The Old Standby

Everyone has one. It's the topic you pontificate upon so often with your friends, that the once fresh ideas have become staid and boring. In fact, even you yourself no longer enjoy talking about it. This isn't that passion you have, that sport you played and get all nostalgic for every chance you get. Those will be with you forever. You'll recount that big race or game until your wife threatens to leave you over it, and your family can tell what kind of a week you've had based on how you recollect it.

No, the old standby is a topic which you wax philosophical on (or at least you believe you do) and attempt to sway the opinions of others on. For a time, mine was butt-tactility and it's affect on educational institutions. Mostly I really just liked using the phrase butt-tactility, which I coined during my high school years. But that grew tired, and no one was shocked by my use of the phrase anymore. Even the fact that I wrote an essay on my college application on this topic (and got in) is getting very old.

For me it's that all females of the species are MEH. Let me retype that M. E. H. or Manipulative, Evil, Headcases. There are unique ratios in all women, but they are all there. Men are Stupid, Stupid, Stupid (those are three separate categories of stupid there, don't mistake them for just gross stupidity), so it balances out. But that's my standby. And every single one of my friends has heard it. So let's avoid using the Old Standby and move on.

The difficulty here, is that I had a topic that struck me as I sat in front of my terminal typing away at some particularly scintillating fragment of code. I was something I'd wanted to sit down and write about for some time, but had never managed to get my pen to paper on. (I actually do use my pen on paper quite often. There is something about the fountain pen that makes you want to write longhand, even though I type quite quickly.) That topic has since left my mind. As I was leaving work, I realized I had lost it, and almost went and sat back down in my chair with the hope that I would remember it, but alas the persistent pressure to relieve myself pushed me out of the lab door and towards the restrooms and home.

Of course the cleaning ladies were in the restroom, and such was my need that I almost decided not to worry about that (the ultimate Splitting foul I suppose, though perhaps those rules are voided by the presence of a non-homophobia inducing someone...ie the opposite sex), but in the end the fact that my drive home is about seven minutes led me to just hold it until I got home.

The upshot of this was, I was left contemplating whether to go with the old standby, or the vacuous contents of my brain. As you can see, the void won out.

My wife and I finished watching the second disc of La Femme Nikita season 1 last night. With an episode entitled Treason. It was a solid episode, with none of the epileptic camera work of the episode before it, but it left me longing for a little bit of subtlety.

When I watched Nikita in the past, I saw it out of order and when I was watching USA at the right time. Like the afternoon Spiderman cartoons I saw in college, episodes here and there were in order, but by and large, things were a mess. Seasons overlapping and storylines completely intermingled. I never realized quite how thick they laid it on that Section would screw you twice while you screwed the bad guys if you could. That they would do their utmost to break you as a person almost as if that was their primary mission. If the option came up to either let you be happy and complete the mission, or make you miserable and complete the mission, they would choose to make you miserable every day of the week and a random power of two on both days of the weekend.

It seems to be laid on a little thick. If they were a bit more subtle about the Section, it would have made for more drama in my opinion. But of course this is the show's freshman season we are watching, so establishing the basis was important, and most shows are a bit hollow or over played in the first season. Especially the first 7 episodes as the characters/actors begin to gel. Also, Nikita is beginning to really understand how the game is played, though she still can't always deal with it. The acting has been pretty decent though so far, and you can immediately see there is chemistry between Nikita and Michael, even if you might not be quite sure where it came from. I think if they suffer from anything, it's a little TOO much showing and not quite enough telling, or at least not showing us ENOUGH to not feel jerked around a bit.

As we slowly get more discs from our Netflix cue (my wife has about 20 things in there before we get to the next disc) we'll see if they address these issues. I honestly cannot remember how good or bad the episodes were when I was watching them the first time. I just remember I loved the show and especially the style of it. I have a collection of about 10 pairs of cheap sunglasses because of a certain blonde with the code name Josephine