Unfettered Brilliance: Walter White Wednedsday 52

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Walter White Wednedsday 52

What a week it's been! As regular readers of this blog know, I teach full-time and it is CRUNCH TIME at my college. My time isn't just taken up right now with class prep and grading,; there have also been several other big (and I mean BIG) projects going on that had non-negotiable deadlines. Add to that a great deal of uncertainty regarding the fall schedule and it's been stressful 'round here, although I still think I have it easier than just about any character on Breaking Bad. (To put this in perspective, I can relate to Lydia far more right now than I am truly comfortable with.) The final straw for me was discovering that my faithful computer was infested with malovolent gremlins. While it's being exorcised, I have a loaner, which is very nice, but it's set up to run Windows 8, which I know nothing about and I find to be - what's the opposite of intuitive? Oh, right - counterintuitive.

So I'm tapping this out on my iPad, with a varying degree of success.

Sometimes you just have to punt and this is one of those weeks. So for Walter White Wednesday 52, let me just remark on the following:

Walt's 52d birthday didn't start so well.
Gilligan will fill us in on the details starting in July.
The Simpsons got on the Breaking Bad bandwagon this past week with a wonderful variation on the "couch gag." My co-author wrote about it over on his blog for "Meth Monday" - go check that out with this link!

Back soon!

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Unfettered Brilliance by K. Dale Koontz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Points of Interest

Lurker's Guide - Excellent fan-run resource guide for Babylon 5

Breaking Bad - The official AMC site for news and recaps about the best show on television

Mockingbird's Nest - What I do outside of my day job

Ensley Guffey's Blog - Musings and links worth noticing

Nik At Night's Blog - Most things TV, including the 2011 Rewatch

TV Tropes - What you've seen, over and over and why it matters

Slayage - Whedon given the scholarly treatment

Whedonesque - Clearinghouse of all things Whedon

BuffyWorld - Shooting scripts, screenshots, and more

Who?

K. Dale Koontz may have watched too much television as a child. She learned to count via Sesame Street and first learned that genres could cross-pollinate through M*A*S*H. When she discovered Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the die was cast. In 2008, McFarland published her book Faith and Choice in the Work of Joss Whedon which focused on themes such as redemption, choice, and consequences in Whedon's work up to that point. (She's fairly sure Volume 2 could be written to include Dr. Horrible, Dollhouse, and The Avengers.) She is a founding member of the Whedon Studies Association (a great group of people, but don't mention Twilight. Just sayin'). She has presented original work on the Rossum Corporation in Dollhouse, Kitty Pryde, and Japanese anime. In 2014, she and co-author Ensley F. Guffey worked with ECW Press to publish the critically-acclaimed Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad. Her most recent project was to team again with Ensley and ECW to publish A Dream Given Form, which is the only guide to all the canonical works in the Babylon 5 universe. That book is currently available for preorder and will be released in September of 2017. Dale is available for speaking engagements and only occasionally uses puppets in her presentations.

What?

I have long been interested in storytelling - how we do it, why we do it, and what happens when we mix things up. This interest might be the result of being born and raised in the American South, a region that has long celebrated the involved story over the quick answer. Television - the good stuff, anyway - does this brilliantly. Far from being film's red-headed tacky cousin, good TV lets characters and relationships build slowly and often mixes up genres, so horror is next door to humor and fantasy rubs shoulders with procedurals. This blog focuses on both the "good stuff" being broadcast that catches my fancy (with a special emphasis on Babylon 5, since that's the book that's in the process of being written right now) as well as film. The films are usually new releases being watched for TV19's weekly Meet Me at the Movies, although I reserve the right to veer off into classics and under-appreciated gems as well. Older posts cover what my introduction to film class was up to - currently, I'm not teaching that course, but who knows what the future may hold.

Notable Whedon Work