David Bleich wishes to have your e-mail address so that he may "bombard" (his word) you with words of wisdom. If you feel up to a little bombardment, then the easiest way is probably to just e-mail El Bleich at dblh (at) mail.rochester.edu.
Let me just preface this by disclaiming that everyone and everything that I hold dear is okay and unharmed. Alles in ordnung, mmkay? So don't be frettin'.
So to get the full sweep of this story, you need to know that my grandfather is out of town (in New Yawk City) through Wednesday, and while he is gone it was arranged that I stay with my grandmother to make sure nothing happens to her. Yesterday was the first day of this arrangement. And yesterday, in the late evening, after my grandmother had already gone to bed, it so fell out that there was a fire in the apartment directly opposite hers. I heard an insistent beeping (of the opposite dude's fire alarm, it turned out), and then came a knocking on the door from the neighbors investigating the beeping and smelled smoke. Fire wasn't directly visible, but there was a flickering light, as though from fire, reflected in the strip of metal that formed the threshold of the opposite dude's door. I called 911 and roused my grandmother, and by the time we were making our way down the stairs, the firefighters were moving up those very same stairs. (I suppose they responded so quickly because someone had beaten me to the 911-calling punch.)
My grandmother was wearing a nightgown, a robe, and a hastily-thrown-on coat, and some footwear insufficient to the demands of the evening. I had lacked the presence of mind to grab the car keys, where we could have sat in warmth and comfort and waited out the cataclysm. Facepalm. (The keys to the apartment were in the coat I was wearing, fortunately.) I did have the presence of mind to grab my cellphone, so we called my parents and informed them of the situation. It turned out that they promptly grabbed some coats and boots and other warmth supplies (like, for no apparent reason, a sleeping bag) and bundled themselves and my brother into the family car and came over, braving the terrible roads to do so. While that was happening, my grandmother and I were invited inside the adjacent apartment-house by some friendly neighbors of hers, and there we waited for the cataclysm to end and my parents to appear. Which they did, complete with that darn sleeping bag. We had some tea and sandwiches and sat around waiting for the all-clear.
So the firefighters put out the fire and let us back in. Everything was unharmed in my grandmother's apartment, and so, after a decent interval to let the adrenaline die down, we went to bed. The end.
I HAVE SURVIVED THE ORDEAL BY FIRE. NO POWER IN THE 'VERSE CAN STOP ME.
A fake overload is when one takes a course as an audit, but as a condition of the audit, the professor demands that you do all the reading and most of the writing. Thus with Bleich's Problems in Western Civ this semester. Not that I would have passed up the course; I enjoyed it tons, and I'm not just saying that because he took us out to dinner. But it made things harder than they would have been otherwise.
So... what did peeps think of the Dollhouse double whammy on Friday last? Assuming anyone watched at all. I did, even though I should have been doing homework instead. It's crunch time, and I'm not sure how exactly I'm going to finish everything. Dollhouse was pretty damn excellent, however. Summer Glau was in it, both episodes, and she was rather substantially evil, which only goes to prove my theory. Would you like to hear (for "hear," read "read") my theory? My theory is that when Firefly actors cross over to other Whedonverses, they do so with the intent of destroying, or at least wreaking havoc in, those Whedonverses. I'm not sure why, but let's look at the track record:
1. Nathan Fillion, Buffy Season 7. Tried to help the First Evil unleash an apocalypse, so, pretty much, evil himself.
2. Gina Torres, Angel Season 4. Okay, she's a touch ambiguous, since she was trying to bring about world peace, but she was doing it using mind control, and negating people's free will. Also, when Angel thwarted her benevolent-nefarious plans, she got pretty tetchy and decided to destroy the world anyway, so... evil.
3. Adam Baldwin, Angel Season 5. Representative of the Senior Partners of Wolfram & Hart, the evil law firm. So... evil.
4. Nathan Fillion again, Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Captain Hammer is a corporate tool. He threw a car at Dr. Horrible's head. He hates the homeless, also. Evil.
5. Alan Tudyk, Dollhouse Season 1. Alpha's insane and evil.
6. Summer Glau. As we've already seen.
You can also count Jonathan M. Woodward, who played Tracey in the Firefly episode "The Message." Not exactly a scrupulous and upstanding character there, but not exactly evil. His characters in the Buffyverse are much more eviler. In Buffy Season 7 he played a vampire (for those of you playing along at home, vampires = evil), and in Angel Seasons 4 and 5 he played a Wolfram & Hart employee... which, you would think would be sufficiently evil, until he turned out to be supererogatorily evil by being a cultist of the ancient demon-king Illyria. He sacrificed our beloved Freddikins to bring Illyria back to life. Not cool.
The only exception is the brief appearance by Summer Glau in the Angel Season 3 episode "Waiting in the Wings," as the enchanted ballerina with the dubious Russian (?) accent. She was not evil then, but on the other hand she hadn't been cast as River yet at that point.
Speaking of graduates from the Whedon school of fake talking: Alexis Denisof. Much worse actor without the put-on English accent. Don't really understand that, but listening to him is weird. He hits his r's really hard. "The Dollhouse is involved in murrrrderrrr." Bizarro.
Speaking of not Dollhouse anymore, tonight I went out to dinner with my classmates from Problems in Western Civilization to Chen Garden on Monroe Ave. It was the professor's extremely generous treat, and it turned out to be an excessively good time. I miss people, and being out with people. Need definitely to do more of that. Haven't really had time for social activities this semester, due to my fake overload (I'll explain that sometime later) and real job. Sigh. Definitely need to make some phone calls after the semester's over. There's movies to see, and dinners to eat, and people to talk to (last but the opposite of least).
But until then, much work remains to be done. So I'll go and some of that. Toodles!
w00t! Monday's presentation and paper abstract and annotated bibliography, all of which I had planned to prepare today, have been pushed back to Wednesday! Oh sweet bliss!
I did finish that Shakespeare paper, though. So there's that.
