Your Civic Doody.

North and South, please stop haunting me.

First of all, I'd like to send a special shout out to the C19 Forum, who picked up on my "North and South" thread where I ask Richard Armitage to give me a fucking break.  Please.  

In honor of them, i've created a new category for these types of posts:  Nutella with a Spoon.

This is meant to epitomize all the things I do in the privacy of my nest that are so square, they would curdle the kefir of my more hardcore friends.  

For the record, I'm as happy watching "Naked Lunch" as I am English costume dramas.  But sometimes, you just need to see Ciaran Hinds smolder for Samantha Morton.  You really do.  A typewriter that turns into a bug that talks out of its anus is great, don't get me wrong.  David Cronenberg, I love you.  It's just sometimes you need Richard Armitage to smell a flower and take off his cravat.  You really do.

However, I have a problem.  I've begun to treat North and South like pornography -- I fast forward through the narrative scenes just to get to the love story.  But this tendency of mine has exposed a real hypocrisy in my personality.  It's making me think I'm some sort of radical fraud.  

The B plot in this case is about a very smart laborer who organizes a union, and then the union holds a city-wide strike, and then the strike is broken by the factory owners -- one of which is Richard Armitage, the person I'm fast-forwarding to get to.  I'm a history major with political scientist parents, and my personal politics are about as far to the left as a person can go without decamping to the farm and starting a family folk-band.  And still I'm swallowing union-busing and hard core market-fixing capitalism, simply because it comes in the Richard Armitage package?  Really, what would Karl Marx think?

Where does this leave me?  Well, it leaves me having thought about wealthy industrialist John Thornton for half an hour.  Which means now I have no choice but to watch "North and South" again.  

Damn you, Richard Armitage.  Your point.

Was "North and South" on TV recently?

One of the nice features of having a blog on TypePad is that you can track the stats of your readers and the origins of their clicks.  Yesterday and today I noticed something odd:  I've been getting quite a few hits from a referring address that is actually a Google Image Search for "Richard Armitage North and South".  

This is complicated for me.  While I love finding increased traffic on my site, I have to admit that this particular post might be one of the most embarrassing for me, because in it I reveal the fact that rather than spending my Christmas holiday watching "Repo Man" or "Eraserhead" or "The Decline of Western Civilization" like a good film hipster, I spent the week watching a BBC period piece.

And the only reason one would Gogle (Google + Ogle) Richard Armitage would be if they saw his smoldering hotness in "North and South".  

Now, either "North and South" has been on TV recently, or the economic downturn and threat of a Swine Flu pandemic has forced wanton media consumers into the arms of English costume dramas.  However, if getting a nice case of H1N1 Influenza is what's worrying you, might I suggest that there are better historical time periods to fantasize about than those before the dawn of microbiology, where people died of things like "hysteria" and "consumption" and "winter."

Yours etc.,

Aemilia Scott

P.S.  Now I am forced to watch the series again in its entirety.  Thank you, faceless horde of Internet.

I wish I had never seen "North and South"... twice in a row.

There is no concealing it:  I've been watching nothing but English costume dramas for the last three days.  The jewel in the crown of my cinematic empire is "North and South," the adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel about old and new money during the Industrial Revolution.  It's a great piece, but I have one thing to say:

What the fuck, Richard Armitage.  

Your portrayal of Industrialist John Thornton absolutely superb.  Fine.  But in one short hour you've turned me from a hard-assed cynic to a sad housewife in a gigantic muumuu.  Your staggering, smoldering, smoking hotness has set me on the path to live a life in front of my TV, slowly gaining weight by watching "North and South" in a continuous loop and eating nothing but Stouffers' pizzas and heavy cream, until finally the Air National Guard has to unhinge my front door and airlift me to the hospital for radical gastric bypass surgery, and in a horrible irony of fate my dreams of fame are granted by a short feature on the Jerry Springer episode entitled, "1000 POUNDS AND PROUD OF IT!"

Come on.  Just give me a Godamned break, Richard Armitage.