Aaaaaaaaaahh! This may be the best thing since sliced bread: screencaps from the 1995 BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice (with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth) with quotes from Parks and Recreation. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, etc., etc., Pride and Recreation:
My favorites include these two above (one, two).
Some things are just too silly not to share!
To accompany the first of our Star Wars rewatches, I made a dark chocolate mousse. As rich as Queen Amidala’s wardrobe and as dark as Senator Palpatine’s heart, this mousse kept us happy through the podrace and droid battles.
Ingredients
Melt the chocolate, butter, and rum together in a double boiler over barely simmering water
Separate the eggs
Remove the melted chocolate from the heat and whisk in the egg yolks
Beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks
Whisk the egg whites into the chocolate mixture
Spoon into dishes and chill for an hour
Image by Eppu Jensen
Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!
Our Star Wars rewatch project begins a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away with Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
1. Best fight
Eppu: Darth Maul vs. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan on Naboo, hands down. This is how the Jedi fight, not the staid fop-fop-tap of Episode IV!
Erik: Agreed. Whatever else you may say about Phantom Menace, we finally got to see Jedi in their prime fighting a worthy adversary.
2. Best line
Erik: “Her Highness commands you to take her handmaiden with you.” Captain Panaka to Qui-Gon setting out on Tatooine. Less for the line itself than for how Hugh Quarshie delivers it. You can tell that he thinks this is a really, really bad idea, but he’s doing his job of helping the queen do what she wants to do.
Eppu: “What, you think you’re some sort of Jedi, waving your hand around like that?” Watto to Qui-Gon. Delivered in Watto’s bone-dry style, too, it’s hilarious.
3. Best minor character
Eppu: Kitster, one of Anakin’s friends on Tatooine. Very sympathetic young man.
Erik: TC-14, the protocol droid on the trade federation ship. Like C-3P0, more personality than you would expect a droid to have.
4. Best reveal
Erik: When the hangar doors on Naboo open on Darth Maul.
Eppu: The droid army unpacked from the bowels of the transportation drones, unfolding into their full size. I still remember seeing it for the first time.
5. Best save
Eppu: During Queen Amidala’s attack on the palace, Captain Panaka shoots out a window, the group steps out to the ledge, and uses their fancy handguns-cum-harpoon-and-line-shooters to skip to the next floor.
Erik: When Watto tries to back out of a bet, Qui-Gon casually suggests taking the matter up with the Hutts. That’s enough to convince Watto to pay up.
6. Best visual
Erik: Theed, the capital city on Naboo. Gorgeous landscape and architectural detail.
Eppu: The approach to the underwater Gungan city. One of my favorite scenic scenes in the Star Wars universe.
Extra question: Best misdirect
Eppu: Palpatine’s plotting, all of it. Plotwise it’s a step up from the original trilogy, just like the Jedi fights are.
Erik: The opening crawl about conflict over the taxation of outlying trade routes. One of the themes of the prequel trilogy is how momentous events can have tiny beginnings. The taxation of trade routes sounds like the most boring subject for a movie ever, but it leads to the fall of the galactic republic.
Your turn – what’s your Best list for Episode I?
Images: Lightsaber fight via Giphy; Kitster: via fialleril on Pomegranate Seeds; Theed: wookiepedia; Gungan city: StarWars.com.
In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.
To prepare for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, we’re Doing a Project. We’ll see all six Star Wars movies in order, roughly one a week, and for each movie, we’ll give our opinion on the following:
For extra fun, Erik decided to make a dessert to go with each movie. We’ll share photos of those, too. Follow the posts with the SW rewatch tag.
And please join us – leave a link for your own posts, or comment with your own Best list!
In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.
From time to time, I get sucked into thinking about the pragmatics of fictional worlds. By that I mean all the mundane details of how people lead their everyday lives, starting from the very basic human (or creature) needs like food, clothing, waste management, and social interaction. Not just who takes care of, say, the laundry and when, but where do they go to do it, how do they get there, what kinds of implements are they expected to bring in themselves and what is shared, how long does it take, what physical motions do they go through, is it a solo activity or a joint effort, and the like.
For me as a visual person, often thinking about everyday activities and movement through spaces tumbles into thinking about what exactly do these various spaces look like. It’s a way to add depth and realism into a story – we are physical beings who love tactile experiences and accumulate all sorts of personal possessions, and if a fictional world ignores that, it makes that world fall flat for me. (Hello, Star Trek!)
The Hunger Games is one of the current ones in my mind because of the approaching Mockingjay – Part 2 premiere and because of an article on Colossal I saw about a World War II era bomb shelter in London that has been turned into an underground farm.
The company running the operation, Growing Underground, produces leafy greens like watercress, basil, coriander, and radish in hydroponic beds lit by LED lamps.
In the The Hunger Games world, the population of District 13 lives in underground bunkers; the above-ground structures were destroyed by the Capitol. In the Mockingjay novel, Collins mentions various spaces like the armory, the laundry, labs, testing ranges, and farms in passing. She describes these spaces mostly just in very generic terms; e.g., the color of the living compartments is white, and we hear of furniture like dressers and conference tables with individual screens, but that’s about the extent of the detail.
Scenes in the movie Mockingjay – Part 1 show the special weapons lab with a shooting range, the hangar, the bunker, and some hospital and apartment rooms, among others, but I don’t think we’ve seen any underground farms of any kind, nor the poultry farm, for example, that was destroyed in the book version of the bombing of 13 by the Capitol.
The Growing Underground photos of their growing beds fit quite well with Collins’s carefully frugal description and the established Hunger Games visual style. So, in my headcanon, even if we haven’t seen them on screen, District 13’s underground hydroponics now look very much like those of Growing Underground.
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
The Mockingjay – Part 2 premier is approaching! I just finished rereading the novel; now it’s time for rewatching. Here are three trailers:
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 Official Trailer – “We March Together”
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 Official Trailer – “For Prim”
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 Official Trailer – “Welcome To The 76th Hunger Games”
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
The words revision and revisionism, when it comes to history, have a bad smell. They are lobbed as insults against people who propose new ways of understanding things that already have a conventional explanation. “We had it right the first time, stop monkeying with it” is the implied retort. Revision, however, is essential to the study of history. No matter how well we think we understand something, our grasp of history is always partial and conditional. New evidence, new ideas, and new questions applied to the known sources frequently yield new results and we often discover that our conventional explanations, while not wrong, are incomplete. And sometimes they are just wrong.
Here’s an example. As the European study of ancient Egyptian history developed in the 1800s, European colonialism was also spreading across Africa. For scholars who supported the imperialist agenda, or at least accepted its intellectual framework (and there were those who didn’t, but they were a minority), ancient Egypt presented a problem. Imperialist thinking declared that Africans were incapable of reaching a high level of culture without the help of superior white men, and therefore European colonization of Africa was not just a profitable venture but a moral imperative. Yet there could be no denying that ancient Egypt had been a high culture. How could both things be true?
Sometimes you put a lot of time and effort into solving a problem, only to realize that you were coming at the problem from the wrong angle and your solution doesn’t actually fix anything, or even just makes things worse. (Or at least I do. I do this all the time.) It’s what I think of as “solving the wrong problem.” Blizzard Entertainment, creators of World of Warcraft, has been solving the wrong problem in the latest expansion, and garrisons are the manifestation of that mistake.
It’s not that there aren’t problems to be solved. WoW‘s player base is getting older and a lot of us have less time to play, can’t sit down and play in long sessions like we used to, and aren’t as interested in investing lots of time and effort into chasing big goals, but we still want to play and enjoy the game. Garrisons were, in my opinion, a good-faith effort at solving this problem, but they came at it from the wrong direction.
This weekend is Blizzcon, Blizzard’s big event when they talk about what’s coming for their games and we’re going to hear all about the next expansion for WoW. I hope we hear something that addresses what garrisons got wrong.
The first Pride & Prejudice & Zombies trailer has been out for a while, and it’s kicking butt bonnet!
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES – Official UK Trailer #1
The movie will be released on February 05, 2016. I’m generally turned off by zombies, but even still, I’ll certainly go see this one. And I’m looking forward to seeing Lily James (whom I know from Downton Abbey) and Lena Heady (Cersei in Game of Thrones) in action. Matt Smith’s Mr. Collins should also be something to see! 🙂
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Have you read Dune? If so, you might enjoy this early art by John Schoenherr:
Apparently, Frank Herbert said Schoenherr (1935-2010) was “the only man who has ever visited Dune.” Schoenherr’s paintings of Herbert’s Dune were published first in the Analog magazine and later in a fully illustrated version.
For me, along with John Christopher’s The Tripods, Dune is one of the SFF books I read in my (much) younger days and have kept re-reading over the years. Seeing this early art was certainly a treat!
Found via Dangerous Minds – go visit for more info & pics.
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
Co-Geeking 
