The 35th Precinct

I'm still plowing manfully through NYPD Blue S1. Fortunately for my beleaguered eyeballs, there has yet to be a reappearance of Caruso's Flobberwormesque complexion or his pasty bum, though they continue to bludgeon me with his smothering, pathological "romance" with Janice. So much of the show is so excellent--the characterizations, the diversity of the cast, the decision to pull victims from all walks of life, the acknowledgement that not all victims are perfect, and that many of them are denied justice by a justice system skewed to protect the rights of the accused, the often uncomfortable yet unflinching portrayals of racism, sexism, and ableism--but it's given short shrift so that Caruso/Kelly can be the Big Damn Hero and the moral hub through which all other plotlines must pass. I'm going to shake my asymmetrical ass in with the unbridled glee of Gollum being reunited with his Precious when they give his character the boot early in S2. Caruso drifting from the show on the overinflated balloon of his gargantuan ego was the best thing that ever happened to this show.

I finished Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death by Richard Marinus. It started off well, but like most academics, he bludgeoned his central theme into paste and leached it of what vitality it once possessed, and by the end, I despised Luther and wanted Marinus to just stop typing.

Luckily for me, it's done and returned to the library, and I never have to cast a jaundiced eye upon it again. Now I can happily devote my attention to a pair of murder mysteries and a horror novel about ancient, mutant spiders that have awakened from their long slumber and crawled from the dark bowels of the earth to wreak chaos and destruction.

As usual, I'm muddling through my class without the requisite book because I refuse to pay $87 for a paperback compendium of religious philosophy. It's ridiculous that textbooks command higher prices by virtue of being deemed "educational material". If that's so, shouldn't they be cheaper in a bid to facilitate access to a larger readership? Silly me. Allowing people access to such books might rouse a few of them from their complacent, sloe-eyed stupor, and that's dangerous. Why, get people thinking, and they might start questioning the machinations and methods of the established elite and agitating for change. Plus, affordability would impinge on the inalienable right to a gargantuan profit margin for the university.

So, I'll be treating my bookstore as a Barnes and Noble until they get wise. If only philosophers weren't so damn loquacious and enamored of semantic hairsplitting.

I'm halfway through NYPD Blue S4, and if nothing else, it's a treasure trove of police procedure. I now know that officers wear their dress blues when receiving a promotion, and the ceremony includes a framed certificate and takes place at One Police Plaza. Hee! Now I have another excuse to dress Flack in his blues, only to get him nekkid later >;)

( Thoughts on Bobby/Diane in NYPD Blue S4 )

Miracle of miracles, my Brassfic was finished on deadline. Huzzah! Now that it's cleared, the last of my time-restricted fic commitments is now gone, and I can choose between a Canon!Flack fic or the third fic for spn13. I should pick the latter because it's been a while since I submitted an SPNfic, but Flackbunny is acting terribly winsome, and I'm afraid that if I don't scritch him, he'll leave pellets of displeasure in unexpected places.

I'm halfway through S3 of NYPD Blue, and wow, do I hate the pairings. Sylvia Costas makes me want to choke a bitch. I know she's pregnant, and that hormones make you crazy, but she was passive-aggressive before Andy upped her duff(see her snit when Andy suggested a small, quick wedding as opposed to the leviathan of a Greek Orthodox ceremony), but it's gotten worse. Now, she's snapping at him because he's worried about her morning sickness. Granted, issuing a fiat that she must go home and rest wasn't the smoothest course of action, but she's known that Andy is a knee-jerk, knuckle-dragging throwback, so I don't get her righteous indignation at his badly-expressed fear. Sylvia is a spoiled Daddy's girl who has to have everything her way, and I don't know what Andy saw in her.

And don't get me started on Bobby/Diane. I like Bobby, love him, and I love that he's trying to support her during her battle with the bottle and the hullaballoo over her dysfunctional family, but just once, I'd like to see a relationship wherein both partners supported each other rather than one acting as the anchor and failsafe for the other. I speak with the mouth of the hypocrite here, I fear, because my fic tends to tilt toward Flack supporting Rebecca, but she does try to return the favor when she can. Thusfar, it's been Diane draping her crazy all over Bobby like a wet coat and Bobby playing white knight. I was particularly unimpressed by Diane's jealousy over seeing him talk to Venita the reporter and would like to know how she knew they'd once been involved, because Bobby never mentioned it.

And Greg/Donna just...no. Donna breaks it off and tells him he has no chance, but then gets jealous when he goes back to his wife? Whatever. She shot him down. He respected her wishes. So now he's an ass? Feh. I will say that Greg is a dolt for going back to Marie again and again when the relationship is so obviously beyond repair, but his intentions are good. Frankly, Marie strikes me as a manipulative whacknut, and I'm wondering if twenty years under her thumb didn't make him the neurotic mess he is.

Those Brassy Lassies interested in my Brassfic can find it here.

Does anyone know how to revert to an earlier version of a Mozilla extension without deleting and reinstalling the entire extension? I use Scribefire for blogging on Firefox, and it ran smoothly until I intalled the most recent version. Now it freezes my computer on shutdown. Every time. I would just uninstall and reinstall, but I have several hundred posts archived therein and don't want to lose my copies, lest LJ see fit to delete them. In the meantime, I'm using the Lochjournal client. I'd use Semagic, but it doesn't like my choice of password, and I refuse to change it.

I went to Wal-Mart today and bought a desk lamp and dried goods-cereal, Pop Tarts, soup, rice cakes, crackers, and ginger snaps. I'd love to do all my shopping there, but the bus ride is easily an hour each way, and the meat would surely spoil before I got it home. So, it's Winn Dixie meat most of the time.

I need to write Brassfic. I've got 2 days' work left, but I'm overwhelmingly unmotivated because of my current obsession with NYPD Blue. I'm still enamored of the show, but S2 is too heavily laced with the Abandondo/Metavoy pairing. I like Greg Metavoy as the sweet, socially inept, insecure cop, but Abandondo does nothing for me with her bouffant helmet hair, ugly sweaters, nasally Brooklyn accent, and Mememe Syndrome. I'm hoping that they lighten up on the Donna/Greg angst over the course of S3, because the show is otherwise fantastic.

The department politics are fascinating, though I wish the root of all evils wasn't always racism. Yes, Haverell was a racist cuntrug who was bitter at Lt. Fancy because Fancy carried himself with dignity and refused to gladhand, kowtow, or otherwise apologize for earning his command, but why does every asshole bigwig thereafter have to have a special white hoodie in his closet? Can't they just be ambitious pricks who think they're better than everybody?

Lt. Fancy reminds me very much of an older Don Flack-even-keeled and fair, but not inclined to take shit when push comes to shove. He plays his cards right, much like Flack did in "...Comes Around". He does the right thing while burning as few bridges as possible, and I love that. Though I confess that sometimes hearing Sipowicz curse a blue streak into the dour face of IAB just hits the spot. Fancy is what folks should aspire to be when dealing with often unlikeable others; Sipowicz is how we too often are. I adore how this show uses all the colors of the emotional spectrum, and I'm looking forward to S3.

The writing computer staggers along, but I have scant hope for its recovery. I file searched for any files that had been accessed or modified within the last month. There was a modified system configuration file, but I might have done that with my BIOS intrusions, and I'm very reluctant to muck about in my computer's brain.

When this faithful companion of mine falls, I'd like to get a laptop. I had one from 1996-'99, and I loved it. Does anyone have any suggestions for the sturdiest brand? I've heard that Macs are more stable, but I've also heard that their failures are more catastrophic. I need stability, durability, Internet and word processing. Maybe a DVD drive. That's it. Any anecdotes from the laptop owners out there?

My Brassfic proceeds, albeit slowly, and since I'm not sure what ails my computer, I'm leery of saving it to another computer, lest the malaise spread. It may be that the Brassfic will be the last to be written from this keyboard, and that makes me sad. This computer has been a tough old nut and has seen me through forty stories and 1.2 million fic words. It's been my partner, and it feels treacherous to chuck it aside after so long, a mere minion that has outlived its utility.

And yes, I get attached to most of the possessions that have allowed me to find my hard-scrabble place in human discourse. The changing of wheelchairs actually has a brief grieving process where I feel disembodied. Sue me.

I'm going to fic and watch NYPD Blue S1. It's been sitting in my DVD pile for years, and I finally decided that I had to watch it right now.

For the record, David Caruso sucked then, too, Horatio Caine with a different name.