Santa’s Reindeer: Ranked From Best to Worst

From our friends at Sass & Balderdash, a timely explanation of those guys who dance on your roof!

 

We all know Dasher and Dancer, and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid, and Donner and Blitzen, but have you ever theorized about their personalities, like which reindeer is guilty of murder and which one is under-compensated? It takes a special reindeer to pull Santa’s sleigh, but being special and being a reinderp aren’t mutually exclusive. I’ve put together the definitive reindeer ranking from best to worst. And no, Rudolph isn’t number one. 1. Blitzen “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” the origin poem for Santa’s reindeer, saves Blitzen for last, and that’s because he’s the best. Mighty, true, and resilient, Blitzen is a king among reindeer, the one true leader. Blitzen is the one Santa truly depends upon, and he doesn’t need to guide anyone’s sleigh to prove he’s the boss. His name is derived from “lightning,” so he’s basically the Thor of reindeer. Without question, Blitzen is far and away the MVR: Most Valuable Reindeer. 2. Vixen It’s hard being the only female reindeer on the team, earning 30% less reindeer feed than everyone else. Vixen is so much more than just “the girl reindeer,” but she struggles to get credit for her efforts in a buck-dominated field. Despite […]

Source: Santa’s Reindeer: Ranked From Best to Worst

Something For an Actor at Winter Solstice

Even in December, your eyes are prodigal

Green like the low and leafy mountains

Of my youth, or variegated green like an autumn

Field that the breeze fingers and the sun flickers

Over, the bright greens of still summer and the faded

Sepia greens of summer drifting away.

 

Lie back as you would adrift on the ocean,

That constantly floating green that wraps the globe

In an embrace of waves constantly, constantly

Ebbing green, flowing green, the flash of sunlight

On the mighty roaring green, the hiss of foam

Like a promise or a kiss. Such greens dazzle

 

This heart, which far away contemplates that one

Distinct gift of the rainbow that light presents us, this time

Through you as you look in this direction, unseeing

But seen, showing all the lively greens—friendship,

Envy, desire and wrath—we come to know through your eyes,

So prodigal green, even in cold December.

Psycho Sunday: Badass Women in Combat Gear #5

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It shouldn’t surprise anyone that roughly half of my BWCGs come from shows helmed by Joss Whedon, since he practically invented the trope. The women of Firefly and Serenity represent a wide variety of badassery from the smart kind—Kaylee (Jewel Staite) is a mechanical genius and Inara (Morena Baccarin) is a woman who knows her way around blasters, swordplay and archery, not to mention the tea ceremony and light massage—to the more usual fighter kind. And once again the fighter kind include both the broken and the unbreakable.

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River Tam (Summer Glau) is a bit like what Natasha Romanov would have been like if, in her teen years, the Black Widow Program had removed her amygdala, the part of the brain that allows you to ignore painful or worrying feelings. This is an operation that apparently makes for a good sleeper assassin, but man, can it just ruin the rest of your life.

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In contrast is Captain Reynold’s second in command, Zoe Washburn. In boots and a duster, the tall Gina Torres radiates confidence and capability and a, hah yes, serenity that is in short supply on the spaceship on the outer rim of the galaxy. She shoots what I originally thought was a shotgun, but apparently is a “Mare’s Leg,” a customized shortened rifle. And she wears a string necklace that Torres speculated might have come from the combat boots that Zoe wore during the war against the Alliance. Which is pretty darn badass, if you ask me.

During a ComicCon panel a while back, Torres said that she has often been told by fans that Firefly saved their lives, that people with cancer or dealing with domestic abuse returned to the show and to her character in particular to gain strength. Which is also pretty darn badass.

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“Mare’s Leg.” Wikipedia. 16 Sept. 2015. Web 20 Sept. 2015

Truth and Truths

In his book, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes about the Vietnam War (because he almost never writes about anything else). He discusses the difference between factual truth (the things that really happened in Vietnam) and emotional truth (the story of what happened that readers can actually take in). I think of this because I have been thinking about Emily Dickinson’s poem:

 

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

 

I also think of this because of all the writers I love who have used fantasy or science fiction or even comedy/horror to tell truths that are difficult to communicate directly in a straight documentarian kind of way. Fantasy frequently helps us talk about religion and moral values: good vs. evil. Science fiction interrogates our fears about the uses and abuses of technology. Horror can illustrate a more manageable or more laughable version of social fears: vampires demonstrate class warfare, werewolves our discomfort with the wild vs. the domestic, zombies our feelings of incipient chaos. Perhaps all of literature is in part telling the truth at a slant so that it catches the light in a more meaningful way.

 

Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Ed Ralph W.  Franklin. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998,

All I Want for Christmas, or Mrs. Claus Has Her Work Cut Out for Her This Year

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My two front teeth. Check. 1978

Somebody to lean on. Check. 1985

Just a little more time. Check. 1992

You.

The abolition of imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.

A self-cleaning litter box.

A hard-boiled egg.

And a cup of coffee.

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Badass Women in Combat Gear, #5 1/2

So last month when I put our Eliza Dushku as our BWCG #8, our buddy Heylookawriterfellow commented, “Is it wrong for me to request a badass woman who wears glasses? Ahem. Perhaps I am revealing too much about myself.”

At the time, I thought, well, in both the DC and Marvel comic-verses, mainly the heroes wear glasses when they are undercover. Diana Prince and Clark Kent take off their spectacles to be come Wonderwoman and Superman.

Agents of SHIELD and Agent Peggy Carter also put on their glasses when they don’t want to be recognized, and we all know how effective that is. And the Dushku also wore glasses in the pilot for Dollhouse as a part of her new persona.

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So I thought and thought until I came up with an actual badass woman in combat gear superhero who actually wears her glasses as a superhero. Heylookawriterfellow, I have found one at last: Tina Fey. You’re welcome.

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Psycho Sunday: Badass Women in Combat Gear #6

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Back to your everyday basic black combat gear (albeit with heeled boots—how do these actors run in these boots???), on the Minority Report-esque TV show Person of Interest, we eventually shift from the two male main characters, the quirky Mr. Finch (Michael Emerson) and the silver fox John Reese (Jim Caviezel). Starting at the very end of season one, the showrunners introduced the character of “Root,” a genius computer hacker who renamed herself after the root code in a computer program. She is pretty much psychotic, and nobody does psycho like Amy Acker, because even when she is preparing to torture you she is just so darn sweet.

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Starting in Season two, they also introduced Sameen Shaw, a former ISA assassin who self-identifies as having Axis 2 Borderline Personality Disorder and occasionally calls herself a sociopath. As she describes it to a little girl she is trying to protect, “You know that thing that makes you flinch? I don’t have that. I don’t do most emotions. Although I’m pretty good at anger.” Although once again we see women being badasses primarily because they are in some way kind of broken, it is also sort of refreshing to see mental differences being portrayed on television at all, and not entirely in bad ways, especially as we get to know the characters and they get to know each other and come to first respect each other and then eventually like each other.

Shaw and Root also have an interesting chemistry that appears most strongly when they are shooting people together. As disturbing as that is to think about, it’s also lots of fun to watch.

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Also, from earlier seasons, Taraji P. Henson as Detective Carter and Paige Turco as Zoe the fixer also make it work whether in uniform or little black dresses. La la la. Our definition of combat gear, like our definition of poetry, continues to expand.

Psycho Sunday: Badass Women in Combat Gear #7

RIZZOLI AND ISLES (TNT)

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For Rizzoli and Isles, combat gear can be hospital scrubs and scalpel or a pantsuit and t-shirt and a police .45 handgun, but they manage to run around “Boston” solving crimes, dealing with their complex families, making us giggle, all the while looking unrealistically fantastic. That Jane Rizzoli (Angie Harmon) frequently takes down the bad guys like a linebacker is on the plus side of the ledger. That Dr. Maura Isles (Sasha Alexander) has the bad habit of talking about shoes while cutting into dead bodies is on the minus side.

But this show does manage to pass the low-bar Bechdel test, in that it a) has at least two women in it, b) who talk to each other c) about something besides a man. It also passes the slightly higher-bar Mako Mori test, which analyzes films by whether there is: a) at least one female character b) who gets her own narrative arc  c) that is not about supporting a man’s story. It’s hard to believe that here and now in the twenty-first century, it is still so difficult to find shows like this.

“Mako Mori Test.” Geek Feminism. n.d. Web. 25 Oct. 2015

The Return of the New Haven Bed Race

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So I was just thinking about the small column I used to write once a month for Matsuyama’s small newspaper The Ehime Weekly RIQ (never did find out what RIQ stood for). There were a few of us foreigners who took turns writing the column, which would be printed in English and translated into Japanese, a sort of Engurish Puraktis. I was thinking about how writing the 20-line (and later down to 16-line) micro-essays was good practice for blogging. Then I thought about my favorite topic, the New Haven Bed Race. Then I Googled the race only to find out that it had stopped running in 1990 but was now running again after 25-year hiatus, and this past Saturday made a comeback! Hoorah!

It is a cool way to make money for charity. Teams decorate their beds and uniforms according to a theme, so for example a hospital team might all be wearing scrubs and stethoscopes with the rider dressed as a patient. The registration this year is $300, which seems excessive to me, but it is for charity, so I guess an eight-person team can split it to make it less ridiculous. Then everybody lines up down on the New Have Common and race in heats.

Giggles all around.