn't so great. i'm looking upon my recently wrenched ankle as a reason to investigate new coffee shops along my usual walk routes since it really is unreasonable to expect someone to stay inside during one of boston's two nice seasons which last about, oh, a generous two weeks at most?

in any case, the topic for discussion this monday is caroline stevermer's a scholar of magics, a sort of sequel to a college of magics -- if you have a good solid title pattern going, why break it right? but seriously, scholar is great fun -- instead of following on directly from the last events in college, scholar picks up sometime later and, instead of following faris, our first heroine, which would have been fun but possibly a bit frustrating, scholar follows jane brailsford. now, i didn't mention jane very much in my earlier review of college, but she's one of the best parts. she's faris's fellow scholar/friend/companion/chaperone/teacher/general aide-de-camp. she's very english and sort of like a cross between harriet vane, amelia peabody, and mary russell. a good combination, i hasten to add!

the plot outline runs something like: in the first book you got to see greenlaw, which is the girls' school for magic; now you get to see glasscastle which is the boys' school for magic because this is england (nominally) and we couldn't have any naughty co-ed mingling. no no no. absolutely not. a*hem*. anyway. one of our protagonists is jane, sent back to england by faris to try and resolve an issue with the warden of the west; the other is samuel lambert, an american sharpshooter working temporarily at glasscastle on some mysterious magical project.

there's the same kind of marvellous dialogue that kept me reading even through the dry spots in college and -- three cheers! -- far fewer dry spots! glasscastle is a much more regimented, faintly misogynist, rather unsympathetic place to focus half the novel, but some of the people in it -- including lambert, who falls in love with the place -- are very lovingly drawn and it's rather hard to dislike them even when they're making fairly obviously stupid claims about the capacity of women vs. men. plus jane's almost always on hand to disprove them which is just awesome.

scholar also moves a fair bit faster than college -- i read it comfortably in an afternoon and once the pace gets going -- a few chapters in -- it's a very seductive read.

friday fun times: don't blame me...

...when you watch this clip of the canadian theatre comedy slings & arrows and immediately feel the need to fill up your netflix queue with all three seasons: