Brewing this Open Thread for 15 minutes unlocks its special tannins, extending lifespan and granting cat-like reflexes. 14 minutes, poison.
The box office this weekend contains one remake (Footloose), one prequel that’s essentially a remake (The Thing) and a bird-watching movie starring Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson. Weather looked kind of crappy in the Northeast, so I was planning on staying in anyway.
I’ll bet Netflix would like to stay out of the news. After famously reversing its decision to separate its DVD business, Netflix got some good news in the form of a deal with the CW, giving Netflix some streaming TV content and CBS some much-needed revenue.
Is there anything to look forward to? How about the new Avengers trailer?
Comment of the Week: While there’s been some excellent discussion in the IMDb Top 250 Analysis, 4th Edition post, I just have to give it to Hazbaz in the comments for episode #171 of the podcast:
Keeping with the Community theme, did anyone else think Lee’s “woman voice” sounded weirdly like Yvette Nicole Brown?
I just had to.
Pop culture’s not giving me a lot of clever mash-up questions this week, so I’m just gonna ask: is there anything we missed? Sound off in the comments, for this is your … Open Thread.
You know what we missed? We missed you, Perich.
They finally released a coherent trailer for the Muppet Movie. Who else thinks Walter will be the new Benny Bunny?
Last night’s Community might have been the best episode they’ve done ever, because it really wasn’t one episode: it was multiple storylines, based around the idea that someone from the group was picked to go get pizza every time, leading to a different yet coherent outcome amongst those left behind (with one notable exception in terms of the “your turn to get the pizza”).
Footloose and the Thing should have been melded together, so that a city kid comes to a small Texas town and discovers that not everyone is who they say they are, at least once an alien from the South Pole has been unthawed and starts taking over the sexy “teens” (Julianne Hough is forty, right?) and forcing them to dance against their will. I would see that movie, oh yes I would.
But that wouldn’t work, because the point of Footloose is that the hero has to make un-dancing people dance. If the aliens’ mind control turned everyone into Soviet-style drones and only Kevin Bacon or reasonable facsimile could free them with the power of dance, with an ensemble finale drawing paralells to the “Broadway Melody” scene in Singin’ in the Rain, that would make sense.
Yeah, pretty amazing that they were able to fully describe seven different alternate universes, all within a 22 minute episode.
I just made the connection! Trevor, a couple of weeks ago you made a comment about your old article on “The Thing” and the coming reboot, and for some reason I read “Swamp Thing” (also from 1982), and it’s been bugging me ever since, barely under the level of making me actually look into it. I couldn’t figure out where the Norwegians fit in. And now this comment has put me right!
At least “Swamp Thing” was the right genre. I could have read “Do the Right Thing” and been really confused…
The Walking Dead premiers this weekend.
And it may be old news, but I found out the Gorillaz are releasing a compilation of their singles next month. I know there’s a lot to overthink with regards to their characters and their whole fictional universe and some of the guests they have. I’m especially intrigued by Snoop Dogg’s contributions, and how those tie in with his own position in the rap scene in the real world. But grad school has me by the*… Has me quite swamped.
The Avengers has a lot to do in its two-ish hour timeframe. I do so love Whedon, but finally seeing the trailer this week makes me worry it’s just going to be a visual clusterf*ck interspersed with a little (but not enough) of that witty banter he’s so good at. I truly hope that’s not the case, of course.
*Side question: Men can say, “…has me by the balls,” but is there an equivalent for women? Hm…
I believe the idiom is “by the tits”.
I think “by the balls” is still fine. But, if you like “by the ovaries” is the most common substitute I’ve heard.
“By ther ovaries” raises two problems: firstly, they cannot be grabbed (without invasive surgery); secondly, “ovaries” does not carry the same informal crudeness as “balls” or, for that matter, “tits”.
Actually I found that the trailer boasted my hopes for the movie. Maybe I’m too much of a Joss fan to think he can do any wrong (although I lost some faith in him during s2 of Dollhouse) but I feel like he’s trying hard to stay true to the comics while still entertain the masses and that’s a hard balance to find.
A lot of people have been angry at the comment Tony made to Steve after Cap asked who Tony was when you took away the suit but I see it as Tony openly saying he knows that the suit makes him Iron Man and that’s all Nick wanted him for (Fury even says so at the end of IM2) but at the same time telling everyone that there’s more to him than just the suit. (Plus it was a b*tchy comment for the Tony/Steve shippers to squee over)
Also my friends and I are having fun coming up with different Wheadonverse nods he could have through out the movie (so far the best one has been an actual Fruity Oaty Bar placed in a scene).
Did the trailer brag about your hopes for the movie? If not, I think you mean it “boosted” them.
so I did, sorry about that!
Ohoho, no problem!
Angry? Why?
A number of people were saying that Tony doesn’t get to be the good guy in the room.
I don’t understand why there has to be a male equivalent for female things and a female equivalent for male things. Forcing one gender into something specifically designed and designated for another diminishes respect of both genders as separate, unique entities. Women’s health and men’s health are separate fields because everyone doesn’t have the same equipment and doesn’t go through the same experiences.
I can’t speak to the whole range of our society’s gender-derived dichotomies, but I believe the reason women can’t say someone “has them by the balls’ is because, as you touched upon near the end of your post, they haven’t got any.
It’s not the health so much as a broader issue. While I didn’t intend it as a women v. men thing, it does now bring to mind that there are numerous terms applicable mostly to men or women when being insulting, or that at least carry much more vitriol when against one as opposed to the other.
In this case, I had never really heard a “female version” that carried the same weight as “by the balls” used (because apparently I’m sheltered or something). I don’t think there has to be, per say. But as Jeremy T said up there, other words aren’t as potentially medically damaging for a woman or as crass as “balls.”
And let’s think about it a little (OTI, yup). The implication of the phrase, the way it’s used (heck, the way I almost used it), is that the physical, literal meaning carries over into a more abstract sense of control of the person being described. If someone has a guy “by the balls,” they don’t (usually- you never know) literally have their hand (or something) clamped down onto that guy’s scrotum. The implication is that the first person has control over the second, that the second person is completely helpless and susceptible to the will and whim of the first. But yes, since women don’t have “balls,” using it when describing a woman removes some of the emphasis or force from it. The general idea carries over, to be true, but it doesn’t have as much oomph. It’s emasculating when aimed at a man, but were I to use it about myself or another woman, it wouldn’t have a dewomanizing (is that a word?) effect.
Now, “grabbing by the ovaries” could, potentially, have the same dewomanizing effect, yes. But, again as Jeremy T said, you can’t grab a woman’s ovaries arbitrarily as you could a man’s scrotum, so the next best thing is her breasts (“tits”). But, I can think of two reasons, apart from not being as crass, for this not being quite fitting. First, while it may hurt a lot and yeah, they can be kind of tender or susceptible to causing a lot of pain to their owner if they get hit/whatever, twisting or grabbing a woman’s breasts in the fashion implied would be more like twisting the her arm or pulling her hair. It would hurt, yeah, but it wouldn’t necessarily be grabbing something that could completely incapacitate, of not kill her, if damaged enough. Second, breasts are not as intrinsic to being “woman” as a man’s scrotum is for being “man.” So the negative connotations of being emasculated that run through being held “by the balls” don’t really carry over to being held “by the tits.”
Yes, I realize this is all very heteronormative, but that’s precisely what I’m getting at. Again, I’m not saying there should be an equivalent, but I think it’s interesting that there isn’t. On the flip side, you can call a man or a woman a “slut,” but it runs a lot deeper when aimed at the latter- and this is something on other threads here and that gets discussed all over the internet, so I prolly don’t need to go into it more. But, suffice to say, I think it goes both ways, depending on the word(s) involved.
Of course, words shape how we think, and how we think shapes the words we use- so the heteronormativity drives heteronormativity. It’s tautological, but that’s how society is: We create it, but it creates us. So moving beyond the heteronormativity would require changes in mindset and word choice. So I could start saying I’m being held by the balls by my grad program, sure. Of course, I’d get lots of weird stares, or people would just laugh because it sounded so ridiculous coming from me, a woman, and a usually chipper one, at that. But hey, I like making people laugh, so it could be worth it, even for that small effect.
Okay, so that was a lot of nonsensical rambling, but I hope something coherent is in all that circumlocution.
Gab might get some enjoyment out of this, but I just bought ‘Heat Rises’ (the newest “Richard Castle” book) and, of course, they had a ‘Watch Castle on ABC’ on the cover. Now the fact that Castle is a fictional character and for the author photo they have Nathon Fillion, is this a stroke of brilliance in cross-marketing or just a ploy to get fans of the show to indulge in being able to actually read a book that was thought up on a TV show?
Also do you think that they’ll publish the Storm novels or would that be going one step too far?
Side Note: The dedication is for Captain Montgomery, which I thought was a nice touch given the events of last season.
I’ve always thought the “Watch Castle!” stuff on the books was kind of silly. I have the first one, but I only read the first chapter so far. And I don’t know about you, but I do my best to pretend Nathan is reading it to me, and that makes it oh so hilarious and awesome. Anyway, the cynic in me thinks it’s prolly the latter, just a ploy to get more money out of the public. As such, they prolly will publish those Storm novels- they’ve already published the Lone Avenger graphic novel. ;)
I just got back from the movies. Has anyone else seen The Trip, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon?
I urge you to find the full 6 episode BBC series. The film is basically just a re-editing of the series to fit in to a couple of hours (or however long it is – I haven’t actually seen it). But the series itself was fantastic and deserves to be watched in its entirety.
I like it, but is essentially one joke done for three hours.
I don’t think as much about insults as I tend not to need them but I think you might be interested in checking out a book I skimmed a while back called Words and Women.
Again, I don’t know why women would want an equivalent term. I think it’s kind of awesome (and evolutionarily sound) for our reproductive organs to be internal and for that physical means of inflicting pain to be irrelevant. I suppose, conjecturing wildly, the reason that men specifically have a term when we could have a gender-neutral saying about an equally sensitive area like something about gouging someone’s eyes out, is because there’s an assumption that men are the physical and dominant gender therefore the discrepancy in that ideal, the one weak spot needs to be highlighted e.g. Achilles’ heel. Achilles’ heel would not matter if the rest of him was not impervious to harm. This of course raises the conclusion that women are the passive, less physical gender who are entirely composed of sensitive areas.
So you’re saying the female equivalent should be something like “has me by the emotions” or “by the feelings”? Which is literally more true than the male version (in most situations).
No, I’m saying there is no equivalent because if the term arose from an assumption about the relative traits of both genders then there is no ONE part of women seen as particularly sensitive. That is, women are just…”had”. You don’t have to target one area to immobilize them. They’re pretty much one big target.