Adventures of a Tofu Slut

Heroes...or at least I would be, if it would hurry and and get back on the air. *sob*

Prison Break, although I got bored and was on the verge of dropping it, except then I realized there were only three episodes left in the season, so I have them, sitting waiting to be watched. Maybe one day.

Hustle. I think we're just finishing up the third series here? Or maybe it's finished. Still, British con artists with a Robin Hood complex - how can you not love them?

America's Next Top Model. I don't have a favourite yet this season, except for maybe that guy Benny who showed up in the crossing guard uniform to teach posing. He was awesome. Still, I am fully on board with my love for this show.

Lost, except that I still haven't found a workable download from last week! Hopefully the one I got last night will work. Because I love my show, and exciting things are happening, dammit.

Ugly Betty. Because of Marc, and Amanda, and Henry (the perfect nerd potential boyfriend), and Justin, and the CAMP and the DRAMA. Frothy and bitchy and just a little sweet.

Veronica Mars. I think I finally got caught up on the season. I'm so sad it hasn't been renewed. I've been hearing that a lot of people don't like Veronica (the character), and I have to admit that when you watch 3 or 4 episodes in a row, the on-again, off-again relationships are a little crazy, but it's still fabulous.

The Riches. This is very fun! Even if Eddie Izzard's accent keeps slipping (and speaking of, why did he have to be American? He could have easily been a travelling Traveller!). Minnie Driver, though, is fabulous. And I've only had to skip through one potentially-too-embarrassing-for-people-on-screen-and-therefore-too-embarrassing-for-me scene. So entertaining.

The Tudors is so very pretty. Also, I love how they're assuming that everyone knows the history - witness the very pointed mention of Anne Boleyn's name when she first shows up, even though it's totally not important at that point.

Doctor Who. You know, I loved the Ninth Doctor so much that I never really got comfortable with the Tenth Doctor. But the first episode of the new series was excellent, and I loved it, and I'm excited. Whee!

What are you watching?

( ANTM )

( Lost )

I haven't watched last night's Alias yet, but I'm definitely enjoying the end, despite the fact that it is occasionally stupid and often incomprehensible. And definitely doesn't stand up to analysis. But I love that they are actually wrapping things up, bringing people back, and STILL talking about plot points that started in the first season.

Speaking of not standing up to analysis, my love for Prison Break knows no bounds these days. Especially C-Note. And Michael's tattoos, of course. Yes, the show is the cause of much eyerolling, but there's some excellent acting (and some terrible, VERONICA), and it's just so highly entertaining.

This TV talk brought to you by the fact that I am intending to cancel my cable as soon as these shows (plus CSI, the only other weekly show I watch) are over for the season, so I am enjoying them to the full extent of my ability. More than likely, I'll be able to pick up CTV, CBC and Global with rabbit ears, but just in case, I need my enjoyment to carry me over until next season's stuff comes out on DVD!

It occurs to me, rewatching Season 1 Lost, that one of the reasons I don't like Charlie very much is that he often ends up accidentally doing or saying the wrong thing, causing things to go wrong, or trying way too hard, which is SO VERY ME.

It's like watching myself but not being able to stop myself. Noooooooooo.

Things I am thinking about today:

1. Sugar. Or rather, I'm thinking about not thinking about sugar. Once again, I'm attempting to not eat sugar (for some unspecified length of time that should probably be at least a week but will be unlikely to last that long, especially with the weekend coming up). And, of course, it's all I can think about. My boss brought back some candies from her trip to Italy, and there's one left, sitting on the counter beside me, and TAUNTING ME. With its voice inside my head and its mocking. I can see it out of the corner of my eye, and I swear it's doing a little dance. Augh!

2. My pants, which I only bought on Saturday, and which I think are just that tiny bit too short, so that they cross the line from "do not make me look like a 5-year-old dressing in her mother's clothes" to "complete and utter loser". Tragique!

3. My pants, again, because I just found a tag partway down the thigh that says "REMOVE BEFORE WEARING OR WASHING". There is no other information on that tag. There is no need for that tag. Why is the tag even there in the first place?

4. Why I could never get a TiVO. Because, judging by the scary crap that Launchcast is trying to pass off as matching my genre preferences, and the weirdass stuff that Amazon is throwing into my recommendations, my preferences cannot be predicted. My brain is impenetrable! This will be good if ever the brain-sucking aliens land on Earth.

5. What a big joke it will be on sci-fi writers everywhere if we really are the only populated planet in the only populated universe, and we never end up leaving this planet for any length of time.

6. Gilmore Girls, which is totally not keeping my interest this season. I'd stop watching it, but I've been watching from the very first episode, so I feel somewhat proprietary, and can't quite let it continue on when I've invested so much time in it. I am incapable of giving up shows once I've put that much time into them. I think I'm worried that they'll get better and then I'll want to start watching again, but I'll be out of the loop. The only show I've successfully given up after years of watching dedicatedly is The X-Files, which I think I stopped watching the year that Duchovney left. Oh, and I stopped watching Angel after the first two seasons, mostly because it was on at a bad time and none of my roommates were at all interested, but then I repented and went back to it in season 4 and eventually bought all the dvds. So that doesn't really count as successful.

7. But Lost just keeps getting better and better. My love of this episode, though, is, I'm sure, partially to do with the fact that ( spoilers for this most recent episode )

8. The difference between bad acting and lame characters. I think Evangeline Lilly is not a very good actress (although I'm willing to believe that she has the potential to get better, since she doesn't have much experience yet) -- she doesn't manage to portray the emotion that the character is given, and as a consequence always looks somewhat confused. On the other hand, I don't think the character of Charlie is very interesting, but I think Dominic Monaghan does a great job portraying him.

9. For that matter, the difference between characters I don't like in a personal sense (as in, I wouldn't want to be stuck in a room with them, or they're complete bastards), but they are very fun to watch and/or are excellent as part of the story and often I love them very much, and characters that I find irritating and useless. To wit, Locke, who I often find completely irritating and faux know-it-all, but he's such an awesome character because of that, and, well, sorry, Charlie again (or at least he's the closest anyone on this show comes to that position. A more accurate choice would be Marissa on The O.C. or Taylor on Gilmore Girls, but that would ruin my perfect symmetry. Unless I went with Paris vs. Taylor).

10. This very cool thing I found on the internet, except I'm not going to tell you what it is, because I think I'm going to attempt to buy it for people for Christmas, if I can figure out where the person who was talking about it found it in the first place.

11. Indeed, what the hell I'm going to buy people for Christmas, and why nearly everyone I know has birthdays right around Christmas, which means that I have to come up with two brilliant ideas at once, which hurts my brain.

12. Pirates.

I am so annoyed with ABC.

Those of you who aren't Canadian might not know of the glory that is simulcasting, but basically what that means is that Canadian TV stations pick up the rights to American shows, and broadcast them with Canadian ads and Canadian promos etc. If they run them at the same time as the American show, then it covers up the signals from NBC, ABC, etc., which means (among other things) that generally whenever a show runs long in the States, it has a few less commercials here and fits right in the hour, and everyone is happy.

Except.

CTV has Lost at 8, which ends at 9 like it's supposed to, at which point they switch over to Fox for American Idol. None of the Canadian channels has picked up Alias, so we switch back to ABC, getting the overrun of Lost, because ABC is stupid and runs the shows over the hour. (It also means we get two different "Next week on Lost"s, which is interesting, because sometimes they are completely different.) The problem being that this means that Alias also runs long, except that at 10, the New VR comes in and starts simulcasting with ABC, so we miss the last few minutes of Alias EVERY SINGLE TIME.

If the previous part looked too dry and complicated, here is the important bit: The last few minutes of Alias never get aired and it's driving me batty.

And I can't figure out who to complain to, because I'm sure the American ABC affiliate doesn't care if Canada isn't getting the show properly, but there's no Canadian station to complain to because no-one has picked it up! I think I'm going to have to just blame it all on American Idol for existing in the first place, because otherwise CTV would have stuck with Alias like they used to.

Also I taped the wrong channel and missed Gilmore Girls last night, but I really can't blame that on anyone but myself, try though I might.

( Lost )

( Alias )

And I taped Gilmore Girls, but I'm too sleepy. Wednesdays make me happy. :)

( I have one thing to say about LOST... )

( Also, Alias! )

This is the best double bill since the golden Mutant Enemy days.

Of course the problem with the bonus day off in the middle of the week is that it's very hard to get up the next morning. I have a vague memory of the alarm going off, but I managed to fall right back to sleep, staying zonked out through Andrea Ratuski, that damn annoying thingy that announces the top of the hour, World Report, weather, sports, and Tom Allen's opening remarks. Bleargh. And I've been craving a chai soy latte all morning. This is not unusual -- I often crave the chai soy latte, because the chai soy latte is, in fact, crack* -- but I don't ever do hot drinks in the morning, due to too many years of burning my tongue on the hot chocolate that my dad used to make for me before school. A nice idea, but not too easy to drink when you only have 10 mintues for breakfast. Dear Body: Do not confuse the listersgirl. She is plenty enough confused without your help.

Ok, y'all. My man Tommy Douglas is still in first place, and Don Cherry has fallen in the standings, so I don't have to kill myself. I'm getting a little worried for Tommy, though - apparently London (Ontario, not England - I'm pretty sure they don't care) is running a huge campaign to get everyone in the city to vote repeatedly for Frederick Banting. Now, Fred was a great guy, developing insulin and all, but I don't think he deserves to be Greatest Canadian, because what he did didn't affect Canada specifically in any way.

The episode on Lester B. (aka Mike) Pearson was fabulous. Of course, it had the advantage of a) a subject who was around during the TV years, so there was lots of footage to use, b) someone who, were it not for Tommy Douglas, I could easily see myself promoting, and c) Paul Gross as advocate (who, incidentally, is filming a movie in the parking lot under my bathroom window on Monday. I think I feel a cold coming on). Also, there were no gratuitous driving shots. Sort of. There were gratuitous bumper cars, trains and airplanes, but at least that was new.

( Lost ramblings, the non-squee version - it's safe to click, llamacran )

Spam: STOP THE PORN
Me: But...I like porn!
Spam: *PORN* *PORN* *PORN*
Me: Ahhhhh! Ok, not your porn.
Me: ::runs back to safety of porn with proper punctuation and good grammar::
No, I did not actually *open* the spam. What kind of fool do you think I am? The subject lines were scary enough.

ps. mistress_wanda! There's an icon here that you need. No, really.

*And I remember having a long discussion about this somewhere, but I can't find it. And the supposed 'search this journal' function does not, in fact, search this journal. Bah.

I love that the Desperate Housewives episodes are named after Sondheim songs.

Lost makes me holler at my TV and bounce in my chair. Also, Daniel Dae Kim may be playing an asshole, but I still think he's hot.

Is it time for The O.C. to start up again NOOOOOWWWW?

ps. Tommy Douglas is in the lead! Yay! Go, my dead Canadian socialist boyfriend. I think I need an icon. Too bad I lack the ability to do anything more than crop a picture.

Hello! I can read again! Everybody do a little dance!

...

Excellent. So let me tell you what I did during my week of not posting:

• On Saturday (both Saturdays, actually, but it's the first one I'm talking about here) I went to yoga and somehow managed to collapse my thumb during sun salutations. When you suddenly can't use it you realize exactly how useful a thumb really is.
  
• Sunday vestra and I walked into town to see Bright Young Things. It took us an hour and a half, and saying that we were happy to sit down in the movie theatre is, perhaps, an understatement. Also, the movie was great.
  
• We went to IKEA and I bought another bookcase, which we only barely managed to fit into mistress_wanda's car. I also managed to pick the communist cart*, which necessitated steering at a very bizarre angle, and in the epic battle between the cart, the bookcase and my hand, my hand was definitely the loser. Ouch.
  
• I went to a Blue Jays game (vs. the Yankees) with dramaqueen_23, starfishchick and S's co-worker, who has "a guy" and got us great tickets. This is not only the only baseball game of any sort (live or televised) I've ever seen, but my first professional sports event, and probably only the fourth live sporting event I've been to, the others being one softball game (that I mostly remember because the boy I had a crush on was playing) and a few cricket games. It was fun! And starfishchick didn't smack me for asking too many stupid questions. The announcer amused me because he kept saying "Orlandooooooooooooooo Hudson", and there were some squeeing teenage girls that were extremely loud in their admiration of someone we nicknamed "Junior", because he looked about 14**. Plus, we won. Sweet.
  
• I finally watched the second part of Lost. Whose stupid idea was it to split them up like that? Still pretty much hooked, though.
  
• I made myself stay up past midnight on Friday so that I could read. It was very exciting. I also tried numerous times to post here over the weekend, but vestra's computer hates me and kept shutting down IE every time I tried to access the update page.

*Very left-leaning. Seriously, this cart wouldn't do anything except go left.
**Okay, I feel very old now. There's like three people on that team who aren't younger than me. How does this happen?

...

In more recent news, vestra and I have decided to become Runners. You can stop laughing now. vestra has a head start - she did some running this summer with mistress_wanda - but we've signed up for one of those "Learn to Run" clinics offered by the Running Room, and we're going to attempt to not fall over wheezing on our first night, which is tonight. I don't usually exercise outside, so I'm not entirely sure what to wear, especially since we've apparently skipped right from humidity index to windchill factor (hello, what happened to fall?!), but I guess if I'm underdressed I'll figure that out when my legs turn blue.

Anyway, if you're in the Beaches, and you see two people running along looking like complete dorks, please do stop and say hello.