I've been creeping through Babylon 5, of which I'd only seen the first couple of seasons when it originally aired, and last night watched 4x06, "Into the Fire." And, wow, the last fifteen or twenty minutes made me cringe with embarrassment for everyone involved. Please tell me this is not an unusual reaction? And -- while there's still plenty I love about the show (Peter Jurasik, you're so fantastic!) -- my resolve to make it through the remaining episodes is seriously weakened. Should I go on?

Returning to professional wrestling is making me realize how much of media fandom's interpretive lenses I've absorbed in the last few years. I can't say that I'm a slasher, but watching the Randy Orton-John Cena feud has finally made me "get" the dynamics of enemy!slash. They despise each other! They're obsessed with each other! They can't quit each other! Their matches involve handcuffs, and bondage-via-ring-ropes, and being locked in a steel cage together! Cena has a certain dorky Boy Scout air about him, kind of like Clark Kent on Smallville, and Orton -- well, he's closer in psychopathology to a Batman villain than Lex Luthor, but he does have a shaved head!

A few random links:

Notes on Going Under: A DEVO Primer (Rhizome) -- a fascinating look at the band, including their video art, and the surrounding cultural milieu in the '70s and early '80s.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #9 (The Hooded Utilitarian), via the DEVO article -- a look at an issue of the 1940s comic: gorilla bondage! the reversal of evolution! William Moulton Marston's fetishistic feminism! And pages and pages of gorgeous art.

Terminology page at POPSEOUL! -- the most interesting ones are those that don't have a direct English equivalent: