Inconceivable!

OMG guess what. 


! ! !


They put a link and a little blurb about my Millennium post up on Lance Henriksen's website. And my blog is listed under "Friends."


Excuse me while I dance around the room and squeal like a little girl. 


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Anonymous 1: I have never actually watched Dexter, but it is on my list of things to watch on the internet. I don't have any of the fancy movie channels, so I couldn't watch it when it was on TV. :/

Anonymous 2: YES, of all the Millennium episodes I picked that one. Sure some of the cliche ones are on my list of favs (A Room With No View, the Mikado, Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense...), but SBoG is still at the top. 

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Fasting today, since I pigged the eff out yesterday. But I did NOT binge on Friday or Saturday. This is an accomplishment. yesterday was unavoidable, what with Mother's Day and all. 

It was a good Mother's Day. When you have 5 siblings, holidays and birthdays become a form of trench warfare--all of us trying to outdo each other with making our parents happy. I brought Mum breakfast in bed. Took her out on a lovely walk.

(Sunday is my "day off" from exercising. Mum strictly enforces this, so I must get crafty.)

For dinner, I made some of Mum's favs--steak and kidney pie, and rhubarb crisp.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find lamb kidneys in America? Impossible, because apparently that's considered offal and thus illegal to sell. I went through 3 different Irish butchers who had always supplied me with that sort of thing in the past, and none of them had any. Apparently the health department or something had caught them and threats had been made. 

But on Friday, Other Secretary called up a butcher near her house, and praise be to God, he had lamb kidneys. It was the sketchiest thing ever. When Mum and I went there Saturday, he brought them out in a paper bag (so no one could see what was in it) and told us to keep in on the DL. 

But YAY, I got lamb kidneys!

I left the pic small to minimize the horror. 

5 whole pounds of them. Since no one answered my summons of free lamb kidneys (I only needed like 1 or 2 lbs of them for Sunday's dinner), I shall be making 2 or 3 more steak and kidney pies tonight and freezing them. 

Ok fine, maybe it's a bit gross; but I don't think it's any nastier than people eating solidified rancid milk. And my S&K pie was pretty delicious. Mum said it reminded her of home. :D

It did, I guess--it tasted just like Granny's. I miss Ireland. 

When I was a kid, Mum shipped me off to Ireland every summer. This gave nanny time off to go back to Jamaica for a while, and meant Mum was free of parenting for 3 months. 

I went to Polranny, in Achill, out in the western boonies of County Mayo.

Check out these guys' blog: Polranny Pirates. Their photos are amazing. I LOVE it there!! If there were jobs there, I think I might move. Just waiting for my writing career to take off...

..... 

In summers in Ireland, it gets light out at 4 in the morning, and doesn't get dark until 11 at night. As a child, you were expected to get the feck outside and come back for dinner. Then get out again until it's dark. We had tons of bog and shoreline and mountains to wander around in, because there's so much unowned land--crap land that's hard to build on, can't be farmed, and gets destroyed by non-stop wind and rain, so no one wants it. 

We're on the Google now!

Sometimes the carnival would come to Achill and camp out in the football field down the road from Granny's. 

They were tinkers. Trailer folk who drive round the country. Like gypsies, I guess?

One of my cousins (I have like 28 1st cousins just on Mum's side) and I were bff's, and most days we would walk into town to get lunch, wander in the supermarket, the chemist, and her uncle's shop, wander around the abandoned Protestant church, light all the candles in the regular (Catholic) church and go exploring in the attic (they just left it unlocked?), or wander down by the water and look for seals. 

Just having the craic in general. 

So this one morning (I think I was 10 or 11) we went walking and we passed the carnival that was camped out in the football field. 

I use the word "carnival" loosely. It had maybe some battered old excuse for the teacups and a haggard pony. 

So when we're a little ways past the field, Cousin says she thinks someone is following us. I tried to be subtle when I turned around to look.

There was someone following us. 

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No joke. 

A guy in a gorilla suit was following us. 

Like what?

When he followed us past the pub and all the way over the bridge to the supermarket, we started to get nervous. So we ran into the supermarket to hide. 

And buy candy.

But mostly to hide. 

After a while, we figured he might have gotten bored and left, so we left the supermarket. We checked all around--no gorilla. So we continued on our merry way. 

The f**king gorilla was still there. Idk where he was hiding, but he started following us again.

He followed us all the way to Cousin's uncle's shop (her uncle on her mother's side, so not my uncle, which means it's ok that I think his son is hot as hell). The shop is more or less a convenience store, though they don't call it that. It's just The Shop. 

Cousin told her uncle that there was a gorilla following us. He gave us the same response all Irish parental figures give to children who come to them with these kinds of problems: "Stop talking nonsense. Go outside and play."

We tried to make Uncle believe. Told him to look out the door and see for himself. After much bothering from us, he looked; but of course the gorilla was crafty and hid. Uncle didn't see him. We were booted out of the shop. Gorilla was still following us.

So now what? We had planned on going to the playground behind the church (the normal [Catholic] church) to go on the swings. But the playground was set kind of far back from the road (and not even a main road), and was separated from the church property by a big patch of woods. Basically the playground was completely isolated, and once you were in it you could not be seen or heard by anyone (clever spot for a playground, no?). Cousin and I were not dumb enough to go there with some gorilla-man following us, because surely that would lead to our ultimate demise. But we didn't want to go home, because we didn't want him to know where we lived.

We wandered around town just to make sure we were surrounded by people, and as luck would have it, we ran into one of my aunts in the supermarket. We begged her to drive us home and she agreed, though she did not believe us about the gorilla. (He had conveniently disappeared again, as soon as he saw us with an adult.)

For the rest of the week, until the tinkers and their carnival vacated the field, Cousin and I only took the long and perilous way into town, through the bogs and the abandoned railway rather than along the road. No one ever believed us about the gorilla. 

It always starts this way. With a single blade of grass.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LANCE!! A day late, but better late than never.... This one's for you. <3


In honour of Lance Henriksen Blog Week, and Lance's birthday, I shall now talk even more about Millennium. 

I know what y'all are thinking: [OMG, does she ever shut the eff up about Millennium??]

Nope, sorry kids; she doesn't.

:D

My favourite episode of Millennium ever comes from season 2: "A Single Blade of Grass." Why is it my fav? I think that has something to do with this one Saturday night about 12 years ago. Mum had grounded me for no reason so that she could go out with her friends and leave me home to babysit Little Sis, who was 4 at the time. I was 14. Mum did that A LOT, and when you're 14 and you're not allowed to do anything, ever, you tend to become full of angst and rebelliousness. So this one night I decided to dig into my drug stash and take some acid. 

I have never claimed to be a maker of good decisions. 

After Little Sis went to bed, I dug out my most recent tape of stuff I recorded off the TV--mostly a mash-up of episodes of the X-Files, Oz, Daria, music videos, and of course, Millennium. The first episode on that tape was "A Single Blade of Grass."

I watched and then rewound and repeated that episode a total of four times. I dunno why--at that moment, with my brain all trippy and my mind all angry, I found comfort in that episode. And apparently conditioned myself to love that episode forever. It's like a security blanket. I have the entire script memorized. The images on the TV in the last post are from this episode.

So I'm going to summarize it for all y'all. 

The episode opens in New York City, where a construction site owner who wants to start building an office or something is battling with a bunch of archaeologists at the construction site. The site was apparently an Indian burial ground, and the archeologists, understandably, want to make sure it's carefully excavated. Construction Site Owner doesn't like this. 

And then the Archeologist, Dr. Liz digs up a dead body--not an old one from the burial ground. The recently dead body of an Indian. Construction Site Owner is double-pissed now, because his site has become a crime scene. 

Good thing Frank Black happened to be in New York!

The NYPD brings him in to investigate. Frank has a Vision.

The vision leads Frank to the basement of a fancy hotel across the street, where they find blood on the floor, and bloody hooks and chains hanging from the ceiling, Hellraiser-style.

...and drawings on the wall from pretty much every Indian tribe in North America. Frank brings Dr. Liz in to help. 

Her power animal is an ant.

Eventually, everyone puts two and two together--the guys working the construction site are all Indians. And the dead guy is an Indian. There's Indian drawings on the walls at the murder scene. Frank thinks they're a lost tribe of the Iroquois--one that split up and hid itself among the other North American tribes. 

So Frank goes to talk to the disgruntled Indians at the bar where they hang out.

And he shows them a picture of this weird circle symbol, asking them if they know what it means. 

The Indians are not helpful. 

But they lied. They know what the circle means, and they also know that the circle was NOT one of the symbols on the wall in the basement. The token Wise Old Indian says their Ancestors showed Frank the symbol in a vision. 

The Indians killed the dude at the burial site as part of some ritual involving a prophecy that will bring the buffalo back, and make the grass stop growing for the white man and junk. (Well, they accidentally killed him by feeding him too much snake venom.) The dead dude was supposed to travel the Spirit Road to the West and bring back the second guy from the prophesy. So since Frank is from Seattle and knows about the circle symbol, OBVIOUSLY he's the other one. 

The kind of crazy and also kind of hot Indian Leader believes so, anyway. And Frank has more visions, and tells Dr. Liz about them.

Oh yeah, and Frank accidentally kills the Construction Site Owner with the heart squeeze.

But that same night, the Indians kidnap Frank out of the museum. 

The cops and Dr. Liz look for him in the hotel basement, but no one is there. Then out in the street, Dr. Liz realizes there's smoke pouring out of the manhole covers.

Down in the sewers, the Indians are dancing around a fire and stuff, and they feed Frank snake venom. 

'Cause that totally worked the first time. 

Frank has some of the same visions as he did earlier (the long house, buffalo, etc.), but he tells the Crazy Indian Leader that the prophesy won't come true the way they want it to. They're looking for the wrong things. 

Crazy is pissed, so they feed Frank more snake venom.

But then Frank is rescued by Dr. Liz and the NYPD. Back up on the street, the cops catch some of the Indians while others run away. 

And then a herd of buffalo runs down the street.

The end!

http://millennium-thisiswhoweare.net/cmeacg/episode.php?mlm_code=205