Category Archives: Tracy Gronewold

by | January 20, 2014 · 4:30 pm

Editorial | Sherlock, “The Empty Hearse” Reactions & Recap *spoilers*

***** SPOILER ALERT *****

This review will be discussing plot points which may be considered spoilers. Consider yourselves warned.

This is not a review of the first episode of Sherlock season three, “The Empty Hearse.”  No, the season premier has left me with the warm glow of satisfaction that usually accompanies post-coital cuddling.  I’m reduced to a mere reaction, rather than review.

So… Sherlock Holmes isn’t dead.  We already knew that, since British television apparently has not fallen into the silly trap of creating a season’s end cliffhanger for no reason other than to frustrate fans.  It was still better to have the mini webisode that appeared several weeks ago, “Many Happy Returns,” which showed us Anderson—now fired as coroner and obsessed with clues of Sherlock’s whereabouts—Lestrade, and Watson all receiving premonitions and oracles that seemed to tell them that Sherlock was indeed alive.

It is well known among my friends that I dislike most female characters.  I usually find them weak, catty, and foolish.  As a reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I knew that Watson would eventually find his future wife and I fully expected to hate her.  Instead, Sherlock’s creators have given us Mary, played by Amanda Abbington (Martin Freeman’s wife IRL).  I enjoyed her performance and I already adore her depiction of Watson’s significant other.

As for Sherlock…  I cried when he met Watson.  I cried when he met Lestrade.  I laughed when he met Mrs. Hudson.  I can be incredibly critical of television shows that have poorly developed characters and inconsistent plotlines, but these characters get to me in a way that I have rarely felt.  I could feel the pain that both Watson and Mrs. Hudson went through, and I could feel how it simultaneously pulled them together and pushed them apart.

Molly is now engaged to someone who looks just like Sherlock.  I don’t want to like her character or be sympathetic to her plight, but I cannot help but feel sorry for her.  The look on her face when she tells Lestrade that she has moved on from Sherlock pleads for someone to believe her words so that she can believe them herself.

I appreciate the use of romantic tropes as metaphors for the relationship between Sherlock and John.  Again I am surprised at how much this amuses me, since I would normally find this humor pedantic and trite.

I loved the pat exchange between Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes regarding the Icelandic hat and the profile of its owner.  It really highlighted for the first time in this show how much alike they are in thought process and intellect.  They are very much brothers.  At the same time, their parents… what to say about their parents?  I honestly did not think we would ever see the elder Mr. and Mrs. Holmes.  To have them appear and seem so normal was rather disconcerting.

I must say that the situation in which John Watson is thrown into on Guy Fawkes day was confusing.  The motorcycle sequence as Sherlock and Mary rush to his rescue was wildly unbelievable and that entire section of plot left me confused.  However, I am learning to have faith in the show’s creators that all of this will make sense in time.  Instead of a pathetic device to move the plot forward, it will most likely turn out to be incredibly important to the rest of the season’s storyline.

Finally, the beautiful and convincing act that Sherlock uses to finally get John to admit to missing him and forgiving him was disturbingly realistic.  I honestly did believe Sherlock (foolish I know) when he said that he had no idea how to disarm the bomb.  My feeble brain thought that John would come up with a way to save Parliament in a shocking plot twist.  Apparently John Watson and I are equally gullible.

This has been a recounting of my reactions to the fantastic first episode of Sherlock just as I felt them.  Post your own reactions in the comments!  (Please avoid spoiling episodes two and three if you’ve already seen them.)  Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to rewatch it and make sure there isn’t anything I missed!

Leave a comment

Filed under Editorial, Television, Tracy Gronewold

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

by | January 15, 2014 · 8:16 pm

Confessions of a Geek: Cinematic Influences, Part 2

obi_boga

Seeing moments like this on the big screen for the first time was amazing!

Much like Andrew, I enjoy movies as escapist entertainment.  I had a very sheltered childhood and didn’t get to watch a lot of movies.  We did not have a TV in our house, and I was never allowed to go to movie theaters.  (This has bemused many of my friends, especially because I don’t associate popcorn, or food in general, with watching movies).  As an adult, I’ve had to catch up on a lot of pop culture references that I just didn’t understand (for instance, I was an adult before I had seen a Disney animated  movie and I still haven’t seen all of them).  I also often don’t have the nostalgic love for poorly made, cult classic movies and shows.

 I’m a little more demanding about consistency and plot than many moviegoers, which drives my movie loving friends a little crazy.  However, there ARE cinematic influences on my life.  Here are a few of them.

  • Disney’s Treasure Island –this was one of the earliest movies that my siblings and I saw.  I was probably around nine or ten.  We reenacted the movie many times in our backyard, using a large cardboard box as a ship.  Our favorite character was Ben Gunn because of a goofy line, “Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese–toasted, mostly.”  We were too young (and not British enough) to know what toasted cheese was, of course.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer—if my mother only knew how many days I would ask to go down the block to spend the afternoon with my friend Alex and her dog… but we were really watching Buffy. That was the beginning of my love of Joss Whedon, although I didn’t know who he was at the time.
  • Pollyanna—this movie was influential not because of its content, but because in my house every movie was compared to it.  It was actually a very perky, overly bright movie about a little girl who was good all the time.  We kids were supposed to look up to Pollyanna as an example, but she was mostly just annoying.
  • NOT The Wizard of Oz—I put this movie in here because it was NOT actually an influence on me.  This was my mother’s favorite movie when she was a child, and she made the fatal mistake of introducing it to her children when they were teenagers.  Of course, we make snarky comments about how cheesy the movie was, which frustrated her quite a bit.
  • The Lord of the Rings—these were the first movies that I properly “geeked out” about.  The Fellowship of the Ring came out when I was fifteen years old.  By this time, even we had the internet, so I was able to follow the process and development of the movies with intense anticipation.  I will never forget sitting for over an hour waiting for our 54k dialup to load the official trailer so that we could watch it in all its glory.
  • Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith—was the first movie I ever saw in a real movie theater.  I was nineteen years old, and was living on my own.  A friend of mine found out that I had never actually been to the cinema and dragged me along.  I enjoyed the experience but thought (and still think) that it was far too loud.

Those are just a few of the movies and TV shows that have had some profound influence on my life.  Mine are more like milestones of development, but even so, they each mark a significant piece of my life.  What movies have influenced you?  Let me know in the comments! -t

1 Comment

Filed under Editorial, Geek Life, Movies, Tracy Gronewold

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

by | January 7, 2014 · 10:10 pm

Confessions of a Geek: Literary Influences, Part 2

I lived a very sheltered childhood, and so books have been the staple influence in my life.  My mom read to me when I was very small (we started the Little House on the Prairie series with her reading to me, and ended them with me reading to her).  I was off and running into the wild world of books that ended up taking me all over the world and beyond it.  Some of the authors and books that have influenced me (and this is only a partial list) are below.

  • As a girl, I was obsessed with horses, and thoroughly enjoyed Marguerite Henry’s White Stallion of Lipizza and of course, Misty of Chincoteague, as well as Cinnabar, the One O’clock Fox (although this one was more about the fox than the horses).  I preferred the less well-known books.  White Stallion of Lipizza had me sitting backward on kitchen chairs for months, because that was how the Lipizzaner trainers would stretch the inside of their thighs to fit over the extra wide barrel of those gorgeous horses.
  • The Colored Fairy Books were another huge influence on me.  Andrew Lang took me all over the world, from the snowy, troll infested forests of Germany to the oyster beds off the coast of Polynesia.  I can’t wait to introduce my nephews to this series.
  • C.S. Lewis was a huge influence on me very early on in my life.  I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe so early that I cannot remember reading it for the first time.  I lost count of my rereads at number nineteen.  I also read and enjoyed the space trilogy.  Perelandra  was a beautiful picture of an idyllic world that made me ache for a place I had never been.  That Hideous Strength was a book that I read long before I was ready.  It was terrifying, but beautifully written.  Till We Have Faces was amazing and profound.
  • I was also really interested in all of the classic authors; Dickens, Austen, and the Bronte sisters were high on my list.  Unfortunately, thanks to the Great Illustrated Classics, abridged books for children, many of these books were ruined for me.  I couldn’t even get through David Copperfield until I was in my late teens.  That abridged series taught me to loathe spoilers.  I guess the children’s versions had some influence on me as well as the original versions.
  • I continued to read books that I could technically comprehend, but was not old enough to properly digest.  I read Jane Eyre when I was fourteen, and I was not particularly impressed.  I felt that Charlotte Bronte got lost on her way to the conclusion.  On the other hand, after I read Wuthering Heights, I wandered around the house in a funk for a couple of days.
  • One of the greatest influences on my life was a series called The Young Underground, by Robert Elmer.  These books were about a young brother and sister, Peter and Elise Anderson, who smuggle underground newspapers, and later humans, in Nazi occupied Denmark.  These books influenced me, not because of their content, but because my mom used to read them to my siblings and me to keep us close as a family after she had to go back to work.

This can only be a partial list (it’s not even CLOSE to a full one), because there were so very many books that influenced me growing up.  I am happy to say that I continue to find books that change the way I see the world, so the list continues to grow. -t

6 Comments

Filed under Books, Editorial, Geek Life, Tracy Gronewold

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | December 31, 2013 · 2:08 pm

Andrew & Tracy’s New Year’s Resolutions

new_year_cartoon2

Hey, everyone!  Like many of you, we here at Therefore I Geek each have a list of New Year’s resolutions, some geeky, and some not.  We thought that we would share them with you as a way of saying farewell to 2013, and looking ahead to 2014.

Andrew

Read More – I haven’t been reading as much as I would like and it’s my own fault. I tend to put the TV on for noise and do other things at times when I could be reading. It’s time to take on the Reading List of Doom and hopefully make it a little smaller.

Catch up on select TV shows – While I want to watch less TV, I would also like to focus that TV watching so I can catch up on several shows that I have never seen. This includes, but is not limited to Doctor Who, Breaking Bad, Lost and maybe (a very tentative maybe) Battlestar Galactica.

Lose more weight – Some of you may remember my Fit 4 Con posts and my attempts to lose weight before NYCC this past year. While not a resounding success, I did lose some weight and I’d like to keep going. Now that the holidays and their endless supply of treats are coming to an end, I’m in a pretty good place to keep going. I now have a rowing machine with which to torture myself, so I think I’m set.

Be more social – We are constantly advocating for geeks to be more social and while I have gotten much better about this than I use to be, there is still plenty of room for improvement. It does me no good to tell you guys to do something that I don’t do myself.

Tracy

My first resolution is to learn to swim properly.  I’ve tried some beginner classes, but instructors want to focus on treading water, which I cannot seem to grasp.  I can float and doggy paddle, so I won’t drown, but there is entirely too much splashing and it takes too long to get anywhere.  This year I want to take on the pool and learn to swim correctly.

Secondly, I want to spend some time researching and reading Cloak & Dagger.  This fun comic duo has always interested me, but I’ve been more enthralled with Beast and the Scarlet Witch in the last couple of years.  It is time to branch out to a series that I don’t know much about.

Like Andrew, I also need to up my book count this year.  It’s a big undertaking, but my goal is to read fifty two books in fifty two weeks.  I remember reading far more than this as a child, but I have gotten out of the habit, and become involved in reading more online or for school.  Books that qualify can be anything other than comic books (although I am willing to include full graphic novels).

Lastly, and perhaps my most difficult and most important resolution, I want to graduate in 2014.  I’ve been working on my degree for almost three years.  Because of careful planning, hard work, and some blind luck, I may be able to graduate a semester early, and I really want to do this.  It will take focus and even more hard work, but I believe I’m up to the task.

So those are our lists.  We cannot wait to see what 2014 holds both for us and the blog.  Are you making resolutions?  Share them with us in the comments.

1 Comment

Filed under Andrew Hales, Geek Life, Tracy Gronewold

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,