Captain Jack, Black Jack and Dr. House

Hugh Laurie will be appearing in an animated commercial with Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack in order to promote the Japanese DVD release for the fourth season of House. Isn't that fun?! Head Over to Anime News Network for more info.

I gotta say, I'm really glad House is making a reference to Black Jack because some episodes, quite a few in fact, are nearly exact copies of Black Jack stories. House himself makes reference to an outcast doctor he met in Japan referred to as "Black."

In Other news, click the image below to check out the new PoTC 4 teaser trailer on Youtube!

Lyric Nazi

My mom says I am the lyric Nazi and finally have decided to agree with her. I just cannot enjoy music without picking the lyrics to death. Take for example, Kris Allen's, "Live Like We're Dying."

Let me preface this by saying I really like this song. The melody is catchy and the message is uplifting. That being said, the lyrics drive me insane. For the entire first verse and for half of the second Kris Allen says "we" when singing about the events in the song. So, after seven lines of "we" he suddenly switches to "you" with the line, "so if your life flashed before you..." Drives me nuts! Lemme put the lyrics here in case anyone hasn't heard this song.

Verse 2
Our hearts are hungry for a food that won't come
And we could make a feast from these crumbs
And we're all staring down the barrel of a gun
So if your life flashed before you,
What would you wish you would've done

Tell me that doesn't make you nuts? Wouldn't it be better to say, "so if our lives flashed before us, what would we wished we would've done?" Or if he has to say "you" he should start the you with the whole gun in the face imaginary (i.e.) "If you were staring down the barrel of a gun and your life flashed before you..." etc.

He does this again in the third verse. He says "if your plane fell out of the skies" and then finishes by saying, "so when we long absolution, they'll be no one on the line."

Makes me nuts, I tell you! Nuts!

As for the refrain, every site says something different so I'll refrain from commenting on those lyrics :)

Still, I like the song!

David Guetta, you fail...

Anyone here familiar with the song, Sexy Bitch?

In the refrain he says,
"I'm tryna find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful."

And what does he come up with? "Damn, you's a sexy bitch."
Wow, way to go pal. No disrespect there.

Then again, I can see where the guy is coming from. I mean, English is such a limited and constrictive language. I don't think I could describe Johnny Depp without using at least two swear words and mentioning his ass.

I mean, "sexy bitch." Wow, that says it all. No reason to describe the girl or say anything about her appearance. It's just like in fairy tales! "The handsome prince swept the beautiful princess off her feet." Except now it's the "the horny singer wanted to rub his butt against the sexy bitch."

*sigh*

And when he does describe her, he says, "she's nothing like a girl you've ever seen before. Nothing you can compare to your neighborhood hoe."

Disregarding the fact that those sentences are horrendously incorrect, saying she's not like a hoe isn't exactly a compliment. (And just what exactly is a hoe? Is it a prostitute or just a lose woman?)

You know, it wouldn't be so annoying if he didn't say he was intentionally trying to be respectful. So we have to assume, either there is no respectful way to describe this girl or that the singer just has no clue how to be respectful. Either way, David Guetta, you fail.

The Beast Below

Be forwarned, there are spoilers for the Doctor Who Season 5 episode, The Beast Below, well... below.

I have to say I am disappointed in this episode. Moffet's writing was not what I expected it to be. The behaviour of the characters was inconsistent, the story was convoluted, and there was no message.

Without going into too much detail, I have to say I was sorely disappointed in the doctor's line mentioning that after paralyzing the starwhale he'd have to get a new name. Good grief doc. He has committed numerous unthinkable atrocities and he freaks out because he has to spare some poor creature intolerable pain? Where did this wishy-washy dolt come from? And I cannot believe Amy, a woman so strong she's willing to sacrifice thousands of lives on a hunch, would hit the "forget" button. It didn't seem consistent. And recall the little kid shot down into the stomach of the beast because he got a zero? Is that a direct order of the Queen? The Queen had been making all the rules, right? Is she sending the kids down there because she knows the beast likes them? Or is she just a heartless, callous, monster? If that's the case, then why have the "oh my poor subjects are being fed to a beast," malarkey?

Setting aside the idea that a city on the back of a giant monster floating in space is overused, the original part of the story was far too convoluted. Why cover a powerful core story with over-hyped, scary tripe such as the elevator scene? Why have the "smilers?" It's not necessary. None of it. What was the point in having the queen character turn out to be so old? If it was it to show that even she, someone who (supposedly) cared about her people, would keep making the same bad choices over and over again, it was a very long winded and confusing way to go about it. And what was with the brief and underplayed democracy theme? It seemed like it was going to go someone but never made it. The story was overflowing with tons of ideas that were never fully realized, it's as if Moffet finally got the right to play in the kitchen and threw everything imaginable into the stew.

And my biggest complaint, there was no message. The humans who created this awful war, escaped by torturing the starwhale, and essentially terrorized their populous for hundreds of years, got away scott free. No one changed, no lesson was learned. The humans are the same at the end as they were in the beginning. There was no punishment, no consequence for their actions. So what's the message?

Thoughts on New Earth

I have to say I was very disappointed in Davies' writing in the Doctor Who episode, New Earth. Davies introduces a fantastic and complicated plot but just cannot continue it through to the end. It feels rather like he is trying to cover a four inch stab wound with a small band-aid. You just cannot wrap up the deep issues this episode brings up with the weak ending he gives us. I don't think Davies has the sophistication to pull this story off.

For those of you who haven't seen New Earth but for some odd reason are reading this anyway, it's about a future Earth where a group of "nuns" grow thousands of pseudo humans in order to inject every known disease into them so they can cultivate catch all cures.

Well, right off the bat we see the story-line start to fall apart. We are told that the the flesh (the nuns refer to the infected as flesh) carry every known disease simultaneously. Yanno, I'm no doctor but I have this tiny sneaking suspicion that no living organism can survive having every single known disease at the same time. Setting aside any real diseases of today (because it could be argued that these are "future disease") let's examine what we are presented with by the writer. In the hospital ward we have a man who's body is turning into stone, which apparently is a slow and painful process while next to him is a another man with a disease which we are told kills you in under ten minutes. How can the flesh have both these conditions when they clearly are at odds with each other? I suppose it could be argued that they host every known disease but only express a few, (bubonic plague by the looks of it) but I feel as if this is a cop-out argument anyway. Unless I am missing something, if your main plot point is completely inconceivable, that's just bad writing.

Settings aside the argument that Davies spends way too much time on Rose's side story and not enough on the main plot, we come to my second big disappointment of this episode, Casandra. She spends the entire episode fighting to stay alive and then, mysteriously, decides it's time to die. Why? Did I miss something? How did she change so quickly? Davies loves to do this to us. On Waters of Mars Brooke spends every moment since she discovers her tragic fate, trying to survive. Then, quite mysteriously, when she is saved she turns around and kills herself! Why? We are not given even the slightest indication by Davies that she has changed her mind let alone why she has done so. This is bad writing, pure and simple.

As a small side, Casandra mentions that Rose is genetically 100% human but that line is wasted because that idea is never brought up in the story. Instead we have a five minutes scene of Rose basically feeling herself up. -.- I like Rose, I really do, but Davies concentrates on her too much and makes her too romantic toward the doctor while Moffet makes her kinda.. well.. unattached. Poor Rose.

My third and final point, the ending. After introducing a complicated issues with huge moral implications Davies wraps it up very weakly. The flesh escape and the Doctor (I don't blame you poor man...err time lord) mixes up every known antidote together (of which there are ten mind you) and sprays them over less than six infected people who, in turn, touch each other and magically pass it along to the other, oh I dunno, ten thousand people!? Really? C'mon Davies! Come on man! You gotta do better than this! I mean, you have no choice! This is bad writing. This is worse than fan fiction! Are the nuns going to be punished? How will society feel about these less intelligent human race? Are you going to address anything that matters other than Rose!?

I would have written this episode completly differently. There must be some consequence to the actions taken by the nuns. I would have ended with the doctor having to burn down the locked hospital or maybe having the flesh spread to the outer city kill everyone but themselves but then, like the nuns wanted, create a race of people immune to everything. There should be, there has to be something to learn. There has to be something to take away.

Sk8ter Boy

I started thinking about the lyrics to Avril Lavign's "Sk8ter Boy" the other day and I get the feeling that Lavigne is, on some level, punishing "ballerina girl" for her decision not to date skater boy. You could even say that the song was an attempt to humiliate her. (Not necessarily in the dramatic sense but more of a, "look what I have that you don't" sort of feeling.) She says that ballerina girl "looks up at the man that she turned down." "Looking up" at someone is usually associated with rank. You look "up" at someone who outranks you (aka makes you feel small.) Lavigne is saying that ballerina girl made a big mistake. But did she? Let's examine.

Let me start by saying that I don't personally know Lavigne so I cannot comment on whether or not this relationship is fictional or otherwise. I am ONLY commenting on the situation as referenced in the song.

First off, we don't know if the "she's just a girl" (a.k.a. ballerina girl) and the "he's just a boy" (a.k.a. skater boy) are in high school or university. I would assume it's high school because university students aren't as well known for cliques but since she's got a baby 5 years later, we can assume it's either last year of high school or first year of university when the fateful meeting occurs.

The reason the timeline is significant is because of the relationship ballerina girl has with her friends. If she is like most people, the friends she makes in university will stick longer than the friends she makes in high school. According to the song, when she sees "skater boy rocking up MTV," she calls these friends. Okay here is where I start making assumptions.

If these are high school friends then ballerina girl cannot be that shallow. How many friends from high school do you regularly keep updates on? Since she calls them up I assume she has their numbers which, five years later, must certainly have changed a fair few times. She cares enough about these friends (a.k.a. the baggy pants haters) to keep current information on them. Therefore the information they gave her about the boy should and was taken to heart. Perhaps what Lavigne thinks of as shallowness is in fact just a cultural difference. No matter how much you "like" someone the relationship will not work long term if you have nothing to communicate about. Since ballerina girl does, well, ballet, we assume Lavigne is saying she has more refined taste than skater boy which could be why she rejects him, as opposed to the idea that "she's just being a bitch."

As for her sitting "alone" instead of automatically assuming that he dumped her after knocking her up perhaps we can speculate that the father of the baby is just not home or perhaps that he passed away? Or that she left him because he was abusive? Or even that they aren't together but still communicate. As for the baby, I don't see anything inherently wrong about having a baby. She's feeing the child so it must be less than 3. Let's assume the "worst case scenario."

If ballerina girl graduated high school at 18 and five years later had a three year old child she would have gotten pregnant at 19/20. She was old enough to make an informed decision. It's not the same as being pregnant at 16. Plus the idea of finger pointing ballerina girl as "being a slut" is not something that can be easily attributed to her. In keeping with the lyrics a girl who would reject skater boy for having less refined taste would not leave school and get pregnant right away.

Now, let's examine this wonderful prize Lavigne boasts about, skater boy.

Lavigne thinks skater boy is worthy because he's on MTV and making a living playing music but that's only her opinion. Having money and fame and playing music for a living might not be for everyone. Perhaps ballerina girl wanted a nice quite life with an intellectual? Why should we give value to skater boy just because he's famous? Famous doesn't equal better.

The song claims that skater boy was rocking up MTV to show "pretty face just what's he's worth." Ouch! So if we are to assume the lyrics are true, everything he has done to come to this point is because needs to prove himself to one girl who rejected him in high school. His current girlfriend even wrote a song about his rejection. I can't speak for anyone else but that sounds pretty insecure to me. Skater boy might be suffering from low self esteem but even worse than that, he seems to have obsessed over this ballerina girl for all those years.

So what we have here is a weak, insecure and potentially obsessive guy. I predict that if ballerina girl plays her cards right she will be able to get this guy. But seriously, who would want him?

Twilight Music Video

Whelp, I broke down and made a Twilight MV. Download it out on my Website or view it on my Youtube channel.