Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: March 2010
Too much penis
The wife and I like Spartacus: Blood and Sand, but based on the comments at IMDB, not everyone is amused.
Nothing wrong with some nudity now and then, and it had a kind of balance of male/female nudity at the start, though the ammount was a bit stupid. I’m up to ep 5, and I’m liking that they’re toning down the ammount of nudity a bit, but damn, the writers must love penis, because it shows up fully every 20min or so in rather long cuts.
With female nudity, everything is generally tucked away and neat, but seeing penises flapping about this much is starting to get grating
This initiated an interesting thread wherein, among other sparkling moments, one commenter complained that all of this homoeroticism is historically inaccurate, and another commenter set that commenter most righteously in her place.
Me? I don’t care about all the penis and male derrieres. There are plenty of perfect unaugmented breasts (implants would be rather anachronistic) and lovely ungroomed bush and shapely female buns to counterbalance the bouncing wee-wees. And Lucy Lawless’s breasts! Great expanses of aureolae bigger than Brazil! XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS’S CASSAVA MELONS!
Sometimes, they wear clothes.
Oh, and it’s violent, too. Bludgeoning stabbing decapitating skull-crushing castrating crucifyingly violent.
I think there’s a story in there, too, but it bewilders me what that would be. Like all Americans, I just watch it for the nudity and violence.
While I love watching this show, I can’t seem to understand some of the unnecessary sex scene. I understand that the producers are trying to portray an accurate picture of rome but it seems as though they are doing too much. For ex, I think ep 6 when Lucy lawless is being bathe by the 3 slaves then comes in old and out of shape John Hannah who then grabs the slave girl hands and puts it on his penis and then about a minute later begins to force himself on the slave girl per instructions from Lucy lawless. I’m not sure what the significance of that scene was*. The show is suppose to be about gladiators fighting in the arena but it’s full of crude sex scenes that have no significance to the show.
Well, maybe not all Americans.
D.
*The wife rather pragmatically points out that there IS a point. This is all leading up to a slave revolt, after all, so it’s important to demonstrate that slaves were regarded as property by their owners, to be used and abused at will, again, and again, and again.
Good drugs, and it all looks like ass to me
Got my throat scoped today. Worst part about it, they made me gargle Cetacaine, this nasty-tasting yellow crap that makes everything numb — lips, tongue, cheeks, throat. But it did the job. Not that I would remember if it DIDN’T do the job, since they also dosed me up with Versed, a wonderful drug for making people forget just about anything.
Seven hours later and I’m still pretty sleepy. I wonder if this means I’ll sleep well tonight? I kind of doubt it. My MO, usually, is to be exhausted as hell, dead on my feet, right up until the moment my head hits the pillow. Then I’m wired.
I didn’t get a video of my exam, but I imagine it went something like this:
D.
Clutter
I wonder often about memory. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have a collection of bits and pieces from my past which surface at odd times for no apparent reason. It’s not like dream imagery, which often has a clever if not vicious logic. It’s random. It’s the crap that falls out when you open an overstuffed desk drawer.
There’s the old geezer in Bandon, I think it was, who had the big model train collection. He would show it (reluctantly) to children. I suspect he preferred other adult hobbyists.
The hotel in Newport, Oregon, with beachfront rooms, and a large moon jelly tank in the lobby.
A drugstore near the Alamo. Jake’s teething, so everyone’s miserable; one of us gets the bright idea for me to run into the drugstore for Q-tips and Orajel. Put the Orajel on the Q-tip and let him chew on the cotton nub. Works like a charm.
Garner Ted Armstrong on our old black-and-white TV . . . I’d watch him while eating lunch, macaroni and cheese from the tinfoil pot pie cup, listened to him weave Mae Brussel-style daisy chains leading from the Soviet Union’s latest acts of aggression straight back to Revelations. (Oy, vey: a Mae Brussel website with TRANSCRIPTS. MP3s with 700 hours of audio. A man could get lost for days, mummified remains fixed in front of his laptop, the Wiki entry for the Zodiac killer, the browser history leading back to Charles Watson, Lee Harvey Oswald, the SLA . . .) No, I didn’t believe in the End Times, but it fascinated me that I lived in a culture where apparently most people DID believe.
My garden, a narrow rectangular plot of soil between the driveway and Sadie’s fence. Good for corn, radishes, tomatoes. Corn cobs would grow to three or four inches then peter out. Red ants loved that soil, too. Summers, the ants would swarm, queens and winged drones would come out to play, and my father was there waiting for them with lighter fluid and a match.
I could go on.
Video of my infant son sleeping. Beethoven’s Seventh playing as a sort of soundtrack. I hold the video camera on him for a long, long time because I know I’m seeing something that is priceless. The same video camera is stolen when our house (vacant for remodeling) is burgled. They take the contractor’s tools, our generator, our tools, the camera, our telescope.
Driving north on the 101 through one windy coastal Oregon city after another, we find an anomaly, a non sequitur: a store that sells nothing but telescopes. Do we buy one? Hell yeah. We get spectacular views of the moon from our pollution-free oceanfront vista. Yeah, this telescope will get a lot of use.
Texas, 1997, late at night, I take my 18-month-old son outside to see comet Hale-Bopp. Hold him high above my head, as if that way he might see it better.
Sometimes I think I’m Billy Pilgrim.
D.
Alice vs. Alice
I suspect few of my readers are familiar with American McGee’s Alice, a ten-year-old video game which was in the opinion of many* an instant classic. Tim Burton’s Alice will, naturally, garner far more attention; it’s big box office, features “sexiest man alive” Johnny Depp, and has twin virtues of being an expensive special effects flick and the product of Tim Burton’s mind. But does Burton’s Alice really deserve such a disparity of focus?
Consider:
1. McGee’s Alice: badass. Burton’s Alice: nice ass.
Maybe. It’s a Disney movie, after all — we see a bit of Mia Wasikowska’s neck and that’s about it.
2. McGee’s premise: an insane Alice returns to Wonderland to regain her sanity. Burton’s premise: an inane Alice returns to Wonderland to dodge a marriage proposal from a chinless lordling.
3. McGee’s message: Guilt is a bitch. But find some way-cool weapons (such as the brutal croquet mallet, jackbombs, and the ever helpful vorpal blade) and you can slaughter physical manifestations of your guilt to your heart’s content. Burton’s message: It’s okay to be your own woman.
Yes, it’s a feminist movie, and I would have cheered the ending had not Burton (through the proxy of Johnny Depp) indulged in that cretinous dance routine.
4. McGee’s soundtrack: from Chris Vrenna — dark, moody. Unforgettable. Burton’s soundtrack: um . . . forgettable.
Okay, I’m running out of compare-and-contrast steam. Alice wasn’t a bad movie, just a disappointing one. I’m of the same mind as critic Amy Biancolli, “But its single biggest failing — an affront to Lewis Carroll and the charms of nonsense literature — is the fact that it makes sense.” Biancolli doesn’t quite get Carroll’s Alice, though. For me, the charm of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was the delightful conflict between the hallucinatory action and Alice’s proper, no-nonsense response to it. McGee captured that aspect of Alice; Burton didn’t.
There was a lot of bizarreness in the movie, but not the good kind of bizarreness. Why does the White Queen prance and mince? Why do the Mad Hatter’s eyes keep changing color? And why the strong sexual subtext between the Mad Hatter and Alice? If Burton had run with that, well, fine. Instead, he gave us bits and clues, as if an entire plot thread had been edited from the screenplay — but not completely.
Oh, one other thing: it strikes me as wrong, somehow, for any Alice-inspired story to be predictable. This movie wasn’t 100% predictable. 98%, perhaps?
I know, I know. Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch.
D.
*My son and me, to name two.
Looking for fun, are we?
The Craigslist personals section is my daily dose of comics.
I’m an fun woman just out of a relationship and i just wants to let go and have some fun. I’m looking for a fun down to earth guy that have some fun with. No issues or hang ups. Just NSA fun. I have a thing for younger guys but any age is fine as long as you are goodlooking and in decent shape.
SEND PICS & STATS or NO REPLY!!!
Please be serious!!!!
I was good with this until the end. Please be serious? I thought you wanted FUN!
Still recovering from last week.
Still expecting (irrationally, now) the pager to go off.
D.
On a lighter note . . .
From the Facebook group, Can this poodle wearing a tinfoil hat get more fans than Glenn Beck?
I'll bet they are. I'll bet they are.
I thought it was only Republican congressmen who lived in closets, but I’m beginning to wonder about Eric Massa.
D.
What I wish I could say
I worry about my son. A lot. Such is the prerogative of the parent. I worry that his world is so small: a room with a computer (albeit a computer that is a window to the world), the inside of a car, a school. We don’t travel much anymore. We never did travel much, but we travel even less than we used to. I don’t get to expose Jake to so many things I was exposed to: places, people. Different kinds of entertainment. I worry that with such a small world, he won’t dream big. And I wonder if that’s such a bad thing. We cone down our dreams as we get older, not without a measure of frustration and sadness. Perhaps he’ll be spared the angst. But is it right for him to have such a restricted view as a 14-year-old?
He’s brilliant, my son, but sometimes I worry that he lacks passion. He just never seems to get excited about much. And then I wonder, is that such a bad thing? Great passions make for great sorrows. If he were an unhappy teenager, perhaps my anxieties about his equanimity would be more justifiable. It could be taken as a sign of depression, for example. But he’s not unhappy. His mother and I often wonder how two such as us could have such a happy kid.
You’re probably thinking, Sounds like he’s doing just fine. Or if you’re having problems with your own teenagers, perhaps you’re getting pissed off at me for wringing my hands over such petty issues. We’re not searching his clothing for drugs. We’re not bailing him out of jail. We’re not paying huge bills for psychological counseling. He’s a good kid.
I’m perplexed, is what it is. Confused and not a little dismayed that someone so close to us, so similar to us in so many ways, can at the same time be so unfamiliar.
And I guess I share with so many parents the fruitless desire of wanting to know the future.
D.