Ordinary Day

A bit belated, this--but as requested, here's my report on the Eddie Izzard show this past Friday, the 11th! In attendance: spazzkat, solarbird, mamishka, and me. We also bumped into tiggymalvern and spoomeister while we were there, too--and in the case of the latter, this was the first time we'd actually met in person, so yay!

Eddie had a fairly casual and butch look going by his standards, but he still looked pretty fabulous with some eyeliner and a very dashing tailed black jacket on over a red striped shirt. And in casual contrast to that, jeans. It was amusing too that he got a standing ovation just by walking out onto the stage (Seattle being pretty easy that way, hee), which took him distinctly aback and prompted him to make a crack about whether he should actually be there.

More importantly, he most definitely brought the Funny. And he was very aware of the nature of the audience he was playing to here in Seattle. There are I suspect few other places in the country where he could have opened the act with ten minutes of looking up Chief Sealth on his iPhone on Wikipedia, and making it work. Complete with side cracks about the iPhone (and asking if anyone in the audience had one of the new ones), being text-messaged by audience members, and the history of Wikipedia ("Founded by Mr. and Mrs. Wikipedia...").

Once he got into the main act, though, it was all about some territory he's covered before in previous shows: the history of Everything, pretty much. He made lots of commentary about the rise of civilization, about religion, and the development of language, all stuff he's milked for fodder before, though for me it was no less funny this time around.

My favorite bits:

Miming his way through a bunch of Neolithic hunters boxing bison, until one of them finally says 'fuck it', picks up a stone, and hits his prey with it.

Vehement insistence that the Romans could not possibly have conquered the known world as successfully as they did with a language like Latin. Included a comparison between the Latin version of a conversation between a messenger and a centurion about the imminent attack of Hannibal (complete with ad-libbed pseudo-German, pseudo-French, and pseudo-Latin), and the much shorter English version.

The entire sequence involving the noises that animals make, and hypothesizing how this must affect how giraffes warn other giraffes about imminent attack: "*coughcough* tiger *cough*". And, how they manage to hide on the plains of Africa: behind other giraffes. Insert obligatory mental image of Eddie miming a hundred giraffes in a line here. ;)

Announcing himself as part of the "Cult of Mac", then proceeding to lament how he has to agree to the License Agreement every time he re-installs iTunes. And how nobody reads these things anyway: "We'll set your grandmother on fire!" "I AGREE! I AGREE!"

Jokes about Galadriel being the mother of Jesus, and how she'd buggered off to the Grey Havens before Jesus went down to Earth. Also, how he noticed that only a few of us in the audience actually got that joke, including Dara and me, over there in our side-section seats laughing hysterically.

Getting in one shameless plug for The Riches, complete with noting that it's streaming on hulu.com. (And yeah, heh, this is me perpetuating the plug.)

ETA 10:07pm: OH YEAH forgot this bit: the bit where Eddie is extremely dubious about frogs as one of the Plagues of Egypt. Locusts, he could buy. Flies, oh yes. But frogs? Not so much. "AAAH! We have MORE FROGS THAN USUAL!"

So, yeah. Mostly familiar stuff to any Eddie fan who's seen his previous performances, particularly Glorious and Dress to Kill. But still highly, highly enjoyable. Worth the ticket price as well as the T-shirt from the swag table!

Monday afternoon, by way of taking advantage of a day off from work, solarbird and spazzkat and I went to go see Cloverfield.

(Which is, by the way, a quite tight and intense little movie--but for the love of god, be warned, if you're prone to any kind of motion sickness, sit way, way back in the theater. Also consider taking some Dramamine beforehand.)

(Also, we had the new teaser for the forthcoming Trek flick in front of the movie, which I have to admit really rather made my little fangirl heart go pitter-pat, particularly when the first few notes of the familiar theme song welled up over the pan shot across the under-construction saucer section of the Enterprise... and, well, gosh. <3 Man, I hope they don't screw this up. I'm really in an Original Trek mood after giving Dara the remastered DVDs of the first season, so yeah. Bring on the new kids, and here's hoping they do the old familiar characters justice.)

(But I digress.)

I mention the Cloverfield excursion mostly because both beforehand and afterward, we popped into Barnes and Noble. I had a couple of coupons I wanted to spend, and the first one went to me picking up another Waifs CD. I offered the other to Dara, but she couldn't think of anything she really wanted to get even though she waffled for a bit on the very first season box set for The Avengers. (ETA 10:08pm: Dara says I got the season wrong--it's second series Avengers she was interested in. My bad!) So I settled on spending the second coupon on the last box set for Remington Steele.

Which of course was very foolish of me to do two days before my birthday--because Monday night at dinner, I learned to my chagrin that risu was of the opinion that I Really Shouldn't Have Done That, to which I went "ah" and immediately resolved to not open up the package so that I could take it back to B&N and swap it for something else. *^_^*;;

I did that today, and settled on two CDs: In All Things by Leahy, since I do have quite the long string of good luck with Celtic-flavored Canadian bands, and also The Best of the Chieftains, because I keep saying I should damn well have some Chieftains, so now I do. I'm pretty sure that there is a law written down somewhere, probably in Ireland or Scotland, that all fans of modern Celtic music should own at least one Chieftains CD. And I am a law-abiding citizen!

Anyway, it turned out that the extra box for Steele was actually a get-well present rather than a birthday, but most welcome nonetheless. And between that and the gifts from Dara and Paul, it has been a very DVD-heavy birthday, with emphasis on the Swoonable and the Funny. In the Swoonable corner, we have Steele (the 4th and 5th season box set), the second season of MacGyver ("his mind is the ultimate weapon", says the tagline on the box, to which Paul added that this is scary given that it lives under the ultimate mullet), and, to crown off the lineup, 3:10 to Yuma, the Crowe/Bale edition. BOOYA. And over in the Funny corner, we have the 11th collection for Mystery Science Theater 3000 as well as Eddie Izzard's Definite Article.

technoshaman has come over to help Dara with a server swap, and he brought a card with him which was very cute. My boss even gave me a card today as well. All in all, as birthdays go, a pretty fine one indeed. <3

It occurred to me today: "Why in the WORLD do I not have any Eddie Izzard icons?"

Determined to assuage this need, I promptly clicked on the "eddie izzard" link in my Interests lists, and found an entire community dedicated to just this very purpose: eddicons! Thanks to the kind folks in that community, I have now scarfed the following lovelies for my userpics page:

By mysticmirth, from Dress to Kill and Definite Article:


By moony_graphics, from Glorious:


By indehed, from Definite Article:


And by megathy27, both from Dress to Kill:


Due credit has been noted on all these icons on my userpics page. And if you don't know who Eddie Izzard is, for gods' sake, go here and indulge in the Funny!