4/21: What I Accomplished Today

1. Finished three Pogo badges; there's a four-badge Super Badge this week and next, so now I'm 3/4 of the way toward finishing it.

Pogo has two badges a week, and then a "wild card slot" that you can fill with any badge you wish from the previously offered ones. If you finish all the weekly badges in a year, you get a badge for the year. I have the 2003 and 2006 badges, and so far, I have all the 2007 badges. I am now working on the 2005 badge book. When I have finished it, I will do 2004. Then I will be caught up, and I do not know what I will do.

(It's not that I'm obsessive-compulsive; it's just that I'm obsessive-compulsive. Anal-retentive does, in fact, have a hyphen in it.)

2. We watched The Devil Wear Prada. Cute movie. Not an Oscar movie, but cute. I can see why Meryl was nominated; she took a cardboard cutout, flatter than Flat Stanley, and gave her redeeming social value.

I never used to like Meryl Streep; she seemed more an impersonator than an actor ("Now I'll do New Jersey for you. Now Australian. Now Austrian."), and everything was so earnest and serious. Even when she did comedy, it was the one in which she & Goldie Hawn were dead, which had some cute moments, but wasn't very good. Now, though, she's making some lighter films; from the interviews , acceptance speeches, and award banquets we've seen her at recently, she seems to be one of the few genuinely grounded and therefore potentially happy people in show business.

This was also our first movie from NetFlix. It froze in several spots. Our player has never done this before. We hope that was an anomaly.

The movie was interesting from a myth and ritual standpoint because of the age-old pattern: after a series of tests in which our hero[ine] performs with mixed results, she is finally set an impossible task on an impossible timeline--and she succeeds. (In mythology, it's almost the goal of the setter of the task to destroy the young person in question with this task. That was certainly the intent here.) She succeeds, however, and realizes she is turning into the task setter: the Fisher King is dead; long live the Fisher King. However, instead of regaining what is usually the hero's rightful position as the new ruler, she rebels against her transformation and returns to a path she sees as more properly hers.

Sorry; whenever I get like that, I usually need to play a few minutes of World of Warcraft.

(And this movie came out just as Ugly Betty would have been solidifying its first few episodes, and much of it seems to have drawn inspiration from this movie. I think Ugly Betty is a more positive statement; she refuses even to begin the Sell-Out path, and people eventually respect her for Who She Is rather than Who She is Willing To Become.)

3. After the movie, we watched Mad About You and Clatterford on Tivo. Mad About You is a favorite; for some reason, we never watched this show in first run, and the writing and acting are very sharp and nicely done. We also simply are Paul and Jamie, but we take turns as to which is being which. In today's episode, they were having one of those "nothing you say can possibly actually mean what it means at face value; what are you really saying?" conversations that we have at least once a week. They're funny afterwards, but at the time, you just want to yell swear words and say, "Honest to gosh, I really, really do mean that your shirt is cute. I was not implying anything about your weight today relative to your weight last week, nor am I making passive aggressive statements about your relationship with your mother. It's all good, and your shirt is cute."

I've heard several comments disappointed with Clatterford, the new Jennifer Saunders (it airs in the U.K. as Jam and Jerusalem) show. I think the disappointed were expecting the wrong show; they were expecting another Ab Fab. She's already done that; why would she do it again? (Yes, I know, that would have been really fun, too, in a different way.)

Clatterford is not Ab Fab. Better points of comparison would be either Calendar Girls or Last of the Summer Wine.

You may remember Calendar Girls; it was a Helen Mirren from a few years ago in which a Ladies' Guild group needs to raise money and decides to put out a topless calendar. This show is also about a Ladies' Guild, although with slightly different emphasis. If you know this movie, the original British title of the show makes sense, since there's a whole montage in which we see the women sing the hymn based on the Blake poem (it starts "and did those feet" and ends "on England's fair and verdant lands" or some such; I don't have the poem here at home. It was one of the hymns at Diana's funeral and was supposed to be one of her favorites); there are several references to "Jerusalem." The "jam" part is because these groups are often well known for making jams and jellies and blankets and other odd craft projects. (The women's group at the church in which I grew up often quilting bees and other craft-related socials.)

Last of the Summer Wine is not one of my favorite Britcoms on PBS on Saturday night. It's basically a show in which nothing happens--Seinfeld if the characters were 40 years older and, for the most part, not smart alecks. It has a huge ensemble cast, but the real star of the show, as far as I'm concerned, is Yorkshire; every episode usually has at least a full minute, all together, of gorgeous Yorkshire scenery.

Clatterford, in many ways, is 180 degrees from Ab Fab; it's essentially about the positive aspects of small town living (as the two works I mentioned above are). Yes, it can be claustrophobic, and one step out of line will set tongues a-wagging, possibly for decades--but on the other hand, it's harder to fall through the cracks if you're part of a mesh that strong. (That metaphor's mixed, but it's late. Bear with me.)

It's an ensemble cast, but I suspect the idea got sold because it was to be a Saunders/Lumley/French reunion. Ironically, they all have minor roles, although Saunders writes the show. Saunders plays the anti-Edina; instead of utter indifference to her children, she is attempting to live out her own fantasies through them, and the daughter, at least, couldn't be less interested. (Her never-seen son [echoes of Sage?] seems to be a celebrity in his own right.) Lumley, former Avenger, former model, former Patsy, plays a dottering crone. French is also the direct opposite of the Vicar of Dibley; instead of the astute caretaker, she's multiply-personalitied/whatever we're supposed to be calling this right now. While all of the performances on the show are very nice, French's is gorgeous. Turns out all three of these women can act.

In my favorite episode so far, the leader of the women's organization has learned their group is to be inspected. She is terrified; their attendance is down, the organization is eschewed by most (not all) of the town's younger women, and protocols aren't always followed. She calls an emergency meeting to help organize the meeting at night which will be inspected, but she is interrupted because an older gentleman in town, widower to a former Guild member, has been letting himself and his house go, and the women rally to clean his home and provide him with some food and other comforts. The obvious point: yes, of course the organization deserves to survive, and will survive--but to care for each other and friends, and not to fill a niche in a hierarchy or supply the high members with regalia and pomp. An American sitcom would have had a whole scene in which that point was beaten by 15 rocks, probably flung by a precocious child (because apparently everyone in America older than 28 is an idiot, to hear our television tell it).

Anyway, Clatterford's not what I thought it was going to be. And I'm glad.

4. Read more in the Oppenheimer biography. We're actually at Los Alamos now, so it's more interesting; he had been told he'd have to give up all his Communist and other leftist connections to lead the Manhattan Project, and he did. There are incidents here and there, but when they're the exception and not the litany, they're interesting. I'm still not convinced I'm going to finish it (I finish almost everything I read because I find most things interesting, but if I don't find something interesting, I grant myself dispensation and move on), but I'll get as far as I can by the luncheon on Wednesday and see whether I feel like reading further.

5. Got my draenei warrior to level 23. This including her finishing the Bloodmyst quests, so that was really cool. I also got her her first polearm. I couldn't be prouder.

6. I haven't played the BigFish Game for today yet; it looks like a business simulator, and I usually enjoy those. I've downloaded it. I'll see if I can get it played tomorrow.