Dollhouse: Man on the Street

The most Whedonesque episode yet. It's a shame it took so long to get to this point but it is what it is.

One of the problems that Whedon has to solve is to explain why someone would bother paying big money for an active when they could just go out and get the real thing - you can buy sex, you can hire a midwife, you can hire a high powered negotiator. The combination of the man-on-the-street interviews and the software mogul's fantasy was a good attempt to work through this problem, although I don't think it is really solved. But it was effective that the first women interviewed compared the dolls to slaves and the last man interviewed talked about the effect of the technology on the human race, Whedon attacking it from the point of view of the human race and the individual human. I agreed with the woman who said it was human trafficking.

The same idea came out in the conversation between the software mogul, Joel Mynor, and Ballard when Joel points out that Ballard's discovery of Caroline makes it personal to him - he now has an individual to focus on rather than one big conspiracy. And the question as to whether Ballard has his own fantasy.

No big surprise that weird girl across the hall (I can't remember her name) is an Active but I found her interactions with Ballard completely unbelievable. As I always do. I don't know if it is her acting (I've never been sure if she's a bad actress or if she's doing a good job with a character I don't like -- a stepford wife sort of character) or if it is Penmikett who is the problem. I continue to think he is completely miscast. I think it in every scene but especially the scenes with her. The bedroom dialog was so Whedon and they just ... didn't do it. It didn't sound natural. I didn't even like him in the Buffy-esque fight scene toward the end ( I wonder if they use the same stunt double for Eliza.)

The guy who played Mynor, though, was great, a natural with the Whedon dialog (was he ever on another Whedon show? He looked or sounded familiar) and I predict that he will be back in another episode if this show lasts.

The subplot with Sierra was also agood because it addressed the exploitation factor directly. Hearne was set up to be the bad guy a few episodes ago so it wasn't a surprise that he ended up the villain. I was kind of disappointed that he didn't kill weirdo girl across the hall, and that disappointment was only mitigated slightly by the confirmation that she was an Active. But even Hearne points out the exploitation factor of the whole enterprise - why is it worse for him to sexually exploit an active than for the paid client.

I'd like to see Victor out in another assignment. One moment I really liked was the moment when Victor told Echo he had done something bad and when she asked what he had done he said "no one will tell me."

And who is the mole inside? The Asian-American assistant of Topher? Topher himself? DeWitt? (Does DeWitt have the necessary knowledge to do it?) The doctor?

So, all in all, a good week. Lots of Whedon. Moral spankitude. lol.

As an aside, when I went to check it out on hulu I discovered that Stargate SG-1, season 1, is now up. Yet another series that I came in on in the middle, only occasionally watched but really liked. I remember describing it to someone as the most creative laughably low-budget show on television. So now I have something to watch when I'm bored.

March Madness

Those who know me well know that I am a baseball fan. This time of year for me is taken up with thinking about the start of the season in April and watching the doings in spring training. (And btw Chris Carpenter pitched six scoreless innings yesterday which makes the Cardinals' prospects sound much better than I thought a mere four weeks ago.)

But it is hard not to get caught up in March Madness especially working in an office surrounded by sports fanatics. Men and women, although admittedly mostly men. During my entire working life, I have always ended up getting involved in March Madness conversations at work. But all my previous years have been nothing like the last few years. What changed? My office location. I am, literally, in the middle of things.

Like most offices we have an NCAA pool. In fact, we have two. There is the "real" pool for those who know what they are talking about. That pool is run by the guy who has the office next door to mine on the south side. I don't enter that pool because I haven't a clue what I'm talking about, but inevitably I end up talking to all the people who come by to talk to him about it. And that's nice because I get to see people from other floors who I don't often see the rest of the year.

The guy on the other side of me with the office to the north runs the "fun and collegiality building" pool, otherwise known as the "luck of the draw" pool. I enter that one because I don't need to know anything about any of the teams. I get a top seed draw and then I get one non-top seed draw from each of the divisions that my top seed draw isn't in. This year I have Syracuse going all the way. (I also have Dayton, Wisconsin and Chattanooga but no one expects any of them to really do it.)

So the past few days I've been surrounded by NCAA basketball fans and other people like me who stop by just to join in the fun and join the "luck of the draw" pool. And for the duration of the tournament they will continue to stop by and, while they wait for their pool leader to be available, they'll stick their heads in my office and talk to me. About basketball. And just about the time when I'll have heard enough to start to feel like I know something about all the teams, the whole thing will be over.

Some people think the whole thing is a waste of time - and admittedly there is probably a slow down in productivity during this period. But I think there is something to be said for the morale building aspect of having people come together - people from different departments, people in different types of jobs with different income levels, people who otherwise have different interests.

So .... go Syracuse!

25 Writers Who Influenced Me

I saw this at Of Books and Bicycles and then at a lot of other blogs. You are to “name 25 writers who have influenced you. These are not necessarily your favorite writers or those you most admire, but writers who have influenced you. Then you tag 25 people.”

Influence means to have an effect on someone or something; to cause change. At first I couldn't think of many books that actually changed me much less the writers of those books. Not that I think it didn't happen but a writer may have influenced me in such a way that I'm not aware of it or don't remember it. On the other hand, many books affect me momentarily but it's hard to say that any of those affects are lasting. And the idea that I could remember 25 seemed unrealistic. But I started thinking about it. Click "More" to see my list.

1. Ludwig Bemelmans. The Madeline books were the first story books that I remember reading. And re-reading and re-reading. I think if I'm going to start a list of writers who influenced me, I should start with the one who influenced me to think that reading was fun.
2. Louisa May Alcott. I think she was the first woman author I ever read that I understood had written a "classic", that I understood was taken seriously by the world if only because her books had remained in print for so long. I never thought about her that way when I was young and reading Little Women or my favorite Eight Cousins. But the fact that she had written a serious book about young women, even including death, had an affect on my conception of who a writer was and what a writer could write about.
3. Francis Hodgson Burnett. She is the first British author I remember who enchanted me and started my lifelong preference for British fiction.
4. Lucile Morrison. When I was a kid I decided that I wanted to be an archaeologist and part of the reason was because I read The Lost Queen of Egypt by Lucile Morrison. There were other "Egypt" books (Mara, Daughter of the Nile was a favorite) but Morrison's book was the one I went back to again and again. I gave up the career idea later but I always retained my love for all things Ancient Egyptian and I thank Morrison.
5. Carolyn Keene. Actually she didn't exist, but there were real authors behind the pen name who were constantly creating Nancy Drew and I'm probably old enough to thank Mildred Wirt Benson who wrote many of the first books of the series. What a role model for a girl! I was a shy child and I remember every once in a while going into a situation that terrified me and thinking about Nancy Drew. I didn't pretend to be Nancy but I thought about what Nancy would do. It got me through a lot of situations. The Nancy Drew books were also the first books that I ever discussed with other people outside of a classroom situation. In fourth grade we lent them all around (girls and boys) and talked about them.
6. Anne Frank. The Diary of a Young Girl was the first non-fiction book that made me see a world that I was protected from and understand how lucky I was.
7. Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre was the rage in 6th or 7th grade (I'm not sure which). Lots of girls were reading it and talking about it. I have a very vivid memory of being on the school playground talking about it with girls in another class who I didn't know very well. As I said above, I was a shy child. I think this was the first time I discovered that I could meet people by talking about books. I'm not sure if that's due to Charlotte Bronte herself, but what the heck I'm putting her on the list.
8. Amy Lowell. When I was sixteen my English teacher spent a class period on Amy Lowell's poem Patterns, going through it from a structural point of view. That was the moment when I learned to love poetry.
9. Charles Dickens. In part because he taught me to love really long books with lots of characters. But really because I still read A Christmas Carol every year and it reminds me to get my priorities straight.
10. Dorothy Dunnett. It's hard to describe the effect that Dunnett had on me when I first read her in my early twenties and has continued to have for me over the years. To read 5,000 pages of a multi-volume series multiple times, picking through the stories putting together the puzzles that are never quite solved, is an amazing experience. She was also responsible for me reaching out to talk to other people around the world via the written word - in the days before blogs, when doing that was harder. But true fans find a way.
11. AS Byatt. She forced me to be a more analytical reader while at the same time giving me stories that I enjoyed. I could say more, but readers already know her affect on me.
12. Paul Scott. I saw the television production of The Jewel in the Crown first and thought I would read the entire Raj Quartet because I liked the story. It ended up, unexpectedly, being a meditation for me upon the flaws that exist in world renowned justice systems. It didn't send me to law school but I ended up writing a paper about it when I was in law school. It was during that time that the Rodney King trial was going on and it really influenced my thinking on that incident.
13. Robertson Davies. I loved all of his books, but the first novel of his that I read, What's Bred in the Bone, caused me to sign up for an art history class at our local museum because I realized that I knew nothing about art. I ended up spending years of Saturdays at the museum taking art appreciation classes that I so much enjoyed.
14. Steven King. He made me give up trying to read horror. I realized that I too fully believe in the worlds of fiction when a master is creating it. I still have nightmares related to my memories of The Stand, which I consider one of the best books I've ever read and I also wish I had never read.
15. John Steinbeck. My grandmother talked about the Great Depression. I read about the Great Depression in history books. But I didn't really feel the pain of the Great Depression until I read The Grapes of Wrath.
16. CS Lewis. His The Problem of Pain gave me a lot to think about at a time when I needed a lot to think about.
17. Virginia Woolf. I haven't read much of Virginia Woolf's fiction but I read "A Room of One's Own" and felt that I could have written every word. I've often wanted to buy multiple copies and hand them out. To men mostly.
18. Theodore H. White. His The Making of the President, 1960 made me want to read non-fiction. It didn't interest me in politics, I was interested in that from a young age. But it made me want to read about it, mostly to learn some tricks.
19. Arthur Schlesinger. I read his books. He, without a doubt, swayed me to be more liberal than I might have been without reading them.
20. Barbara Tuchman. She made me love reading history for fun. I was going to put down David McCullough, but I realized I would never have read any David McCullough if it hadn't been for Barbara Tuchman. Nor would I have read Shelby Foote or Margaret MacMillan.
21. Agatha Christie. She started me on my lifelong love of a good mystery series. I don't like her books as well as Dorothy Sayers, but there would be no Dorothy Sayers in my life without Agatha Christie.
22. Richard White. I've already blogged how Richard White's book The Middle Ground changed the way I looked at the relationship between Europeans and Native Americans.
23. Douglas Adams. Because he gave me the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.
24. Ayn Rand. Yes, she changed my life. It was when I was reading The Fountainhead with my reading group that I decided to start this blog.
25. Nancy Pickard. The only author on the list who I actually know. She has given me an understanding of what it means to be a writer and how much hard work it actually is. And how magical it all is when it all comes together. And that makes me appreciate everything else I read in a way that wasn't possible before I knew her.

Cashew Chicken Springfield Style

According to the New York Times the people of Springfield, Missouri, only 3 1/2 hours from here, are fond of a unique style of Cashew Chicken.

Cashew chicken, in the form first cooked by Mr. Leong nearly a half-century ago, is not the stir-fry served by many Chinese-American restaurants. Around Springfield, cashew chicken — deep-fried chicken chunks in a brown slurry of soy sauce, oyster sauce and stock, scattered with green onions and halved cashews — is the culinary common denominator. It’s a weeknight dinner, bought from a drive-through. It’s a weekday plate lunch, accompanied by fried rice and an egg roll.

The Times goes on:

In St. Louis and Kansas City, cashew chicken is served “Springfield style,” heralded with provincial categorization like Sichuan or Cantonese.

I don't know who the Times is getting this information from.  I've never heard of "Springfield style" cashew chicken.   But you can bet I'll be on the lookout for it now.

Dollhouse Episode 5

It has been a busy weekend and I finally got around to watching the last Dollhouse episode on hulu this morning. I liked it. It was the first episode that I really liked. I liked that Reed Diamond has changed from ambiguous to a clear enemy, although I still think DeWitt is ambiguous. I liked that Agent Ballard saw Echo live and in person (well on teevee). I liked the mission Echo was on and thought it was clever to combine that with the "dislike factor" of the risk to her eyesight. (I especially liked that this episode didn't involve gratuitous sex for FOX audiences - that cult thing could have gone either way.) I thought the "Victor having an erection" crisis was very Whedon-esque (although part of me was picturing Xander in that scene and it working better with Xander saying the lines rather than the annoying Topher). All in all I liked it and I feel like it's going to finally start moving forward. Finally.

After I watched the episode, thanks to Jen's linky goodness, I read the original script for the original pilot and thought that we might have gotten to this point a lot faster if they would have allowed Joss to use that script. But it didn't, apparently, have enough gratuitous sexy scenes in it. And FOX must have thought all viewers were too dumb to "get it" with just small vignettes of her "missions". Noooooo. We have to spend 5 weeks showing full missions for us to understand the concept of a mission. I just hope they leave him alone and let him do his thing from now on.