Ambrose & Elsewhere

Last night, my daughter and I were watching the CBS show Criminal Minds–which, I guess, was our first mistake. It may be the weakest of the successful shows in the procedural crime genre–often the plot hinges on profiling (a psychic power for people with no psychic power), and there is a definite tendency in some episodes toward torture porn. On the other hand, it has a couple of the more interestingly geeky characters on mainstream TV (e.g. Garcia and Reed). There was a great episode a year or two ago when Reed and Hotchner were stuck in a cell with a serial killer who seemed intent on provoking a violent confrontation, and Hotchner (for various plausible reasons) seemed to welcome the opportunity. Reed saved the situation by talking with brilliant semi-relevance until help arrived. It was priceless, especially the last exchange between Reed and the killer. Garcia probably needs no words of praise from me; even as I speak, people are setting up geeky cults about her. If not, I want to know why not.

Still, last night’s episode was so deeply vile that I probably won’t be watching the show again.

The plot involved a family abducting a couple of girls whom they intended to train as a mate for their 10 year old boy, after murdering the girls’ parents. The big reveal (stone obvious from the start, like many of the Awful Secrets on this show) was that the mother of the family had been abducted the same way when she was a child. The family had been doing this (abducting girls and murdering their parents), generation after generation, for at least a century. Also, it was just part of a network of families doing the same thing. A group of families, travelling from place to place, engaged in stealing, murder and child abduction.

Do you see where this is going?

Yes, the murdering kidnappers turned out to be Romani. Not just isolated Romani criminals, but part of a whole Romani subculture that preys on the wealth and the lives of us saintly, law-abiding non-Romani. Any non-murdering non-thieving Romani were depicted by Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Film.

It was hideous: an hour of commercial television devoted to a blood-libel against a cultural minority, all for the sacred purpose of selling cars and soap and pimple-cream and whatever else CBS was advertising that night.

This is how CBS celebrated the first full day in office of President Barack Obama. I suppose Plan B was a miniseries remake of Birth of a Nation or a colorized version of Triumph of the Will.

Extra bonus dumbness: the scriptwriter thought the Romani speak Rumanian. I kid you not. I guess they don’t have an internet connection, or books, or shreds of human decency in the dark hole where this script had its loathesome birth.

I apologize for the unpleasant tone of this entry: this isn’t the sort of issue I’d normally address on this blog. But, in a quick glance around the interwebs this AM, it looked like no one was talking about this. And I think that someone should be.

I dashed off some ideas about the perennial bone-of-snarkation, definitions of sf/f genres, and posted them at the Blog Gate.

In other BG news, Howard Jones reports that Black Gate 13 has gone to press.

This guy misspells Poe’s middle name, but I like the narration and the low-tech animation.

King’s last speech.

1. -2° (F) at the moment outside–up from a low of -8°. Feels almost like home. My son, a sun-belter by temperament despite his Minnesota roots, hates the guts out of days like this, but I’m kind of enjoying the cold snap.

2. In honor of Patrick McGoohan, my son and I watched “The Girl Who Was Death,” maybe the best of all the Prisoner episodes. AMC, the guys who are producing the new Prisoner, are (trying to atone for their sins by) kindly offering the entire series online in streaming video. (The AMC linked snaffled from Chris’s Invincible Super-blog.)

3. I’m not saying it’s cause and effect, but, you know. I join SFWA. and within a few months–BAM! New rules for the Nebula that actually make sense. I’m not saying there’s any causal effect. Because there isn’t any: I didn’t contribute to the discussion and was as surprised as anyone by the announcement. I’m just saying… nothing, apparently.

Patrick McGoohan has made his final escape, it seems.

My latest post at the Blog Gate is up. It’s about urban fantasy which has been a frequent topic in the blogosphere of late and which I had about half an idea about.

Fast Forward 2, from intrepid editor Lou Anders, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Philip K. Dick Award. Unless I’m miscounting, this is only the second third time a fiction anthology has been shortlisted (the other two being Leviathan Three in 2002 and Constance Ash’s Not of Woman Born in 1999). Kudos!

[edited for historical accuracy. Sorry Constance!]

A particularly painful form of insomnia occurs when the subject, finally fallen asleep after a long and restless night, wakes himself with his own snores.

1. Hot fast Neptunes. Either it’s Pelops’ tell-all autobiography, or Systemic’s top exoplanet story of the year. (Seen at james_nicoll‘s LJ.)

2. Zack Handlen has started reviewing the original (i.e. actual) Star Trek series at the AV Club; he starts (reasonably, I think) slightly out of order with a review of the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Among many things about this episode that are a little off (the old-style uniforms from the first pilot; the absence of Bones and Uhura; Kirk’s middle initial; the fact that they travel through the navigational hazard, not around it; etc.), it suddenly occurred to me the last time I watched it that the title is wrong. Other men had gone there before, cosmographically and in plot-situation, sometime in the 21st century (which now looks like a rather optimistic estimate for human exploration of the galactic rim). (After the Pelops reference above, “galactic rim” looks somehow salacious, but let it go.)

3. Over at the Blog Gate, Scott Oden asks how noble we want our Orcs to be? Just noble enough to refrain from the “galactic rim” joke, I’d say.

There are actually no Wallace Stevens references, this time (I should have used the above title last week) but, anyway, my latest Blog Gate post is up. It’s about episodic novels or, as everyone else on the planet calls them, fix-ups.

I don’t actually say so anywhere in the Blog Gate post, but the reason why this is on my mind is that I’m in the last throes of an episodic novel, the sequel to the upcoming Blood of Ambrose, and I’m flipping out about it, a little. In part, the Blog Gate post is an attempt to talk myself down. It must have worked because my face keeps smashing into the keyboard, an infallible sign of relaxation.