Tokyo Juliet

My very deep thoughts upon this Taiwanese miniseries about skullduggery and fashion design:

1. Sui (the heroine, prone to crying fits and somewhat self-absorbed) is very annoying. And dumb as a warren of rabbits. An intellectually challenged hamster could probably out think her.

2. Liang (the hero, who loves unbuttoned shirts) is very pretty. And is also very nice. As he has to put up with the eternally damp Sui as a girlfriend I believe he should run off with evil textile company queen who wants him for his body and his design skills.

3. Evil dad is great. He keeps separating his son (Liang) and Sui with an effortless ease that bespeaks years of evilness and plotting. And he smirks wonderfully and casts an aura of nastiness with careless abandon. I love evil dad.

4. Horrible teen star who is in love with Sui (like every other man except evil dad, who has taste) should run off with her and leave Liang for for the textile company queen. Or maybe just leave Liang to mope in disturbingly attractive pain and woe. Um.

5. Why did they drop the plot of evil dad running off with Sui's mum when Sui was a wee child? At least it gave her revenge fantasies some point.

And in other news, meyerlemon, who has been posting about CSI: NY for a while (speciically about Danny from that show) posted a link to a picture of the aforementioned Danny. And all I can say is --- well, yes indeed. I do not know what it is about the picture, but despite the fact that I hate these sorts of programmes I now want to watch this show.

( And for Doctor Who stuff to do with new pictures what BBC has released )

Giving up Freedom to Protect Freedom: That always works

From The Guardian:

The home secretary yesterday gave the thinktank Demos his strongest hint yet that a new round of anti-terror legislation is on the way this autumn by warning that traditional civil liberty arguments were not so much wrong as just made for another age.

"Sometimes we may have to modify some of our own freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their misuse and abuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms in the modern world,"

Read the full story here

And in case anyone was wondering if this sort of thing works, I bring you a quote on the interment without trial that was practiced in Northern Ireland when apparently ordinary laws would no longer work; and we all know how swimmingly that went and how it solved that whole problem of violence in the North and in no way made everything worse:

Brian Falkner said: "The terrorists' campaign continues at an unacceptable level and I have had to conclude that the ordinary law cannot deal comprehensively or quickly enough with such ruthless violence.

"I have therefore decided... to exercise where necessary the powers of detention and internment vested in me as Minister of Home Affairs.

He said the decision had been made to protect life and property and the main target would be members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

The act has been described as one of the most powerful anti-terrorist measures on the statute books of any Western democracy but Mr Faulkner said he could not give any guarantees it would bring an end to the campaign."

Link here

Ros na Run

I have recently got a bit obsessed with the Irish language soap opera Ros na Run. It is not actually good or anything but I still cannot stop watching it (think Coronation Street on a very low budget). It's set in the West of Ireland (Spiddeal, I think; anyway, near Galway) and has devious fathers who just got out of jail, CD pirates, wife-beaters, a man who has just been arrested for killing his wife in a mercy killing, a mad bride-to-be, and a love-lorn priest. Though why cannot I not find the episode where the priest declares his love for one of his parishoners? TnaG, why is it not on your web site? Do you want to torment me with never seeing their illicit love?

I am sad that I AM THE ONLY PERSON ON LIVEJOURNAL WHO LISTS ROS NA RUN AS ONE OF THEIR INTERESTS.

Should anyone feel compelled to watch it (or just to hear what Irish sounds like): you can go here: http://www.tg4.ie/Webt/webt.htm

Click on web tv and then pick 'drama' at the side. Go on, go on, go on.....

Hey, at least it's better than that scifi programme they made a while back. That was a bit disturbingly horrible, with special effects worse than Who in its leaner years.

Hana Yori Dango

So I've just watched the first episode of the Japanese live action version of this, and it's love, love, love. It's the story of middle-class girl* in an elite school which is run by a gang of bullies called the F4 who torment her for various reasons (mainly because she has a spine). There's a Taiwanese version called Meteor Gardens, which is also excellent, but this is totally wonderful too.

I love the look on the heroine's face when she punches one of the F4 in the school cafeteria; she's been taking the bullying and trying to just survive and then one of them messes with her lunch box and then she just explodes and whales on him. And he just lies there on the ground with this dawning expression of respect and interest on his face, and she declares eternal war against him and his cronies right in front of the entire school. Yay! And there's a bit where she is stumbling around one of the F4's mansions in the second episode and she comes across their banqueting hall and she says 'Harry Potter?'

So good.

* Actually I am not sure what class she is, because I know nothing about Japanese culture. But she is an awful lot poorer than the people she goes to school with and her parents are skimping on the food. So maybe lower middle class?