Gramarye

I’ve been seriously neglecting my knitting, partly because of other hobbies, partly because the last time I picked up needles, a couch ate them. Nonetheless, ??Pushing Daisies?? earned a sizeable helping of my love recently with the line, “Big daddy needs some new yarn.” (Major male character knits? Awesome. He’s not even gay, although he apparently really has a thing for women’s toes.)

??Bionic Women?? was substantially better this week. Why was it better? Partly because they let the mythology go in favor of an episodic plot (the writers really aren’t up to doing mythology with the big boys yet), but mostly because they let Michelle Ryan use her real accent. The change is astonishing. She’s substantially hotter in British, but she’s also a better actor. Don’t get me wrong — she’s not like the “American” businessman on ??Hotel Bablyon?? whose accent was so bad it wrecked the entire subplot. But she doesn’t have the really fine-grain control over her inflection, tone etc. in her American accent that she has in her native accent. There’s so much more information — not to mention character, humor, eros, etc. — in the British version that I anticipate all future non-British episodes to be really gratingly painful by comparison.

I’d like to go on record as saying that I won’t hold it against the writers and producers if they just quietly leave the accent in for the rest of the series with no further explanation whatsoever.

??Scrubs?? is back. I love ??Scrubs?? (it’s all I have left of ??Clone High??, after all), although the first ep wasn’t anything to right home about. But there’s really no getting around that; they’re knee-deep in series-ending emotional trauma, which is what happens on sitcoms with this high a morality/lesson quotient.

I hate to admit how much I like ??30 Rock??. Alec Baldwin, in particular, is inexplicably, amazingly awesome.

I watched the first ep of ??Viva Laughlin??. I have no freaking clue how that show made it on the air. The idea of a musical drama tv series isn’t actually a bad one — per se — but to execute it, they should have gotten musical theater people to write and then sing original content; having people do a bad mix of lip-syncing and karaoke to purely needle-drop songs was a horrible idea; it made everything feel like a cliche, it distracted the audience from the content, and it had to be pretty expensive. Happily, it’s now canceled.

Bizarrely, the same cannot be said of ??Moonlight??. Go figure.

I like both ??Chuck?? and ??Reaper??, but I have a problem with them: they’re the same show. I have a really hard time keeping the characters and their relationships separated in my head; I think they should arrange a little cross-network cooperation and put the home depot clone and the best buy clone in the same strip mall, and have ??Chuck?? and ??Sam?? form a little support group.

* ??Ugly Betty?? — Still awesome.
* ??Life?? — Surprisingly not awful, although mostly for the lead actor’s facial expressions and the often totally inexplicable strings of offbeat dialogue he spews.
* ??Journeyman?? — It’s very much a ripoff of ??Quantum Leap?? and ??Daybreak??, even including one of the cast from the latter, Whatsernmae Blooddingnus, who seems to professionally date time travelers. Still, I haven’t tuned out yet…entirely.
* ??Dexter?? — Highly uncomfortable in the new season, as well as disgusting, but it’s still an amazing show.
* ??Moonlight?? — Possibly the worst show on television…ever. It can only have been written by lobotomized monkeys with severe developmental problems who have received Skinner-box conditioning using harlequin romances and soap operas. There is nothing good about it, except how bad it is. However, I feel bad about hating it, because the female lead was in an awesome episode of ??Doctor Who??. (”The Girl in the Fireplace”)
* ??Reaper?? — Another ripoff, this time of ??Brimstone??. That was an excellent program, long before its time and punished appropriately for that sin. This show is not before its time; in fact, it might be a few years late. It is funny, however, mostly because of William Devane and the fat bearded friend whose name escapes me. It also has the guy who had the memory-wiper on ??Eureka?? as the dad.

Also: Speaking of ??Eureka??, it finished out the second season in reasonably good order, despite a relatively weak second half. I’m glad to know it’s coming back for a third season, and my loyalty is not substantially diminished.

It’s also good to know that ??Jericho?? has scripted two season endings for itself — one opening the door to season three, if they get one, the other ending the series cleanly. All shows should do this.

I’ve been pretty good about shifting photo content to Plentvent 2.0. However, I just achieved a small personal bird-photographic coup: reasonably acceptable images of a Black-Crowned Night Heron in flight. Normally I’m lucky to get these skittish fools sitting on a branch — typically at the sacrifice of my neck — and when I get them in flight, it’s because I accidentally spooked them and their getting as far from me as I can.

This time, the fellow jumped into the air, did a quick circle, and settled back down in his original position — which gave me time to track his flight path and focus more or less adequately.

The second shot has the eye sharper and less motion-blurred, but the first one has better colors in the reflections on the water, a more dynamic posture in the bird, and I like the rocks in the background; the overall effect is superior.

Here he was before his flight antics:

Of course, the universe couldn’t help taunting me at the same time as rewarding my diligence, so while I’m taking the picks on the railing, I notice the heron flinch a bit, and look at something off to my left. I shift myself a little bit to bring my peripheral vision in that direction, and I catch the white blur of an egret followed in hot pursuit by a brown blur I didn’t recognize. In a display of total awesomeness (although total success did not result, sadly), I turned and refocused (which is no mean feat with the 135mm f/2.8 Nikkor-Q +2x tc combination I was using — I love my 135mm, but its focus ring is…a little stiff) and managed to snatch this: