Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Random Notes from Home

Daily life stuff....

:: I made pizza for dinner last night. Nothing fancy, just cheese, pepperoni, and sausage, but I made my crust and my sauce from scratch, so that's something. It turned out really well, I thought. There's something really satisfying about DIY pizza. Now to experiment with other crust recipes; the one I used is a basic crust from Cooking Light magazine.

:: I watched the last half hour or so of the 24 finale. Hmmmm. Spoiler thoughts (highlight to read):

Jack doesn't even get to go to bed after his day? Now he's on the run from both the US and the Russians? And at some point in the past he pissed off China, so where can he go? Canada?

And if the President is feeling that bad about Jack and what he's been through, why doesn't she pardon him before resigning her office?

And yes, I'll totally see a 24 movie.


:: SamuraiFrog on the finale of LOST:

There are two kinds of people--those who loved the last episode of Lost, and those with no poetry in their souls.


I watched the finale (switching back and forth between it and the Celebrity Apprentice finale, which was so much filler that you could watch about eight minutes of the whole thing and catch it all), and I like to think that my soul's got poetry a-plenty within it, and my reaction to the show was pretty much what my reaction to LOST has always been: Yeah, it's a pretty show and it's extremely well-made and Michael Giacchino can write some good music, but...that's about it. Maybe I'm simply not attuned to the poetry in LOST, wherever it is, but the finale struck me as lots and lots of sentimental stuff, right down to the tearful reunion of man and dog, combined with lots of glowy stuff about death and Heaven. As a non-fan of the show I wasn't looking for "the answers", but the online commentary I've seen is pretty unanimous that the finale didn't offer any.

So, basically, what seemed to wind up happening is LOST boiling down to "Our Town meets The Five People You Meet In Heaven meets The X-Files". Whether they were dead the whole time or whether they were only dead in the parallel timeline doesn't really matter, apparently, and the creators basically gave themselves the ultimate "out" in terms of explaining stuff: they can simply say, "Explanations, schmexplanations. It's all religious allegory about death and the afterlife. We don't need logic for that." From the vantage point of someone outside the whole LOST phenomenon, it seems to me that what the producers did here was this close to being, if not actually being, an enormous deus ex machina ending. And not just the ending: the entirety of LOST is deus ex machina.

I'm wondering how this show and its ending are going to age, as the emotions of the journey fade and other memories come to the fore. It'll be interesting.

:: In other teevee season finale news: CSI: Miami's finale was unbelievably silly; haven't seen Grey's Anatomy or Castle yet (in fact, we're still eight or nine episodes behind on Castle, so we'll have new teevee here at Casa Jaquandor for a while); I'm growing more and more weary of The Office and think the show should just end when Michael Scott leaves; The Mentalist needs to wrap up the not-that-interesting Red John storyline soon; and...that's about it, I guess.

:: It's really hot this week here in Buffalo. Mid-80s. The kind of weather that makes me irritable and cranky because it's too unpleasant to go outside and do much of anything. I hate hot weather. This is July weather, and it's the big reason why July (excepting the Fourth, which I adore) is my least favorite month. July weather in May? I really hope this is an aberration and not a harbinger of a July for the ages in these parts....

:: I'm closing in on finishing Super Mario Bros. on the Wii. I'm past the first "Boss" level in World Seven, so I have a couple of levels and then all of World Eight to go. Yay me! I had "reached" World Eight before, but that was with me doing a lot of playing doubles with The Kid, who has beaten the game multiple times now; basically she completed levels while I died a lot. Now I have a game that I'm playing myself. Fun stuff! (We need some more Wii games, though...maybe Mario Galaxy, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and one of those Lego games, like Indiana Jones.

:: The Daughter is now reading all of the Harry Potter books. She's on Order of the Phoenix, although she keeps asking me what happens in Deathly Hallows. I refuse to tell her. We've watched the existing movies, so she's still operating on certain assumptions as regarding Professor Snape. Heh! I, of course, refuse to confirm or deny.

That's about it. More posting later, I hope!

3 comments:

Lynn said...

I just have to say the last nine episodes of Castle have been great. Hurry up and watch them. :-)

émilie b said...

Ditto.
(It's the one of the few shows where I was a little sad that we'll have to wait until autumn to see how the end-of-season hook will play out.)

Roger Owen Green said...

I'm curious about your reaction to Grey's Anatomy.