Bad-TV-we-love Hangover ...

Spent the whole day doing nothing but watching the entire first season and the first episode of the second season of Footballer's Wives. We discovered this show recently on BBCAmerica - apparently in the UK they're already on the 5th season, but on BBCAmerica they just finished Season 3 and started on Season 4.

This show is just deliciously awful. It's total Soap-Opera, Dynasty-for-white-trash-nouveau-riche British football (soccer) players and their wives, mistresses, wives' lovers, long-lost babies, yadda yadda yadda. Our favourite characters are, of course, Tanya and Hazel: man-eating, chain-smoking, ball-busting vagine dentate who are just about the only characters to have survived to season 4, apparently.

Interjection: I find it interesting somehow that in England, it's the Northerners who are depicted as stupid, brutish, ignorant, "white trash", and have the "thick" accents, while in the US it's the exact opposite.

We've been enjoying quite a lot of TV about these types of characters, actually, since our other great "discovery" late in the TV season this year was My Name is Earl. Joy steals absolutely every scene. "Boys, get your mama's white plastic stripper shoes out of the lego box!" Unlike Footballer's Wives, though, Earl is a really, really sweet show. It manages to have its cake and eat it to: ridiculing an entire socioeconomic segment of American culture while still treating them with a lot of affection and warmth. It's one of the freshest, most clever shows we've seen in a long time.

Catch-up Post

I was doing pretty well in April, then May was a total loss, blog-wise.

Lots of things happened in May: we saw Madama Butterfly in Portsmouth, fostered a copper-coloured husky for a while; I found a huge mess of flickr groups to which I have started contributing photos and which I will be doing more of; I finally did something about my stalled Greek-reading and proposed starting an online reading group for Euripides' Medea, which is now in full swing; I started getting more and more interested in videoblogging and started uploading some full-sized videos and am also now shopping for a digital camcorder; we had the annual SomDog presence in the Somerville Memorial Day Parade (for which I appear to be cursed, when it comes to getting video footage), and to ring out the month, on Tuesday, May 30, our dog Prospero fell off the 2nd-floor balcony to our abiding terror and suffered a severe dislocation of his right hip (and thankfully, nothing more). I've uploaded some photos to flickr and am in the process of making videos to document his recovery.

Sorry for the boring, no-links, no-photos posting, but I've got to get the blogging RE-jumpstarted somehow and this is the quickest way.

Zap!

Now I know why the CIA trained Latin American Secret Police to use electrodes as torture devices. I had nerve conduction tests done today just to make sure that the persistent chronic sensory peripheral nerve problems I've had since my "floxing" with Levaquin and Cipro 3 years ago are not signs of a more serious, or degenerative, problem.

Take it from me; if you don't HAVE to have a nerve conduction test done, DON'T. It's ... very ... VERY ... painful. 90 minutes of it.

666

SOOO much going on I've fallen wayyy behind on blogging (but since so much has been going on I have even more of a backlog to blog ABOUT).

But I just couldn't let this day go by without a quick nod to the apocalyptic cadences of the date (and it works whether you do European or American order): 06/06/06.