Star Trek Enterprise

So I've been rewatching Star Trek Enterprise episodes lately. I never did finish watching the series, can't remember why.

I find myself skipping episodes that don't have that much T'pol and Trip interaction. Guess every second viewing requires a new perspective. Like when I rewatch BSG I notice or follow one couple or pairing more than I did the first time I was watching.

If you haven't figured it out by now i'm a total trekkie. No I don't speak Klingon but I have seen almost every version of Star Trek minus the animated series. But lets focus on Enterprise. For those of you who are unfamiliar Enterprise is the latest in the Star Trek tv series conglomerate. Even though its the newest, timeline wise it falls at the beginning of all the previous shows. So this is pre red shirts, pre borg, the crew is still squimish about the transporter, the technology is so new.

Its a interesting new take on the Star Trek Universe. Personally one of the best parts of this show is just how primitive everything is in comparison to all the other shows. They truly are explorers and everything is so new that they mess up a lot.

TeaInACan called Trip the Why We Have The Prime Directive Guy. This show falls before the prime directive was created so lots of cultural boo boos are made. Roughly the prime directive says respect and don't mess with or alter other cultures. In the older Star Trek series this usually meant not sharing your technology with other species. Most of the time in Enterprise this makes for awkward and at times hilarious shenanigans, once in a while it gets really unfortunate.

I really appreciate some of the thought that was put in this show, like how Hoshi the communications officer is actually a linguist who seems to be to have special powers when it comes to languages. What I find cool about that is when the translator is down she tries her best to use her natural skills and talents. They all do this, since they can't rely on their technology all the time.

Some funny quirks about this show. As usual the Captain can some how always have sexual tension with every alien female they encounter. The best moments though are when Trip and Malcolm get into bachelor hijinks with female aliens. This happens way more often than it should. Its one lesson I appreciate that they haven't learned.

My favorite character in this show is clearly Trip, he is the chief science officer. He is arrogant and intelligent but he's also some what of a hill billy. He always makes the human mistake in a series all about humans trying to prove humans can do better. Personally I think he is very lovable and so of course I want him to get with the person who mist emphasizes all those traits in him, T'pol.

Funny thing is I think the first time I watched this series I was more focused on Hoshi and Travis. Hey, we all need a love story to root for. My fickle heart likes to change it up sometimes.

Not Starving to Death

I'm not a very experienced cook. Or housekeeper in general. I tend to eat most of my meals out for either convince or laziness. My refrigerator is both barren and rotting, like the Blight from the Wheel of Time. But tonight maybe because I had accomplished nothing else all day, maybe due to some kind of inspiration, but probably just because inclement weather kept me from driving to get food, I cooked.
So for anyone else who can barely sustain themselves as an adult human, here is a very simple and fairly tasty recipe.

Step one: fry onions. Honestly this is step one in pretty much anything I cook. This time it was special since I decided to fry the onions in curry flavored coconut oil. Generally I use butter, but 1) coconut oil is supposed to be good for you (unlike butter) and 2) the coconut oil did not seem to have gone off (unlike my butter). Generally I would recommend cooking the onions for like five minutes until they get a little soft. But I rushed it since I was nervous/excited for step two:

Step two: fry other stuff. In this case, zucchini and lentils. The zucchini were the brave survivors of my refrigerator (unlike the broccoli and kale). As for the lentils I had originally envisioned making pasta, but having to boil the noodles in a whole separate dish which I would then have to wash seemed like too much of a pain. So then I thought of frying/cooking the pasta in with the sauce. I wasn't quite sure this was an actual legitimate way to cook pasta, and as I reflected on this I remembered that it was a normal way to cook lentils. Plus those lentils have been living in my cupboard forever. God bless dried goods. Anyway, keep frying those for a while.

Step three: add other stuff. Basically this other stuff falls into two categories: flavorings and tomatoes. For some reason I love pretty much any tomato based sauce. Stir fry doesn't always feel like a meal to me, but by adding a can of tomatoes and putting on a grain, all of a sudden it's a meal. So for flavor I added salt, pepper, two chopped cloves of garlic, dried oregano and basil, and a cinnamon stick. The tomatoes were a simple can of diced tomatoes. I also added about a canful of water.

Step four: leave it be. Ok so first I stirred it and looked at it. Then I brought the whole thing to a boil (raise the temperature and wait) and then lowed the temperature and covered the wok with a lid. Then I went and watched videos on the internet for a while. At one point I added another spoonful of curry flavored coconut oil. But basically I just wasted time until the water had reduced and the lentils so longer felt like little rocks,

Step five: enjoy. I garnished (and by that I mean smothered) a bowlful with parmesan cheese. I would have liked to have had buttered toast, but sadly that was not possible. All in all it was tasty and not too stressful to make. Plus I hear lentils are good for you.

Podcast 1 (Sad Songs)

TeaInACan and SardonicQueen present to you our long awaited recorded conversation about sad songs. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: No conclusions were made. We like to laugh at our own jokes so don't worry if you don't think we are funny

Arrow

So it's my day off of work, and I have nothing better to do than to stay home and browse through daytime tv. If anyone else has ever attempted this with a basic cable set up you also know that there is nothing on television in the daytime. It is just reruns of shows you thought had gotten canceled. Long story short I ended up watching CNN all day. Hey, at least it was something new. You try watching the news for more then four hours straight. It gets depressing quick. Basically the world is a bad state of affairs and the politics in America might as well be the latest bad reality tv series.

So enough of that.

After a day of CNN I was willing to watch Arrow. (Which, I believed to be a spin off show of one of the characters from the tv show Smallville.) Needless to say I didn't have high hopes for the show. Here's a rough breakdown. There are lots of spoilers.

Premise (at least the way I see it): Rich party boy gets shipwrecked for 5 years in which time he some how becomes a killing machine and formulates a plan to harm, kill, or discredit everyone on a list of enemies, that his father conveniently gave to him before he killed himself to save his son. Son gets rescued, and now he's secretly the Green Arrow, fighting back against crime in his city that looks strangly like a modern day Gotham city. Where else to have his Bat cave, sorry I mean Green cave, but his Dad's old abandon warehouse.

If you haven't noticed I have a lot of issues with the basic premise of this show. Oh and of course he can't be a supper hero without a love interest. Which in this case is a dogooder lawyer whose sister was also screwing our super hero when she supposedly drowned in the boat accident that left our Green Arrow stranded for 5 years.

Can we talk about what a terrible name for a show that is. Arrow. I mean really does it cost more to call it Green Arrow? Did you think it would sound less cool? Cause let me tell you something, I can't imagine telling someone that I am going to watch Arrow tonight and not have them give me a funny look. It's a bad name for a tv show.

All that said I still plan on watching it, that's until I get completely bored. Why you might ask, after all the disdane I just threw out at this show? Well i'll tell you.

1) Stephen Amell running around doing acrobatics that make him look like a monkey is sometimes shirtless.

2) Even though I had not heard of the Green Arrow until Smallville, it turns out the Green Arrow has been around in DC comics before the boy wonder ever appeared on the small screen. Don't take away my sci-fi credetials, you learn something new everyday.

So since it seems I have a lot of assumptions about this show I will it a chance to break some of them. I watched the pilot and the show has the potential to get better. You don't see archery in many tv shows, even though the popularity of the Hunger Games series has somehow brought it back into the spot light. Maybe in the up coming episodes the plot holes will be filled, maybe the action scenes will improve, maybe everything about this show won't be so predictable. If nothing else bring on the shirtless work out scenes and hopefully a better costume.

Watch the pilot for yourself and make up yout own mind on the show. I won't lie about why I plan on watching this show. I'm shallow and I have an interest in sci-fi/action advebture. Sue me. Enjoy!

 -SardonicQueen

Kings

In 2009 NBC brought out a television show called Kings based on the Biblical Story of King David. Below is the promo that came out with it.

My mother was a fan of this show while it aired on NBC. While the show was on she was always glued to the tv, you couldn't get her to pay attention to you at all. I tried getting into it with her but i hadn't watched the first episode. I always like to start from the beginning with television shows.

So I had some time on my hands tonight and this show came to mind. I searched for it online and found that it was on Hulu. First episode in and I am already hooked. This show is written and acted really well, even to a degree that you rarely find with shows that have come out this year. The plot makes you intrigued with where they could possible take a modern day King David story. Adaptations of biblical stories usually don't go over well production wise in this day and age. The viewer wants to see where the characters portrayed will go next.

Watching this show and getting so wrapped up in what could possibly happen next makes me also really pissed off. Here you have an example of a really great show that got canceled. NBC tried cash in as much as possible on this show, moving it from one night to another, and eventually canceling and rejecting the idea of another season. Seriously NBC, you couldn't keep this well scripted, well developed, and well acted show, but you can play reruns of Two and a Half Men. Don't get me wrong, Two and a Half Men minus Aston Butcher is hilarious. It just riles me up to think that stations like NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox control what we airs on television but have the audacity to say that they base their decisions on viewership. I call bull on that one. The average American does not watch television anymore. You know what they do. They record their shows on DVR, they watch their shows online, they wait for it to come on Netflix.

Big stations are just looking for big money and I highly doubt they are making money off of television programs the way they used to. I am rambling but I really am pissed of that shows like Kings, like Firefly get cut off before their time for shows with more viewers. How about we keep the intelligently done shows and tell the people who want to be zoned out on Big Brother for an hour that they should go get some fresh air instead. I realize that my argument is not sounds but I mostly just wanted to pour out my outrage. Now I will go back to watching Kings. Try it you might like it too.

Birchbox 3: July 2012

For the month of July, birchbox matched their theme to Glamour magazines and celebrated the five senses. I'm all about using beauty products to engage my senses, so this box was a hit with me.
I recieved the following:

Prime: Movie Review

Originally I was going to write a movie review on Bad Teacher or Step Up Revolution (aka Step Up 4). You know, some movie that is more recent than Prime. But last minute I changed my mind. Maybe a review on the previously mentioned movies will come later. Now onto Prime.

 ******Warning: Spoiler Alert******

This 2005 movie stars Uma Thurman, Meryl Streep and Bryan Greenberg. Can we take a moment to talk/gawk at Bryan Greenberg?

Okay. Had your fill? Moving On.

Greenberg is 35 year old Nebraska native, singer, song writer, and actor. You may know him from One Tree Hill, October Road or his most recent television show, How to Make it in America. He also stars in Prime as the 23 year old love interest.

So back to Prime. I had friends who had watched and talked about this movie before I happened to randomly sit and watch it on television. Peoples comments spanned from "there was a lot of sex in this movie" to "its the perfect crazy mother movie". Basically, a 37 year old divorced woman falls for a 23 year old artist. As their relationship develops she confides in her therapist. But the therapist turns out to be the guys mother! And instead of his mother ending the therapy sessions she continues to listen to all the gory details of her sons relationship. And I mean all the gory details.

So to my thoughts of this movie. I always heard about all the crazy amounts of sex in this movie. I watched this on television and just assumed that they cut out all the sex. Out of curiosity to see how much of this movie was cut out when played on television, I watched the movie again on Netflix. Now I wasn't expecting a porno but I was expecting some Unfaithful caliber sex scenes. Unfaithful is a movie notorious for its hot and steamy scenes that don't cross into the line of porn. I got nothing. Cable didn't cut that much out of the movie; there wasn't really any sex in this movie. I bring this up because this is one of the main comments I always heard about this movie. Now that I have seen this movie for myself I have to come up with some sort f explanation for other peoples commentary of this movie. I am going to assume that most people watched this movie with their parents and therefore any instance of making out or about to get down and dirty is too much to handle. Its like when watching the movie the Namesake with your parents all of a sudden its become a full on porno. When watching by yourself, there are some mediocre sex scenes thrown in for no reason because they definitely weren't there in the book.

Secondly, the trailer makes this movie out to be so freaking funny. Don't get me wrong, the movie is funny but not in a romcom, I-am-laughing-more-than-half-of-the-time, while I am watching this kind of way. It is more funny in an indie film, throw in a couple of awkward funny moments kind of way. This movie lands more on the romantic side than on the comedy side.

Thirdly, and this is a HUGE SPOILER if you have not seen the movie, they are not together at the end of the movie. Now as a 23 year old woman watching this movie I was icked out by the idea of dating and being in a relationship with someone who was 37. Sue me, I am shallow. But by the end of the movie I didn't get why they couldn't be together. They seemed perfect for each other to me. Did I miss something? I mean by not ending up together, you just put the audience through all your drama for no reason. I barely remembered that the mom was even an issue in the relationship. It was always an age issue. What was I suppose to learn from this movie again?

Bottom line Prime is a good movie. Watch it if you haven't seen it. And I may be biased because Bryan Greensberg is in it and I could stare at him all day.