The 35th Precinct

One thousand and twenty-five words today.

Dear NCIS:LA,

You get Craig Parker in a guest role, and that is what you do with him? Fools! What A waste of talent.

Dear Criminal Minds,

Holy God, are you scraping the bottom of the barrel. I see you trying to insinuate that J.J.'s having an affair with the new Section Chief, but lo, I have been watching network TV too long and am not fooled. I know it's likely connected to some clandestine case about which J.J. has been sworn to secrecy because you useless scribble monkeys need to ratchet up the angst. It's nice to see that the team hasn't learned anything from the Prentiss boondoggle.

And are we really going to watch Hotch have a thunderclap heart attack in the middle of a briefing next week? God knows that's just what I look for in my crime procedurals. Just rename yourselves Grey's BAU.

Dear CSI,

Whose dick did the obnoxious and talentless Elizabeth Shue slurp to land this job? She's godawful, but I'll grant that she hasn't been given much to work with. Does an experienced CSI like D.B. need to be told that exposure to heat denatures DNA? Why not have Finn toss that bit of ridiculous at someone better suited, like poor Alimi Ballard, relatively new detective? I don't think your script monkeys are even trying to pretend that they don't write with their own poop anymore.

I spent the evening writing and watching the season premieres of Criminal Minds and CSI. CM was mediocre, with too many leaps of baseless intuition, and after Blake's opening scene with Garcia, my reaction was, "Go away, Hermione Granger, no one likes you." I know she was single-handedly solving the case because they need to establish her credentials and competence, but she was overbearing at times, especially when she steamrolled Morgan during delivery of the profile and haughtily invited him to join her and Reid for a brainstorming session. Mmmmkay. I'm sure Morgan knows how to brainstorm, thank you. He would just rather you share with the rest of the class.

CSI was better. I love you, Russell. A lot. Finn is still brave but incredibly dumb.

The Sprache interstitial should be finished by tomorrow or the day after, and then it will sit until can proofread it with fresh eyes. With luck, it'll be posted Monday or Tuesday. Calliope has come to the(glaringly obvious, woman, Jesus)realization that she is in love with Richard. I think she's been in love since Berlin, honestly, and she was certainly gone by the end of that trip, but she's proud and doesn't want to come off like a starry-eyed tween with her first bout of the twitterpated tinglepants, so she's keeping mum for now.

Looks like someone fell asleep in the tanning booth.

( SPOILERS for CSI:NY, Criminal Minds, and The Mentalist )


Oh, LJ, what the hell? The new font is so spare and ugly.

A mishmash of thoughts:

( SPOILERS for CSI, Criminal Minds, and NCIS:LA )

-Do all scrotes look like drawstring bags made of elephant hide?

I really want to like Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior; I like Forrest Whitaker very much, and Prophet and Super Sniper have potential as characters in their own right, but so far the cases have been tepid rehashes of CM plots with females in the unsub roles, and Cooper is such an overwrought, frenetic character that it's hard to take him seriously as a stable leader to which the others can look in times of stress. It's hard to muster a sense of urgency about whether the intrepid heroes will thwart the dastardly unsub when your primary thought is, "Damn, that guy needs a Xanax before he pops a blood vessel." Intensity is good, as evinced by the stoic awesomeness of Hotch on CM, but agitated mania, not so much.

Still, I'm going to give it the old college try and watch a few more episodes before I write it off.

( SPOILERS for Criminal Minds, Specifically Prentiss' Storyline )

Criminal Minds should be subtitled "The Show That Makes You Go, 'EwewewewewewaghaghaghaghaghshowershowershoweraghaghSHOWER'" God bless that boy for being as strong and resourceful as he was, but oh, God Almighty, the implication of the flashlight scene was nauseating, and the designated unsub was creepy as hell. And eleven registered sex offenders at the same address? There's a thought I need to have festering in my head while I'm wandering around New York.

Spiel Mit Mir is off to a decent start, but I think it needs a news forum. I could just plop a news thread in the general forum, but I'm not sure if that would be sufficient.

And news there is. If cheeky Paul isn't pulling our chains, then Rammstein will release a best of album in 2011, along with a DVD. Yee! I would love an album full of my favorite tunes, not to mention another opportunity to leer at Richard in various states of undress. Of course, the fannish rumor mill has begun to speculate that the best of album will be the impetus for a US tour. I think they've based this on wishful thinking, but I certainly won't complain if it turns out to be true.

cassandra_wolf asked me what I thought of Wednesday's Criminal Minds.

( Criminal Minds: Moseley Ave.--SPOILERS )

C-

Yesterday, Roomie noticed that the computer was running several mysterious processes, so this morning, we gave it the figurative finger with Avast. Sure enough, it had acquired three trojans within forty-eight hours. They're all relatively new; WOW64main.exe emerged just six days ago. Anyhow, Avast! kindly torpedoed them into oblivion, and the computer is purring happily along.

The lesson? Norton is useless. I'd uninstalled Avast a few months ago because it and Norton were having a massive technological cockfight that was gobbling system and network resources. Since Avast finds threats Norton doesn't, it wins the proverbial shooting match.

The heavy rains resurrected the previously-patched leak in the roof in the upstairs bathroom. Ideally, I'd replace the shingled roof with a new tin one, but I know that if I even broach the subject, my mother will immediately renew her campaign for me to buy another house in the area and move again. I could negotiate with the red-necked angels and pay for it from my trust, but the house is still in her name, and I couldn't keep her out of the loop in good conscience. If the bathroom were the only problem, I might keep mum and learn to live with a wet ass, but there are other water spots in the master bedroom, and I don't relish the thought of waking up to a spot of impromptu water torture. I just know that this is going to invite the bull drama llama to the yard faster than the enticing scent of llama pussy on the breeze.

I fully expect the CSI:NY portion of the much-bally-hooed CSI trilogy to be a Mactimonious snorefest, but I'm hopeful that Criminal Minds will continue its trend of coaxing superlative performances from guest stars of dubious talent.

Dear entitled NY fantits,

I'm not sure if Eddie Cahill will get "paternity leave" when his wife gives birth, but fuck you and your self-centered whining. If the man takes a week off to be with his new family, he has that right, and good on him for using it. He's not your personal masturbation fantasy doll. It might come as a shock to you, but Eddie isn't Don Flack. He's Eddie, whoever that really is, and he doesn't need your permission to live his life. I'm sure he won't lose a wink of sleep if you stop watching because he misses a few episodes. Unlike you, he has his priorities in order.

Fuck off, you selfish little fucktits,

La Guera

I am dead-dog tired. Because enrollment in class is a requisite for university housing, I'm taking a six-week course in Central Asian History, and today was the in-class essay. We had three hours to answer two questions of our choosing. I used two blue books and two hours and fifty-seven minutes and still didn't answer the second question as thoroughly as I would've liked. No, I'm not Hermione Granger. I'm just constantly haunted by the fear of paucity, that bane of professorial existence wherein lazy students scribble vague, unsubstantiated generalities onto the page in a bid to camouflage their gross unpreparedness. Perhaps nine pages for one response was overkill when you consider that he classified five paragraphs as a thorough answer, but I would rather overperform than underwhelm.

I only managed three pages for the second question, but by then, I was running out of time, and my hand was cramping, and so I left him a note at the bottom of the page crying surrender and promising to be more specific on the rewrite if necessary. And I meant it. But just between me and you, I hope it isn't because I've no desire to tread that particular patch of historical ground again.

I'm proud of my effort but anxious about the results, and the combination had rendered me groggy and slack-jawed and a trifle headachy from three hours of rigorous participation in the esteemed and oft-held Nerd Olympiad, and so I doubt I'll be fannishly productive tonight, much as I'd like to fic and squee about the season finale of Criminal Minds. Like as not, I'll stare at the TV in a vacant stupor until I collapse from exhaustion at a ridiculously early hour.

Oh, all right. I'll say this about the CM finale. It made me do the Xandir P. Whifflebottom Panic Dance. "Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God...!"

( Criminal Minds Finale--MAJOR SPOILERS )

A+

Oh, W., you are an asshole. You've had days to address the collapse of the economy under your watch, days and days of shitty repeats that you could have interrupted without hampering the fall TV season. But you decide that you just have to address a crisis that is well underway during premiere week of the fall TV season. At 9PM. And better yet, you've probably known about this address for days but didn't bother to inform the networks of your decision until it was too late for them to adjust their schedules. So, Criminal Minds will be delayed by at least ten minutes(oh, sure. Make that forty-five in the real world)while you dither incomprehensibly about another plan to turn this country into a superstitious, repressive, irrelevant, impoverished backwater that makes British-ruled India of the 1800s look like a liberal utopia.

Well, fuck you. I'm sure that nothing good is going to spill from that Howdy Doody mouth of yours, and since you're going to be out on your ass come January 20, I don't care about whatever cockamamie plan you've cobbled together from bad advice, rich-man's privilege, and cack-handed buck-passing and ass covering. I don't want to meet the new demagogue who will have trillions of dollars at his disposal with no oversight other than the pleasure of the Fundie in the White House. I would really rather watch pretend criminals commit pretend crimes and be caught than watch real ones commit real crimes on national TV and get off clean.


( NCIS 601--Last Man Standing--SPOILERS )

A-