To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

1. Bomb pops are, well, the bomb. Definitely the best inhabitant of popsicle land, with the possible exception of Purity's lemon pops.*

2. I found a great site full of old photos. I think this one of the Jersey Shore from 1905 is my favorite so far. The subjects of so many photos from prior to, oh, 1920 or so, are so stiff and distant due to long exposure times and the fact that photos were usually formal occasions. This one totally looks like a snapshot from today, except with weird clothes. (Stockings with bathing suits?!) The Harry Potteresque guy making the girl in the middle smile is my favorite part, but I find the girl on the left with the bonnet very intriguing as well. She kind of looks like a grown-up Wednesday Addams. The dark-haired girl about her age on the far right looks exactly like one of my former students would if she wore her hair like that. It's a little creepy, actually.

3. I watched Rizzoli & Isles, finding it a bit bland, but enjoying nerdy/quirky Isles and the fact that the show features two women as the leads. I'm going to stick with it for a bit, but don't anticipate getting really into it. Mostly I want it to become the new Xena insofar as femslash fic is concerned. (It strikes me as unlikely that it'll go beyond subtext on the show itself.)

Someone over in the thread for it at TWOP noted that it's not entirely dissimilar to a 2004 pilot that didn't get picked up, but which has been uploaded piecemeal on YouTube: Nikki & Nora. I would've been into it purely for the allusion in the title, but the pilot itself was actually a pretty entertaining mixture of So Bad It's Good** and Actually Good (And Even Funny). The premise is that the title characters are a sort of Odd Couple-y team of detectives who are hiding their personal relationship from their coworkers and, in Nora's case, family members. The two of them were adorable together. Yay canon femslash and all, but I think mostly what I appreciated was that it wasn't another iteration of Will They/Won't They; they already Did, and that was refreshing.

I was impressed that they appeared to have actually filmed on location--it's set in New Orleans--and they made the characters southern without exaggerating them into stereotypes. (Possibly this means it's all wrong for New Orleans, but hey, they used "y'all" correctly. That's more than I can say for other things.) Also, bonus Seamus Dever as a beat cop.

...Uhhh, basically I think I'm saying that I wish that pilot had been picked up way back when rather than R&I now, but anyway.


* Though after looking through their site for a link, now I'm craving a Nutty Buddy. My elementary school had them for desert at lunch, and I remember getting them there. Haven't had one in at least a decade, though.

** Case in point:
Suspect Nora just chased down: Did you get that outfit at Wal-Mart?
Nora: Yep. I got my bullets there too.

No, really, she actually said that. And yet it also tells us something about her character. Likewise, during the inevitable gratuitous bathtub scene, made all the weirder by the fact that the bathtub is apparently in their living room, the dialogue gives us character info on both of them in a way that shows rather than tells: Nora is sentimental because she bought Nikki a necklace for the anniversary of the start of their working relationship; Nikki can't remember these things, but is appreciative.