So there is all sorts of stuff I could be posting about - what I did last weekend, things I have been working on making, deep thoughts of deepness, interesting RL events, that I have caught up on the crossover requests from that meme and am still answering them, the fact that I finally replaced the screen and keyboard on my laptop (after the crack grew to the point that I couldn't navigate my opera tabs and my S key stopped working entirely) -

but I am celebrating my new screen by catching up on my TV watching, and I feel the need instead to announce to you all that last week's HIGNFY was hosted by DENNY CRANE. With CHARLIE BROOKER as one of the guests. Not sure what all the random Star Trek references were about, but seriously, DENNY CRANE.

I was terrified for a bit that it would be too embarrassment-squicky to watch, like Tom Baker's last guest-hosting stint, but I forgot about the fact that the Shatt has transcended shame, which means he can turn even the most terrible of media appearances into self-aware comic gold. Even the bits where he 'sang'* were made tolerable by the fact that I could watch Charlie Brooker being unable to watch while making the exact same incredulous cringe-grin faces that I was.

Which is just to say, Bill Shatner and Charlie Brooker were on HIGNFY together last week, your argument is invalid.

(also, American accents on television sound really strange. All television people are supposed to speak British, aren't they?)

* why did I not know he had a new album out last year? Fandom grapevine, you have failed me again.

Here are some posts I have made to DW communities in the past week:

asexuality: Queering the Census: We ALL Count, in which I gripe about the Queer the Census campaign, which is about greater visibility for LGBT people but erases everyone who isn't heterosexual but doesn't fit it one of the L-G-B-T boxes.

common_nature: Welcome!, In which elke_tanzer and I have started a community that is all about nature, and you all should join it! And post stuff there! And leave comments!

create_my_comm: Little Details, in which we are all agreed that DW needs a community that is like l_d only awesomer, and none of us want to be the one to start it! (So you should!)

starry_sea: Anybody still here?, in which I apologize abjectly for abandoning my own community, and talk about how to get it active again.

tarot: An Amazing Tarot Blog, in which I rave at length about Pre-Gebelin Tarot History, which discusses tarot from a strictly historical and rational perspective, a perspective which is deeply awesome and far, far too hard to find.

treknovelfest: Illustration for "Three T'kay Stories", in which I have done a lot of research in the Starfleet Archives and found photographs & descriptions of the original ancient Vulcan artifacts that were used to illustrate ljc's treknovelfest entry based on my prompt, From The Terran Coyote to The Klingon K'Ortar: Tricksters of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.

...there, that can be my followfriday. :D (What posts have you made to DW communities in the past week?)

Most of those were posts I have been procrastinating on making for months! Having them done is like breathing clear air again. (Also, omg, I might actually have to change my to-do list now - I'm afraid the dry-erase marker might have set in on some of them.) There's several more I've had on hold, though - maybe now that I'm on a roll I can scratch even more of them off.

In the spirit of getting things done, how about that WIPs meme that was going around awhile ago? One paragraph from everything in my "In progress" folder, was it?

( This includes fics, meta posts, vids, fanmixes, and various stranger things, in all states of completion, fyi. )
...it says something about me that my reaction to all of that laid out is "That's less than thirty things! Not at bad as I thought!" If you ask for more information about any of them in comments, I will probably give it to you. (At length! ^_^ )

Also while I am doing random meme-y things, poall:

So I have been trying not to get to emotionally involved with the politics (though I still want to do that "Sarah Palin or TGP: Who Is More Qualified?" point-by-point comparison), but I have been following fivethirtyeight.com pretty closely. And OMG, if Obama takes the South? That will be not only win, it'll be the most important thing to happen in American politics in my *lifetime*.

***
Anyway.
1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your blog.

stellar_dust gave me "D".
...I had a list of twenty-five characters to pick from, and that was before I checked my notes. So, um, have the short list as meme x 3.

And hey, while I'm at it, why not give me two numbers between 1 and 15 and I'll write you a comment-fic where those two characters meet. :D (Random or calculated, I don't even care.)

( Five Large Fandoms )

( Five Small Fandoms )

( Five Nonexistent Fandoms )

...Yeah, I should probably stop there. Even if it means I have to leave out David Starr, and Mike Doonesbury, and Dick and Dorothea (the D's), and Diana Fowley, and Dick Grayson**, and Dickon Sowerby**, and Daystar, and Death**, and Doli the Dwarf, and ....

(** marks characters I have either written in fic or tried to write.)

I just opened a kit-kat bar that had absolutely no Crisp Wafers embedded in its chocolate! Rip off!

...In other news, am I allowed to attribute my complete lack of wordcount since Sunday to solidarity with the WGA writers' strike?

(But I'm almost half-done tagging my mp3 collection on this computer.)

ETA: OMG DENNY AND ALAN, HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU.

To Jon Stewart and the Daily Show:
How on *earth* do you do an entire segment on a new drink named after cocaine and *neglect* to mention, even obliquely, that he totally stole that gimmick from the world's most popular soft drink?


To Denny Crane and Boston Legal:
Okay, now I *know* that you're just screwing with the slashers, because that entire speech to Alan could have come right off of a passive-aggressive "why do we slash?" rant on metafandom. I'm beginning to think that my giddy dreams are right, and Boston Legal is being written to deliberately end slash as we know it. William Shatner giveth, and William Shatner taketh away...

I've spent memorial day weekend at the shore.

Alan Shore, that is. My sister's Boston Legal DVDs came in and she brought them home and I have watched over 40 episodes of Alan Shore (counting The Practice S8 which she torrented) snce Friday night. Right now, in fact, I'm sitting in her apartment on her laptop having just finished the three episodes she watched without me. Whee! My head is full of lawyer stories. Even if Alan and Denny don't confess their love for the first time until over halfway through Season One.

And my sister's cat? If someone looks her straight in the eye and says: "Denny Crane!" - she invariably meows back. Miss Darcy knows where it's at.


stellar_dust also tried to get me to watch a few episodes of Strangers with Candy for her man Steven Colbert, but I couldn't. *Physically* couldn't - it pinged my "embarrassment squick" so hard. Honestly. Colbert's brand of comedy touches close to it a *lot* - a lot of his Daily Show appearances bothered me, and I didn't make it through that Press Association speech that everyone was so excited about. The Report isn't quite as bad, because I kind of need it as catharsis - I've never been able to watch the shows he's satirizing, where the hosts don't even *realize* how badly they're humiliating themselves; at least Colbert is doing it on purpose, and has the mental capacity to be able to invite us to share the joke.

Not enjoying watching people humiliate themselves is always a problem in American society because so much of what passes for 'comedy' here these days is based on that. I went to see the movie 'Big' with the Brownies when I was five and had nightmares - even though I hid my eyes for most of it. I've adapted to simply looking away and thinking about something else until the soundtrack lets me know that they aren't trying to be funny anymore. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to watch any American comedy - even BL has hit just the wrong note a few times. Though generally, if the characters are aware that they're looking ridiculous, it doesn't bother me nearly as much, and on Boston Legal, they definitely all know how insane they are. I think that's why I fell so hard for Britcoms when I started watching them - here at last were comedies where the characters themselves understood the fundamental absurdity of the universe! But I try to work past it, I do. especially when something comes highly recommended. When I was watching SwC I was holding a piece of scrap paper up in front of my face whenever I couldn't watch; when I realized I hadn't been able to put it down for over ten minutes straight of a twenty-minute episode, I just gave up.


Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes.

DENNY CRANE!

Sometimes I sore regret that I grew up with a language which makes no distinction between formal and informal pronouns.

This comes up because I seem to be writing Boston Legal fic as a Sir Thomas Malory pastiche, and while Late Middle English *grammar* I can manage pretty instinctively, I keep having to stop and think about whether to use 'you' or 'thou'. Okay, so it's not as hard as it *could* be - clearly King Dennys uses 'thou' to *everyone*, because *everyone* is inferior to Dennys of Cranepool. Sir Alain du Côte, by contrast, always uses 'you', because Sir Alain is familiar with nobody - except with Dennys, and occasionally with whatever damosel he's sleeping with. I have a feeling that Sir Jeraint, the Knight of the Hands, uses 'you' with absolutely everyone, except when he's very nervous and forgets, because it seems like that's one of the social things Asperger's would make difficult. It's when I start with the characters who are more or less normal that I run into trouble.

I suppose that this isn't that big of a difficulty - after all, many modern languages still make the distinction, English being one of the first to drop it, so translators must handle the issue. But when I speak Spanish I usually just go with 'usted' for everyone, because none of my teachers bothered to explain how to choose (and since they all spoke different dialects anyway, they'd probably have contradicted each other), and anyway it's one less set of conjugations to remember. I have a feeling I sound comically old-fashioned, but then my grammar sucks so bad they'd be laughing at me anyway, and better too formal than too informal - anyway usted is the direct translation of English 'you'. And in English I only fall naturally into 'thou' when cursing people.

This is actually the *second* Arthurian pastiche I've attempted in the past few months. The first was an SGA retelling of the romance of "John, the Knight of the Lion", (because who other than John Sheppard would go on adventure, get manipulated into marrying a lady, and then go back to his city and get distracted and completely *forget* that he'd married her?) John uses 'you' graciously toward his men and ungraciously toward his superiors but 'thou' promiscuously towards people he considers his equals. Rodney, by contrast, thous everybody indiscriminately until they earn his respect, at which point he switches to 'you' and sticks with it, even while he's calling them idiots. Elizabeth is scrupulously correct, using 'thou' to inferiors and 'you' to superiors and equals, although she tends to fall back to 'thou' in private, even with Caldwell. Ronon uses 'thou' on everyone except those above him in his direct chain of command, because that's how they did it on Sateda. Teyla and the Athosians only use the formal (except in prayer), although she's been picking up the informal a little with people who use it to her, mostly John. Ford uses 'thou' with his inferiors and equals and 'you' with his superiors and has always felt slightly odd about the Major calling him 'you'.

And, hey, since I went there *anyway* - Mulder thous everybody as a direct affront to his aristocratic background, except when he's being manipulative. He was being manipulative when he met Scully, and then never got around to switching back. Scully is very correct in the same middle-class way as Elizabeth, but the longer she spends around Mulder the looser she gets. House uses thou exclusively except with his parents. And with Wilson's wives and Chase's father, and other attempts to be deliberately obnoxious with it. It took him almost six months to get Chase to stop using 'you' on him, and he still hasn't broken him of being polite to Cuddy and the patients. Cameron switched from 'thou' back to 'you' with him after their date, and Foremen always uses you, except when House suceeds in provoking him. Wilson also uses 'thou' with everyone, but somehow with him they assume it's affectionate rather than contemptuous.

Harry Potter uses 'thou' with everyone he calls by their first name and 'you' with evereybody else, except for Dumbledore and Snape whenever he thinks he can get away with it, and Mr. & Mrs. Weasley because they insist, and Slytherins when he wants to make trouble. Bones uses 'you' with everyone, even small children, except the people she considers hers, which is basically just the stooges and Booth. Hodgins considers 'you' to be a tool of the patriarchy; Zack calls everybody 'you' because whenever he tries to 'thou' somebody he gets shot down, except Hodgins and Bones and (when she's feeling generous) Angela. Booth takes 'thou' from Bones and his army buddies but nobody else.

SG1 always sticks with 'you' except in moments of extreme emotion, except for Daniel, who will at the slightest provocation give you a ten-minute dissertation on why English preserved the informal form, and who likes to randomly switch to 'thou' just to see Jack twitch, and has gotten everybody but Jack to use thou with him off-duty. Jack has never yet called a Goa'uld anything other than 'thou', except that sometimes with General Carter he forgets; and he's been on thou terms with Thor since about ten minutes after they met. The Asgard and the Ancients thou *everybody*, but the Nox don't, even when they're calling us children; the Tollan use 'you' but they make it clear it's only to be polite.

Darnit, now I want to write stories where they really do use middle English pronouns. Oh, wait - there's one open on my desktop right now! What a coincidence! I'll get right to that, then.

Knights Arrant,
or, the Romance of Sir Alain du Côte and the Cup of Truth

Knights Arrant,
or, the Romance of Sir Alain du Côte and the Cup of Truth
(Boston Legal fic; WIP)

( How Queen Shirley of Cranepool sent the companions forth upon their Quest. )

( How King Dennys had an altercation with a Beggar, and Sir Brad met with a Damosel most fair. )

( How Sir Brad and Lady Dyones parted from the others, and how Sir Brad did strive with a fell beast, and how Lady Dyones gave unto him courage in battle. )

(Sorry. I tried. It won't flow. Maybe more in the morning.)

iv. How they encountered a Priest most Foul; and what passed at the pavilion of Sir Daniel the Merry.

v. How King Dennys and Sir Alain set out upon the Quest of the Cup of Truth.

vi. How they found the Chapel of the Just, and what happened when they entered into it.

vii. How King Dennys fought many battles, and Sir Alain defeated the Friar of the Cup in a battle of wits.

viii. How Sir Brad was smote upon the head by a knight most dishonorable, and how by enchantment King Dennys was held captive.

viiii. How King Dennys did make love unto a damosel, and Sir Alain came upon Lady Dyones in the field.

x. How King Dennys did defeat the stratagems of the false Lady, and how Sir Alain freed Sir Brad from the captivity of the Knight of the Hands.

xi. How Queen Shirley was sore displeased, and how Sir Alain and Sir Dennys took refreshment upon a balcony.

I love to tell the story; 
'tis pleasant to repeat 
what seems, each time I tell it, 
more wonderfully sweet. 
I love to tell the story, 
because I know 'tis true; 
it satisfies my longings 
as nothing else can do.  

I love to tell the story; 
more wonderful it seems 
than all the golden fancies 
of all our golden dreams.  
I love to tell the story, 
it did so much for me; 
and that is just the reason 
I tell it now to thee.  

I love to tell the story, 
for those who know it best 
seem hungering and thirsting 
to hear it like the rest.  
And when, in scenes of glory, 
I sing the new, new song, 
'twill be the old, old story 
that I have loved so long!

(Words by Katherine Hankey, 1834-1911)

P.S. stellar_dust: If I dream about William Shatner's .... bullseye tonight, it will be ALL YOUR FAULT. And probably grounds to sue.

In honor of learning about the Nutritional Transition, today I have eaten: a bowl of cereal, a granola bar, a soft pretzel, a cup of Instant Lunch, and some sandwich cookies. Yay, starch!
(One of the few things that makes me wish I lived on my own is the dream of having fried plantains whenever I want them. Mmmm. third world food.)

Even with all that starch, and add in three glasses of milk and a can of guava juice, it's still on the low side of the number of calories I'm supposed to get a day. But, hey, I had fruit, and sweets, and bread, and milk, and salt; the only basic food groups I was missing today were cheese and chocolate.

Anyway and meanwhile. The library book I checked out for my sustainability project has sunk to the bottom of the pile; the one about alternative uses of pharmacologically active herbs among premodern cultures, which I checked out for fic purposes of course, is turning out to be very useful for class. Typical. Plus, I found my credit card marking my place in it from two weeks ago, so now I can renew my paid lj account!

Oh, and I watched this week's House and Bones and Boston Legal tonight while sewing the gauntlets and utility belt for the Drop-Bear's costume. I got stuck on the utility belt - see, KB doesn't actually have a waist, so any sort of substantial belt just looked silly. And then I thought, what do marsupials and superheroes have in common? That's right - Pouches! So even though he's a male koala, he now has a belt with a pouch on it, and is busy trying to tell me what supplies he needs, other than boomerangs, swing line (for doing the DEATH FROM ABOVE bit) and eucalyptus leaves (which are pretty near impossible to get 'round here, but he swears are a miracle drug.)

Anyway. ( House, Highlander, House, Stargate, Bones, X-files, Boston Legal. )

Today was a very nice day outside, wasn't it? *ruffles today's hair affectionately*

Now, to pray that my dinner hasn't exploded, and yesterday's Boston Legal and today's Bones and some lj time.

ETA: Nope, it exploded. Curse you, Mr. Microwave! *shakes fist*

ETA2: Okay, so that 'last week on Boston Legal' montage - did that have *any* purpose except highlighting the Denny/Alan scene at the beginning of the new episode?

On the other hand, *'ships Alan/Shirley like mad* It's curious the way that male characters perving over older women seems to be a marker of a certain type of moral ambiguity (usually coupled, of course, with some sort of gender ambiguity) in today's media. Not sure where I'm going with that, except, hmm, interesting.

ETA3: Zack and Booth are so very cute with their manly bonding rituals. I think if I get my hair cut shorter (although I'm currently not planning to) I think I'll ask for it to look like Zack's.

Well, so far the Lenten fast is going well. I kept the laptop closed during all three classes today. I also drew a Sierpinski gasket with a fractal dimension of seven, and calculated Pascal's Triangle to the eleventh level in base 36, and read two more chapters of "A History of Playing Cards."

I am *fascinated* by the dribble that book is letting out about the midieval cartier's trade. Apparently the making of playing cards was a major industry in some Rennaissance cities, enough that there were cartier's guilds and lots of disputes about imports and exports - which makes sense, because playing cards must have been one of the first cheaply mass-produced luxury items - in many countries, the making of playing cards was the first economically important use of printing techonology. And apparently women were very important workers in the trade, from the beginning. I desperately want an excuse to learn more about this, and possibly write a story on it.


In other news, I want to talk about Boston Legal some more. I know very few (if any) of the people on my flist who like slashy TV are watching Boston Legal. I just want to know *why* they aren't.

This is the fandom that my sister pimped me into by telling me "Captain Kirk and Daniel Jackson are sleeping together. *Canonically*." (Which was true.) If you're watching House or Smallville or SGA and saying "My god, are they really that gay?" - no, they aren't. Denny Crane and Alan Shore are. There's the sleeping together, and the slow dancing, and the suggestive cigar smoking, and the *constant* heavy flirting, and the pre-wedding jitters, and the frequent promises that they'll be there for each other no matter what, and no girlfriend will interfere, and the longing gazes - and that's just in the half-dozen episodes I've actually seen. I'll bet a sawbuck that it's even gayer than The Sentinel.

So, anyway, here's the BL gay marriage story that I fear I am never going to see, unless the fandom grows exponentially (as it really should):

( This is the story I told myself to go to sleep by last night. )

It would be titled "It's Legal in Boston!". Or something like that. *g* The thing is? This could be an episode of the show! Seriously! It's all one-hundred-percent in character, and fits with the tone of an average episode, and they've done storylines nearly this controversial before. The only reason I can think of that they *wouldn't* do it is if they think that resolving the sexual tension between the romantic leads would be a bad thing, which after my XF experiences I can sympathize with. On the other hand, apparently there are rampant rumors that Denny Crane is going to get a boyfriend later this season, which breaks my brain. If that's true it had better be Alan. Or lead into Alan/Denny. Would this be the first m/m slash 'ship to go canon? (Not counting Spike/Angel, which was too coy to count as true canon in my book. q:)

Today being the day that my church celebrates the Feast of St. Pancake, I came home from school (a lovely day filled with midterms and quizzes) and headed right to church, after stopping to put on my dancin' shoes and some of my grandmother's jewelery.

I ended up getting there very late, but that was okay, because we had Game Night right after, and I had great fun, but four hours straight might have been a bit much. So I ate pancakes, and played blocks and Candyland and puzzles with my little Sunday school kids and their families. (They also brought Hungry Hungry Hippos, but I didn't get a chance to play. Man is that game loud! The little one loves it, so his mother is trying to get him to agree to send it to Daddy in Iraq, so that Daddy and his friends in the National Guard can play instead. :D I hope she convinces him, I just love the image it brings up.)

Then it was bedtime for the little ones, so I played my first game of chess in *years* (and lost), and then us few remaining 'youth' (aka under-30s) pulled out the set of Quiddler cards we gave Mom for Christmas. That game, however, quickly degenerated into 'find a word in the dictionary that melannen doesn't know', which quickly degenerated, of course, into 'find the dirty words in the dictionary'. (What? It was fascinating, especially since the dictionary didn't *have* any dirty words - the entry under 'sex' didn't even *mention* the act of intercourse. And the book was only thirty years old, too.)

For Lent, I have decided to give up reading lj and fanfic during my classes. I plan to put a daily update on my lj as to how well I'm keeping it up, too. (I know, I know - baby steps, okay?)

ETA: MY GOD! Alan is *canonically* in love with Denny; I'm starting to actually suspect that they're planning to take this beyond (really, really freaking heavy) subtext. Which is just *wrong*, because it's old, fat William Shatner. And Daniel Jackson.

Title: Lawyers at 30,000 Feet
Author: melannen
Warnings, etc: Gen, Denny&Alan, ~2,000 words. Crossover, of a sort, if you're *insane*, like I am. Definitely crack.
Notes: This is me, writing without a net. Which is to say that at the time I wrote this story, I had seen all of two episodes of Boston Legal (Having seen several more episodes now, I have to say that the characterization holds up frighteningly well.) And I did *zero* background research on any of the real-world parts of this, it is most likely tragically wrong. On the other hand, I was *really* up on canon for the other TV show that's involved, since I wrote this late New Year's Eve after my uncle had had the Sci-Fi Channel marathon on *all day*. So it's really not my fault - I plead not guilty due to diminished capacity. And on the other hand, I've proven that I have an unhealthy grasp of William Shatner trivia. q-:

( Look there, Alan! )