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stargleeksil-blog · 6 years

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Criminal Minds s04e02 Angel Maker review - or more aptly named, oh my god this is amazing yet gross at the same time. Why do this to me?

Episode 02 – Angel Maker

Hey guys! So I’m still reeling from that first episode. Oh my goodness gracious. That was a definite showstopper. But, I’m over it, I hope it’s going to be fine. I hope for a little breather, and that this one will be a little funnier. But let’s see what happens. Okay?

Let’s get it started.

Creepy music isn’t instilling me with much confidence, you know.

A young cat lady? Oh honey.

Oh boy. Someone else is walking in the house.

Oh boy.

Why is that creeper hiding in her closet till the morning to kill her? What the fuck?

And why a hammer?

“You’re experiencing hyperacusis. It’s caused by sudden loud noises, like an explosion.” REALLY?

(that’s sarcasm) – hyper sounds loud.

Wait. So the doctor wants to take him off the field? Oh boy.

I mean, I get it, and I want him to get better, but poor baby, he can’t sit still forever. He hated being a prosecutor.

“W-what if I said I’d … take it easy and … limit my role in the field?”

So cute! He’s like, I need to get back to work.

Wait. He’s so damaged in the ear he can’t hear his phone ringing? Oh, baby.

Wait. That fucker raped and hammered her to death? Ugh.

JJ: “Lower Canaan, Ohio.”

Emily: “Lower where?”

Ha! I love you, Emily. I have no fucking idea where that is either.

“Ritual. Nice hair, by the way.”

Hey! Leave my poodle’s mane!

Wait what? It’s the same victimology of a serial killer who was executed? Makes no sense.

Oh. A copycat honoring the anniversary of his hero’s death. Ew.

I’m sorry, Reid saying ‘semen’ is like hearing me talking in Japanese – unnatural.

Hold up, the jizz they found in the girl is matching to the DNA of the Angel Maker? WHAT?

Oh boy.

Chuck Palahniuk: “We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” AMAZING

“They have parachutes on board, right?”

“They should. It’s standard on all federal air transport.”

“Maybe we can give one to the elephant in the room, get him out of here?”

OH MY GOD! ROSSI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I JUST DIED! SOMEBODY GIVE THOSE WRITERS A GOLD STAR!

“That’d be the elephant with the dead man’s DNA.”

“Well, obviously somebody planted the semen on the victim.”

Derek: “In the victim.”

“Reid, you’re not seriously floating around the idea of an evil twin, are you?”

WHAT?

“No, I’m not. I’m floating the idea of an eviler twin.” DOES HE NOT UNDERSTAND SARCASM?

Oh my god, I’m dying right now.

“Traditionally, the concept is a good twin and an evil twin. But in this case, it’s evil twin and eviler twin.”

Oh god, I love my pure angel.

Why would the puncture wounds seem familiar to Emily? Weird.

That’s a pretty prison.

“Real lady killer.”

REALLY? Did that guard just make that lame ass joke? Oh god.

“The type of DNA that cats in lockup don’t have occasion to use.”

Wow. That’s some strong language there, Derek!

Can I ask? Why does he speak to everyone normally on the phone, but when he talks to Garcia, it’s to the hearing piece? Is he that desperate for her voice? I don’t get it.

Wait. There are rumors about the execution being sloppy? Oh boy.

Wait. They’re digging up the angel maker to prove he’s dead to get the townies off their backs? That’s wrong. Listen to the FBI.

Okay, so I’m naturally extremely sensitive to loud noises, like the buzzing in Hotch’s ear, so can they NOT do that please? UGH

So that’s an empty coffin. And it’s not a good sign.

Oh boy.

Oh god, Shemar is sitting on a desk. Why do I find that hot?

“What does that mean, doctor?” God, no one should sound that hot. Fuck. No really, if you check out my lady parts, you’ll see them all aflutter.

Wait. So they killed him with drugs, and yet he was still alive? Oh boy.

Wait. When they killed Cortland he said he’d come back right before they attempted to execute him? Oh boy.

“Did you know that John Wayne Gracie painted clowns? A murdering pedophile paints clowns, and people hand them on their walls. It’s creepy on so many levels. I mean, clowns –”

“Garcia, I didn’t know you had that hang-up.”

Aw, Derek is learning stuff about baby girl.

“Coulrophobia – abnormal fear of clowns.” Good to know, female Reid XD

“Oh, no, there is nothing abnormal about it. When I was twelve, a hobo clown groped my breast at a birthday party and made this old-timey honkey noise when he did it. Apparently making it funny makes it okay.”

YOU ARE ONE AMAZING GIRL! AND I COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND THE FEAR OF CLOWNS! THEY CREEP ME OUT TOO! (never seen one in this country, but still).

Derek’s face is like, who the fuck touched my baby girl’s boobs? Only I am allowed! Who is this clown and how can I kill him?

“Oh, my vision, I found a ton.”

That’s sad. Angel Maker memorabilia. Ew.

“He also made these little origami figurines out of cigarette boxes, which, I hate to say, are really cute.”

Oh honey.

“Shebang!”

Wait. The guard sells his crap? Oh boy.

“Wakey, wakey, my man.”

Well, Sid’s dead. Shit.

“One to the grill, one to the groin. That’s personal.”

Damn straight.

“Strikes me as an Aqua Velva guy.”

Bam. Nailed it. That’s his cologne.

Ha!

What’s in the pill box?

Wait. It’s a woman now? Oh boy.

Wait. Rutledge blackmailed the unsub? OH BOY!

“We now know that Rutledge was transferred to Hawkesville from a female prison, in the wake of allegations that he was using his position to leverage sexual favors from inmates.”

Oh boy.

“That and the fact that he took a PDE-5 inhibitor shortly before his murder.”

“A what?”

“Viagra.”

Oh damn.

Are they allowed to say that on CBS? Hahahaha oh my god.

“Hybristophilia. It’s a sexual attraction to men who commit violent crimes.”

I’m sorry, but Derek talking about sexual attraction is seriously sexy and he can’t talk about unhealthy attraction and look sexy at the same time because it ruins the whole point.

“She’s using an instrument to simulate the sexual assault …” did they actually say she was using toys on the victim? OH BOY!

“Hey, you ever get groupies at your book singing?” “Sometimes, if Barry Manilow isn’t in town.”

I love you, Rossi.

“Waits an average of three hours for a ten-minute visit, mandatory strip search. Would you endure that for a guy?”

“For Barry Manilow, maybe.”

OH MY GOD EMILY!

Wait. This lady professed she was the fucker’s lover? Oh boy.

“Last time I checked, they didn’t allow conjugal visits on death row.”

True.

Wait. So the lady then stopped loving him because she got a letter addressed to a different woman, but it was written in a different dialect, how can it be from him, then? It makes no sense.

Oh god. Another victim.

She killed a day-care lady? THAT IS CRUEL!

Wait. The puncture wounds mean something? Oh boy.

The letters to ‘dove’ were a code? Oh boy.

I love you, Reid.

“What do you need to crack it?” “The ability to clone myself and a year’s supply of Adderall.”

“I’ll put on the coffee.”

Oh my god, that was genius.

“So they both had home-based businesses. A stranger could walk in off the street and be a prospective customer.” Oh god.

SHIT. The puncture wounds represent constellations. Damn.

“Delphinus, the dolphin; Equuleus, the little horse. Anything sound familiar?”

“His origami things.”

Oh boy.

Shit. One more kill to complete the set. Shit.

“They weren’t just close. They were in love.”

Gross.

“How’d you crack it?”

“I profiled the author. Cortland Ryan was on death row with several high-ranking members of the Aryan brotherhood.”

“He got the code from the Aryans?”

“Either that or he read a lot of 16th-century literature.”

Wait. “The Aryans liked to use a cipher based on a 400-year old code written by Sir Francis Bacon.” Oh god.

“Normally you’d use a computer to run all these combinations, but it was quicker to just to do it longhand until I found the right one.” WHAT?

“He’s so lifelike.” OH MY GOD! EMILY!

Seriously, those letters were so romantic, if it weren’t for the horrible fact that he fucking killed people and she continued his ‘mission’ after death.

JJ’s right. Reid confirmed, “Well, she did say ‘us’ – watch over us from the stars.”

Wait. The victim survived? Because she screamed? GOOD FOR YOU LADY!

Wait. So Shara did the whole thing, trying to get pregnant with the wacko’s kid? EW!

“So if you want me to find baby angel maker, we’re gonna have to narrow it down.” I love you Garcia.

“Ten months, actually.”

“Really?”

No wait. Hold up. Seriously? I didn’t know that a woman was pregnant ten months. Wait. Are they making this up? Hold on. Nope. They’re right. So why are we so convinced that it’s always nine months? MOM! HAVE YOU BEEN LYING TO ME????

HAS MY SCHOOL SEX ED CLASS IN THE SIXTH GRADE BEEN LYING TO ME THIS WHOLE TIME?

“We’ll do single mothers only, in case she wanted to keep the father a secret, you know, didn’t want to brag: ‘oh, your baby daddy’s a third-grade teacher? Well, mine likes to poke people in the stomach with tools, so there.’” LOL

So gross, yet so awesome

Wait. Why is the name familiar to my poodle?

Damn. She was on the jury. So she knew the case. Fuck.

Shit. Her baby died in the hospital, she wanted a baby so bad, and she fell in love with the fucker so deeply that she was willing to continue his legacy and let her new baby know who his daddy was? FUCK.

“Completing the murders was the only way she could hold on to him.”

I’m with you, baby, that’s gross. She stole the body from the grave. Fuck.

“Meetings with Delilah Grennan and Maxine Chandler the day of each murder.” Oh boy.

Bam. found the next victim. Let’s hope we get her in time.

Shemar leaning over a car. Hot.

Sneaky, yummy Shemar.

Shit. She took a gun and is roaming the house and my baby is there, too. Fuck.

Wendell Berry: “The past is our definition. we may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.” Sounds weird. Then again, I’m pretty sure I’m high on caffeine. Which is weird.

“Morgan doesn’t like to follow directions. You didn’t know about that?”

“Yeah he likes to vibe it.”

What does that even mean?

“Ok, smart ass, you drive.”

Emily: “Oh, great.”

I love this cast so fucking much!

And Morgan said ‘ass’.

Okay, so this episode was creepy in so many ways, but we had more fun between my superheroes which was amazing beyond belief! I’m so happy they put everything in one episode and also addressed what happened to Hotch and didn’t just glance over it.

I’m not gonna elaborate too much, seeing as this is already heavy on the verbosity and I’m planning on adding tons of pictures of Shemar, Kirsten and Matthew anyway. So I’ll see you all for the next episode, and thank you again, for taking the time to actually see what I have in my filthy mind.

Love you all!

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encephalonfatigue · 6 years

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for its maker trusts in what has been made, though the product is only an idol that cannot speak

In late April and May, I had some tomatillos from the Port Credit Seed Library growing along side some Chadwick cherry tomato seedlings.

I hope to explore the history of these two plants some time in a post here, because they have a fascinating and somewhat intertwined history, and there’s quite an interesting story of global botanical exchanges behind the tomato itself, something that only arrived in Europe after Spanish colonizers encountered it in Latin America.

Anyways in May, I transplanted these sprouting friends of mine into an existing bed in my family’s backyard.

Not a proper vegetable bed, and not quite adequately spaced or exposed to sunlight, but hopefully a few of them will survive. I did not read extensively on best practices, nor did I follow the little that I did read, because I’m only borrowing space in a backyard that’s not really my own. Yet it’s not really my parents’ own either, in an important sense.

This process of transplanting seedlings into the land last month prompted me to think a little more about the history of this land. I often hear language along the lines of ‘look how far we’ve come’, as people discuss the vanishing of farmland in the areas surrounding my neighbourhood, because there is a very particular idea of progress presumed by most people who live where I live.

Machine as Metaphor

I last discussed on here Terry Eagleton’s suggestion that modernity’s ideology of progress does not know what to do with death, as death does not fit within its linear ‘upward’ narrative. Modernity’s fixation on ‘progress’ however is not only implicated in our collective repression of death, but also in the functioning of power and the way our species (particularly under ideologies like imperialism) asserts power over other species within the ecosystems we inhabit. Modernity is paradoxically emblematic of the sort of perverse romanticism that Haraway brought into doubt when she said the cyborg knows of no Edenic dust to return to. Wendell Berry’s “Unsettling of America” speaks of this attempt of modernity to recover Eden by way of the machine:

“having thus usurped the whole Chain of Being, conceiving itself, in effect, both creature and creator, humanity set itself a goal that in those circumstances was fairly predictable: it would make an Earthly Paradise. This projected Paradise was no longer that of legend: the lost garden… This new Paradise was to be invented and built by human intelligence and industry. And by machines. For the agent of our escape from our place in the order of Creation, and of our godlike ambition to make a Paradise, was the machine-not only as instrument, but even more powerfully as metaphor. Once, the governing human metaphor was pastoral or agricultural, and it clarified, and so preserved in human care, the natural cycles of birth, growth, death, and decay. But modern humanity's governing metaphor is that of the machine. Having placed ourselves in charge of Creation, we began to mechanize both the Creation itself and our conception of it. We began to see the whole Creation merely as raw material, to be transformed by machines into a manufactured Paradise.

And so the machine did away with mystery on the one hand and multiplicity on the other. The Modern World would respect the Creation only insofar as it could be used by humans. Henceforth, by definition, by principle, we would be unable to leave anything as it was. The usable would be used; the useless would be sacrificed in the use of something else. By means of the machine metaphor we have eliminated any fear or awe or reverence or humility or delight or joy that might have restrained us in our use of the world. We have indeed learned to act as if our sovereignty were unlimited and as if our intelligence were equal to the universe.”

Berry’s comments resemble the way Ivan Illich speaks of our addiction to machines and how it harbours within it an old addiction to slavery. Yet I find Berry here most resembling a theme that recurs a lot in various indigenous thought, particularly the intellectual Vine Deloria Jr’s work. Deloria, in a talk on Native American religious freedom said that:

“The vast majority of Indian tribes (and I don’t know off hand of any that would not hold this view), the vast majority knew, saw, felt, and experienced the universe as a living entity.

...And for thousands of years, living in the North American continent, traditional people, medicine people... were able to communicate with other forms of life, whether they were rocks, or trees, or birds, or other kinds of animals. They were able to communicate with areas of the land itself.

…Now our continent was invaded by your ancestors. A lot of them came over here seeking religious freedom, but they also came over here with a European form of the Michelangelo virus. And that was the belief that the universe operated like a machine. And that has proven immensely useful in science, but I’ve seen a great rebellion among the younger generation of scientists, that the analogy of the machine does not adequately describe the physical world. And if you treat the physical world as if it was a machine, from time to time it’s going to break down.”

Deloria, in “The Metaphysics of Modern Existence”, quotes Alvin Toffler in order to explain the prevalence of the machine as metaphor:

“we all learn from our environment, scanning it constantly—though perhaps unconsciously— for models to emulate. These models are... are, increasingly, machines. By their presence, we are subtly conditioned to think along certain lines. It has been observed for example, that the clock came along before the Newtonian image of the world as a great clocklike mechanism, a philosophical notion that has had the utmost impact on man’s intellectual development...Then we used the analogy of a clock to prove the presence of an absolute time within the universe, which was conceived to operate in the absolute manner we had been taught to expect.”

Deloria goes on to discuss Paul Tillich’s critique of the machine metaphor:

“Tillich suggested that the “man who transforms the world into a universal machine serving his purposes has to adapt himself to the laws of the machine. The mechanized world of things draws man into itself and makes him a cog, driven by the mechanical necessities of the whole. The personality that deprives nature of its power in order to elevate itself above it becomes a powerless part of its own creation.”

Or, in the words of Karl Barth (from Vol 3, Part 4 of his Church Dogmatics):

“the power that exceeds our real necessities of life, the power of technology — which basically has its own rationale and purpose, and which, in order to survive and be able to improve itself, must call forth ever new problems to solve — this had to become the monster that it largely is today, and ultimately, absurd though it is, it had to become a technology of disruption and destruction.”

So what is the problem that the institutions of power have constructed here in this land I live on now?

The Problem

Machines stand in for modern ideas of progress, because we have too often defined progress as the ability to increasingly instrumentalize the world around us, to increase its productivity according to the exclusive interest of ‘us’ humans, or more accurately humans with the most power in a ‘free’ market economy (i.e. humans with the most money).

The arrogant ideology of modernization is the same one that the indigenous intellectual Taiaiake Alfred references in his work. He believes Canada’s government policy regarding indigenous issues is perpetually misframed as a solution to a particular ‘problem’, that ‘problem’ being the lack of economic development in indigenous communities – a failure on the part of these communities to adequately ‘keep up’ with modern progress or to accommodate the liberal democratic state. This has historically been called the ‘Indian problem’.

An example: Duncan Campbell Scott was a bureaucrat in the Department of Indian Affairs for two decades (1913 to 1932), while also maintaining a reputable literary stature. Northrop Frye once wrote glowingly of Scott’s ability to write on subjects ranging from “a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh” to “the music of Debussy”. Frye, however, never mentioned how Scott, in many ways, perpetuated the ‘cultural genocide’ of indigenous communities. Scott once wrote:

“I want to get rid of the Indian Problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department, that is the whole object of this Bill.”

This aggressive integrationist model is behind all government policy that locates the problem of indigenous issues as one of ‘development’. This is a way the Canadian nation-state has acted as if it were God, and to make indigenous nations into its own image: ‘modernized’ and ‘developed’.

Taiaiake Alfred instead insists that Rosalee Tizya was right when she said the main issue and root problem is and has always been that indigenous land was stolen. The issue is not economic development nor even access to institutional state power. It was and is dispossession.

People Who Dwell at The Mouth of a Large River

Planting vegetables this summer, I am unavoidably planting vegetables on stolen land. Not only stolen, but also utterly ruined. The destruction of this land and its intricate ecological systems of interdependence was vital to its theft.

The the Anishinaabe academic, artist, and activist Leanne Simpson posed this question: “Why did my ancestors sign treaties after we lost the political power to have agency? They signed them because they were starving and they wanted me at the very least to be alive.”

Poverty in indigenous communities at the time of ‘treaty signing’ was not so much an issue of development, as much as it was about a tapestry of ecological connections that were torn apart, and a bounty of food that consequently disappeared. Survival and hunger (from a land stolen and destroyed) was the context of coercion that those treaties emerged from.

One of the most important food resources that disappeared in the 19th century was the abundance of salmon that once populated the area. In a footnote in “Dancing on our Turtle’s Back”, Leanne Simpson explains Mississauga’s etymology in this way:

“Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg means the Nishnaabeg people who live or dwell at the mouth of a large river. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg Elder Doug Williams explained to me that this is the way his Elders referred to themselves. Peterborough, ON, October 26, 2010. This is similar to Basil Johnston's Mizhi-zaugeek, Anishinaubae Thesaurus, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI, 2006, 14. Michi Saagiig or "Mizhi-zaugeek" people live at the eastern doorway of the Nishnaabeg nation, located in what is now known as eastern Ontario. According to Doug Williams, the word "Mississauga" is an anglicized version of Michi Saagiig or Mizhi-zaugeek.”

Leanne Simpson has also said that her people, the Michi Saagig, were salmon people. That was what they survived on. People have relied on the fish of the Missinihe river long before White settlers arrived. One of the most significant ‘pre-contact’ archaeological sites found in Mississauga (often called the Scott O’Brien site) is located around where the QEW highway intersects with the Missinihe (Credit River). The photo below (from “Mississauga: The First 10,0000 Years”) is a small sample of the 124 notched stone netsinkers found at the site, once used to catch fish in the Missinihe, back when the native species of salmon abundantly populated the river.

These netsinkers were found in two different caches on the site, one of them dating to the Middle Woodland period (~400 BCE to ~900 CE), conservatively over a thousand years old. People have evidently relied on the fish in the Missinihe for a long time, and within a century or two, these fish completely disappeared from the river.

What happened to the salmon? How did ‘the machine as metaphor’ shape the way 19th century White settlers treated the Missinihe river? And for what purposes and to what ends did they do so? Was it ‘worth it’? I hope to examine some of these questions in my next post here.

#Mississauga History

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