Insomnia & Warehouse 13
Finals are over, and so is my sophomore year of college–a mildly frightening thought considering I still have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do after I graduate. I’m still waiting on tenterhooks (I really like that phrase for some reason, think I’ll try and use it more often…) for the results of some of my exams, so we’ll see how everything went at the end of the week.
While studying for these exams and writing an obscene amount of final essays, I developed a very bad–oh who are we kidding? I’m an insomniac anyway. It was just worse these last 2 weeks because I was up till 4 in the morning writing and studying.
Getting my sleep cycle back to (relatively) hasn’t been working out too great. But, on the bright side, it meant I was able to watch all of the epic Eureka/Warehouse 13 marathon on SyFy the other day/night/mornight. I’ve never seen Warehouse 13 before, and after watching all of Season 2, I simply cannot understand why.
It has most all of my favorite elements: sci-fi, supernatural, historical, random factoids…the list goes on.
The basic premise is that Warehouse 13 is that there’s this huge super-secret government Warehouse in the Middle of Nowhere, South Dakota (a fictional–I hope–town called Univille) that houses “artifacts.” These artifacts have ties to a mythological or historical figure (ex: Pandora’s Box, Ben Franklin’s Lightening Rod, Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass…) and possess some sort of–supernatural trace of their original owner’s personality. Some are good (and kind of cool) and others are very, very, very bad. The Warehouse stores them all so they don’t fall into the wrong hands and wreak havoc.
It’s one of my new show obsessions (the other is the BBC’s Sherlock, which I highly recommend) and sometime during the marathon (around 4:30am or so) I thought up a short little list of things that I think would make pretty sweet artifacts. I took the five least insane and decided to post them here:
- So, back in the 16th century there was this ninja(!) named Hanzo Hattori. Sound familiar? Well, if you’ve seen Kill Bill, it’s the name of the sword master. This is just one of the many ways this badass ninja clan leader has been honored/portrayed throughout history, for (some) good reasons.He fought in the battle of Anagawa (1570) where he led a night raid into the enemy’s camp where he not only managed to successfully sneak inside, but kill so many of them that they had to withdraw from the battle. This led to not only a fearsome reputation, but a lot of stories in which he was thought to be invisible or capable of teleportation.
So, what if he had some sort of armor or weapon that made him invisible or capable of teleporting? I think that’d make a good artifact, gentle readers, don’t you? A little cliché, sure, but c’mon: ninja invisibility. That practically screams ‘artifact.’ (Or, you know, whispers.)
- In 1927, Isadora Duncan (known as the “mother of modern dance”) died after being strangled by her favorite, trademark scarf. I couldn’t find many details (oh, hey, obscurity…), but from what I can gather, there was a car that was passing by and her scarf somehow wound its way around the wheel and dragged her.Ouch.
Sounds like the makings of an artifact though. Just enough obscurity to come up with a really good story, freaky, and more than a little disturbing. Plus there’s the added bonus that the plot would thicken if one of the agents were to be attacked by the silk accessory.
- Theodor Seuss Geisel (you, gentle readers, might know him better as Dr. Seuss) often credited his rhyming prowess to his mother, Henrietta Seuss Geisel, whose idea of a nighttime lullaby was chanting a rhyme that she remembered from her childhood.Anyone else see artifact potential here? A piece of his mother’s jewelry? A pair of glasses? Some other little doodad or knick-knack?
- Rose colored glasses. During the Civil War, colored lenses were used to treat sick people. Got syphilis? Here’s a pair of yellow sunglasses. Insane? Try blue. Depressed? Here’s a wonderful pair of pink lenses. (This, gentle readers, is where we get the that clichéd phrase, “seeing the world through rose-colored glasses.”)
So, put the glasses on, feel absolutely fantastic about yourself and the world. Pretty harmless…or is it?
- No one has any idea what Shakespeare did between 1585 and 1592, which is when he began his writing career. So, there’s no way of knowing how it actually started or why/how he became so famous.Over the course of his life, he wrote 37 plays (an average of 1.5 per year) and 154 sonnets. And there were some who believed he didn’t even write them all himself.
So, what if he had some help from an artifact? A quill perhaps? Or, better yet, that always-fashionable ruffled collar.
