Ad of the Week

Political ad-makers take note: if you feature reunions of my favorite TV casts, in character and doing what they do best, I pay attention.

Likely the best political ad of the season (hard to top an all-star cast) and who is it for? A Michigan judicial candidate. Read about how it came to be on The Wire.

 

Friday night frights

The title of this post might be misleading. Specter Spectacular is an anthology released this week that I edited, and while it opens with a pleasantly eerie story ("My Rest a Stone" by Amanda C. Davis) and a straight up frightening story ("Alabaster" by Jaime Rand), the anthology as a whole isn't one fright after another. It's a fabulous mix of the frightful and fanciful. The eerie and the romantic. The horrific and the humorous.

Putting this together, I must admit that my favorite tale to come across my desk was "Wendigo" by Shannon Robinson. The tale appeals to my young-working-woman mindset with a quirky family, yet it enthralls, horrifies, and triumphs.  It's about addiction, but not merely in the substance sense of the term.

Yet I also had so much fun with funny stories like "The Haunts of Albert Einstein" -- hey, if Einstein is stuck on the ghostly plane, you think he'll sit back and do nothing? -- and "Cooter, Ass-much, and Me" -- as the title implies, it's damn funny ... and a little bit chilling.

Ghosts are fascinating creatures. But I admit to approaching horror tentatively. There's so much gore-fest out there in cinema that horror has earned a "I don't like that" rep from many people. I'd like to think that Specter Spectacular transcends that and invites in those who love the slightly mystic as well as the horrific and the otherworldly. People who enjoy folk lore and romantic tales. People who may or may not believe in "ghosts" but who are willing, in the course of a fabulous short story or two, to explore their potential.

Available as an ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo, as well as in print, Specter Spectacular: 13 Ghostly Tales is out now from World Weaver Press, just in time for your Halloween reading pleasure. Find a dark, chilling evening one night soon, and curl up with this anthology ... but maybe keep a flashlight close at hand. Just in case.

Not running, just groaning

A little over three weeks ago I decided I was going to run a 5k in October. This would mean a lot of training as I was in 5k-walk shape but not 5k-run shape. I promised  running updates.

I found a map of the course and the very next day I did the entire course. I walked most of it, but I started the interval training that had worked so well for me six years ago doing short spurts of jogging to gain strength and stamina.

By the end of that first run/walk, I was a full of emotional contradictions. As I wrapped up after pushing myself, all I could think was: Running sucks. But it's so awesome.

I was ready to do it all again.

Then disaster struck.

Okay, maybe not disaster, but it is painful and it is keeping me from running.

I've injured or aggravated the muscles in my lower back the first week I was back to teaching. Standing on a cement floor in crappy shoes (honestly, you'd think that we would have evolved to be able to stand flatfooted without any shoe-support, but nope, crappy flat-as-pancakes dress flats are more pain than promise).

During week one of The Pain In The Back Saga, my back seized while I was trying to get off the couch where I thought I'd been calmly resting and relaxing my poor, battered body. Nope. Not resting. Having a muscle seize is a bit like localized electrocution. There's pain, then the muscle stops moving. I'm told by athletic trainer types that this is known as "muscle guardianship," your body's means of preventing  you from doing any more injury to already injured or aggravated muscles. Yes, I have muscle guardians! The moniker is way cooler than the reality.

The reality was that there was no one else home to help me at the time. Since I'd been trying to stand when the muscle went into guardianship, I was now in a position where going back to sitting wasn't an option. Instead I wiggled. I managed to get myself flat on my back on the couch, then used my legs and arms to roll off onto my hands and knees. Once on the floor, I could use my legs to get myself into a standing position.

The whole thing is quite funny in retrospect -- I think it would be terribly funny to watch a video of me wiggling around without moving my back/stomach muscles -- although at the time, the experience was tinged with terror. Namely the fact that as I was alone, it wasn't like I could just holler for help until someone gave me a hand and/or put my sad ass into a gurney and cart me off to the doctor.

It's been going on for almost three weeks now. Some days are better than others. Some days I'm smarter than others. When I had a bad flare up, relapse, not-quite-a-guardian-muscle-but-you-can-bet-I-was-afraid-it-would-turn-out-that-way incident, I finally stopped taking ibuprofen sporadically to cope with the pain and started taking it methodically to address the inflammation.

It's made me appreciative of the ease of movement I usually have. Simple tasks like laundry and vacuuming become giant mountains of pain and tall spiky shards of stress. I start humming that "there's so many things your hands back can do" tune that's used in the Delta faucet commercial which might be a Sesame Street original* every time I twist, turn, bend, list, sway, reach, lean, and rollover.

It's also made me really appreciate of the headboard on my bed; more than one time, the only reason I've been able to roll over without sipping from that long, cold, drink of pain is by hanging on to the headboard and using my arms to rotate my body. ... I have to have been hilarious to watch for the past few weeks.

* (I have no proof of where the original came from and if it really is a Sesame Street original or a Sesame Street remake, but I did find a recording of Jerry Nelson as Count von Count singing the full song.)

Ad of the Week

I can't get enough of these paint chip animations. It reminds me of all the really cool work I've seen artists do with found objects -- worthless in the day-to-day sense, fabulous when made into art.

 

Ad of the Week

I love this ad so, so much. And I laughed so, so hard when I first saw it. Below, in its full glory. One part American Eagle, one part Urban Outfitters or H&M, dash of every pretentious perfume-for-young-people-reclaiming-their-freedom-that-they-never-lost ad, when in actually, it's for SEARS.

Jumping the Shark

I've been thinking about writing this post for months now, ever since the spring TV season wrapped up, disappointing me in several ways that could all be attributed to one term: jumping the shark.

The term derives from Happy Days when the Fonz literally jumped over a shark on water skis. Now it's used to describe the moment when a TV show loses its relevancy and embarks on one too many gimmicks to try and retain the audience's interest. With the exception of House M.D., jumping the shark is almost always fatal to the show.

When the character House went into a mental institution, fans were certain the show had jumped the shark, ditto for when the core of secondary characters (House's team of doctors) was fired and replaced. But the show survived both instances. Perhaps because of the same sort of wit and pluck that allowed the show to craft an opening scene one episode showcasing House making an elaborate matchbox car track in an exam room, the whole purpose of which was to launch the matchbox car over a tiny toy shark -- an allusion to the show's shark-jumping tendencies.

This spring allowed for two disappointments of my long-term show lovin': when In Plain Sight ended before it could jump the shark and when Grey's Anatomy strapped on some water skis in an attempt to outdo the Fonz.

Seriously, don't try to outdo the Fonz. He's the Fonz.

In Plain Sight was a four or five season show featuring Mary McCormick as a US Marshal for the Witness Protection Program filmed in Albuquerque. The main character (also named Mary), was a hilarious, sarcastic, no-nonsense, kickass woman with abandonment issues. Mary's father had left the family when Mary was still young, leaving Mary to take care of her baby sister and alcoholic mother. Over the course of the show, Mary repairs her relationship with her mother and sister, has a baby -- which is a huge shock, since Mary and kids was always an oil and water relationship -- and finds her father again.  With the father issue resolved, the show ended.

Oh, I wish it could have kept going. Mary was such a funny character and she played off her partner in the Marshalls Office beautifully. But I know that to have the show continue beyond the resolved father-issues, no matter how funny it might be, or how rushed and realistically uncertain her life/situation was in the final moments of the final episode, to keep going would be to lose the compelling storytelling elements and jump the shark. So In Plain Sight gracefully ended its run. (Watch this show if you haven't already!)

As for Grey's Anatomy... Oh, Grey's Anatomy. I shake my head at you.

After eight seasons of doctors making out in the extremely slow elevator of Seattle Grace Hospital, the main characters are finally finished with their surgical residencies. This was the moment that had been alluded to in the opening fifteen minutes of the very first episode of season one. All the doctors are accepting fellowships at different hospitals across the country. It was the logical place to end the show: the chicks fly the nest.

Perhaps they fly away to spin-off shows. Sometimes this is its own death sentence, but the show's already spawned one fairly successful if totally fluffy spin-off, Private Practice. Or perhaps they do the morph-into-a-new-show-that's-really-the-old-show thing that The Closer recently did when it dropped Kyra Segdwick (who played the titular character), kept the rest of the cast, and became the new-old Major Crimes.

Instead, as the baby birds tried to fly the nest, the show's writers crashed their plane.

Literally.

The second to last episode of the season ends with jumbled shots of scattered plane wreckage. And I'm sorry, but as I watched, I burst out into laughter. This has nothing to do with an inability to feel appropriate emotion on my part -- this show usually moves me to crying at some point during each 60 minute episode -- this has to do with the fact that the writers just totally lost me. I could no longer suspend disbelief.

The main characters over eight seasons have drowned, returned from the dead, been shot (on multiple occasions), had brain cancer, been hit by a bus, blown up, been in car wrecks ... a couple characters have died from these events, but most of them miraculously make it through their extremely high rate of tragedy. Oh and no one, and I mean no one, on this show ever has a normal pregnancy; babies are either miscarried with medical complications or born in the midst of tragedy.

In the season finale, Christina even wails, "Why does this keep happening to us?"

I blinked and flatly told my TV screen, "Because you've jumped the shark, honey."

Honestly, shooters on a rampage, car crashes, train crashes, ferry boat crashes, giant sinkholes opening in busy intersections, lions on the loose, bombs in the hospital (inside of patients) ... it's just ... too much. Now they've stuck six or so doctors in a plane crash and are letting most but all of them survive into the next season? And I'm certain they'll be healthy enough to do surgery in no time.

This used to be a good show. Too bad it couldn't end gracefully like In Plain Sight did, because I'm fairly certain it won't be rallying like House M.D.

Updated blogging schedule

The summer doldrums have struck this blog hard. Although I've been working all summer on World Weaver Press (working and summer being concepts that rarely produce fruit for a grad student / college instructor), Speak Coffee to Me has sadly languished. Therefore I'm announcing a new blogging schedule!

On Tuesdays I will have some sort of post! Tomorrow, Tuesday, September 4, 2012, will feature "Jumping the Shark." Oh yes, it will.

On weekends I will continue with Ad of the Week, as per request of the Jud -- my longest running and most faithful comment-maker. (Dear Jud, please note, you now have a title. This does not come with a knighting ceremony, but could with some fanagling.)

And intermittently, I will have RUN POSTs. Because after an almost six year hiatus, I'm a runner again. Who knew? But I'm also a reluctant runner. In short: this is bound to be humorous.

So that's the new blog schedule. Be seeing ya, folks!