summer glau/winter babe

I've never watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles aside from seeing the last few minutes of it the last few Fridays, i.e., what airs just before Joss Whedon's latest TV venture, Dollhouse, takes over the Fox Network airwaves.

But if I were to watch the small-screen Terminator, it would probably be because of another Joss Whedon connection: Summer Glau is in it. Preternaturally smart / crazy / beguiling / scary as River in Whedon's Firefly, and absolutely owning Serenity (the Firefly movie), the idea of Ms. Glau as a terminatrix is pretty darn appealing.

However, Summer Glau alone does not a TV series make. For those o' you who might be watching Terminator: is the show worth adding to my TiVo season passes? I have an iffy record with James Cameron creations; it's probably easiest to sum it up by saying that I liked the first two Terminator movies just fine, and everything else seems pretty half-baked and not nearly as smart/cutting-edge as Cameron thinks he's being (The Abyss, Titanic, Dark Angel, etc., etc.).

By the way, I'm still reserving judgment on Dollhouse, but I hate that I'm this far into a Whedon joint and not totally crazy about it yet. After I watch this past Friday's episode, maybe I'll blog on My Dollhouse Impressions Thus Far.

dreams so real

You may be an undigested bit of Frisco Melt, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of Chili Mac...
- Ebeneezer Goosens, 2009


Last night, after leaving work at 11 PM, I picked up some good eats from Steak n Shake on the way home. Once I arrived back at the domicile, the wife and I chowed down, then spent a couple of hours unwinding, mostly with a TiVo'd Wife Swap that aired earlier that evening. We finally went to bed around 1:30 or 2 AM.

That night, I could swear that I started feeling sick. Not "I ate something too late and it's not agreeing with me" sick at my stomach, more like "damn, I must have caught a cold at work tonight" sick. I remember kinda sorta waking up a few times with my throat hurting. I felt feverish at one point, and I was thinking stuff like "it's gonna suck to be so sick during the BVLL Rookie Draft tomorrow" and "wonder if I'll be well enough to go to work on Sunday?" (I had today - Saturday - off.)

I finally woke up for good today around 9:30 AM and... felt completely fine. And have felt fine all day up to and including right now.

I'm really puzzled by this. Once my throat starts hurting, it doesn't un-hurt in midstream - I always get the full-blown cold. So was I actually feeling sick last night, or did I dream the whole thing?

feels like 1974

Last week, my ex-wife left me a voice mail telling me that the Milner-Matz Hotel in Bluefield, West Virginia, had collapsed.

My first thought wasn't about how the Colonial Theater, which was next door and is now crushed in the rubble, had hosted many a celebrity of the '20s and '30s, or about how the once-swank Matz hotel I remembered only from its seedy '70s Milner-Matz denouement wouldn't be part of the Bluefield landscape any more.

Instead, it was "where will people commit suicide in Bluefield now?"

For me, the Milner-Matz was part of that weird early-to-mid-'70s vibe where it seemed like everything might fall apart. Vietnam, race riots, Patty Hearst, Baader Meinhof, Watergate, airplanes being hijacked to Cuba, "Duke/Funk" graffiti on a bathroom stall at Grant's Department Store, Wacky Packages, Jimmy Hoffa, WHIS' March of Dimes Telerama, Quincy, Greeks vs. Turks in Cyprus, women trying to shoot Gerald Ford, shirtless Mark Farner, The Arthur Smith Show...

...and people jumping off the roof of the Milner-Matz on what seemed like a weekly basis. Yes, that was the rich social tapestry of my early youth. Sometimes I think the oddness and uniqueness of those times gets lost in the shuffle between Woodstock and disco, but they're all vivid memories for me.

The Milner-Matz roof jumpers of the '70s seemed like a local manifestation of the symptoms plaguing the nation and, heck, the world. It doesn't surprise me that the Bluefield Daily Smellograph... er, Telegraph (sorry, old Welch Daily News loyalties showing there) doesn't mention the Milner-Matz suicides in their retrospective article, but if I'd written the piece, I would have at least worked in a passing mention.

Anyway, I'm going to relive some more childhood memories now and go be afraid of the cover of Hair of the Dog. Have a nice day!