Project Runway, The Tigers and what I'm reading and watching

What's up with all the controversy at Project Runway? All these people all so interested in who might or might not get to show at Fashion Week? Did they not pay attention when Fashion Week actually took place to see the pictures from everyone's collections? EVERYONE got to show, people. No got kicked off because of cheating-although I don't believe Jeffrey did all the work himself.

From fashion to science fiction-I'm still reading a lot of Charles Stross-and The Iron Sunrise was great. The sequel to Singularity Sky features Stross's usual wit and subversive sense of humor. The bad guys turn out to be not quite the evil Nazis that they seemed to be, the people in charge turn out to be NOT what they seemed and the good guys are just trying to keep eight million people from dying-is that too much to ask? I'm reading Accelerando now-the prequel to Singularity Sky and it's much like William Gibson's Pattern Recognition-very much in a future we can recognize but is still recognizably different. He has a new book coming out soon-a sequel to The Atrocity Archives and I'm looking forward to it, but I have to read the Chelsea Quinn Yarbro vampire book and F. Paul Wilson's new Repairman Jack book first...

And the Tigers-woohoo! Who would have thought after losing 119 games three years ago that they'd be in the Series? My Dad and I have argued for years over the "good pitching beats good hitting every time" (I didn't think this was true) but the Tigers have shown this old adage to be true. Let's hope their pitching can hold up and they get some big hits (thank you, Magglio Ordonez!) and hopefully they won't need any more bottom-of-the-ninth-2 on-2 outs heroics. Knowing how they've played this season, that's exactly what will happen.

Lost has been reeling me in more and more and I hope they keep it up-but I've also been watching Heroes, which has has been very good as well. The boys over at Supernatural are going through some hard times, as have the crew on Battlestar Galactica. We'll see what happens....

Lost and Fox News

First, Lost was excellent last night. To quote a friend, it totally won me back. The nice little ocean town, the book club (Is it a flashback? Who are these people? And then the plane breaks up in mid-air! It was scary and awful-once again, Lost gave me a creepy shiver, which it continued to do throughout the episode. Was Jack really underwater? How did they manage to shut the door on all that water? I hear pushing the ocean back is kind of hard...And why were Kate's wrists all banged up from the cuffs? Did she fight? Was she raped? Did she just chafe against the cuffs a lot? And Sawyer gets to be the smart-ass mouse, running the maze to get the piece of cheese...I liked the exchange-"it tooks the bears two hours.
Yeah? How many were there?".
I don't trust those Others at all-Juliet is working on Jack, Henry is working on Kate and Sawyer is being tested (well, I guess they all are). If these people tell you that the next two weeks will be hard, you should expect difficult times ahead. And the Jack's flashbacks were really good to-Matthew Fox was very good in this episode-upset, crazy, distrusting and always thinking...
Anyway, like I said, they won me over, again.

And here's a little piece of horror, courtesy of Gawker and Fox News


We like to think that we're pretty much unshockable -- especially when it comes to, say, Fox News. But prepare to have not just your socks knocked off, but also your feet, legs, groin, and thorax. Infamous hatepreacher Fred Phelps -- the Godhatesfags.com guy whose congregation of lunatics routinely pickets the funerals of gays, soldiers, miners, or pretty much anyone dead -- has threatened to picket today's funerals for four of the five Amish girls murdered in Pennsylvania on Monday. Phelps's daughter, Shirley Phelps-Roper, explained thusly:
"Those Amish people, everyone is sitting around talking about those poor little girls -- blah, blah, blah -- they brought the wrath upon themselves," Phelps-Roper said, adding that the Amish "don't serve God, they serve themselves."Rather than the simple Witness-style response-beating this situation calls for, Fox News has come to the rescue. In exchange for the Phelps freskhow's pledge to stay away from the Amish funerals, Fox is offering them an hour of radio time on Mike Gallagher's show. Perhaps hard-core Fox fans won't really notice the dogmatic difference, but if there was any particular polyp of decency left on the Fox organization, it just shriveled up and dropped off. That said, we'd like to know what atrocities we can threaten in order to get our own Fox timeslot.
Anti-Gay Kansas Church Cancels Protests at Funerals for Slain Amish Girls [Fox News via Proceed at Your Own Risk]
9 comments

My favorite phrase for the past five years has been "what's wrong with you?" It works in a vaiety of situations and is more than applicable here on those sides. The anti gay people think the Amish don't serve God? That would be, they don't serve God how YOU serve God, so they're wrong. And Fox News caved to them! I never thought they had much credibility anyway, but I think now it's in the realm of the ridiculous-which wasn't that far a leap for them, actually.