Auteur : Martine

Ocean breeze.
The smell of pine trees in the air.
Lobsters everywhere.
Clam chowders.
Lots of reading.
Too many late night trivia games at the chalet (I really suck at them).
The mobile phone service refuses to let me post photos to Flickr.
I forgot the passwords to access my e-mail accounts.

Life is good.

The house is full of piles: clothes for hiking, clothes for lounging around, books to read, magazines, cables for camera/iPod/Palm/cell phone. My computer is backed up. The Tivo is set to record a bunch of season premieres (Lost, Nip/Tuck, ER). The iPod has been filled with great music for the road and the luggage is finally out of the closet. A charming young man is coming by later to pick up The Mini who will spend his very first week indoors (yikes). The house-sitter is on her way. Blork just walked in the house and sang: « I’m on vacatiooooon! »

Ni.vu.ni.connu is finally taking a summer vacation! Woo-hoo! We’re going to spend the next week in Bar Harbor, Maine, where we rented a chalet with friends. Of course, Ophelia will pay us a visit so the drive might be a bit tough tomorrow. We’ve put one of us in charge of bringing a bunch of games, just in case we have to spend a lot of time indoors.

The chalet we’re going to is nice and fancy enough but it doesn’t have Wi Fi and that, my friends, is a good thing. There’s an Internet caf� in town and we might get curious during the week, considering that a few of us are bloggers, but don’t expect much updating this week.

So I can manage a whole week without posting anything?

Heh heh… Not quite. I’ve got a new phone and posting to Flickr has never been easier, so this is where the action will be during my absence.

On se voit la semaine prochaine! Soyez sages!

« How was Xena a female pioneer? Let me count the ways. She had no male support or regular romantic interest. She didn’t, unlike Wonder Woman or the Bionic Woman, have a conventionally feminine day-to-day alternate identity, though on a mission she could pose as a Roman matron, a virgin priestess or an exotic dancer. Xena was not « strong but feminine »; she was unapologetically strong and unapologetically female, sexy and powerful, unafraid to get sweaty and dirty on the job, and all the more beautiful for it.

The fan-driven growth of the subtext illustrates another « Xena » phenomenon: the special relationship between the show and the fandom. Other than « The X-Files, » « Xena » was the first cult hit of the Internet age: the face that launched a thousand Web sites. One of the producers and principal writers on « Xena, » Steven Sears, participated in discussions on « Xena » message boards (and occasionally still does); other staff members and actors reportedly lurked there as well, and seemed well aware of fandom debates. In the last season, popular fan-fiction writer Melissa Good was hired to write several scripts for the series, two of which were made into episodes. »

From What we owe Xena in Salon.