[Faith Reference]

Top Five Linguistic Misconceptions (from yhlee)

• The "passive voice" is evil. (This is particularly annoying among the lawyers who usually have extremely good reasons for using the passive voice.)
• "They" can't be used as a singular pronoun.
• It's possible to not have an accent.
• Accents or dialects (like African American Vernacular American English) indicate laziness and low intelligence.
• Languages other than English are a threat to the United States.

Top Five Quotes from John Hughes Movies (from lqc)

• Pardon my French, but Cameron is so tight that if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you'd have a diamond.
• Why are we wearing bras on our heads?
• Keep the change ya filthy animal!
• This is no longer a vacation. It's a quest. It's a quest for fun.
• I don't have to runaway and live in the street. I can runaway and I can go to the ocean, I can go to the country, I can go to the mountains. I could go to Israel, Africa, Afghanistan.

Top Five Delightful Anagrams (from chris)

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Top Five Things to Do on a Rainy Day (from dine)

• Lie in bed, tight under covers, listening to the rain outside.
• Start a jigsaw puzzle in the grey light from the windows, moving lamps to the table as the day passes.
• Read a book you loved when you were a child.
• Order in, and tip heavily.
• Walk outside barefoot, soaking the hems of your jeans.

Top Five Culinary Spices (from elusis)

• Lawry's Seasoning Salt
• Goya Adobo con Pimienta
• Chocolate Mint (peppermint cultivar)
• Cinnamon
• Sage picked wild in the Santa Monica Mountains

The poll is still open, and you should be able to fill it out using an Open ID (like your LiveJournal account).

Poll #964 Top Five! More Dead Than Alive!

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10

View Respondents

Suggest a Top Five list for Tablesaw:

View Answers

Mysterious Cities of Television

As I mentioned before, Hulu is streaming The Mysterious Cities of Gold. I've been catching up on it, and I've watched the first ten episodes. I'm having lots of fun running mini-marathons at work while doing other things.

It holds up really well, and I think one of the reasons it does is because the three children are played by child actors. It makes the whole thing feel a lot more authentic (though I wonder if the children's voices are heightening the sense of nostalgia for me). I did a little research about the process, and learned two interesting things. One, the actors were Canadian, and apparently bilingual, since they watched the original French before recording the dub. Also, the actor who played the European kid Esteban was a person of color, Shiraz Adam.

It still bugs me that Tao, the "steampunk" (but older than steam) boy genius is portrayed as a clown in the credits. But damn that song is catchy. No wonder he's a billionaire.

---

If you don't believe that I love watching the trashiest of trashy TV, you should know that I've been watching More to Love. It starts out at the level of trashiness of The Bachelor, then descends lower because it's on Fox, then it descends lower because it uses all overweight contestants as its "gimmick."

It presents itself as far more enlightened than it actually is, but it still manages some small victories in showing fat men and women looking sexy on television without being told that they need to lose weight to deserve their screen time. But the show seems to take great joy in exploiting the vulnerability of the women on the show (which is tacky), a joy seemingly also indulged in by the "bachelor" Luke (which is creepy). In the first episode, one of the women introduced herself by saying, "I'm a rocket scientist!" and it was very clear that Luke wrote her off before she said another word.

The detox I'm using for this show is Lesley's recaps at Fatshionista, which do a good job of picking out the little gems of fat acceptance amid the compost pile of reality-television production.