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“Let’s continue to take risks. Let’s tackle the issues. In many ways our film community can do it better than anyone else. There is no challenge, artistic or otherwise, that we can’t meet.” —Christopher Reeve

Thank you for your strength. We’ll miss you.

Now is the time to call your congressman and express your support of embryonic stem cell research.

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And the second half of the Big Damn1 Shindig Post!

A few Saturday things I forgot to mention in last night’s post were the shirts and my fence exploits. One couple brought a bunch of shirts they had made up for the event, with Serenity line art and the text “1st Annual PA Shindig Under-the-Stars / Oct. 2004” on the front, and the Blue Sun logo and Mal’s Shindig quote, “Sounds like the finest party I can imagine getting paid to go to” on the back. Hahaha!

As for my fence exploits, because I carried quite a resemblance to River when seen from a great distance, a bunch of fans asked to get my picture replicating the “River communes with the cows” scene from Safe. Then, someone joked about me standing on the fence corner and recreating the “River eavesdrops, standing on the ship railing” from Objects in Space. The second time I fell off, I decided it wasn’t going to happen on the top rail, but one of the attendees got some nice shots of me standing on the second-highest rail. Hopefully, she’ll either send them to me or post them on the boards sometime soon.

Other amusing jokes:

Browncoats for Kerry

Niska/Crow 04 (Vote for a man with reputation. Are you solid?)

My perfect name for the Mal/Inara ‘ship: Spongebath Tightpants.

One of the day’s first activities was getting one of the attendee’s cars out of the mud. The front end was sunk in halfway up the wheels. As we strove to remove the car from the mud, one of the guys grabbed some mud balls and made a Mud Man (like a snowman, but with mud), in honor of Jayne. With “Hero of Canton” on the brain, a few of us more musically oriented started joking about what sort of songs could make up a Firefly musical. We went off on this tangent for a good long time, then a bunch of us just launched into the Buffy musical. Two girls, one guy, and I sang all the way through to “Standing.” We decided that for next year, we would actually arrange something in advance and either sing a series of Firefly filks or sing the Buffy musical broken into something beyond “girls sing the girl parts and the guy sings the guy parts, unless they feel like singing, like in ‘Rest in Peace’ or ‘Sweet’s Song’, and then they can just sing whenever they want,” which could have been marginally more sophisticated. :D

Next was one of the most crazy fun parts of the con: Charades. From the just plain silly (Wash describing what he loves about Zoe in “Bushwhacked”) to the mockingly pornographic (Kaylee eating strawberries)! I turned out to be eerily good at it, getting practically every third charade. Go me! Kristin handed out CDs with the gag reel and the teaser trailer burned on to them to the first bunch of people that guessed correctly, so I ended up with one as well.

Some of the funnier charades: Nathan Fillion filming the circle scene around Tracey’s coffin in the blooper reel, Jayne offering to trade Vera to Mal for Saffron, Rick’s moment of glory, Crow getting kicked into the engine (which I got before it was even acted out, due to the charadee’s complaint of having to throw herself on the ground–another of my River moments, I suppose), Alan Tudyk getting shot in the butt in the blooper reel, Saffron’s offer to wash Mal’s feet, Mal getting shot in “Out of Gas”, Mal showing “mercy” to Atherton Wing, Purple Bellies searching for Simon and River under the placemats, River eating Ice Planet, “It’s a cow fetus”, River killing people with math, Simon asking for a menu, Mal deciding to go to the Special Hell, “Sponge Bath” coming up for the third time (and performed by a guy, hah!), River terrified by Book’s hair (which also came up three times), Simon’s reaction when he sees the statue of Jayne, River’s jig, the Crazy Ivan, Jayne going crazy and falling asleep, and “I shaved off my beard for you, devil woman!”

We quickly developed easy methods of identifying the characters: Jayne was either putting on a hat or an overly masculine pose with a massive gun (gesturing to the massive gun to indicate Vera), Book was the miming of exploded hair, Wash was pretending to fly the ship (or playing with dinosaurs), River was pointing at me, and Mal was implying that one’s pants were overly tight.

After over an hour, we started running out of ideas, so we decided to include the entire Whedonverse, such as the dusting of Vamp!Willow, a hilariously accurate portrayal of The Master prodding at the Hellmouth barrier, PuppetAngel’s detatchable nose, etc. During Charades, people started peeling off one by one and heading home, and as the game wound down, so did the Shindig. Kristin’s mother sent us home with bags of uneaten bagels and other snacky goodness, and we vowed to do it again next year.

Mighty fine Shindig!

1Note to Parents: This is not me using profanity. “Big Damn _____” is a running joke among Firefly fans, stemming from the episode “Safe”, in which Zoe refers to herself and Mal as “Big Damn Heroes.” Therefore, the cast members are our “Big Damn Heroes”, the upcoming film is the “Big Damn Movie”, etc.

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So Gregory Maguire is writing a sequel to Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Um, yay and all, but didn’t she kind of DIE?

Edit: Thespian_geek on LJ writes: “Gregory said that the success of the musical made him go back and look at the novel, and he realized just how many storylines and threads he had left open. So the sequel is going to be what happened to the other characters, pretty much.”

Hmmph, I rather liked the openness and unresolved-ness of the ending. Oh well, I’m sure it will be excellent, as is everything else GM does.

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SHINDIG! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!! So much crazy fun there are no words!

But first, before I continue squeeing about Firefly, I shall squee over the fact that I just found out I won two tickets in the lottery for the Dean/Buchanan debate I may have mentioned earlier. La-LA! I’ma gonna see DEEEEEEEEAN!

EDIT: WAH LIFE IS SO HARD. Michael isn’t letting me miss rehearsal that night, as we’re doing all Act I, so I’d be kind of necessary. So close, and yet so far… *weeps* First he comes to Dallas the day before I leave for Nimbus, and I’m too frantically preparing to be able to spare the time, and now rehearsal. Life clearly hates me.

So instead, I shall concentrate on reasons why life is great! Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or rather the farm, the Pennsylvania Shindig was utterly fabulous. I think one of the most fun aspects of the ‘dig was being able to completely geek out and make all the ridiculously dorky Firefly inside jokes you can possibly conceive, and have all those around you understand every word. And not just Firefly–Buffy, Angel, Star Wars, etc. were all fair game. Penn seriously needs a sci-fi club, pronto.

Saturday around noon, we started with the “meet and greet” and lunch (fresh bao!). Seeing a few people dressed as Kaylee and YoSafBridge, and observing the sheer quantity of knitted orange Jayne hats, I immediately donned my Safe!River outfit. Tthen once we’d assembled most of the attendees, we launched into Firefly Jeopardy. There were three teams of two, and I was lucky enough to be chosen, and even luckier to be paired with Steve, the guy who we later nicknamed “Freaky Memory Guy,” as he was fast like a freak and killed our rivals with his brain. Good lord, the trivia that guy could dredge up… though in the probably most esoteric question of the game, “Which two characters are seen using sugar tongs?”, I knew that it was Jayne and Inara. Which is kinda eerie in itself. :D I credit this random knowledge to the fact that I was dressed up as River at the time.

We ended up winning by quite a comfortable margin, and as our prize, we both got to select from the cornucopia of DVD sets donated by the glorious RhymePhile, who gets loads of free DVDs as a perk from her job. I chose Buffy Season 6 (list price: $60), which if I’m not mistaken is now my first piece of actual official Whedon merchandise. Gravy, I’m such a fandom mooch. XD

We then did a Trivia Bee, where I was eliminated in the first round with “What does Book say about the use of spices in Serenity.” I was trying to say something along the lines of “a man can eat like a king if he has enough Rosemary,” which I now know should be “A man can live on packaged food from here til Judgement Day if he’s got enough Rosemary.” But it was fun to backseat drive with the other eliminees (is that a word? it should be), dorkily whispering amongst ourselves “pulmonary stimulators, cardiac infusers, and cortical electrodes!” and other such fannish things that we would be shunned by polite company for knowing. Bwa ha ha! The bee was eventually declared a draw when the duel between the two top girls had been going on for so long that we started to run out of questions.

It was in the Bee that we were met with what would become the biggest inside joke of the Shindig. One question asked for the name of the Mudder who sacrifices himself and takes a bullet for Jayne, something not a one of us knew. Hat’s [MyOrangeHat, aka Kristin, the host] answer sheet said his name was Rick. The trivia was provided by fans, so we weren’t sure if this was canon or the result of a confused mistake. In the end, we found that Rick is the name of the character the actor plays on the show “24”, but the name stuck. However, we kept making jokes about Rick (ie, “Alas poor Rick, I knew him, Horatio”) until it turned into an all-out Rickstravaganza (my pun), and we concluded that we needed to form a Rick fanclub–I suggested we call ourselves “Rickets” (or “Rickettes”)–and live our lives through the moral guidance of “What Would Rick Do?” We further decided that the freaky (obviously inbred) blond kid with the buggy eyes should be named Norma. Man, that kid is weird.

Later, several people brought instruments (namely a guitar, an autoharp, and a trombone), so we jammed dorkily to “The Ballad of Serenity” and “The Hero of Canton.” You haven’t seen funny until you’ve seen a guitar, an autoharp, a trombone, and a bunch of fans with different ideas as to lengths of certain rests and fermatas try to make music. Hilarity!

Before the light was gone, the Big Damn Costumers all assembled (okay, all 5 of us) for pictures. We had a couple normal ones, some semi-posed, and one with “Okay, pretend a bunch of Fox executives are attacking”, which resulted in zany hijinks and me looking threatening with the gun-shaped stick (just an object; it doesn’t mean what you think) I’d carried around all day.

As night fell, we pointed the projector at the barn wall and launched into “Serenity.” It was so much fun to watch episodes with a huge gang of crazily obsessed fans. The boys shouted catcalls at the Sponge Bath Scene, and the girls threatened to replay Mal’s nekkid scenes in “Trash” repeatedly. Unfortunately, we ended up not having time for either “Trash” or “Objects in Space,” which is quite a tragedy, as I was looking forward to seeing Simon’s delicious torso projected two stories tall. We ended up watching “Serenity”, “Our Mrs. Reynolds”, “Shindig” (obviously), “Out of Gas”, the teaser-trailer, and the extended gag reel. Then we all went to sleep.

And now I’m going to stop writing this blog entry because I’m feeling very sleep deprived and can’t think straight, despite it not even being 11:30 yet. I’ll wake up bright and shiny early to finish my CSE 240 problem set. I cannot do logic in this frame of mind.

Things I will talk about tomorrow: OMWF, first signs of sleep deprivation, charades, our Jayne statue, Tim Minear, and more! Also, photos!

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Dear Bush,

You are a moron.

  1. “I wasn’t happy when we found out there wasn’t weapons……”

  2. The Dred Scott case? You make me want to bash my head against the wall repeatedly.

  3. “Well, it’s pretty simple when they say: Are you for a ban on partial birth abortion? Yes or no? And he was given a chance to vote, and he voted no. And that’s just the way it is. That’s a vote. It came right up. It’s clear for everybody to see. And as I said: You can run but you can’t hide the reality.”? Dude, what did Kerry just say? IT’S NOT BLACK OR WHITE. And hey, federal judges ruled the partial-birth abortion ban unconstitutional.

  4. “You can run, but you can’t hide.” Are you trying to sound like a cowboy? You’re just making yourself look ridiculous. (“Man, Fhqwhgads. You’re just making yourself look worse, y’know. I mean, everybody’s just gonna feel sorry for you. I mean, I do.”)

  5. Hey, I like your new eye tic! And the jaw twitch… is that new?

  6. What did Kerry just say about the embryos used in stem cell research?

  7. “internets” ::snicker::

  8. 75% of Al Qaeda? What in the world are you basing that on?

  9. Actually, yeah, you have part ownership of a timber enterprise. Need some wood? Need some brains.

  10. Why yes, Kennedy certainly is a very Liberal senator! Meanwhile, your opponent is John Kerry.

  11. “Battling green eye shades”? What the HECK? Are you speaking English? “Jabberwocky” makes more sense than you.

    Jayne: You can’t change that just by gettin’ all bendy…

    Wash: All what?

    Jayne: [drifting] You got the light, from the console to keep you, to lift you up… they shine like little angels.

    [He topples forward. Hits the floor hard, chin leading. Out like a two ton light. Everyone just blinks.]

    Wash: Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?

  12. “Well now, that almost made me want to scowl.” OMG, I made a facial expression! “Oooh, pouty! Look at that lip! Gonna get it… Gonna get it!” (Why am I rampantly quoting Joss Whedon?)

  13. Your environmental record is painful to think about. Don’t even try to justify it. You are not a “good steward of the land”, you are an asshat.

  14. You proposed the hydrogen-powered automobile? Is that anything like inventing the internet? Or internets, if you will?

  15. Dude, you forgot Poland! You remembered again later, but still. BWAHAHAHA.

  16. Is the International Criminal Court a bad thing? Or are you afraid you’d be charged?

  17. Aww, a bill is stuck in the Senate? I’m intrigued as how you can blame Kerry for that, seeing as how that would be the fault of the REPUBLICAN MAJORITY.

  18. “Plus, I want ’em all voting for me!” Did he just say that?

  19. Yelling at the moderator is not good debate etiquette.

  20. Do not talk about your budget. Your budget is laughable.

P.S. Canadians are evil and want to kill us all with poison drugs.

Reasons why Kerry is Beyond Awesome:

  1. “The military’s job is to win the war. The president’s job is to win the peace.”

  2. “I think it is respecting life to reach for that cure. I think it is respecting life to do it in an ethical way.”

  3. “We did something that you don’t know how to do: we balanced the budget.”

  4. How he remembered the questioners’ names.

  5. “[‘Clear Skies’ is] one of those Orwellian names you pull out of the sky, slap it onto something, like “No Child Left Behind” but you leave millions of children behind. Here they’re leaving the skies and the environment behind. If they just left the Clean Air Act all alone the way it is today, no change, the air would be cleaner that it is if you pass the Clear Skies act. We’re going backwards.”

  6. Good GRAVY this man knows his stuff. His stats about Missouri’s contribution to the Iraq war? Let me quote that: “If Missouri, just given the number of people from Missouri who are in the military over there today, were a country, it would be the third largest country in the coalition, behind Great Britain and the United States. That’s not a grand coalition. Ninety percent of the casualties are American. Ninety percent of the costs are coming out of your pockets. I could do a better job. My plan does a better job. And that’s why I’ll be a better commander in chief.” MAN he’s good.

  7. Potter Stewart. Teh w00t. “He said the mark of a good judge, good justice, is that when you’re reading their decision, their opinion, you can’t tell if it’s written by a man or woman, a liberal or a conservative, a Muslim, a Jew or a Christian. You just know you’re reading a good judicial decision.”

  8. And best of all? His response to the woman’s question about abortion. That was just beautiful. THANK YOU JOHN KERRY.

SHAZAM. Now take a moment to tell the world how well Kerry did by casting your vote in some of these polls. And here’s another amusing summary, if mine got too spiteful.

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Wheeee, tomorrow is the Pennsylvania Shindig! *does a little dance*

DO NOT MISS THIS LINK! Utterly brilliant. GWB Flip Flop Catalog

And not as funny as the original but still amusing, Good to Be in DC, a new animation from the creators of “This Land”

YouForgotPoland.com has been updated! *snickers*

Apparently, according to Cheney, the war is over.

CNN.com: Official: No WMD Stockpiles in Iraq, yet Bush, Cheney Say WMD Report Bolsters War Decision. Ummmm….

Jon Stewart on the cover of the next Rolling Stone

Cheney’s Selective Amnesia

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Meme ganked from Becca G and Fiendling, among others: Tell me up to five things [within reason] you’d like me to take a photo of.