TV

Books 2009 // Another Update

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It’s been a while since I updated the reading list so here goes.

I’m used to varying quality when reading tie-in fiction, since it needs to compete with the image of the TV-show (since I tend to read TV-show tie-ins) I have in my head. And since I tend to read books of shows I really like, the judging is harsh. That being said, until recently I mostly read Star Trek books and I think they have been blessed over the years not just with great writers, but also great editors. I have been spoiled with a plethora of good tie-in fiction. I’ve branched out now and added not just Charmed to my list but also Stargate and read a Supernatural book earlier this year and have a Buffy book waiting.

So far, I also love the Stargate books and the Supernatural one was very good too. The Charmed books, however, we’re not so good. Caveat beforehand, since I read these in translation I can’t really judge if it’s the books themselves or the translation that bugs me. I usually buy tie-in in English but got these at a discount store for about 50 cents a piece so had to take them 😀

I kept hearing the characters say the Dutch phrases in English in my head but it still wasn’t really right. I found, with most of them, the initial plot idea fun and entertaining but the execution either out of character, long-winded, obvious or just plain boring. I might re-read the ones I liked best in English to see if that makes a difference.

I’m currently not reading anything, I’m in the middle of finals. So, yeah I guess I’m reading the school books, but no fiction 😀 I have planned, for after the finals, to hit the Buffy tie-in book (The Lost Slayer, which is really a 4-in-1) as well as The Color Purple, which I got from the Library’s pile of books-for-sale.

2009 (so far)
01. Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear – A Companion to Wolves
02. P. Nowee – Arendsoog. Vogelvrij {Eagle-Eye Outlaw} [Dutch]
03. Maggie Tallerman – Understanding Syntax (translated into Dutch and edited for Dutch students by Jan-Wouter Zwart) [Dutch] [school]
04. Hanneke Houtkoop & Tom Koole – Taal in Actie. Hoe Mensen Communiceren met Taal {Language in Action. How People Communicate with Language} [Dutch] [school]
05. Erica van Boven & Gillis Dorleijn – Literair Mechaniek. Inleiding tot de Analyse van Verhalen en Gedichten. {Literary Mechanics. Introduction to the Analysis of Stories and Poetry.} [Dutch] [school]

06. Star Trek: DS9 – Relaunch 1-5 – Twist of Faith (S.D. Perry, David Weddle & Jeffrey Lang, Keith R.A. DeCandido)
07. Esther Verhoef – Alles te Verliezen {Everything to Loose} [Dutch] [school]
08. Orson Scott Card – Ender’s Game [re-read, it’s been years 🙂]
09. Robert J. Sawyer – Hominids
10. Neil Gaiman – Neverwhere
11. Justin Richards – Doctor Who: The Clockwise Man [Dutch]
12. Star Trek: DS9 – Prophecy & Change (short story collection)

13. Keith R.A. DeCandido – Supernatural: Bone Key
14. Paul Ruditis – Charmed: As Puck Would Have It [Dutch]
15. Laura J. Burns – Charmed: Sweet Talkin’ Demon [Dutch]
16. Atte Jongstra – De Avonturen van Henry II Fix [Dutch] [school]
17. Martin Caidin – Indiana Jones and the White Witch) [Dutch] [re-read]
18. Bobbi J.G. Weiss & Jacklyn Wilson – Charmed: Between Worlds [Dutch]
19. Martha Wells – Stargate Atlantis: Reliquary
20. Cameron Dokey – Charmed: Truth & Consequences [Dutch]
21. Sabine C. Bauer – Stargate Atlantis: Mirror, Mirror

22. Scott Ciencin – Charmed: Luck be a Lady [Dutch]
23. Laura J. Burns – Charmed: Inherit the Witch [Dutch]
24. Doeschka Meijsing – Over de Liefde {About Love} [Dutch] [school]
25. Emma Harrison – Charmed: A Tale of Two Pipers [Dutch]
26. Debbie Viguié – Charmed: Pied Piper [Dutch]

27. L. Frank Baum – The Wizard of Oz
28. Eliza Willard – Charmed: The Power of Three [Dutch]
29. Cameron Dokey & F. Goldsborough – Charmed: The Crimson Spell [Dutch]

30. Suzanne Wood – Stargate SG-1: The Barque of Heaven
31. David Brin – Kiln People
32. A.A. Milne & E.H. Shepard – The World of Pooh (The Complete Winnie-the-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner)

Random Occurence of My Mind – Whoosh!

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Here’s a little bit of everything post to kill some time and populate the journal some more with stuff beyond just books (even though that is clearly more than enough 😀 ). Also, I’m hanging out at the parents and need to kill some time until my laundry’s done (I don’t own a washer myself so I come over here for theirs).

So, let’s see… I’ve had fun this week helping my best friend Nienke move house. She went from a tiny house about 50 yards across from me to a somewhat less tiny house right next door 😀 It was much fun both to watch people move pieces of furniture across the field separating the old block from the new place and to be walking back and forth myself. Connected her computer, messed with furniture placement in the living room and repacked the bookcase. I LOVE organizing bookcases. Seriously, if you want to make me happy, give me access to your bookcase and let me re-organize it.

Right… So Nienke handed in the key to her old place yesterday and then went off to Ikea to get some additional furniture and shelves and such. I was going to spend the day doing some chores around the house so I emptied the trash cans, made food, went to the store and then wanted to vacuum. Only to realize my vacuum cleaner was still in Nienke’s house and I didn’t have a key yet… (And so began the quest to get the vc back!)

So, instead, I grabbed the dust buster to get rid of the biggest clumps of cat hair and then had a relaxing afternoon. The weather was absolutely lovely for the time of year: sunshine, decent temperature, hardly any wind, so I opened all the windows and the back door to let the fresh air in. The cat was ecstatic to be able to walk in and out as he pleased. He was also very happy to find that Nienke has her attic window (where her bedroom is) open enough for him to climb in to (he jumps from my large trashcan on to a little wall and then on to Nienke’s mud room roof and from there it’s easy-peasy into the attic window…). He apparently spent some time sleeping there ‘ cause Nien found a load of cat hair on her bed yesterday evening 😀

When Nienke came back she had brought me three little stuffed rats from Ikea as a present. They’re absolutely gorgeous and very cute. Then she went off again to go with her parents for dinner. I remembered the vacuum cleaner just a minute or two too late. I ran towards the road but they were gone already… *sigh*

She got home late and since it was too late to actually do anything with it, I forgot about the vacuum again. Instead we watched Stargate. We’ve been working our way through the entire series, we made it to Season 9 a day or three ago and we’re enjoying the Daniel-Vala dynamic immensely 😀

This morning I got out of bed and did remember the vacuum cleaner 😀 I pulled the sheets from my bed and put them in the laundry and then hung the duvet and coverlet out to air. Then I tried Nienke’s door to see if she was awake, but no such luck. So I grabbed a handful of cat kibble and started throwing them against her window until she appeared.
After that, I asked her to watch my bedding for me (they are expecting rain today) while I was away and got the vacuum cleaner back, yay!

Not that I really want to vacuum… it is the chore I hate most. However, with a cat that never seems to run out of hair to drop everywhere, it is a necessary evil. *sigh* The dreaded thing awaits me when I get home. If it’s still dry then I think I shall open the door again to at least keep some fresh air coming in while I work the monster 😀

Outside of the banalities of the household, I should start studying for my history exam in ten days. It’s a mid term about the first half of the class (of which my attendance was far from regular). It shouldn’t be too much of a problem though, it covers the middle ages and I’m reasonably familiar with that period already; both from my fascination with history from childhood on and my archaeology BA. That was also the reason I took the class in the first place, I figured it’d be an easy way to fill up five of the required 30 credits 😀

Ooh, methinks the laundry is all done. See ya!

Quotes

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I’ve decided to also start posting quotes and memorable lines I pick up here and there to add some variation to the numerous book and meme posts I’ve been making. I’ll start it off with some Deep Space Nine stuff. I’ve been watching season 5 over the last few days (I got the dvd sets of season 5 and 7 late last year) and the last two episodes of season 5 tonight.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 5.25: “In the Cards“

Dr. Giger (going on about the people opposing his research): soulless minions of orthodoxy

At the end of the episode:

Nog: Lions and Gigers and bears.
Jake: Oh my.

This line is so much fun 😀 All three things actually refer back to things in the episode: Giger obviously to the character of Dr. Giger, lion to Jake saying they were going to beard the lion in its den and the bear to Julian’s teddy bear they have to retrieve.

The episode has so many more funny bits but most of them don’t really make sense unless you’ve seen it so I’ll keep it at this.

Dr. Elias Giger with his cellular regeneration and entertainment chamber. Designed to combat cellular ennui; aka being bored to death. According to Dr. Giger, we die because our cells get bored with doing the same things over and over again so he builds a chamber to entertain them so we may live forever…

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 5.26: “Call to Arms“

Rom (to Captain Sisko about his wedding to Leeta): Would you marry me… I mean us? I mean… would you perform our wedding ceremony?

Garak (to Odo): You’re an island of tranquility in an ocean of chaos.

Dukat (to Weyoun): I’ve found it wise never to underestimate the Federation’s technical skill or Captain Sisko’s resourcefulness.

State of Emotion

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I’m an introverted person, I don’t show my emotions easily. The one thing I almost never do is cry. Not when there’s people around and even when I’m alone, I rarely do so. And, just as some people get emotional with the TV easily, I’ve never had that, at all. Until, apparently, I became an adult. Now, that doesn’t mean I now suddenly start bawling at every remotely emotional thing, it has to be something big. Like people dying. And then only when they’re characters I love deeply, or it affects characters I love deeply. For the longest time, my tv-crying was limited to one moment only. That being the death of Claire McLeod in the season 3 finale of the Australian drama McLeod’s Daughters. And then, a few months ago, I finally saw Stargate Atlantis season 3 which featured the death of Dr. Beckett.

And, as I said, I don’t show my emotions easily and I hoped it would stay with that. Of course, that was an idle hope, shattered when I saw the season finale of House yesterday.

:,(

Stuff

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I called the housing cooperation and they said that, although I won’t get the official paperwork and all until the girl now living there has handed in her key and they’ve inspected the place, the house is mine. So I’m moving out, yay. 😀
This afternoon I’m going to a second hand store to see if they have some nice furniture and such as I still need a coffee table, a dresser and a fridge. And possibly a simple nightstand or so would be nice as well. I have a little thingy here I could use, but something new, or at least something new to me and something I really like would be nicer.

Tonight I will also have my first bagpipe lesson. I’m really looking forward to it ever since I joined the pipeband a few weeks ago. I can’t wait till I get the practice chanter and can get practicing.

Then, a little while later, on December 18 I’m going to the taping of “De Lama’s”, a comedy show/game program on tv, together with one of my friends. It’ll be so much fun!

House pt. 3 & TV

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I filled in and posted the House Acceptance form. Now to wait for the Housing Cooperation to get back to me to say whether or not they approve of it (I don’t foresee any issues with that).
I’ve already made a list of things I’m gonna need, which is, furniture wise, not much, just a couch, a dresser and a coffee table. I’ll probably go to a thrift store for it as it doesn’t have to be perfect for just this starter place. I’ll get decent furniture once I’ve graduated and got a job and a normal bigger house (some years ahead and stuff). As for small things, I’ll mainly need kitchen stuff, pans and cooking supplies and such.

In other news, the repair guy came this morning for my TV (which was broken, it wouldn’t show anything anymore and the built-in DVD player would freeze and such) and he just replaced it and it didn’t cost me a dime as it fell well within the guarantee period.

So afterward I spent half the afternoon to get all the channels on the proper places and such and decided to watch a DVD. So I took out my Charmed Season 1 box to continue where I left off only to find that while the TV worked fine, the DVD player didn’t.

It would take almost 5 minutes just to work itself through showing the paramount logo (which normally takes what, 5 seconds?) and then it showed the language menu and refused to respond to any button.

So I ejected the DVD and tried another Charmed disc, same story. Then I tried a Deep Space Nine disc and then it just didn’t do anything, it remained black. And before you say anything, I know the discs are correct, I have seen them and they never malfunctioned before.

So I gave up and called the repair people again and now they’ll come around again.

*Sighs in frustration*

Domino Bird

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Nation mourns bird killed in domino shooting
Fri Nov 18, 2005 10:26 AM ET15

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Dutch animal lovers are mourning a sparrow shot dead after it fluttered into an exhibition hall and knocked over thousands of dominoes set up in preparation for a world record attempt.

The sparrow will be commemorated in a live Dutch television broadcast of the domino-toppling Friday after a wave of national outrage at the shooting.

“We know we are responsible for a lot of emotion in the country and we realize we couldn’t go on without properly marking this,” said Jeroen van Waardenberg, a spokesman for reality TV company Endemol, the firm behind “Big Brother.”

An exterminator shot the sparrow Monday in the northern city of Leeuwarden after fears the bird could upset more of the 4 million dominoes which staff had spent weeks balancing on their edges for the record attempt.

Dutch animal rights groups are outraged, especially as sparrows are a protected species in the Netherlands.

Hundreds of condolence messages have been posted on a website for the sparrow (www.dodemus.nl), which has attracted 200,000 hits.

Link to original story on Reuters.com

Yeah, this is what we Dutchies bother about, not the mess the world is becoming, noooo, we bother about one little bird being shot. In case you get worked up about it, they had tried for an hour or two I believe, to catch the thing which didn’t work.
Although, there was something funny on tv tonight. We have this comedyshow thing which is called “Mooi! Weer de Leeuw” (trans.:Good! de Leeuw again). And Paul de Leeuw, the presenter, had organised a cremation for the bird. An official car arrived with carriers and all that carried this tiny coffin, shaped like a domino stone, and it had wreaths on it (one, supposedly, from Sesame Street’s Big Bird) and such. Then he and some artists with birdnames in their name sang some songs adjusted to fit the bird and then it was carried away and ‘cremated’ in a microwave. It was hilarious.

Out There

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Last night, I decided to finally watch the stuff that I taped during the week (Gilmore Girls, Law & Order: CI and Star Trek: Enterprise), mainly because the new GG and LO:CI will be on tomorrow and I want to have seen the previous eps before that.
So, around midnight when Dad had gone to bed and stopped hogging the tv, I installed myself on the couch, rewound the tape and enjoyed myself.
When I got to the Enterprise ep (4.20 “Terra Prime”) I cursed myself for missing last weeks episode as it’s a twoparter. Shortly after it began, the dog started whining and felt an urgent need to go outside. So, I let her out (after which she ran around the yard barking at various fences and plants) and stepped outside as well. It was a beautiful night with a nearly full moon and clear skies. I positioned myself in such a way that the moon was hidden behind the house so I could gaze at the stars a bit. I saw Mars, Orion, the Pleiades and Cassiopeia.
Seeing Mars out there like that, as a bright, shining yellow dot made me feel funny as at the same time, the Enterprise episode was partially set on Mars. As I watched that dot glister in the sky, I realised again why I am the Trekkie that I am. Not because of the series and movies being so good (which they are, even ST:5 :D) or because of the prettiness of the actors/actresses (and there are quite a few goodlooking ones) but because of Hope and Faith.
Hope for humanity that one day we will succeed in putting our differences behind us and start living together instead of next to each other, in infinite diversity in infinite combinations. Faith that one day we will reach the stars. We might not find a universe out there like the Star Trek one, but we will find it, no matter what.

I’d like to end this by briefly paying tribute to Michael Piller who died November 1st. I just found out about this yesterday and it really made me sad and probably caused my philosophical mood while watching Trek. Michael Piller was a producer/creator and writer for Star Trek in a lot of its incarnations. He (co-)produced TNG, DS9 and VGR, he wrote the movie Insurrection and in general was an enormous asset to Star Trek. He will be sorely missed and I hope he’s out there, having fun with Gene and Jimmy and DeForest and all other Star Trek people that have gone.

Koninginnedag

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En toen was koninginnedag weer voorbij. Niet dat ik nou zoveel speciaals heb gedaan gisteren. ‘s Ochtends eerst maar even voor de tv om de kwinnegin te bekijken in Warrfum, natuurlijk ook kijken of ik toevallig Eva nog zag (helaas). Vervolgens heb ik de rest van de dag garageverkoop gehouden wat niet echt wou lopen. Ik had een berg met dingen om te verkopen (cd-rom spelletjes, een paar cd’s, wat dvd’s, boeken, bloempotten, knuffels en nog prullen) en ben uiteindelijk kwijtgeraakt: een hondenspeeltje, 4x prulletje, 2 dvd’s, 2 boekjes, een knuffel en een paar pantoffels; en dat in 5 uur tijd (van 11 tot 4 uur). Needless to say dat ik er dus toen flauw van was en er maar mee ben opgehouden. Daarna nog even verder gekeken naar de kwinnegin in Warrfum wat moeders had opgenomen en nog steeds geen Eva gespot, wel Maurits zien spijkerbroekhangen, Wim-Lex zien darten met gootsteenontstoppers en Maxima zien bierpulschuiven.

Die avond had ik me voorgenomen om lekker op de bank te hangen en Charmed te kijken en dat is precies wat ik heb gedaan ondanks een telefoontje van Ingrid die vroeg of ik mee ging naar het optreden van Ilse DeLange in Groningen. Ben achteraf wel blij niet te zijn gegaan want volgens de krant was het stamp en stampvol op de Grote Markt tijdens de optredens en ben ik blij dat ik daar niet tussen stond.

Juliana, Sci-Fi, Amsterdam & Presentatie

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Dan was er vandaag natuurlijk het grote nieuws, Prinses Juliana is overleden, 94 was het mensje, een hele leeftijd hoor. Had ik nog een beetje pech ook. Normaal kijk ik op zaterdagavond naar Andromeda en Firefly en dan tape ik Firefly en kijk Andromeda (het overlapt een half uur). Dit had ik vanavond ook gedaan want Yorin en RTL5 (de uitzendende zenders) zijn meestal niet zo herdenkering en dergelijke). Had ik beter niet kunnen doen. Ik ging namelijk om half 10 Andromeda kijken, en kwam tijdens het zappen naar RTL5 ook langs Yorin waar Firefly bezig was. Op RTL 5 was X-Files nog niet afgelopen dus wachtte ik even. Dus, dat eindigt krijg je reclame enz… Toen kwam er dus geen Andromeda maar een docu over Juliana (ongeveer 5 van gezien/gehoord vandaag, dat is echt genoeg…). Ik had dus beter gewoon Firefly kunnen gaan kijken. Nou goed. Volgende keer beter.

Verder ben ik afgelopen donderdag naar A’dam geweest, naar het Bio Molecular Archaeology Symposium samen met mijn minorklas. Het congres zelf was vreselijk ingewikkeld, en voor ons studenten eigenlijk te hoog gegrepen. Daarentegen hadden we onder elkaar wel veel lol in de trein er heen. De terugweg was ook leuk aangezien ik samen met een paar anderen er eerder tussen uit geknepen ben, terwijl we een paar andere klasgenoten en de lerares achterlieten. Daardoor waren we tegen 6-en thuis ipv tegen 9-en.

Morgen… eigenlijk vandaag… ga ik maar eens aan de slag met een presentatie die ik moet maken voor dinsdag, dan kan ik mijn cijfer voor het werkstuk waar het op gebaseerd is een beetje ophalen (had een 2). Veel plezier.