The other day, curiouswombat (ETA: sorry, can't brain) posted something about real-life Swedish chefs. Here's a typical one in action this morning:

Swedish TV Host Starts Fire Live on Air While Frying Cheese Doodles for Some Reason


In other news, under the cut, my thoughts on s3 of House of Cards (the weather was really unbearable this weekend). The short version: not all that impressed. While the first two seasons never really reached the heights of the original BBC series, it was still often really entertaining, and brilliant binge TV. Now, though...

( Spoilers all of s3 )

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD (which I guess will forevermore make it impossible to talk about The Shield in Whedon fandom without causing confusion): ( Vauge spoilers for the first two eps )

Breaking Bad. Other people have said it better than I could, so I'll just note that damn, that was a brilliant, brilliant series finale.

...OK, I do have a few words.

Now, everyone loves a good anti-hero. Or anti-villain. Let's face it, apart from The Middleman, uncomplicated knights in shining armour are boring (which, again, most action series...) We love those shades of grey, we love to see good people do bad things... and bad people too. A lot of great TV series of the last 10 years have spent season upon season digging deeper into the souls of people doing horrible things for, what they maintain, are good reasons. At the centre is usually a man, who more-or-less genuinely Loves His Family, who has his own Code Of Honour, who does things for what he things are The Greater Good, who is trapped in a Culture Of Violence, etc etc etc. Basically, he is Just Like Us. Except he's also a (check any that may apply) racist, misogynist, sociopathic, mass-murdering, drug-dealing, hit-ordering, raping, self-righteous, hypocritical, wilfully-blind-to-the-effects-of-his-actions villain. Fine; those make for good stories. But sooner or later you get to the point where you need to end this story. And then what? You can't end it with our anti-hero retroactively turned into a knight in shining armour; that would be dishonest. Yet you can't end it with him simply getting his just desserts either.

( Spoilers for Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos, The Shield (the Shawn Ryan series), Angel, Dexter... )

Did that get long? Sorry. I did it because I liked it.

Speaking of making excuses, though, the current season of The West Wing running on all channels really sucks. I know the Sorkin years were criticized for making caricatures of republicans, but it's nothing compared to this. When your supposedly adult characters start acting like 3-year-olds holding their breath until mom buys them ice cream, you need new writers.

And speaking of endings, How I Met Your Mother is just phoning it in for the last season, isn't it? Don't get me wrong, HIMYM phoning it in is still better than 90% of the sitcoms on TV, but we know this plot and we know these characters and we know how it's going to end and they should just have made a 2-hour movie and been done with it.


But at least I'm still watching it, unlike Under The Dome which never managed to breathe even a spark of life into a pretty good idea and seems content to be a poor man's Lost. Give me an ambitious failure over a competent bore any day.

Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing was pretty neat, though. And on one final musing on endings, The World's End does a neat job with a loosely connected film trilogy - building not on the characters but on the themes, and aging (or refusing to age) along with the actors.

I started writing this for snickfic's crackficathon and eowyn_315's prompt "Crossover with The West Wing - Buffy shows up for Total Crackpot Day Big Block of Cheese Day to alert the President of the existence of vampires." Then it got delayed, then my computer crashed and it was lost, but then I figured "What the hell, it's a fun idea, I have to write it sometime." So here it is. Big thanks to my beta lutamira! Any remaining mistakes are entirely mine.



Title Ms Summers Goes To Washington
Author Beer Good (beer_good_foamy)
Rating PG13
Word Count ~3000
Fandom West Wing/Buffy (post-series)
Characters/Pairing (if any) Mostly gen, with some Josh/Donna and Giles/Lord John Marbury.
Warnings ***Friendly mockage of cultural and political stereotypes***
Summary The American people need protection from vampires. Buffy needs funding. The American government has money. You'd think there'd be an obvious solution to this. And so, one day, Buffy, Giles and Willow dressed up in their best business suits and dropped by the White House.

( It seemed like a regular White House morning. )