Love Bites - Modern Plagues

The final episode of Love Bites wraps up Annie's storyline with Matt. It also brings back Jodie and Charlie (aka the Banana Bread couple) and Kyle and Drew (the engaged gay couple) from episode 2. So it was almost like coming full circle at the end. If only all the stories were better.

Love Bites - Boys to Men

This is episode seven, the penultimate episode of the show. Unlike all the other odd-numbered episodes, I mostly liked this one. It actually aired a couple of weeks ago, and I'm only now catching up on my reviews. For some reason the writers got lazy with this episode and just titled the three stories after the couples' names, rather than after the plots.

Other Stuff

In other news, I started reading Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. Wow, what a difference in readability! I was beginning to think that every Victorian writer was as stilted as Allan Pinkerton (or whoever his ghostwriter was). Verne possessed an easygoing style that is refreshing. (At least that's what it's like in translation. Don't know what the original French was like, but it ought to be good, given the wide and enduring popularity of his books.) Plus the characters are three dimensional, with eccentric traits and their own way of talking. Except for Aouda, who is simply a pretty cipher at the moment, though I hope we'll get more after they leave Asia. I have to keep reminding myself that Verne is French and not an English writer, because Phileas Fogg seems so quintessentially English.

Pinkerton Practices

I finished reading another Pinkerton story, this time "The Burglar's Fate" from 1884. There's actually more than one burglar in the story, and they are more like bank robbers and perpetrators of check fraud. So the title seems to be referring to an abstract, hypothetical burglar, i.e. the inevitable fate of a burglar is to be captured and sent to prison for his crimes. It's Victorian moralizing (and Pinkerton self-promotion) at its best.

Anyway, four criminals conspire to rob a bank in Geneva (I think Geneva, Illinois), and Pinkerton is called in afterward. One robber is an inside man at the bank, and his accomplices are his gambling buddies who plan to split the proceeds with him. I found this story more readable than the Expressman case because there is actual evidence on which Pinkerton bases his suspicions. It's not all purely his intuition anymore, and the case moves fairly quickly, ending only a couple of months after the robbery itself. So no waiting endlessly for any progress to be made.

Love Bites - TMI

For some reason I only like the even-numbered episodes of Love Bites. So again I'm skipping an episode. (Episode 5 was not only bleh, it made fun of some of my favorite 1980s artists, Simple Minds and Howard Jones! And the third story was eye-rollingly unrealistic and annoying.)

Anyway, onto Episode 6 "TMI" which focuses on characters feeling embarrassed in various situations. I was worried I wouldn't like the stories that didn't feature Judd or Annie, but this time they were more successful, tying the stories together in a less gimmicky way.

At Last

Finally I broke through the impasse on my Madness story. I've finished one new chapter and hope to get another one up soon.

As a reminder, Madness is set in 1895 after the Oscar Wilde scandal. An asexual Holmes realizes that Watson is in love with him, and because he's a Victorian, he thinks Watson is ill and/or insane to have such feelings. However, Holmes doesn't reject Watson, because he feels guilty about faking his death. He confesses that he loves Watson and will do anything to protect him from scandal or prison. Watson agrees to go see a German doctor in the hope that he can be cured of homosexuality. This of course does not work, and Holmes decides to beg him to come home. They are in France now, still on the way back to London, and Holmes has shown some blindness about the fact that he likes to cuddle and kiss Watson even though he claims they're only friends. He says they're intimate friends.

(Holmes is in fact asexual, but he does feel romantic/emotional love for Watson, and they will be discussing the matter further in Chapter 10.) For now, enjoy Chapter 9, in which Holmes is semi-compatible with Watson's desires.

Shadow's story

I went to the zoo today, which was thankfully open despite the holiday weekend, and though some of the animals were merely sleeping and finding shade, others didn't mind the heat and were active.

Also I wanted to recommend Psycho-somatic Sex Junkies by Shadow. It's set in BBC Sherlock-verse and is very sexy. It has the right amount of Sherlock's cold analysis, but he's not so cold as to be a sociopath. I find I don't like the darker fics that are so prevalent lately on the kinkmeme. There's only so much unrelenting angst, pain, and torture that I can stand before craving something light and happy.

Happy 4th of July

Well I have a three day weekend now, but it's not that happy given that I heard that Glenn Beck is thinking of moving to Texas. So even if his TV show's gone, we'd be plagued with him and his threats to run for Governor. Fuck. As if Rick Perry wasn't bad enough.

And before anybody suggests I move out of Texas or says "let Texas secede," you try picking up and moving away from your family, with no job prospects anywhere else. I don't fucking need lecturing from other progressive leftists who fucking abandoned us when it came to campaign funds.

Anyway I was right. I just got another form letter from Kay Bailey Hutchinson, totally ignoring what I wrote her. If she's not gonna actually read what I write, what's the point?