i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

in honor of labor day, today i ... went to work, even though the rest of systems¹ had the day off. but only sort of went to work. i sat in my office and ran ghost images on new computers and surfed the internet while the images ran, mostly so i wouldn't have to do it tomorrow.

the other thing is that my big academic passion, since high school, has been w.s. gilbert, as in gilbert and sullivan. if i ever went and got a phd in english, i'd write my thesis about the satire in gilbert's works as influenced by the victorian culture he was writing in. i've been carting around a box of index cards literally since high school, each card with a different quote on it, something relating to this thesis i thought i was going to write someday. i probably won't ever write it, but i can't stop doing the research, and so today after i finished ghosting the machines at work, i went over to davis from the undergrad library and checked out about fourteen books on gilbert's life and works that i'd never read before.

... i am unquestionably the biggest dork ever. so now that y'all know i am basically a loser, let's talk about tv, okay? good.


the thing that makes monk so particularly brilliant is tony shalhoub's physicality. he's a good actor, but it's the way he uses his body that makes monk so real. he's twitchy and obsessive, but never in a way that doesn't seem real. his hands, the way shalhoub holds his hands, is so entirely perfect. his hands completely encompass the entire way that monk is crazy. i would watch the show only for the way shalhoub moves, uses his body, uses his motion. there's a level to monk's obsessively touching things that is in the acting, and the acting is perfect.



finally getting around to watching this ... the summer was too insane for me to watch much of anything, much less a full season of anything. but this, this fraser in season one is so different than season three fraser. and it's not just vecchio, though it's partly vecchio; mostly it's what we get to see - we see so much more of fraser not being a mountie. he has an apartment! he has a life! he wears jeans!

i like this fraser, and i'm liking these episodes. i have no interest in fraser/vecchio, and not for a lack of vecchio love; just, you know, i don't see the attraction. (vecchio/kowalski, though, i'm always on the lookout for good ray/ray slash.) but vecchio's interesting, and a different sort of foil to this slightly more normal fraser. i mean. season one, this isn't supermountie. sure, he's brilliant and weird and still completely fucked up, but he's not perfect. he's a lot more human.

the writing's sharper - more conscious of itself, i think, and when it's funny and when it's not - but it feels like less parody, more honesty. i don't know. y'all know how i feel about s3, and about ray kowalski, and i still do prefer kowalski to vecchio, both when it comes to a partner for fraser and as a character himself, but, you know, vecchio's a better foil for fraser, and the writing's better, so it's hard not to like him. you know what i mean, you people who've seen all four seasons. season one is better. that doesn't mean i don't love season three.

but when it comes right down to it, season three is distinctly lacking in horse-related shenanigans, and also fraser in jeans. two things of which i am very fond.

this morning the icat barfed on my copy of "what is a marc record, and why is it important?" i suppose i now know his views on the anglo american cataloging rules (2nd edition), and to be honest, i have to admit that i share them.

in conclusion, ray kowalski.

1: i am working for systems in the davis library, the main library on campus, in the desktop group, which basically means i spend twenty hours a week installing preset images onto new lab computers and pulling harddrives out of old lab computers and writing webpages. i have my own office. my boss TOLD me to install aim on my computer. no one checks my history or my internet use stats. pretty much it rocks.