Dafter Thoughts

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist."
  —Baudelaire

A thought that occurred to me as I watch the laughably obsessive "political coverage" that fills the air these days.

The puppetmasters have us snowed. It's all about defining the question, defining the very words, to deprive us of not just the intention but the ability to challenge their devious little system.

Ballots and polls and caucuses and all that? That's not politics. That's the democratic process, the ittiest bittiest part of politics. That's the burger on our plate, the final stage that gets us all hepped up to enjoy the "experience" but that conveniently evokes nothing of the murderous nine-tenths of the experience that preceded it.

Politics is power, people with position and resources and secrets and organizations and money, dealing and threatening and strategizing and spending people like money or chess pieces, to maintain or increase their power. And it's all a game, 'cause just like the Super Bowl, someone's gonna win, but someone's gotta lose. And by the time you or I get involved in it, the conclusions are almost foregone and most of the skullduggery has been completed. We're just countless little agents of legitimization, one more tool that the power people use to prop themselves up and keep their enemies opponents at bay.

That's politics, and the "political shows" are just one more way they erode our awareness and redefine the question, until the question just ain't there to ask any more.

(Oy. Clearly working at a TV news network in an election year is getting to me. I'm prone to these cynical little outbursts from time to time...)

Science Fiction, not San Francisco.

Truth be told, I'm not 100% positive I have a coherent train of thought, or a point, here. But consider it thinking "out loud."

( Windy pontification cut for length. Click at your own risk. )

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On a simultaneously related and unrelated note: Good gravy, am I enjoying the hell out of The Family Trade by Charles Stross. A strongly sci-fi-ish bit of fantasy noveling in which, yeah, a girl blips into a medieval alternate reality and finds out she's really a long-lost princess—not a fairy-tale princess, but a Mafia princess. Y'know, in the de Medici sense. Madcap political hijinx, with byzantine plots and ill-advised sex and, um, economics, ensue. It's been some time since I've been so happy that a book is the first in a series. (Bonus: I picked it up used for 25¢ at the New York Public Library...)

That is all.

The Good: New computer!

The saga of my wayward laptop has finally come to a conclusion, and I must say I'm happy with the outcome.

( The sorry details and happy ending )

The Bad: This really is the Martian Death Flu I'm rocking here. Thursday the doctor diagnosed it as one of my regularly recurring sinus infections and prescribed the usual course of antibiotics. But here it is, four days later, and I've the 100.6°F (38.1°C) fever going on, a maddening stomachache, and a splitting headache. I'd feel better if I could stay home and rest, but I'm under orders, essentially on pain of death, to be at work at 5 in the morning tomorrow. Oh dear. I think I'm scheduled to get my annual review tomorrow as well. Double oh dear.

The Troubling: Yeah, it's been a good many months since I quit my comic habit cold turkey, but I still have my memories and my attachments. And I can't say that this review of the next Amazing Spider-Man collection doesn't fill me with disappointment. I've said for a while that one of the things that made Spider-Man comics work big-time for me as an adult, was the seriousness and reality of Pete & MJ's marriage. This is just... well, dumb, I think, and I can't even blame it on an inferior writer. It's the swansong of J. Michael Straczynski on the book, and his six-year run has been mostly unimpeachable. Damn those editorial mandates...

The Martian Death Flu from which I have been suffering the last couple of days has left my nose, lips, and philtrum badly chapped from constant nose-blowing and mouth-breathing — since, according to the first law of something-or-other, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, I need to know how there's anything physically left of me after all the blechhus I have produced. My head feels like a friggin' quenepa.

The MDF has also proven impervious to tisanes, vapors, and over-the-counter medications of various sorts. So I've decided to keep what's left of me home from work tomorrow, so a doctor can prescribe me some proper drugs.

Since no one seems willing to mercifully hack my head off, I'm going to go NyQuil myself into submission and delude myself into thinking sleeping is imminent. (No, I'm not a very good patient, why do you ask?)

In the meantime, I leave you with the very entertaining website of a Dutch department store.

ETA: Oh, and since we're in the middle of moving, our apartment is refreshingly free of any aloe, chapstick, or similar items that might, y'know, actually help. Insert my impression of Stitch destroying San Francisco. Not a model of San Francisco, the actual city. Graaarh.

It's been about a week since I got a decent night's sleep, and contrary to my hopes for last night, it was one of the worse nights of that run. Part of it, I'm sure, was the sinus issues that have been plaguing me the last few days — scratchy throat, post-nasal drip, etc. etc. — and part of it was probably the large tumbler of coffee I drank around dinnertime while Warcrafting with celestial_usagi and kal_el77. And no doubt there was some persistent moving-related stress at work as well.

But then there were the dreams. Greasy, disjointed dreams, in which every sequence of incomprehensible, barely-perceivable ideas landed with a resounding thump, like a disturbing musical cadence, on the repeated phrase "New Crobuzon."

Aah. Ah-hah.

I did indeed start China Miéville's Perdido Street Station last night, and about a half-dozen pages in the only character that's been properly introduced is the city of New Crobuzon. Miéville uses intensely biological, muculent imagery to quickly establish a really visceral portrait of the rot and degeneracy of his decaying metropolis. Reading those half-dozen pages as I was laying in bed getting ready to go to sleep... enh, not the best of ideas, in retrospect. I fully expect to really enjoy Perdido Street Station, but judging by the wet slop of raw idea Miéville deposited into my brain in relatively short order last night, it's a book probably better enjoyed in daylight and digested somewhat before sleep.

Together with all the other aforementioned factors, and it's no wonder at all that my sleep was truncated and supremely unrestful last night.

No matter. I got me one o' these, one o' these, and one o' these, so I should be okay to face the nine-hour work day I just began...

...so what better time to write my first post in over a month? Lots going on, so I'll... oh, who am I kidding? I'll do a bullet point list of random stream-of-consciousness headlines regarding whatever events of the past month seem most noteworthy at this moment. And you'll all like it. ^_^

• Played the piano in public again, on my birthday no less; this time around it was the first movement of Schubert's A Major piano sonata (D. 664). It was... well, "ugly" doesn't seem to quite encompass the experience. Playing the two Mendelssohn Songs Without Words back in December, I was nervous sure. But this time the nerves really, really got the better of me. My hands were shaking so bad they actually trembled out of alignment with the keys I meant to play. And, of course, I got lost a couple of times, which is perhaps somewhat excusable on account of the piece being more than ten minutes long. Anyway, it was bad bad bad. Blood on the flagstones. Carnage, I tell you. "Oh, but Brian," I'm sure some are saying, "you're just being too hard on yourself. It couldn't have been that bad." Au contraire, my friends. There's MP3 evidence of the event. Go. Hear the humiliation for yourselves. (A footnote: This past Friday night, my piano teacher took celestial_usagi and me to Calle Ocho for Restaurant Week. I had a couple of sangrias. After dinner, hanging out back at her place, I sat down at her Steinway and proceeded to play the movement at speed with confidence, flow, and expressiveness. Dammit.


• Thursday night celestial_usagi and I went to Lincoln Center to see Radu Lupu play piano and Riccardo Muti conduct the NY Philharmonic. The Schumann Piano Concerto was, dare I say it, downright catchy, and while Bruckner's Sixth Symphony was of course the Brobdingnagian slab of sound one would expect of a Wagner Bruckner work, Muti kept it controlled and focused and it was frankly magnificent. It was (and celestial_usagi agreed) the most enjoyable evening we've ever had at the Philharmonic.


• celestial_usagi got a gorgeous, shiny new monitor. She's gonna start dry-humping the thing any second now, and I can't say I blame her. ^_^ And hey, I benefited from that, 'cause her old monitor has become a lovely upgrade for me.


• The house we're moving to has been signed for and deposited upon (by my in-laws, so, alas, I'll still be—albeit temporarily—a renter in someone else's home), so the move (back) to New Jersey is now official. The place won't be ready until late March, so I'm gonna have to spend a month or so rooming with my good friend kal_el77. Which will probably be fun. You know what's not fun? Packing up all the crap we've accumulated over the last six years of co-habitaton/marriage. I'm more than a little stressed these days, and that's the reason why. Grump grump grump.


• The antidote for said stress? Warcraft. Lots 'n' lots of Warcraft. celestial_usagi and I spent the weekend introducing kal_el77 to it, and he seems well on board now myuh hah hah hah. We created new characters to play with him, so our main characters (Franzian and Aprixe) have gotten no love from us of late (although our new Blood Elf alts, Ilkadann and Asminnadra, did get some play time.)


• Steven Saylor's Roman Blood: Excellent book. Took me way too long to read, though. Now I'm finally, once and for all, really honestly truly gonna read Perdido Street Station—it's been gathering dust on a shelf long enough.

Bah. Between moving, and primary season making work chaotic, and more moving... I want a vacation real bad...

Weekend went fabulously. Took Friday off of work and mainlined tea and soup. Was forced to stay in bed for most of the day by celestial_usagi, who I've decided desperately needs to find a job. ^_~ But I felt a lot better by the time I went to bed, and my voice had come back for the most part by Saturday morning. I made it through the three-hour dress rehearsal with only one coughing fit.

My ACMA performance was unspeakably nerve-wracking and I know I fluffed a couple of things badly, but the truth is that, although through the haze of nerves the thing flew by and I don't have much real recollection of actually doing it, the fact remains that I did it. I got up in front of [more] people [than were there last month] and played my little Mendelssohn bits, and (most importantly) played through the mistakes. I feel really good about that, and I got some really nice feedback from the audience (amusingly, much of which concerned how relaxed I looked while playing). Hopefully the performance anxiety will subside as I continue to perform there over the next few months, although I'm in no hurry to play on their aging Steinway, as beastly an instrument as ever I've touched. The audio of it should show up here within the next couple of days.

The Advent concert today also went wonderfully. I gotta hand it to our director, Ken Dake. The man works himself into the ground, and is occasionally quite the pain in the butt. But today proved how worth it it all is. His music selection was profoundly moving, as were the readings interspersed throughout the program; the chamber orchestra sounded brilliant; the dramatic lighting combined with the dark, candlelit sanctuary to provide an atmosphere of deep spiritual resonance. And, I'm pleased to say, my voice held up throughout the whole thing. (Thanks to prjt2501 for suggesting the saltwater gargle and, again, celestial_usagi for making me actually do it!) Of course it's totally shot now, and I'm likely to be croaking for the next two or three days.

But it was all totally, totally worth it. I feel like I've topped at least a small rise in my life's journey, and I no longer feel quite so fraudulent as I used to when describing myself as a "musician."

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On an entirely unrelated note, I owe an apology to Miss trishalynn. Back in May, she rec'd David Gemmell's Legend to me, but as I do (all too) often with book recs, I stubbornly paid no attention to anything except what I wanted to read. I am now, however, halfway through said novel and loving it. It is, as Trisha said, awesome fantasy. So thank you and I'm very sorry I ignored put off listening to you.

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My newest musical discovery is quite a bit afield of my usual stomping grounds, but there's no two ways about it: Mitsuko Uchida astounds me beyond the telling of it. Don't know if she'll change my opinion of the Second Viennese School, but she plays Schubert the way I've always wanted Schubert to be played.

Friday: Piano lesson, including last chance get teacher's feedback on my ACMA recital pieces.
Saturday morning: Three-hour dress rehearsal for choir's Advent concert.
Saturday afternoon: ACMA recital.
Sunday afternoon: Advent concert.

Both the recital and the concert are hugely important to me, since they will be the first time I've played piano and sung for an audience since I was in grammar school. (Singing in services with the choir over the last couple years doesn't count so much for me, as we were an incidental part of something larger and, in theory at least, weren't so much the focus of the attention.)

So what happens? This morning I wake up, painfully sick and achy and coughy and... wait for it...

I have completely lost my voice. It's not a rasp, it's not a growl, it's GONE. Just happened this morning.

I just... I can't think of anything to say except what I put in the subject line, and it feels so apropos at this moment I think it bears repeating. So, in conclusion:

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!

Sang in church this morning, and both the service and the week of preparation leading up to it — a rehearsal on Monday night, and a day-long retreat which included rehearsal, worship, and a BYO luncheon — were exceptionally inspiring to me.

( This is gonna get pretty darned religious, I think, so I'm snipping it to spare any possible offense. 'Cause, y'know, the one thing you're really not allowed to talk about in public these days is God... )

I also learned over the course of the week, after the director asked me to move from the baritone to the bass parts for a couple of pieces (to improve the choir's balance), that (at least once my voice is warmed up) I have a low E (a/k/a E2, two Es below middle C)! This is a full step and a half lower than the low G I had believed was my bottom. What was that about sounding like a tenor, Mr. prjt2501? ^_^

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After church, we went to J.J. Hat Center on 5th Ave., one of the few real hat shops left in NYC, 'cause I've been wanting a proper hat for some time now. I wound up with a black Lite Felt outback hat with a three-inch brim. What's that? You wanna see it?

( Oh, all right... )

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Other things I've been loving lately:

• my new burr grinder and press pot — they help me make consistently fantastic cups of coffee, such as the chocolate hazelnut from Oren's Daily Roast that I'm drinking at this moment


• Glass Hammer's new CD


• the 1972-1973 output of Italian prog pioneers Banco del Mutuo Soccorso (headlining at NEARfest X in 2008!), Premiata Forneria Marconi and Le Orme, as well as another Italian classic, the astounding 1977 album Forse le Lucciole Non Si Amano Più by Locanda delle Fate — here's a link to a video of LdF playing the fantastic title track on Italian TV


• our new piano, and (on a related note) just about everything that Franz Schubert ever wrote


• Ultimate Spider-Man (the only comic book I'm still reading actively)


• the Rigante novels of David Gemmell — I can't wait to get into his other stuff, like the Troy books, and the Jon Shannow books, and the Drenai books, and it's an absolute tragedy that I didn't discover the guy before his untimely passing


• the Iron Man trailer (I'm so geeked out already for that movie it's not even funny)


• Pushing Daisies and The Next Great American Band (yes, I love that show) and the fact that the new season of House is the best one yet


• Heartland Brewery's Smiling Pumpkin Ale, which I quaffed 23 ounces of with lunch. They also make the best Cuban sandwich I've had in NYC, just for the record (although if anyone else knows of a better one elsewhere, I'm more than happy to... research the matter. Yeah...)

I could compile a list of things I most certainly do not love (not least of which the fact that, thanks to the incompetence of the Geek Squad at the Chelsea Best Buy, my laptop has been "in for repairs" for more than a month now), but that would go against the marvelous mood I'm in, so it can wait for another time.

...gacked from Mr. prjt2501. I also gacked a few of his answers, 'cause they apply perfectly to me...

Two Names You Go By
1. Brian
2. Z

Two Parts of Your Heritage
1. Jewish
2. Slavic

Two Things That Scare You
1. Getting old
2. Losing my job

Two of Your Everyday Essentials
1. Coffee
2. Music

Two Things You Are Wearing Right Now
1. Jeans
2. My wedding band

Two of Your Favorite Bands or Musical Artists (at the moment)
1. Neal Morse
2. Le Orme

Two Truths
1. Don't live today for tomorrow, like you were immortal.
2. Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.

Two Physical Things that Appeal to You About the Opposite Sex.
1. Eyes
2. Back (especially the lower back)

Two of Your Favorite Hobbies
1. Playing piano
2. Reading

Two Things You Want Really Badly
1. My laptop fixed
2. Peace in my family

Two Places You Want to go on Vacation
1. Japan
2. Scotland

Two Things You Want to Do Before You Die
1. Play in a band on a real stage.
2. Get fiction I wrote published by someone I'm not related to or friends with.

Two Stores You Shop At
1. Best Buy
2. Borders

Two favorite web sites
1. Wikipedia
2. LiveJournal

Two pets you had (have)
1. N/A
2. (Never had a pet of my own)

Two People who will fill this out
1. kal_el77, maybe?
2. Um, no idea after that

Two things you did last night
1. Went grocery shopping
2. Watched Reaper

Two shows you like to watch
1. Doctor Who
2. House MD

Having just spent a rather frustrating half hour at the piano struggling with Messrs. Bach and Chopin, alls I got this evening is a quote, as much for my benefit as for anyone's. It's from The Name of the Wind, a novel I recently reviewed:

"Music is a proud, temperamental mistress. Give her the time and attention she deserves, and she is yours. Slight her and there will come a day when you call and she will not answer."

Baseball is a pitiless mistress.

My beloved yet so often hapless Phillies finally, finally made something out of themselves and snatched the National League East title from the collapsar called the New York Mets. It was their first trip to the post-season in fourteen years.

Fourteen years. There are teenagers in the world who were born after the Phillies' last playoff appearance.

Still, given the Mets' dominance of the division for most of the year, the unsettling inconsistency of Phillie pitchers who weren't named Hamels, and the fact that they were seven games out of first only three-and-a-half weeks ago, I really was just happy they were there. Once the giddy euphoria subsided and my sense of reality reasserted itself, I was fully aware of how unlikely it was my boys would go all the way. There were a lot of good teams between us and the World Championship, starting with a Colorado Rockies team that had won 14 of its last 15 regular season games.

But after a thirteen straight seasons of misses both near and far, was one measly playoff win too much to ask?

Apparently.

The Rockies were an irresistable force, and the Phils were far, far from being an immovable object. Ironically, our pitchers weren't too bad, but our supposed juggernaut of an offense were apparently trying to inherit the earth, if ya know what I mean. Take Jimmy Rollins, who went .296/.344/.531 in the regular season, in the process becoming the first player ever to have at least 200 hits, 20 doubles, 20 triples, 20 home runs, and 20 stolen bases in a single season. In the three playoff games, he went 2 for 11 (although, admittedly, those two hits were a triple and a home run). Defending MVP Ryan Howard? 47 homers and 136 RBIs in the regular season, one solo homer (his only RBI) in the Divisional Series. It was the same across the board — Chase Utley (2 for 11), Pat Burrell (2 for 11), Aaron Rowand (1 for 12).

That's what I mean by pitiless. The Rockies didn't care that the Phillies were in the playoffs for the first time since before Bill Clinton had ever heard the name "Lewinsky." Nor was there any reason they should. They did what they came to do, and my boys didn't. Win or go home.

Well, only 132 days until Spring Training...

Oh yes oh yes OH YES!!!

Headline One: More singing in church!

After my experiences with my church's all-volunteer "Summer Choir" in 2005 and 2006, I discovered I have both a love and a talent for choral singing. While Marble's main choir, the Sanctuary Choir, is actually a professional group (and an acclaimed one at that), there is a volunteer choir called the Festival of Voices, which does the singing for one worship service a month as well as two big concerts (one in December for Advent and one in the spring for Easter). I'd been jonesing for a long time to join that group, but working until 11pm every night kinda prevented that. But back in January they changed my work schedule to, essentially, banker's hours, so when the new Festival of Voices season began this month I wasted no time in joining up.
     I'm already finding it one of the more thoroughly rewarding experiences of my life.
     If any of y'all are interested, the first service we're singing in is this Sunday, Sept. 30, at 11:15am, and it'll be streamed live over the internet. So, while I doubt anyone will be able to pick my voice out of the whole of the baritone section (there's four or five of us, and another four or five basses in addition to that), technically you will hear me singing.


Headline Two: Been reading some really good stuff lately.

( Reviews of the novels 'Eifelheim' and 'The Name of the Wind.' I tried to keep the wordiness down but I don't think I did too well so I'm putting 'em behind a cut... )

For the record, I'm currently finishing up The Colour of Magic (which I'd call "cheerful" as opposed to "guffaw-inducing," but I am assured the Discworld series gets really great and I believe it; I'll be moving on to The Light Fantastic presently. But next up is Sword in the Storm, the first in David Gemmell's "faux-Celts vs. faux-Romans with magic and Conan-ish hijinks" The Rigante quartet.


I was going to add a third headline item about the music I've been digging on lately, but this is getting lengthy and I've been at it a while. I'd best be off to see to showering and eating breakfast before I head off to work. Besides, although I already have 12 CDs that have been released in calendar year 2007 (an especially high number for me to have within the year of release), and thus have plenty to talk about, it's still a tad early for "year in review" and three of my favorites have albums coming out soon — the Flower Kings (The Sum of No Evil, this weekend), Little Atlas (Hollow, October 8) and Glass Hammer (Culture of Ascent, featuring Jon Anderson of Yes, October 23). So I think I'll wait a bit before I wax windy and rhapsodic on my music listening.

Besides, I got music making to do. ^_^

Still out at the friends' house. We were initially gonna head home today, but we came up with more cool stuff to do. So, since none of us had to work tomorrow either, we all decided to extend the visit. I love it out here—trees and stars and crickets and mountains. It makes me realize I'm so over Brooklyn.

Did more fun stuff today that I'd never done before. Played the ponies—harness racing at the relatively new Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs in Wilkes Barre. (Won $1.80 on the eighth race, then lost $2 on the ninth. That 20 cents was a blow, so I was done. ^_^) Hot tubbed on a nicely cool pitch black night with the stars overhead. So frikkin' wonderful. Played dominoes, kind of—actually, "Mexican Train Dominoes," which was mad fun even though I was the only one who didn't win a hand. Grrr. Oh, and nearly gave myself a hernia and/or a fatal coronary laughing at something my friend Will said, which objectively probably wasn't remotely that funny, but it was one of those moments.

Oh, wait. That last one? Not even close to the first time that's happened...

It's coming up on two in the morning, and I'm still up 'cause celestial_usagi and I are out at our friends' astoundingly nice log-cabin-esque house in the woods of northeastern Pennsylvania, and we've been able to spend a frightening number of hours just sitting around, drinking and talking and occasionally playing blackjack very, very badly.

But I'm staying up another couple of minutes to write about my experience earlier this evening at the West End Fair in Gilbert, PA. Our friends took us over there with two objectives: 1) eat as much fun fair food as we could stuff into ourselves without dire medical consequences; and 2) see the demolition derby. I've never been to a demolition derby. The sight of virtually junked autos limping noisily around a mud "ring" deliberately smacking into each other (and I use the word "deliberately" in several of its common meanings) and occasionally bursting slightly into flames is not one I would ever have thought I'd be entertained by.

I was quite wrong.

And, just to make it cooler, in between rounds of automotive violence we looked out over the breathtaking Pocono landscape that rose beyond the fairground to see the moon rise slowly over the ridge (or mountain or hill; I'm not 100% sure what the formation is properly called). It was mesmerizing.

And not just because I was still dazed from all the junker fumes. ^_^

Jamie Moyer's been a big-league pitcher for 21 years. Last night, he had one of the worst games of that long career, giving up 10 runs — all of them earned — in five-and-a-third innings, as the Dodgers' shellacked the Phils 10-3. After the game, Moyer gave the press a quote that encapsulates the Phillies baseball experience better than any other I've heard, at least for a long while:

"One game doesn't make a season. If you say that enough, it does."

Welcome to my baseball-loving (?) life.

Okay, not even remotely. But I did buy a new bass today.

It's a Fender Jazz Bass 24, so named because it's got 24 frets — two whole octaves, which is a bit more than a normal bass has. Not that I need all that, as I am a fair-to-middling bassist at best, but when I bought it I didn't really get the whole "24" thing. All I know is that I fell in love with its crisp, growly tone and the smooth feel of the fretboard at the store, and when I found that the Guitar Center in Commack was asking about half its MSRP, and about $300 below its usual "street" price, I was powerless to resist. (It had some competition from a sleek Ibanez EDB405 5-string, but somehow the Fender just felt... more right, ultimately.)

Here's a cell phone pic of me at the store, test-driving the soon-to-be-mine beauty:



So now I can get rid of my old piece-of-crap Aria Pro II bass with the missing strap peg (thanks to a completely stripped socket) and the buzzy frets. Anyone on my flist interested in a cheap, serviceable-but-not-much-more bass that looks like this, except that it's completely black?

For the record, I'm exercising restraint and severely limiting the number of new anime shows I'm trying out this spring. Here's what I'll be checking out:

Bokura no ("Ours") - Fifteen schoolchildren are invited to "test" a giant-robots-versus-alien-invaders game that quickly — and unpleasantly — turns out to be all too real.

El Cazador de la Bruja (Spanish for "Witch Hunter") - When a bounty hunter tracks down a young girl suspected of a high profile murder, she doesn't turn her in but instead helps the girl uncover the truth of her past and her future.

Kaze no Stigma ("Stigma of the Wind") - More pretty, pretty anime from GONZO Digimation. A powerful "wind user" returns to take his revenge on the family of "fire users" that banished him in disgrace years ago.

Lovely Complex - A tall girl and a short boy, both long unlucky in love because of their unusual heights and viewed by most people as a comedic duo because of their constant bickering, try to put aside their differences to help each other find love, and may wind up finding it in each other instead.

OverDrive - Looks like a totally formulaic sports anime, which of course means I'll love it to death. After getting talked into joining his school's bicycle club by the girl he has a crush on, a teenaged boy strives to become the first Japanese man to win the Tour de France.

Kissdum: ENGAGE planet - a sci-fi show with a dumb name about young people trying to protect humanity from mysterious aliens

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Heroic Age, a good old-fashioned space opera about a young queen trying to save humanity from extinction at the hands of an alien race, also looks good to me, but only episodes 2 and 3 seem to be available right now. I'd rather wait until episode 1 turns up.

And okay, I'll admit it. I'm feeding my dumb moe fetish by watching Nagasarete Airantō ("Drifting Off to Indigo Orchid Island"), which appears at first blush to be a moronic but pretty show about a boy who runs away from home, gets washed overboard, and washes ashow on a primitive, technology-free island populated entirely by girls. It's fulfilling the cute quotient for now, but the moment it gets screechy I'm cutting it off.

TV

• Heroes is back on Monday! Woo!


• "Gridlock" (this past weekend's Doctor Who) was thoroughly delightful. Possibly the best straight-up science fiction the show's done since it's been revived.


• I may have said this before (I'm feeling too lazy to go back and check my previous LJ entries), but Cheryl Burke is the hottest woman on TV. Hands down.


• Oh, and new Ugly Betty tonight! As much as I like Heroes and Jericho (and I love both), Betty is probably my favorite of the new shows from this season.

YouTube

The Vader Sessions — This is absolutely ruttin' high-larious.