Supernatural 7.4 Recap: Ghost Cars Not Scary; Everyone Feels Guilty, Except Sam

If there's one thing I've learned from watching Supernatural -- and never let it be said that time spent watching this show has not taught me anything useful -- it's that haunted cars are not scary. 

Arguably the worst Supernatural episode ever (Yeah, yeah, I know) is "Route 666" from Season 1, in which the villain is a racist truck. Yes, a ghost truck. A ghost truck that is racist. A racist truck.

It's so bad that they even refer to it as the "racist truck" when they get all meta in Season 4 and discover that Supernatural is a series of cult books.

Dean: Everything is in here, from the racist truck to me having sex. I'm full frontal in here, dude.

When the Impala gets possessed in Season 6's episode "Mannequin 3: The Revenge" (yup, it's actually called that -- also the villain in that one is a haunted kidney!), they at least play it for laughs: 

  "It possesses sex dolls! This is not a sex doll!" 

Thanks to here for gifs

  So, you'd think if there was ONE thing anyone involved in Supernatural would know, it's this: haunted cars. Not scary.

Guess how S.7 episode four, "Defending Your Life," begins? 

 

Yup. Ghost car. 

Even the guy getting chased by the ghost car thinks its lame:

A ghost car? Really? It's not even a meta episode!

Supernatural 7.02 and 7.03: Everything Was So Awesome and Then Everything Sucked

Alrighty-roo, so obviously I'm waaaaay behind on Supernatural recaps. I'm going to do a compressed recap of 7.02 and 7.03, which is basically going to be a recap of just 7.02 because I REFUSE to do a full recap of the third episode. 

My reactions to the two episodes can be summed up by: 

An alarmingly large chunk of the average day

Okay, so, like I said -- Imma try and do Supernatural recaps when the new season starts up. We'll see. There's like eighty billion things I could say about Supernatural but I think it's vital to the success of this endeavor that I not say as much as I'd ideally want to. Nick Hornby has this great moment in Fever Pitch -- he's says, when you're really obsessed with something (in his case soccer, or "football"), often when you're asked, "What are you thinking?" you have to lie:

At this point I lie. I wasn't thinking about Martin Amis or Gerard Depardieu or the Labour party at all. But then, obsessives have no choice; they have to lie on occasions...If we told the truth every time, then we would be unable to maintain relationships with anyone from the real word. We would be left to rot with our Aresenal programmes or our collection of original blue-label Stax records or King Charles spaniels, and our two-minute daydreams would become longer and longer and longer until we lost our jobs and stopped bathing and shaving and eating, and would lie on the floor in our own filth rewinding the video again and again in an attempt to memorize by heart the whole of the commentary including David Pleat's expert analysis, for the night of 26th of May 1989 (You think I had to look that date up? Ha!) The truth is this: for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.

Substitute "Season 2 DVD commentary" in there and you get the picture.

For instance: complaining. I could do a lot of that; for instance, about Season Six. But there's already plenty of complaining out there, some of which I agree with and some of which makes me feel like this.

So, I'm going to limit myself. For instance, in this blog entry I'm only going to complain about promotional materials! No biggie. Everybody thinks about that stuff, right?

Reader Request Winner: The Time That the Apple Company Accused Me of Peeing on My Computer

Okay, so I nagged y'all via poll and you voted. The winner was probably predetermined because "The Time That the Apple Company Accused Me of Peeing on my Computer" has the phrases "pee" and "Apple company" and "accused" in it.

Let's begin.

Part I: In Which We Introduce the $1200 bottle of Three-Buck Chuck.

Awww, people on YouTube are so sweet!

I used to be on the board of a lovely little theatre company in Minneapolis: Off-Leash Area. As part of my brief stint on the Marketing committee, I uploaded some clips of their old shows onto YouTube, under my account. Almost immediately, I actually got some nice comments about a clip, which was actually the first show I ever saw by Off-Leash Area. It's a little show about the artist Philip Guston, called "Philip Guston Standing on His Head Standing Philip Guston on His Head."  Now, of course, someone has added to the nice comments, "Guston is rolling in his grave." Awww, sweet!


Watch the clip here.


The other day, I woke up, checked my email, and discovered that someone had commented on a clip of the show "Border Crossing" -- "the worst video ive seen on youtube by a long way."


What a nice way to wake up!


And...really dude? This is the worst thing? On YouTube?

I think the part where they form the spider-creature is pretty cool.

I love the internet, but I think Zach Galifianakis gets it right a little.

Anyway, Off-Leash area now has their own channel, with lots of interviews about the shows they put together in garages (their own car garage and other peoples' garages as well -- they do a tour, now). It's definetly not the worst thing on YouTube, by far.

Just About to Lose My Mind, Honey, Honey

Really? Really? First this and now this? :

Of course, I discovered these on a shopping expedition during which I bought (and only bought):

1) Diet coke with Splenda

2) Diet coke with Lime

3) Red Vines

Ze judgments, I should not be making zem!

ETA: The above is not entirely true. I also bought a bottle of wine.

I go to several yoga classes. At one, most of the other women there are middle-aged. There's a fair amount of talk about hot flashes and divorce. The yoga is therapeutic and uses all sorts of props. I leave that class feeling pampered, extraordinarily young, and tremendously fit and flexible.

The other type of yoga class I go to is fast-pasted and uses no props. Most of the other students there are undergraduates. There's lots of of talk about classes, credit cards, and various outrageous things that other people have said or done. I can occasionally do a posture that many of the undergraduates can't, which produces extremely un-yoga-encouraged feelings of comparison and self-congratulation. However, they are pretty much all supernaturally beautiful (and I don't mean that snidely: these are just the facts, ma'am) so I doubt they give a shit that I can do a wheel or crow pose (sort of). I leave that class feeling well-worked out and extraordinarily old (not to mention unfortunate looking).

I occasionally go to a more advanced type of class at the same studio. These classes usually have a range of ages: from folks in their twenties to crazy-flexible sixty-year-olds. The students there are pretty serious yogis, for the most part. We attempt things, and I fall down a lot. We do various partner poses and have to get into very intimate positions with each other. Occasionally, I wonder if I have accidentally joined the marines, like when an instructor asks us to do eight wheel poses in a row. The despairing laughter and heavy breathing in the room at such moments creates a feeling of solidarity, even if most of the other folks usually have an easier time with the postures than I (yes, even the sixty-year-olds). I leave that class feeling humbled, out of shape, and extremely un-flexible.

I think all three sets of feelings are useful and good in their own way. If anything, it's a nice reminder that at any given time -- depending on who we're talking to -- we're all old, young, fit, fat, attractive, unfortunate looking, boring, daring, beginning, advanced.

Of course, you shouldn't compare yourself to other people at all, least of all in yoga. But as long as you're going to (and it's hard to leave that habit entirely behind), it's good to have a range of folks to compare yourself to. Gives you a healthy sense of perspective. If I'm feeling a little too cocky in one class, I can remember another where all the hard, golden bodies left me in their yoga-dust. If I'm feeling a little down on myself for not being able to do x or y arm balance, I can remind myself there's a class in which I feel downright advanced.

This is where I draw the line

Okay, so I obviously waxed fulsome below about my love for Twizzlers and Red Vines. Also, I love chocolate (to further underscore the cliche, I especially love chocolate during my bouts with PMS. Suck it, stereotypes).

But this is where I draw the line:


I mean, maybe I'll try them and they'll be delicious. But the thought makes me gag. Two great tastes that I can't imagine tasting great together. On the other hand, Hershey's chocolate already tastes like wax, which is the texture that Twizzlers aim for, so maybe it was inevitable...

Have rediscovered Aimee Mann recently, who brings my two obsessions together in a haunting, lovely way:

Learn How To Park! You Are So Inconsiderate! Smiley Face!

Back in Minneapolis. There's a ridiculous amount of snow. And parking sucks.

I got on the wrong side of a snow emergency and had to wait multiple hours to get my car out of the impound lot. Multiple hours. Nearly three. And an hour of that was waiting outside. It was such a bizarre experience, actually, that it was almost worth it just to have the story. Almost.

The first hour (and this is at 10 pm at night, by the way) was, as I said, outside, and even with FUR-LINED boots my feet were freezing. The line was one of those lines that move so slowly that it seems as if it's not moving at all and how you progress forward seems mysterious and unlikely.

The lady in front of me had had a tracheotomy and talked by using one of those electronic devices that you press to your throat, which only compounded the surreality of the whole thing.

"I...want...my...car...back..." she said several times. "Just...give...me...my...car."

I sympathized. Also, she wasn't wearing a hat, which...what?

Once we got out of the cold into a makeshift covered waiting area, which was heated, the quality of life improved greatly, though the line moved even more slowly.

What was remarkable about the whole thing was that for the most part everyone was quite nice and well-behaved. You wouldn't think that, as we crept into the next day, in the cold, without our cars, having to face the prospect of paying a lot of money, that we wouldn't take it out on each other. But I think the fact that the line was so completely terrible, and that we were all in the same boat, and, to a certain extent, it was our own faults that we were in this situation (I mean, the snow emergency rules are confusing, but they're not impossible, and I certainly should have known better), combined to make us reasonably pleasant. Someone had written a note and hung it up: BE KIND TO EACH OTHER. NO ONE WANTS TO BE HERE. And for the most part, people followed this principle.

When I got the window, finally, the guy working there was even in a fairly decent mood. He couldn't read my handwriting on the form I'd filled out, and joked, "What, are you a professor or something?"

"Uh...yeah," I stammered. "Sort of."

"Really?" he said and we both laughed. "Why do professors always have such terrible handwriting?"

I'd actually never heard that before, though I'm willing to believe it's true. I thought he was going to say "doctors" since they're the ones who have the reputation for terrible handwriting. I guess professors do too.

I'm actually pretty confident I know why my handwriting sucks, but I'll explain that another day.

Anyway, I eventually got my car back. Here are two other parking stories:

1) Now, you can't park on the even side of non-snow emergency streets until APRIL. Which means available parking is cut IN HALF. This BLOWS. It used to be easy to find parking in my neighborhood, unless you came home past, like, one in the morning (if, for example, you were coming back from claiming your car at the impound lot). But now, even coming home at seven it's nearly impossible to find a place.

2) I've written before that parking at the University where I work is difficult to come by. I used to come to teach at an insanely early hour, meaning I could usually get a spot. Now, I still have to come early, but not insanely early, so parking is very difficult to come by. On Friday, even the metered parking was reserved for a special event. And I didn't have tons of time to find a spot. I ended up accidentally parking blocking a driveway. Which is awful, I know, but in my defense, the block where I parked makes it very difficult to determine what's driveway and what isn't, since snow basically covers all of it, the driveways don't occur in regular or logical intervals, and there are no signs. Anyway, when I got back, I realized what I'd done, and somehow I'd escaped a ticket. However, there was a note tucked into my windscreen wipers, written in cute, curly handwriting:

LEARN HOW TO PARK! YOU ARE SO INCONSIDERATE!

The contrast between the message and cute handwriting was so great that I almost expected them to add, HAVE A NICE DAY!

I also love how Midwestern all of this was: you are enjoined to be nice in a horrific line in the middle of the night, and the worst insult anyone can think to level at you is that you are "inconsiderate."

Anyway, parking sucks. And I suck at it. Please stop, winter.

Overheard at the busstop

A woman said today, while I was waiting for the 2 bus, "I don't want to smoke. There's a pregnant lady... and a girl [referencing me]...reading a book."

I liked that I was in the same category as the pregnant lady.

I watched You Can Count On Me tonight and smoked three cigarettes inside my apartment. Bad plan.

I couldn't help it! Mark Ruffalo was smoking in the movie!

I'm impressionable.

Even if I am the girl reading the book.