One for the Whovians
I’m indebted to Feynmangroupie for this one (bigger). I’m not a Doctor Who fan — I tuned in a few times back when the effects were crudest and thought, “nah” — but this is a deeelightful character.
Lady Cassandra O’Brien.Δ17 (that’s pronounced “delta 17”) is a human so old she’s been kept alive by 709 plastic surgeries. She’s nothing but a brain in a jar attached to a piece of skin with a sort of face. Though she’s reduced to a CGI mouth and two eyes, it’s easy enough to recognize actress Zoë Wanamaker in the role.
Do watch the introduction to this character — it’s funny enough to be worth your time.
April 14, 2015 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 24
Hey, baby
‘Member this face? The burbling sunbaby from the Teletubbies? Well, she’s a nineteen year old college student now. Click the pic to see her all growed up. (No, it’s not a rickroll or anything, just a picture of a nineteen year old girl with an oddly familiar face).
The Teletubbies were new when I first started coming to the UK, and I got hooked. The UK version was much stranger than what it turned into when they brought it to the US (I can just see Children’s Television Workshop frowning at the screen, “but that wasn’t educational. It didn’t even make sense!”).
In my defense, I spent nearly all my time here either drunk or hungover, so my tastes ran to the simple and colorful. Uncle B plied me with an awful lot of strong drink back then. I’m not sure his intentions were honorable.
Last day at work before the holidays. No alarm clock for five days! w00t!
December 23, 2014 — 7:12 pm
Comments: 12
T-day marathon for thee, not for me
MST3K is recreating their good old Turkey Day Marathon online this year. I’ve been looking forward to it all week. Got the notice, tuned in and…”sorry, the owner has not made this stream available in your country.”
Oh, boo. I mean, I can spoof it and watch it on my computer, but I wanted to stream it to the television.
😮
Anyhoo, the turkey — not a whole turkey, but a generous slab of the finest from Marks and Spencer — is all set. The fixin’s. A bottle of schmoo. We do Thanksgiving as an evening meal, but we damn well do Thanksgiving in this house.
You guys are among the things I’m grateful for. This blog has gone a long way to keeping homesickness at bay — real Muricans to chat with! Hope everyone has a splendid day, and a chance to shop until your brains run out your ears tomorrow.
😯
November 27, 2014 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 23
Waiting their turn
Okay, last one from the Mapp and Lucia shoot. I call your attention to the little dog on the wagon. And the fact the man is checking his smart phone.
I’m only posting this stuff because I didn’t earlier, when it happened, and the news is just too depressing right now.
p.s. Except Ukip takes Clacton, a safe Tory seat. And, even more impressively, came within 600-something votes of taking a safe Labour seat! That’s pants-shittingly interesting politics, right there.
p.p.s. Have a good weekend!
October 10, 2014 — 9:45 pm
Comments: 13
More props
Another shot from the Mapp and Lucia shoot this Summer. I think reproducing Twistevant’s was the most impressive set building the BBC types got up to. This entire storefront is fake, bolted onto a very plain-fronted white building on the corner. This is all burgundy paint and gold leaf; they must have a good old-fashioned sign painter on staff. When they were done, the whole thing vanished overnight.
There are even period displays inside — for example, you can just make out in the center a revolving rack of seed packets, all from the appropriate era! And all the notices in the windows and all the handbills posted — all of them perfectly period.
The cheese wheels in the foreground are all plastic, but the produce out front is half and half. There would be plastic onions mixed in with real ones. For some reason. I couldn’t work out the rationale — except that any fruit or veg that was cut open was fake, which made sense.
The production crew was very cool about it. When they weren’t actually filming, we were allowed to wander right through the sets and take pictures and gawk at stuff, though they got itchy if anyone pointed a camera at one of the stars. This area is right in the touristy heart of Rye and tourism carried on right throughout, though I did get briefly pinned down in the gun garden while they filmed a scene.
This is apparently in contrast to the Hollywood types in for the filming of Monuments Men. They were real asses to everyone, locals told me.
October 9, 2014 — 10:05 pm
Comments: 16
Ann B. Davis: a tribute
As you’ve probably heard, actress Ann B. Davis fell and conked her head last Sunday and died. She was 88. Nobody had her in this Dead Pool, but I would like to give her a sweasel.com shout-out anyway.
Davis had a rare screen gift: a cheerful sexlessness. And, indeed, most of the obits note that the actress was never romantically linked with anyone in her whole life.
She had a twin. Nobody revealed whether the twin got any.
Davis found religion in 1976, joining an evangelical Anglican church that she stuck with to the end. Evangelican Anglicans sounds a little contradictory to me, but I’m used to the Anglish Anglicans, who are pretty anglicable.
Davis never entirely retired from acting. Also, in 1994, she put her name to Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook which includes recipes for “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia Muffins” and “Groovy Old-Fashioned Pancakes.”
Kirkus reviews sniffs, “Cookies made with instant oatmeal and Snickers bars are way too sweet, and St. Paddy’s Whole Wheat Oatmeal Bread has the texture of sawdust and a dog-biscuit taste only Tiger could love. A final chapter gives recipes from the cast members themselves, including Eve Plumb’s lamely joking instructions for making boiled water out of ice. Even intense nostalgia cannot justify this book.”
Incidentally, the publisher of that inestimable volume also offer Mary Ann’s Gilligan’s Island Cookbook, but Granny’s Beverly Hillbillies Cookbook and Aunt Bee’s Mayberry Cookbook are totally by somebody else. Don’t even get me started on the I Love Lucy Cookbook!
Good weekend, all!
June 6, 2014 — 10:22 pm
Comments: 20
A hearty bowl of cultural goulash
This might be an “only in Britain” kind of thing. It’s a Channel 4 documentary television program called Gogglebox. They film families watching television. Watching people watch television. For reals.
You can get a flavor of the show here. Bear in mind this is a fan collection of favorite moments, which might give you a sense of what the boring bits are like.
Which puts me in mind of the very interesting book Watching the English. The author points out that while many, many countries have long-running soap operas, they are usually about rich and glamorous people. British soap operas are all about chavs. It’s extraordinary, when you think about it.
In theory, these two people aren’t chavs. On Gogglebox, they are known as “the posh ones.” They have good accents (a thing of which the British are acutely aware) and they’re usually half sloshed on wine. So. Posh.
In real life, they own a 16 bedroom Grade I listed mansion in Kent which they run as a B&B. It’s called Salutation. It’s on the market. Which might explain why they rented it out for a masked orgy.
The article is weirdly indiscreet about it. A private swinger’s club called Killing Kittens (ew) rented it for the modest sum of £1,700 for the night. Then they charged 60 people £500 apiece to turn up for oysters and champagne and sex in all the nooks and crannies. Of the house.
You know what? Yuk. I’m sorry I typed all that. Just forget I said anything.
May 21, 2014 — 10:36 pm
Comments: 20
rrrrRRRRrrrr
So that Elmer Fudd thing has a name: rhotacism. From the Greek rho, for R. It broadly describes one kind or another of effed up R, but most commonly substituting W for R.
And then Wikipedia opened its mouth and this came out: Lenition of intervocalic /t/ and /d/ to [d] or [ɾ] is also common in many modern English dialects (e.g. <got a lot of> (phonemically /gotə lotə/) becoming [godə lodə] or [goɾə loɾə]). Contrast is maintained with /ɹ/ because it is never realized as a flap in these dialects of English.
You know, I was following along pretty well that right up to that last bit. Tragically, I was never realized as a flap, either.
Anyway, we were talking a couple of days ago about BBC presenters with rhotacized Rs (about half of them, by my count) and specifically Lucy Worsely. Unlike most of the others, I think a lot of my readers would enjoy her stuff.
Her day job is Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces — Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, the Banqueting House in Whitehall and Kew Palace. She’s currently overseeing major renovations worth major coin, so I guess she can’t be as much of a lightweight as she seems. Her television specialty is daily life, costume and customs of historic Britain, mostly (but not exclusively) the aristocracy.
Reader BJM tipped me off in the comments that much BBC content can be found in its entirely on YouTube (at least until the Corporation plays whack-a-mole with individual programs). And, sure enough, quick search turns up shit-tons of Lucy Worsley programs in all their glory.
I think I’ve watched most of those and +1 would recommend.
September 18, 2013 — 10:47 pm
Comments: 20
Wow. I think the BBC forgot how to BBC.
We’re getting pretty desperate for stuff to watch on TV these days. We both favor non-fiction — documentaries, science, history, that sort of thing — and the BBC has arrived at a rigid formula for this kind of programming that is just unbearably dumbed down and insulting.
First of all, they’re clearly hoping each new presenter will turn out to be some kind of enduring BBC superstar. The whole series will be written through the eyes of some unattractive douche-canoe you never heard of and her meaningful journey to discover some boring shit that is peripheral to the main topic. (I blame Carl Sagan and Cosmos for this phenomenon).
This person will invariably have a serious speech impediment. The successful candidate will be a young fat goth chick, an old skinny goth chick or a dweeby guy of ambiguous sexuality. He or she will have a PhD in something. Go figure.
For certain sure, the presenter will NOT be an elderly white man who knows what the fuck he’s talking about.
There will be much dumbness, condescension and breathless reporting of facts that were once regarded as common knowledge. Oh, and animations. Silly ones in the style of Terry Gilliam with goofy music. Tubas and or kazoos feature prominently here.
So we feared the worse for the most recent BBC program we recorded, a three parter on the British food harvest. But…actually…its awesome.
I know you USAians can’t use the BBC iPlayer, but if you click the link, I think it’ll allow you to play clips and look at charts and stuff. The program is chock full of big robot machines driven by GPS satellite, fun science facts and nifty gadgets for measuring the moisture content of grain and much more. Also, capitalism. And it isn’t dumb at all.
But here’s the thing — we’ve watched two of the three programs, and there has been a noticeable absence of these words: organic. Sustainable. Climate change. Shoot, they even revisited how plants love, love, LOVE some sweet CO2.
The BBC.
You reckon we’ve maybe turned a corner on globular warmening at last?
September 16, 2013 — 10:43 pm
Comments: 18
The Butler’s Song
‘Nother YouTube. This is The Butler’s Song. The performance (happily caught on phone cam, looks like) was in 2010, singer is nonagenarian actor George S. Irving (he was also the narrator for Underdog — there’s trivia for you!). The song is from the short-lived Broadway play So Long, 174th Street, which was an adaptation of the long-lived play Enter Laughing, based on Carl Reiner’s semi-autobiography.
Dolores del Río, by the way, was a Mexican actress, one of the lucky ones who successfully made the transition from Silents to Talkies. She was also the One Great Love of Orson Welles’ life.
And you’re a better man than I if you don’t get at least that first line badly stuck in your head. Which — am I wrong? — more or less shares its tune with I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy and She Was an Acrobat’s Daughter (at 4:23, but give yourself a treat and watch the whole damn thing).
And that there is a metric buttload of ancient pop culture references. If you got them all without following the links, you a) are old, b) American and c) wasted your youth sat open-mouthed in front of a television set. Like me.
November 27, 2012 — 11:43 pm
Comments: 17