Monthly Archives: July 2009

Shoes Glorious Shoes! And Toys!

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Yesterday they blocked off the street and threw a Crazy Days sale type thing downtown.

The streets seem to be back to normal today, but I believe a lot of the businesses are still having fabulous sales. The shoes above are from Center Sports, and the shoes below are from Brown’s Shoe Fit.

But there were also toys from L’il Wizards, making me wish I had a kid in my family, which would give me an excuse to buy toys.

And possibly the most fun toy ever, for kids but possibly not for parents who just want some quiet.

And lots of apparel from Main Street Kids, and other neat stuff from Poise’n'Ivy and the other gift and craft shops down on that end of the road. There was too much there to take pictures of everything, and it’s apparently all indoors again today.

It’s a lot of work to move things in and out like that, so I hope they sold a lot yesterday. Be sure to stop by downtown and check out the shops!

The Babes of Star Trek

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An astonishing amount of female eye-candy is featured in Star Trek, the original series. It seems like every episode has some new, scantily clad female guest star, who usually falls hard for Kirk, but sometimes, just for a change, goes for Spock, Scotty or McCoy.

Sometimes the ladies are aliens, and sometimes they’re human. Often, they represent a challenge of some sort to overcome, especially when they’re in some position of power, or perhaps they’re just psychotic androids bent on taking over the galaxy.

Sometimes they represent a different type of challenge, like Edith Keeler, at left and above, played by Joan Collins. Kirk had to let her die in order to restore the course of history in one of Star Trek’s most famous episodes, "The City on the Edge of Forever."

The women of Star Trek are, pretty much, all gorgeous.

I mention this because I’ve been watching Star Trek on Hulu, and I hadn’t seen most of the episodes before, so they are new to me.

I had always wondered why so many more men liked Star Trek than women, especially in the earlier days, and although I hate to be sexist, I have to think the abundance of scantily clad, amazingly gorgeous women may have something to do with it.

Unless you count William Shatner, who even at the time had a bit of a paunch, there is no corresponding male eye candy, or if there is, it’s been so thoroughly covered with bizarre costumes apparently made out of cheap sledding toys, that I haven’t noticed it.

Or maybe I just don’t think the men of 1966 were attractive. I don’t know.

But it’s very difficult to to accept William Shatner as male eye candy when the men are getting Julie Newmar (at left, looking very fierce), Joan Collins and Lee Meriwether.

It’s also rather difficult to accept the silly wigs most of these women are wearing.

Look at Julie Newmar (left, above), for example, whose acting skills really made the otherwise silly "Friday’s Child" into an episode that’s still entertaining and interesting today. Does anyone believe that’s her actual hair? If so, I have a bridge to sell you, cheap.

Some of the makeup they wear doesn’t hold up very well in 2009, either.

The most noticeable thing about all these gorgeous women, though, is that often, they have the power to make or break an episode with their acting talent.

Many of the episodes I’ve liked the most have had very strong female characters.

"Friday’s Child" focuses on an imperious pregnant queen (Julie Newmar) who for social reasons needs to kill her baby. "Is There in Truth No Beauty" focuses on the strange career of a blind telepath (Diana Muldaur, shown at the right) assisting an alien ambassador who must not be seen by the human eye. "Elaan of Troyius" focuses on the upcoming nuptials of a bossy, barbaric warrior princess, who needs to learn how to get along in her husband’s culture.

I’m not saying they’re feminist episodes, because often they aren’t.

The plotline of "Elaan" reads quite a bit like "The Taming of the Shrew," and as I noted before, people are making sexist comments about the nature of women more or less constantly throughout the show.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to like, either. Just because they’re eye candy doesn’t mean they’re only eye candy.

Often, the babes of Star Trek have more to do with whether an episode of Star Trek is good or not than the main cast does.

Vampires, Pirates and Hit Men

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Farmtown and FarmVille are supremely popular games on Facebook these days, but I have spent a little time trying out three other Facebook games: Vampire Wars, Mafia Wars and Pirates: Rule the Caribbean!

The three games are all by the same company, Zynga. All three are similar, but have a few differences in game play that become more significant with time.

In all four, you have four basic statistics (called different things in each game): Money, health, action points and fight points.

Actions (called Plunders for pirates, Missions for vampires and Jobs for mafiosi) are the heart of the game. You get a list of actions to accomplish for each set of levels, and when you accomplish an action, you get experience points and money. Experience points will eventually bump you up to the next level and money can be used to buy equipment with which to complete actions.

As you reach new levels, you get additional points to allocate to health, action or fighting, as well as defense and attack skills. New missions and equipment open up too.

Fight points (Stamina for mafiosi, Rage for vampires and Strength for pirates) allow you to take on other players for more experience and money. I hate player-vs-player, though, so I opted out of pretty much all the fighting possibilities in all three games.

It’s much simpler than it sounds and the games are all very similar.

Vampire Wars has the best atmosphere, but then, I like vampires and the spooky creep factor. In this game, you can make your own vampire avatar, quests don’t have three separate levels (forcing you to repeat them ridiculous numbers of times), you can get random gifts each day and the abilities/items you buy can be enhanced.

The downside of Vampire Wars is that there don’t seem to be as many quests as there are in Pirates or Mafia, and it seems to be a slower game, generally speaking. I may have merely chosen the wrong "type" of vampire to be at the beginning. Also, your avatar is cool, but there aren’t that many options so most of them look about the same.

Mafia Wars randomly awards you items that you can collect, and when you gain all the items in a collection it gives you a bonus. Cool stuff for the Pokemon crowd, and you can make wish lists for items you want. You also get to go to Cuba eventually, but I’m only level 29, so I’m not there yet.

The downside is that each quest has three levels, so instead of repeating it just a few times, you have to repeat them many times in order to finish out a level.

Pirates is the best of the three games, in my opinion.

All three games have a way to give you continuous income over time, even when you’re not playing the game, but in Pirates, you have an island, too. On your island, you can place buildings which give you bonuses (extra energy per hour, reduction in costs for items) and collect resources, which can be traded for health refills, extra experience or energy refills.

The island gives you a lot of extra options that you just don’t have in the other games, allowing you to play for longer if you want to. Time is a big factor in all the games, since when you run out of action points and fight points, you’re pretty much done. Pirates has more options for renewing action points than the others, as far as I can tell.

The downside to Pirates is: you get a pirate pet, but no avatar. After having played the Vampires game I was really looking forward to making a cool pirate chick avatar, but alas, it doesn’t seem to be included in the game. Mafia Wars doesn’t have an avatar system either.

Another caveat on all these games, I take directly from Wikipedia: "Zynga has been accused of copying or cloning other popular online games for their own catalog." FarmVille looks an awful lot like Farmtown, and apparently, Mafia Wars looks an awful lot like Mob Wars, another popular online game.

Mad! Mad I Tell You!

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If you can’t be on television, at least you can create a picture of what you would look like on television, provided you were on AMC’s hit retro show, Mad Men.

At left, you will find a representation of what I might possibly have looked like had I joined the working world in 1960 instead of 2003, courtesy of Mad Men Yourself.

That is approximately what my  hair would look like if I bothered to curl it every day, and the cats-eye glasses are the glasses I would have if my mother hadn’t forbidden me to get cats-eye glasses.

And whether it is 1960 or 2009, I require coffee in order to start.

The thing I like about this little iconmaker is that it allows you to make a chubby avatar. I chose the medium-sized body type for mine, but there was a thinner body as well as a chubbier body type available.

And there’s also a thin, medium and heavyset man if you want to make a male avatar.

The funniest thing about the Mad Men Yourself thing is the accessories. There are cigarettes, cigars and pipes, hats for both genders and of course, booze. Women have purses and men have briefcases.

I don’t watch Mad Men, but my dad is a fan, so in his honor I took a few more minutes (it’s not a slow process) and made an icon in his image, which you can see at left.

I think mine is more accurate than his is, since they don’t have a proper salt-and-peppery beard, and there weren’t many options for accessories that actually made sense for my dad.

He doesn’t drink coffee, hasn’t smoked even a pipe for decades and I think his briefcase has been parked on his desk for years, if he even still has it anymore. So I had to leave his left hand empty, but I gave him the briefcase in his right just to see how it looked.

I should get my dad a hat like this one.

I often wonder what it would have been like working at the Globe in 1960. Was there a haze of smoke? Did everyone keep a bottle of booze in the bottom drawer, like they do in movies?

Release Your Inner Hussy and Sing

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I’ve gotten several, uh, interesting responses to the dating advice featured on this blog yesterday, so I thought I would share them too:

From my insane, gifted friend Adam:

From my knowledge of movies, this is best done by breaking into a full-scale musical number with everyone else in the bar doing backup. So, you may need to arrange some choreography. And, let’s face it, if the full scale production number doesn’t work, well, maybe you can date someone in the chorus.

I have written you a song for the purpose.

I’m sexy, I’m smart
I’m a real work of art
My wiles beguiles because am… myself.
I seduce men with ease
By being willing to please
And sometimes I ask me, why, self?
The answer appears,
After a few beers
That my wiles beguiles because I am…
Angela Jolie!

(Take off glasses, shake out hair, jump cut to new actress.)

And finally, from a colleague:

"You have an inner hussy, I can tell."

How Not to Be Single

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Quite a few people have given me some fairly dubious advice that can loosely be called "dating advice" over the years and I would like to share some of it with you.

Now normally, I avoid talking about my personal life here, unless it’s weird, funny, or weird and funny. So I will strip these of all context and omit the names to protect the guilty. You know who you are.

"Just be yourself."

This is perpetrated by every public school I’ve ever been to, and unfortunately, it is only true for the handful of people who 1. are gorgeous and 2. have no bad habits, such as scraping one’s teeth on one’s fork, talking at the theater, or breathing.

Usefulness: 0 out of 5 hearts. Who the heck else would you be? Angelina Jolie already exists anyway.

Hilarity: 0 out of 5 hearts.

"Use your feminine wiles."

This only works if you have, in fact, wiles. I was behind the door when the wiles were handed out. In fact, I’m not even sure I was behind the door in the right building where the wiles were handed out.

Usefulness: 2 out of 5 hearts. This may work for women who have, in fact, got wiles.

Hilarity: 5 out of 5 hearts. I giggled for days over this.

"Oh, just seduce someone."

 Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me? You want me to do what?

Usefulness: 1 out of 5 hearts. This may work for someone who isn’t me.

Hilarity: 4 out of 5 hearts.

So now I have to ask: What’s the funniest or least useful dating advice you’ve ever been given?

Pineapples Don’t Just Grow on Trees You Know

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I play Farmtown, as I have had occasion to mention before, and I had gotten through planting an entire field of virtual pineapples by the time my brain finally kicked in.

(It’s a slow starter, okay?)

Wait a second, I thought. Pineapples grow on trees. … don’t they?

As it turns out, no. They don’t. Just as they are pictured on Farmtown, pineapples grow on, more or less, bushes. These can get fairly large (up to five feet), but that doesn’t mean they’re trees.

Photo © 2002 Jacob Rus http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

On the top, you can see the Farmtown pineapples, and on the bottom, in a Creative Commons-licensed photo © 2002 Jacob Rus, you can see actual pineapples.

I was rather impressed at how close Farmtown pineapple plants came to actual pineapple plants, and I’m looking forward to when they get ripe and I can see if they managed to keep them accurate. But yes, I learned something yesterday.

Pineapples don’t grow on trees.

Ruminations on Star Trek

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Thanks to Hulu and CBS, I have been watching Star Trek (the original series) online now for a couple of weeks, lazing through an episode or three a night when I get home from work.

While I’ve seen many of the episodes before, I’ve also somehow missed quite a few of them. And now that I’m an adult, I see them differently anyway. Here are a few observations, which may be interesting to historians as well as Trekkers.

  • Race never came up for humans. In fact, it didn’t come up at all unless it was The Issue. You know, The Issue the episode really confronted, such as freedom vs. socialism, the stupidity of racism, the Frankenstein complex. Racism was also not visible. Uhura kicked a lot of butt and has been involved in at least one physical fight, which she won.
  •  Sexism, however, came up all the time. There haven’t been any negative remarks about race (even the Squire of Gothos is somewhat complimentary when he talks about Uhura being a Nubian or some such silliness) but there are remarks about women in several episodes. MOstly about how we should be warm and fluffy and sweet and kind. To the series’ credit, though, it does show women in important positions fairly frequently.
  • Number of times they end up as gladiators, so far: 2. Number of times the crew meets a godlike alien: 2,503.
  • Some episodes hold up better than others. Anything based on special effects, for example, is just bleah.
  • Some episodes work far better in the  novelizations than they do as television. The gunfight at the OK Corral episode for example: Bad TV show. Great story.
  • McCoy gets all the good lines. Really. He does. Watch the show. "Why I’m beginning to think I could cure a rainy day!"

Surviving the Family

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I went to my family reunion this weekend and I’d like to provide a brief report of the major events.

  • I didn’t strangle any of them.
  • They didn’t strangle me. (This is the larger accomplishment, in my opinion.)
  • My children’s sermon went well, but the family appears to be between generations just now, since there were only 4 kids at church. However, this meant that all four kids received a toy sheep. I’ve always been of the opinion that children’s sermons should always have something to take home or else, eat. Possibly both, although children being somewhat sticky, probably either edible or take-home-able is best.
  • I played Secret of Mana, a beloved SNES game, on the way to and from the reunion, with my brother. This was one of the few games we could play together as kids without attempting to murder (or at least maim) each other, since it was the only game we had that was cooperative rather than competitive. Sure, there were a few slugs on the arm when I inadvertantly let him die or when I couldn’t keep up with him on the screen, but it was a relatively peaceful thing. Warm nostalgia there.
  • I am just a girl who can’t say no. I agreed to be on the Family Reunion Committee. I have two distinct opinions about this, one of which is that I’m extremely smart for agreeing to this, and the other of which is that I’m a complete idiot for agreeing to this. I don’t feel these opinions are contradictory.
  • My cousin’s beau asked her to marry him in front of the entire extended (and extended, and extended, and extended…) family. She said yes. My mom got weepy and I clapped until my hands ached. No word on the date, yet, but that’s 1/15 first cousins (including me and my brother) married and another 3/15 engaged.
  • It was chilly. No one went swimming at the state park where we had the picnic, but at the same time, no one had to marinate in sunscreen and the church on Sunday was pleasantly cool instead of sweltering hot.

And that was my weekend. I spent much of yesterday recovering in a cool, dark, quiet place, and also went to the coffee shop so the sudden lack of bustle wouldn’t be too much of a shock.