New River Gorge

New River Gorge Bridge, WV

I haven't been down to West Virginia in a couple of years, but since we're going to North Carolina this summer on vacation, we'll be passing through the wild and wonderful Mountaineer state. On our way back I'll make a point of stopping at the New River Gorge again, it's just so striking!
Vacation plans have become a bit dramatic since we're going with MK's entire family. The Dew's have a saying, "Someone has got to make an executive decision!" And then there's panic. Not arm waving, oh-dear!, panic, just a middling decision is then thrust upon us. That's how we end up eating skinless chicken breast roasted to dustbowl perfection for so many family dinners. Right now the panic is over which cottages to rent. We need two cottages because we're taking Bela and one of MK's niece's is constitutionally weak and has allergies. It's this big thing, and very convoluted, and honestly, I quit paying attention. I am a middle-aged woman! My brain only has so much free space remaining and I want it all to be taken up by commercial jingles (five, five dollar footlong), figuring out the hidden meaning in "Fringe", and solving the Lindberg baby case.

Judi, Judi, Judi

When I read the headline: Oscar Winner enters Dollhouse! The voice in my head was pleading, please let it be Dame Judi Dench (here seen mostly topless decades ago), but no. It's Keith Carradine. I didn't even know that he'd won an Academy Award (he won for best original song, according to imdb).
Is it just me, it is probably just me, but doesn't that show need more women on it? Especially a couple of older women? If it's semi-nudity that they're looking for, Dame Judi has shown that she's willing to go there. Just imagine the fun with the teaser the marketing crew could have with a somewhat disrobed OBE recipient on a failing US show. It almost writes itself! "Next week on an exciting all-new Dollhouse, Dame Judith Dench is reanimated as the first 'doll', 'Honey Potts', and has to go undercover as a stripper to discover the identity of the killer dealing in counterfeit Hello Kitty merchandise!
I don't want to see Keith Carradine at all, much less sans attire, and unless he's doing a sequel to "Andre", which is impossible because SPOILER: Andre dies at the end; then I don't care what he's up to. Or down to.
I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan, but I don't know if this show can be fixed. I want it to be fixed because I also love Eliza Dushku, but my whole relationship with this show is a lot like how you feel about somebody iffy that you're dating. How involved do you want to get with this person? One day they're there on your couch eating the last of the Doritos, and the next thing you know they've stolen your dog, car, wallet and headed west to 'find themselves'.
Sigh...I have to say that I much more looking forward to the return of Fringe than I am of Dollhouse.

Fringe Bonding

On Friday my father is scheduled to have surgery to remove much of his right lung. He's been battling cancer in various parts of his body for about a decade now.
My father and I have a problematic relationship. In some ways we're alike, we have the same sense of humor, but in other ways we're so diametrically opposed that it's difficult to believe that we're sharing the same plane of existence. Which also might explain why we both love Fringe.
So, yesterday I was at the hospital all day with my dad while he got biopsied and scanned. While we waited all he wanted to talk about was Tuesday night's Fringe. Which we did. My mother sat by the bed and knitted barely listening, sometimes interjecting something along the lines of: A cow in the lab seems unsanitary. I would argue that the cow is a metaphor for the easily led masses, but that seems to pat a conclusion to draw. For all I know the cow is just a cow, or maybe an ancient god reincarnated who is really leading Walter. Or the cow is just a cow.
Anyway, Dad seemed to be in much better spirits by the time I left, fully satisfied that we'd plumbed the depths of meaning within Fringe...and more importantly, his mind was off all of the medical stuff at hand. Better to bond late than never.

Fringe 1.8 "The Equation"

Best Walter line: These medieval cracks are more proficient at phrenology than psychopharmacology.
Best Astrid line: What's up, Chachi?

With Fringe you never know if something just is something, or if it's something more, or something else entirely. That said, I caught the whole windshield wipers-as-metronome before the kid, Ben, mentioned the tempo of them to his father. But wipers are like that anyway, back and forth, back and forth, almost hypnotic. Not unlike the hypnotic effect of sequentially flashing red and green lights one often finds under the hood of a car when a strange woman is in distress along side a darkened country road on a rainy night. Yes, Ben's dad, whatshisname, stops to help a stranded motorist and regains his senses later only to discover that the woman and his son are gone.
When Olivia, Peter, and Walter are brought on the case we learn that this has happened three other times in the last ten years. All of the abductees were subsequently released, but were rendered totally insane!!!! The same woman was the abductor in all of the cases, and all of the previous victims were academics, geniuses. Ben was a normal kid before he and his mother were involved in a fatal (for the mom) auto accident. When Ben, after 6 days, emerged from a coma, he'd become a musical virtuoso. Initially I thought that we were going to trot down fribonacci lane with math and music, but they didn't address that at all. I was both relieved and disappointed. I didn't want the story to be that predictable, but I still thought that it would be a fun mental exercise to see where they might go with it.
Anyway, Ben's own repetitive composition is the musical equivalent of one of Walter's former mental patient friend, Dashiell's, unfinished equation. I saw this coming, and felt a little smudge over it.
So, Agent Dunham goes to talk to Dr. Sumner, head of the insane asylum, to get permission to speak to Dash. Sumner is not unlike Dr. Chilton in The Silence of the Lambs. Part meglamaniac, part asshole, he runs the place like it's his personal lab and all the men and women merely rats. He's chilling in that "I know best" kind of blind way. Sumner only will allow Walter access to Dash, which begs the question, What is this mad doctor up to? It's just so manipulative, and more than a little sadistic. Still Walter agrees to the terms and venture back into that dark place to interview Dash and hopefully gain some info that will help rescue Ben and save him from losing all of his marbles at such a tender age. Where are my aggies! I want my aggies!
Sorry for the lame ass joke.
Ahem.
In an effort to get Dash to reconnect to his former obsession, an unfinished equation, Walter begins scrawling the equation out on the table with a blue crayon. I mention this because...why a blue crayon? Why not red or yellow (if we have to stick to primary colors)? Dash insists that he doesn't do math anymore and becomes angry and hostile. Walter becomes mixed up in a melee and ends up sedated, at which point Dr. Sumner refuses to allow Walter to leave and Olivia has to get a court order for the following morning to get Walter out of the mental hospital.
Meanwhile, Ben is being pushed by the woman and a virtual reality version of his dead mother to finish the musical score. The kid is at a loss on how to finish it until the woman makes his mother start to degrade into a severely injured accident victim. Ouch! I loved my mom desperately when I was a kid, so I would've figured out how to finish the thing too.
Back at the asylum walter approaches Dash once more about his won kidnapping. The only thing that Dash can offer is that he was in a dungeon in a red castle.
With Olivia out in the field canvassing, Peter shows up to pick up Walter. Dr. Sumner definitely turns nasty, throwing Peter's past back up at him and threatening to petition for guardianship over Walter. Well, this dude is definitely working on some agenda. Is he on Massive Dynamic's payroll? Does he want to be? The whole thing reeks like a self serving self serve buffet left out in the noonday sun in Miami in August.
Finally, and a little conveniently, Olivia stumbles across the red castle. A former carousel of the future damned, she finds Ben...but then the woman who took him, Ritz (or some such ridiculous hotelier name...why not just go for Hilton? Marriot? Red Roof?), tries to prevent Olivia from taking him. Girl Fight! Girl Fight! Rinse, repeat. Of course once the green and red lights start blinking we know that this isn't going to go as Olivia planned. Ritz escapes, but Ben is left behind and eventually reunited with his dad, which makes Olivia smile and I just want to cuddle her, give her a cup of coco with a big shot of Jack Daniels in it, just like what my mom used to give me when I had a rough but gratifying day at the playground.
Ritz pops up in a warehouse lab with Agent Loeb. They plug in Ben's finished composition, and voila! Loeb reaches through the solid wall of a safe and extracts an apple. While he chews on that, he kills Ritz. We hardly knew ye, Ritzy! Where's Blair Brown? You just KNOW that she's got to be behind some of this crap. She's like a female Cheney, the great puppet master pulling the strings from an undisclosed bunker.
Next Up: Peter's past catches up big time and Olivia risks the Altered States isolation chamber again to get into the mind of Dead John.

Fringe!

I know, I'm crazy for this show. Bear with me. I mean, the Buffy comic is over a month behind on releasing the idiotic arc ending issue for the Fray crossover. Man, I can't wait for that to be over. I think the storyline never fully meshed in Joss's humongous brain. It's not hard to follow, almost nothing has happened so far, it's just - dare I say it? - poorly conceived. Like somebody spent too much time at the Double Meat Palace.
Anyway, look what's on the cover of the new TV Guide!!!! I picked up a copy while standing in line at the supermarket, buying the stuff I needed to make veal w/ mushrooms and wine gravy. I found this recipe and I thought, wow, this sounds edible! So I went to the store at some point today (my sister called while I was gone) and bought food and TV Guide.
I'm soooo hopelessly hooked on this show. It's not like crack, more like crack on crack.
I haven't read the article yet, but that's only because I've been cooking, and talking on the phone, and now blogging about something I know nothing about. Life is good.

Power Hungry, Fringe 1.5

Fringe really keeps my synaptic relays on their toes. Did you notice the bald dude from episode 1.4 exiting the elevator right before the big plunge? Nice touch, J.J. It was so perfectly executed as pure throw-away that I completely missed it the first time around, and it was Cree who picked up on it. Good one.
Also, the continued use of older technologies (homing pigeons, tapes) really resonates. Call me a luddite, but this oddly appealing. It factors into the eldritch-like atmosphere and nuance...I was going to say without missing a beat, but it's so off-beat that it's a tattooed rhythm that is entirely unfamiliar to me. How would I recognize a missed beat? Genius!
I can't say yet what I think of the Vulcan mild meld connection between Liv and Dead John yet. Initially when he popped up I was hoping that he was a Massive Dynamic bio-engineered zombie, preferrably a nonbrain dining denizen of the undead, but really, either way is five by five with me. That issue though is largely moot because he's merely a cacophony of thought vestiges rattling around Liv's consciousness. Darn it.
I'm still loving Walter. Best line of the show belongs to him: "There was a test subject, everytime she hiccuped the lights would dim." He's a wealth of non sequiturs. Gotta say that I barely notice Pacey, but that's as it should be, which is cool. I'm hoping that they give Astrid something more to do than aid and babysit Walter.
Lastly, I really love the basement laboratory, although I really wish they were somewhere other than Harvard and Boston. Stick 'em in Cleveland, or better yet, Buffalo, or even better still, Carnegie Mellon U in Pittsburgh! That's just me idly dreaming...

Fringe

Deep down, I'm a skeptic who loves conspiracy theories and is a little thrilled by fringe science. I can't help it. It's like eating Funnyuns, or chocolate, or drinking cheap vodka and Tang: You just can't stop!
The new Fox show from J.J. Abrahms, "Fringe" is almost too good to be true. I didn't trust my initial assessment on the first viewing, so I watched the whole 1.5 hr premier again. I was even more blown away by the set up and premise, owing in no small part to Anna Torv's turn as Olivia Dunham. While other people are in the cast, and they are capable enough to deliver their lines, it's Torv as Dunham that sets the pace and direction of the show. She's an absolute joy to watch. She's not afraid to show emotion and go the extra yard for something that is close to her heart, but when push comes to shove, she's all FBI all the time. A weird balancing act, but Torv pulls it off.
So, I'm committing to this show. Despite how I felt about J.J.'s other show, "Lost", I'm going to stick with "Fringe" for at least the full season.
As a footnote, the show I've given up on - "The Sarah Connor Chronicles". One big WTF? Nothing but extraneous filler for an outcome that we already know. Yes, I love Lena Headey (what lesbian doesn't?), but the show itself is dreck. Too much tension is built every single week and the show just can't sustain that. It feels forced because it is. Maybe if they could've just had some more down time funny moments, something relatable, I would've thought that there was hope. But no. I'm outta there.