Fun With Keywords: Auf Wiedersehen, 2013

So, 2013. Kind of a mixed bag, huh? For my part, I started to move to Seattle, then ended up staying in New York. Through my company, Luft Books, I published two more of my novels—Lonely Satellite and Charlotte Dent—plus another novel, A.K. Adler’s Disconnected. I released a paperback edition of Wrong City. My book Bias Cut won an IPPY award, then reached #2 in Amazon’s entire Kindle store during a weeklong giveaway, and currently has a staggering 91 reviews and an average rating of 4.5 stars at Amazon. For this site, I wrote an awful lot of words about Teen Wolf, a goodly chunk of words about Arrow, and somewhat fewer words about Duran Duran than I have in previous years. For those who’ve hung out around these parts despite my erratic posting schedule and my weird and random taste in pop-culture entertainment, thank you very much.

I haven’t done a Fun With Keywords post since very early in the year, so here’s a refresher: With the help of Google Analytics, I occasionally take a look at some of the search terms visitors use to find this site. The result looks something like this:

isaac lahey father

John Wesley Shipp, who played Barry Allen in the 1990 CBS series The Flash, appeared as Isaac’s doomed abusive father on Teen Wolf. Hey, has anyone watched The Flash lately? Does it hold up? I haven’t seen it since it first aired, and I remember liking it a lot, but I had super-questionable taste in television shows back then. (I mean, I still do, obviously. See: my fierce love of Teen Wolf.)

moore hotel seattle

It’s great. Love the Moore. Top marks. Fantastic old building, nice rooms. Cheap, friendly, clean, and in a fantastic location right smack next to the Pike Place Market. No frills (no AC, no in-room coffee makers, no room service), but you’re not going to find anything better in that price range in downtown Seattle. 

talk soup 1998

Ah, 1998. That was the year John Henson retired as host of Talk Soup and was succeeded by Hal Sparks. That was also the year a spunky young line producer named Morgan Richter left the show to seek out greener pastures elsewhere in the television industry. Spoiler alert: I did not find greener pastures. Nor did I get to keep that yellow dress.

Bonus photo! Here’s me (front, black cardigan) in 1998 with the Talk Soup production staff and crew, plus our frequent guest host Ryan Seacrest (this'd be pre-Idol, obviously). Still have a soft spot for Seacrest. Awfully nice guy.

banana republic t-shirts 1980 lizard

I know exactly what you’re talking about. There was no Banana Republic in Spokane in the eighties, so when the cool kids would go to Seattle or Portland, they’d come back with those hotly-coveted safari logo t-shirts. I couldn’t find an image of the lizard one, but some nostalgia-fueled vendor is selling both the giraffe shirt and the tiger shirt on eBay.

why captain pellew replaced by captain sawyer

 Pellew wasn’t replaced—Hornblower just transferred ships from the Indefatigable, which was captained by Pellew, to serve as Third Lieutenant on the Renown, captained by Sawyer.

benedict cumberbatch in drag with ioan grufford
Hmm. I can find you photos of Cumberbatch in drag, and I can find you an excellent film Cumberbatch made with Ioan Gruffudd (2006’s Amazing Grace, in which Benedict stars as Prime Minister William Pitt opposite Ioan’s William Wilberforce). Unless you count all the powdered wigs and heeled shoes and frock coats in Amazing Grace, though, I couldn’t find any photos of Cumberbatch and Gruffudd in drag together. I know. I’m disappointed, too.

eyal lavin why does he call her nashema

I’m not a Hebrew scholar, but I believe “neshama” is a general term of endearment. On Covert Affairs, sexy Mossad agent Eyal calls Annie “neshama” as part of that cute, friendly flirtation thing they’ve got going on.

bonanza porn big hoss naked fake

So… you’re looking for fake nudes of Hoss from Bonanza, right? You’re looking for Bonanza porn? Do I have that right? Hey, no judgment here. To each his or her own. Just want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly.

can't find waiting for the nightboat video blocked

Yeah, looks like EMI yanked all copies of Duran Duran’s awesome “Night Boat” video from YouTube on copyright grounds. This would be easier to tolerate if it were available elsewhere, but since it’s rarely/never included on officially-licensed Duran Duran video compilations, it’s a little frustrating. (Psst: Click here.) 

derek teen wolf t shirt scene

Possibly Teen Wolf’s finest moment. Revisit the glory here starting at around 3:11.

diggs arrow shirtless

Here you go. To promote the current season, Diggle got his very own shirtless poster (as did Oliver, Roy and Slade. That was a really good ad campaign, Arrow! Very effective!).

arrow season 2 when does oliver take roy under his wing

I’m not sure you could accurately say that Oliver has taken Roy under his wing—I mean, two episodes ago, he shot the kid through the leg with an arrow, just to be a dickwad—but Roy’s been running errands for Oliver’s vigilante alter ego since the end of the second episode this season. 

"dead leaves in your pocket" lyrics

You’re thinking of “The Little Land”, a hard-hitting cautionary tale about the dangers of hanging out with Leprechauns, as sung by the Limeliters. Great song. It’s hard to find these days—it’s not on YouTube—but my sister hunted down a copy a couple of years back. The lyrics are as follows:

When you're in the little land, they fill your hands with gold.

You think you'll stay for just a day, you come out bent and old.

Dead leaves in your pockets, oh my enchanted, have a care.

Run, run from the little folk,

Or you'll have dead leaves in your pockets and snowflakes in your hair.

When you're in the little land, you'll watch the wee folk play

You see them through a game or two, you come out old and gray

(chorus)

Lights shine in the little land from diamonds on the wall

But when you're back on that brown hillside, cold pebbles after all.

(chorus)

Music in the little land, it makes your heart rejoice

It charms your ear so you cannot hear the sound of your true love's voice.

(chorus)

gundam relena sexy

No.

sexual tension between claire and noah on heroes

No!

hot guys wearing eyeliner

Yes. Always. Never a bad thing.

jt's apartment duran duran new york

During his Power Station days, John Taylor had an apartment on the 27^th floor of the Park Belvedere on Central Park West, right down the hall from Boy George. 

lonely satellite morgan richter

charlotte dent book

Those are two of my books. They're good. Please buy them.

morgan richter on adam lambert

Here is everything I've written on the talented Mr. Lambert:

“For Your Entertainment” 

“If I Had You” 

“Never Close Our Eyes” 

miami vice is amazibg

Oh, yeah. Miami Vice is fbckibg amazibg.

possibilities tuff turf

Tuff Turf has a pretty great soundtrack—love all the Jim Carroll songs, love that Marianne Faithfull song that plays over the opening credits. Here’s a weird thing about “Breakin’ the Rules” (aka Possibilities): Thanks to a rights issue, the Lene Lovich version that was used in the theatrical version was replaced in the VHS release by a totally different version by Jonathan Elias. The Lene Lovich version was restored for the DVD release.

quatre and treize best gundam wing characters

Probably, yeah. Quatre is hands-down my favorite Gundam Wing character, thanks to my demonstrated soft spot for tiny, soft-spoken pretty boys who turn out to be stealth bad-assess, but Treize—the ruthless yet chivalrous military leader with the fondness for bubble baths—is no slouch, either.

save a prayer homoerotic

I will leap at any opportunity to re-use this photo of John and Nick getting soaked by that elephant in the “Save a Prayer” video.

song wild boys duran duran about firefighters

This is by far the most wholesome interpretation of “Wild Boys” I’ve ever heard. I can sort of see where you’re going with this, what with lyrics about “sirens for a welcome” and “on the way back from the fire.” You’d have to ask Simon Le Bon exactly what was going through his very decorative head when he penned the lyrics, but since the song is based on the William Burroughs novel of the same name, which, per the Powell’s Books website, is “…a futuristic tale of global warfare in which a guerrilla gang of boys dedicated to freedom battles the organized armies of repressive police states,” it is probably not about firefighters.

teen wolf kate argent

Kate Argent! Crazy, amazing, evil Kate! Love her. Around the time she chained a shirtless Derek up in a basement and started licking his abdomen, she became the most awesome character on Teen Wolf.

colton haynes body

teen wolf jackson naked

Okay, scratch my earlier statement, because as fabulously nasty as Kate is, clearly the most awesome character on Teen Wolf is crazy, amazing, only-sometimes-evil-but-never-exactly-what-you’d-call-good Jackson. And yeah, Colton’s body is pretty spectacular, as you can see from Roy's shirtless Arrow poster above (someone described it online as a “porn star body,” which is the sort of thing that makes me think I’m watching entirely the wrong porn, but that’s neither here nor there). I love how Colton’s nude scenes on Teen Wolf kept getting less and less motivated by anything resembling story, until by mid-Season Two, Jackson’s just stripping off his clothes and taking spontaneous showers in the locker room in the middle of the school day.

Special Teen Wolf bonus: Here’s that scene where Scott and Jackson joyously beat the crap out of each other in the aforementioned locker room (“I have a RESTRAINING ORDER!”). 

the wild boys last one of the boys only monsters the or wild or boys "the wild boys"

I think your Google search got away from you. It happens. Take a deep breath and try again.

what up with criminal minds getting bloodier and bloodier i don't like it

Yeah. Neither do I. It’s why I gave up on Criminal Minds in the middle of Season Six. Actually, it’s not really about the blood, per se—the amount of blood and gore was fine in the right context, since it’s a show about hunting serial killers and all. It’s more that the show started getting transparently sensationalistic—the stories started centering on the serial killers themselves, and the murders grew increasingly more lurid and extreme, while the FBI agents hunting the killers became more and more tangential to the story. The imbalance was off-putting. To be fair, I haven’t watched the show much since then, so maybe the ship has righted itself in recent seasons.

who wrote the lyrics to girl panic

Nick. Per John Taylor on the making-of DVD that came with Duran Duran’s All You Need is Now album, “Girl Panic” was originally titled “Pale Blue Planet”, complete with cerebral, introspective, Simon-penned lyrics inspired by an Arthur C. Clarke documentary. And then Nick got his beautifully-manicured hands on it. John: “So for a while, the song was ‘Pale Blue Planet.’ And Mark (Ronson) heard it and said, ‘I think it needs to be about girls. I think it needs to be an old-school Duran thing.’ And we were like, “Girls, girls, what are they?’ And fortunately, Nick still sees girls now and again, and he still knows what they are… Simon and I were saying, ‘No! “Pale Blue Planet” is more mature!’”

why did neil gaiman write about duran duran

Money.

Happy New Year, everyone. Hope to see you around these parts in 2014.