tv

Halloween Eve

A pretty quiet day here, more or less exactly what I expected of it. I think I more or less managed, somehow, to reach a kind-of ending with this short story I’ve been working on. I’ll polish it a little tomorrow and send it off. Other than that, I watched a little TV, a little of the Rally to Restore Sanity — mostly Jon Stewart’s closing remarks — and this evening The Masque of the Red Death. (After Thursday’s House on Haunted Hill, I thought a little good Vincent Price was in order. Although, really, he tended to class up even the worst joints.)

And that’s about it.

Monday various

  • The Tea Party is a movement without a compass? Who could have guessed?

    In an unruly, unpredictable and chaotic election year, no group has asserted its presence and demanded to be heard more forcefully than the tea party. The grass-roots movement that was spawned with a rant has gone on to upend the existing political order, reshaping the debate in Washington, defeating a number of prominent lawmakers and elevating a fresh cast of conservative stars.

    But a new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process. [via]

  • Astronaut Uses Foursquare to Check In To Space Station. Oh noes! Does this mean one of his followers is going to use this opportunity to rob NASA? [via]
  • Can we just stop with the Battlestar Galactica spin-offs for a while? Personally, I like what I’ve seen of Caprica — just a handful of episodes, but then, I never did finish watching the original Ron Moore series — but with this new series planned to “take place 10 years into the first Cylon war,” I can’t think of another sci-fi universe that’s been this over-explored. Outside, say, of Dune.
  • An angry Leonard Nimoy writes to Gene Roddenberry in 1976. It’s funny, today blooper reels are pretty much par for the course on any television DVD set, but I can see Nimoy’s point.
  • And finally, could the world be heading towards a frightful kimchi shortage? [via]

A day in the theatre

I spent most of the afternoon in Manhattan, joining my parents for a Broadway matinee and dinner out to celebrate their anniversary. We went to see A Life in the Theatre, which, despite the opportunity to see Patrick Stewart on stage, I really can’t at all recommend. I thought both he and T.R. Knight did the best they could with some very thin material, but I have to agree with Ben Brantley’s take on it:

At least as damaging is our impression that the relationship between the two men doesn’t evolve. A counterpoint between the irritable wistfulness of Robert — eager to impart his skill to his younger confrère — and the impatient heedlessness of John is established in the beginning, and any variation on that dichotomy is sparse. And in the scenes that find the actors in costume, in plays, they are as cartoonish as figures from Broadway satires in old television variety shows.

The show is kind of atypical of David Mamet, although there are a couple of c-words tossed in near the beginning, unfortunately, just to remind you whose play you’re watching.

And would somebody tell me, when did standing ovations become something audiences did at the end of shows just as a matter of course, regardless of the show?

Then we had dinner at Keens Steakhouse, which was okay.

Now I’m home and watching episodes of Fringe — seriously, when did this show get good? — and trying to finish the Sunday crossword puzzle. I think I’m going to be more successful at the former than the latter.

Tuesday various