Happy Birthday!

This isn't much of a post mostly because its sole purpose is to wish Peter O'Toole a happy birthday.

Happy Birth Day Peter O'Toole!  We are so very very happy you were born 80 years ago and are still alive today.

Please stay alive as long as possible.

Thanks.  :)

Movie: The Siege

I don't know if anyone remembers this movie.  I don't know if it made much of a splash when it came out in 1998.  I certainly don't remember anyone talking about it then or now.  I might have seen part of it on tv once: one of the scenes was slightly familiar.

But watching this movie now from the vantage point of 2012, all I can think is how horribly predictive it was, and how heart-breakingly sad it is to watch now.

The plot is simple: there are arab terrorists in New York and they are using bombings to try to gain the release of their religious leader whom the American military kidnapped after he directed a bombing on an army base in the middle east.  The FBI (headed by Denzel Washington) does its best to discover and take care of these many threats but they are hampered by both the cultural differences and the US military when martial law is declared in New York city.

Arab extremists.  Bombs.  Hundreds dead.  Terrorist cells.  All of these things made more haunting by the occasion wide shot of New York city with the two towers still standing.

1998.  All this in 1998.  And seeing how Hollywood works, this script could have been in production for up to ten years.  Maybe less, maybe not.  I couldn't say.

This movie--while powerful--wasn't spectacular.  I can see why it isn't particularly remembered now.  (Although Denzel and Tony Shalhoub turn in some great performances)

The reason I tell you of this movie is because it represents something of our history.  Not only 9/11, but of WWII and the camps that interned innocent Japanese Americans.  This is what we can become when fear rules  us.  It is a good thing to be reminded of.





And a very Happy Birthday to Liam Neeson and Karl Urban!  We are glad you are alive and making wonderful movies.  Well, I say we.  At the very least I'm glad.  :)

This should be a National Holiday

It's Morgan Freeman's Birthday everyone!!!

Break out your exclamation points and get ready to par-taaay!!!!!!!!  WHOOOO!!!!!!!!!



I'm sorry, I just can't help it.  It's MORGAN FREEMAN.  And he's still alive!  Yay!!!  I mean, he's not terribly old (75) but he's not getting any younger and that makes me seriously dread the day when he won't be alive any more.  I know--too morbid--but if celebrating your birthday is about anything then it's about having been born on this day once upon a time--and still being alive on this day right now.   :)  This is a reason for happiness!

So we should all celebrate Morgan Freeman's utter awesomeness and go to Clarksdale, Mississippi and hang out at his blues club.  (Morgan Freeman owns a blues club!  See?!)

Or, y'know, for those of us not within easy driving distance of his blues club (sad day :(     ) we should just have Morgan Freeman parties and talk about how awesome this man is.

We can break out our worst/best Morgan Freeman impressions!

We can watch our favorite Morgan Freeman movies!

We can get into fights about who's allowed to kidnap Morgan Freeman and force him to legally adopt them!

Yay!!  This is turning out to be a great party, guys.

But seriously, dibs on the legal adoption thing.  Don't make me come after you.

:D

Crafts and Cleaning

Every so often I get one of those days where I feel inspired to do everything.

Or else I've just been putting it all off so long that it catches up with me.

Such was today.  :) 

I made a good start on my thread board--although I do believe I'd rather clean a whole gym's worth of toilets before I do a frame again.  They're evil.  Especially because I somehow miscalculated the amount of framing that I needed, so I had to cut my board down to fit the frames that I had.  Grrr.  But a little bit of sandpaper, a lot of glue, and some pretty copper and bronze and burgundy paint--not to mention a whole lotta nails--and I'll have the prettiest thread board ever.  :)  In about a week or so when I finish.

I also made good headway on a shirt re-design that I'm doing.  I was given a plain yellow blouse and I decided to do something interesting with it.  I cut it apart and redid the neckline to look something more like this:

 But without the skirt.  I think it'll be pretty nice when I'm done, so I'll try to post some pictures.

So much for the Crafty part of today.  But since the cleaning part is far less interesting, I will sum up with a few words: my room looks less like a disaster zone than it did.  Yay.  :)



Happy Birthday James MacAvoy!  Keep making fun films!  And even if you don't, yay for the ones you've made!

Children of Dune

(as I was writing that, I kept wanting to write 'Children of Doom' instead.  Has a bit of something, doesn't it?  It would either be a heartbreaking drama about bad life decisions, or a very strange sequel to the Doom movie.  hee)

Back on topic.

More of my time has been sucked away into the black hole that is a television mini-series!  Yay!  (I find it hard to seriously object to the time-sucking when the aforementioned mini-series has a very young James McAvoy)

How is this not excellent?

This is the first time I ever saw McAvoy act (or knew he existed) and it was only two years later that Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe came out.  I remember hearing the casting choice for him as Tumnus and my first instinct was--'but he's young!' while my second reaction was 'But he's good.' 

Honestly, my favorite parts of that movie include him and little Georgie Henley.  They made that movie special and magical and non-creepy.  I have friends who say that in the old BBC version they always got a child molester vibe off of Tumnus.  I say grrr to them in reply, but they do have a slight point.  (go here if you want to hear me talk about the BBC Narnia)

Back to Children of Dune.  (Doom!)  It's the continuation of the Dune miniseries that was produced in 2000, and while it has a higher budget it doesn't have all the same actors and actresses who played the same roles, so that's a bit of a bummer.  But the important people are still the same, and we get a couple of new faces who do credit to their characters. 

For the readers of the Frank Herbert books (the few, the proud) the Children of Dune mini-series is actually the combination of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.  As such it glosses over a lot of material but still manages to get the essence of the story.

It's been 8 years since I first saw CoD.  I had just watched an all day marathon of Dune that Sci-Fi had run, and at the end of it there was the first part of the CoD series.  I was entranced.  The story, the characters--it was all amazingly intertwined and complex.  I had to wait for the rest of the series to come out over the next two weeks (only a three part series) and let me tell you, that was some difficult waiting.  Possibly because I tend to get wrapped up in a story.

For this reason I love this modern age of ours.  We have Netflix and instant viewing etc etc etc so we have the opportunity to watch tv shows all the way through instead of having to wait week by week with the agony of possibly missing an episode and never being able to see it again.  Yay!

What can I say about CoD?  Well, it only really works if you've seen Dune--at least, in my opinion.  The music is beautiful (I own the soundtrack) and perfect and most of the acting hovers above the acceptable line, with only a couple occasional hilarious dips below.  ('So I tell you to summon wooorrms!')  And McAvoy is talented so therefore all is well.

But if any of you are at all inspired by my recommendations to watch it, keep in mind the fact that my Suspenders of Disbelief are very large and sturdy and that I like to approach everything I watch with a mind towards enjoying it in the way it was intended to be enjoyed.  (the following examples are not intended to be a commentary on the Dune or CoD series) Flimsy scenery?  Just use a bit more imagination (like in the Theater).  Bad SFX?  Use more imagination.  Bad script?  The story is still good.  Bad acting?  Well--that's less forgivable.  But if everyone is having a good time who cares?  I watch movies and tv shows to enjoy them, not to get all angry about how they aren't perfect.


A very happy Birthing Day to Haley Joel Osment (you're all grown up!) and Max Von Sydow (you grew up a long time ago!).  Many happy returns.

Wednesday Word: Murgatroyd

For all of you fascinated readers who are looking at your screens in confusion: no, Murgatroyd is not a word.  Spellcheck keeps trying to insist that I mean purgatory.  And as a point of interest, spellcheck does not recognize itself as a word.  Ha.

I do wish to raise the question however: Is a name a word?  Names qualify as nouns, and nouns are words, so are names words?  Not in the conventional sense, I know, but do they qualify? 

For the purpose of me having something to write a blog about, I will arbitrarily say yes.  :)

Murgatroyd!

It's a name!  Not a very common one, though, although I think it should get a comeback soon.  Mostly because it sounds like a 50 foot tall destroyer robot.

'Look out!  It's the Murgatroyd!!!!!'
'Aieee!!'
'Aaaaahhhh!!'
cue lots more screaming and running away.
someone gets stepped on.
laser eyes blow up a house.

You know, all the standard destroyer robot stuff. 

And even if the kid hates being called an awesome destroyer robot name, there's even a good nickname: Troy.  Troy's pretty solid as names go, and it's not overused either. 

That's it.  It's settled.  One of you must now go out and name one of your future children Murgatroyd.  Preferably a boy.  It would just be too cruel to saddle a girl with that name.

And Happy Birth Day to Hugo Weaving and Robert Downey Jr!  You make fun movies!  Thanks!

But on a slightly sadder note, if we could all take a moment to remember our favorite Heath Ledger movie, because today was also his birthday.  We miss you, Heath.  

Wednesday Words: Haiku

Instead of the usual single word post, I have decided to write haikus in honor of several of today's famous birthdays.

Congrats Michael Caine

On your distinguished career.

Please don’t ever die.

To Billie Crystal

On his 64^th birthday:

The Oscars were fun.

Jamie Bell, so young,

I wish you the very best

And a long career.

Michael Caine is 79 this year.  I think we all need to start putting in a bid for his immortality.  I don't know what we'll do without him.

And just how bad were those haikus?  Pretty bad, I'm thinking.  I don't have much practice with them, so I guess it's normal that they're not very good.  I just felt like I had to really express my happy birthday wishes.  :)

And to everyone trying to remember what Haikus are all about, here's the wiki page. 

The rest of you may now argue over whether or not I should have attempted to cite a real definitive website, or if a wiki is good enough.    Enjoy.

As the world turns

Today's a pretty good day.  I got enough sleep (don't know how that happened, I went to sleep around 2 because my computer took too long to defrag) it's sunny out, I'm going to a cool sewing store where I'll hopefully pick up a couple cool new feet for my sewing machine (walking foot!  pintuck foot!  rolled hem foot!  piping foot!) and I'm finally mostly over all my sore muscles that I got helping a couple friends move house. 

So today is a good day, right?

Of course right.

But for some reason I'm going to tell you about sad things today.  Because that's just how it works.

Number one sad thing is that Dame Judi Dench, the wonderful mistress of the silver screen, has Macular Degeneration.   Now, most of you won't know what that is, and why should you?  But here's the short version: MD is a degenerative eye disorder where you slowly lose the center of your vision, and everything around it becomes really blurry.  For a quick example, put both fists right in front of your eyes maybe an inch or two away.  That's what it's like for someone with MD.  Your peripheral vision will remain pretty much intact, but it becomes nearly impossible to read or recognize people's faces--even when they're right in front of you. 

My Bubby (Jewish Grandmother) has had MD for 10 years now.  It's a slow progression, and at the beginning it wasn't so bad.  At first, you just think you're vision's going a bit, well that's normal, you're older and things start to fail a bit.  (she was around 90 then, she's 101 now)  But your center of vision starts to act like a black hole: it just keeps eating away at everything around it until even light can't escape. 

The only mercy about it is that it isn't painful at all, at least, not physically.  And you certainly can't die from it.  But in every other way this disease is 'life-threatening.'  Your life as you know it will never be the same.  My Bubby was a voracious reader all her life, a great cook, and the most independent minded woman you'd ever meet.  Well, that last bit hasn't changed any.  But speaking as a voracious reader myself, listening to books on tape is no substitute for reading the words yourself.  And cooking becomes dangerous when you can't see what you're doing. 

Not that she lets any of this slow her down much.  She still lives on her own, pays her own bills, does most of her own cleaning, and she can whup you until next year at Bridge. I did mention she's strong-minded?  

But no matter who you are, MD is one of the most frustrating things to happen to you--as are all eye diseases that slowly steal your vision.

I had a theater professor in college who had Retinitis Pigmentosa--a close cousin to MD, where you lose all your peripheral vision and are only left with the center, and even that slowly narrows to nothing.  He was one of my favorite professors, and when I first met him he was already considered legally blind, white cane and all.  He could still see, but not very much.  But he was still teaching, still directing plays, still determined to not let his disease steal away what he loved to do, even if he couldn't stop it stealing away his vision. 

And here we slowly circle back to Judi Dench, a renowned actor who's been playing indomitable ladies for so long I suspect it's rubbed off a bit (or that's just how she is--wowza!).  She's 77 years old and she's not letting MD stop her from doing what she wants, she still intends to continue acting as long as possible. 

Which is great.  The world would be a sadder place without Dame Judi Dench.  So perhaps this could be seen as a positive thing, a message of hope where you see that a wonderful woman won't let life get her down.

But I find it somewhat sad too.  Having seen close up how difficult MD is to deal with, I just wish this hadn't happened. 

And number two sad thing isn't really sad (depending on your point of view) so lets wish Alan Rickman a Happy Birthday!  He's 66! 

(cue sad shoulder slump) 

Why can't the best actors just stop aging?  Why can't we keep them forever?

Does anyone want to give me an Embroidery Machine?

They look kinda like this:

They're awesome.  They automatically embroider cool designs onto whatever you want.  (within reason.  And you need to buy the patterns.  And a couple other things that make it a bit of a hassle)

Believe me, I know.  I borrowed a friend's machine to help make me this:

It's me as Eowyn at a Renaissance faire!  I made that!  Except for the hat.  I'm in a funny hat shop!  

But let me tell you, the embroidery machine can be evil.  Of course, I insisted on designing my own pattern and it took me near 24 hours from start to finish....

Which is why I never again want to have to design my own patterns if I'm doing embroidery.

This is where the internet become my friend.  Not too long ago I found a really cool website that specializes in awesome embroidery patterns.  And when I say awesome, I mean that in their website charter it specifically states that they wanted to design things that would be used in actual fashion: not just potholders.

Their patterns range from the beautiful:

To the adorable:

 (just tell me you can resist saying awwww.  I dare you)

To the humorous:

To the geeky:

To the just plain weird:

And did I mention their wonderful assortment of steampunk?

Thought I hadn't.  :)

And this is only the smallest sampling of all the inexpressibly cool and awesome and wonderful patterns that they have.

After my last project I knew it would take a lot for me to ever want to use an embroidery machine again.   Well, it seems 'a lot' has occurred.  And it is mind-numbingly pretty.

Now all I need is an embroidery machine....


 And Happy Birthday to Levar Burton and Christopher Eccleston!  The both of you represent the beginning and the current sci-fi geekery that is my life.  Go Star Trek: The Next Generation!  Go Doctor Who!

Click Here for Urban Threads (the website I've been going on and on about)

Wednesday Word: In defense of Whom

Now, I am not a grammar Nazi.  (in fact I'm not any sort of Nazi--unfortunate usage of that word, hmm?)  In fact I despise grammar as something overly confusing really not all that important especially since all the rules seem to change from year to year.  Yes, I'm talking to you, neutral possessive.  You deserve your apostrophe back.  (did anyone else grow up being told that its' was the proper way to express neutral possession?  Like a table's top.  Its' top.  I remember learning this b/c it was difficult to remember whether the apostrophe was supposed to come before or after the s.  Then I get to college and a professor reams me out for using the neutral possessive and tells me it never existed.  You lie professor.  You lie.)

I've always had a difficult relationship with grammar.  Even after majoring in English in college I still have untold difficulties when trying to differentiate between a colon or a semi-colon.  And if you ask me to name all the parts of speech I will glare at you.  Evilly. 

There are so many 'rules' of grammar that are falling by the wayside (and then getting picked back up when someone feels like it) that it seems silly to insist upon perfect grammar all the time.  That which was a heinous offense years ago, is in common usage now.  It all changes so quickly--how can we be expected to keep up? 

Before the real grammar Nazi's descend to remove my head, let me say that I understand why we have rules of grammar.  They are supposed to be an aid to communication--how can we understand each other if we make up all the rules as we go along, sort of like everyone is playing lingual Calvinball?  We'd all be walking around spouting gibberish and nothing would ever happen until someone had the revolutionary idea to standardize the meaning of certain words and the order they should come in so that people could communicate with each other.  Crazy, no?

All this is to say, I've got a bit of a love hate relationship with grammar.  Which is funny because I love words.  As you've probably realized.  I love the simplicity and complexity of them.  I love how one word can mean so much and have so many connotations that it can take a full paragraph to understand it.  Big words are an aid to communication, not a hindrance.  If there was a word that meant exactly what you wanted it to, subtext, regular text, over-text--why wouldn't you use it?  If there was no chance of it being misunderstood then wouldn't you use it?  The point of talking is to communicate a point to someone else.  Words are the medium by which we share our thoughts: shouldn't they be as precise as possible?

And now, after all that, we finally get to what you all have been waiting for.  (or at least some of you.  Maybe one of you?  Please?)

Whom!

I love this word.  I really really do.  In fact it's one of the only points on which I turn into a grammar Nazi.  If I hear someone saying 'to who did you send the letter?'  my blood starts pumping really fast, my muscles swell up, I turn a funny shade of green and--

oh.  Wrong story.

Mostly I just find myself uncontrollably shouting 'Whom!  To Whom!'

And since this mostly happens while I'm watching tv shows or movies, I don't think I'm really getting my point across.  Do you?

Whom is not that hard a word to use properly.  If the words 'to, for, from' are in front of 'who,' you can be assured it really should be 'whom.'  And sometimes whom can even start a sentence (thank you Saruman) such as 'whom do you serve?'  Which sounds boatloads more ominous than 'who do you serve?'  Whom has this lovely lingering effect because of the 'm' at the end. 

In fact, I think the reason I want to keep whom around is because it sounds cool.  Not because it's grammatically correct, but because whom just sounds so much cooler than who. 

We talk all the time.  Why shouldn't our words sound just as cool as the things we're using them to say?



And Happy Birthday to John Williams!  You have made the world a far more beautiful place than it was.  Thank you for existing.

Monday Musing: Biological Imperative

It is one of the great strangenesses of humanity that we both crave what is new and different—yet at the same time refuse to acknowledge change because we’re very comfortable as we are, thank you.

Where’s the switch?  How can we exist in such a state of controversy?

To that end, I give you the Biological Imperative.  (clap clap clap clap)

I take you back now to the dawn of time.  Whether we just crawled out of a slime pit or God just placed two people in a Garden, or we were created from trees (by the way, Norse mythology has the coolest Armageddon ever.  Ragnarok Rules!—now I want a t-shirt), you can choose.  (It matters not what your views are on Macro-evolution, but micro-evolution is a documented fact.  Feel free to look up the difference).

So there are all these people running around on Earth and in order to survive they’ve got to have two things (technically three, but we’ll get to that): food and shelter.  Shelter will probably occur near a large deposit of foodstuffs, and it is easier to determine what makes a good shelter.  Does it keep out the elements?  Check.  Does it in some way protect me from creatures and other people?  Check.  Is it in a place that is unstable or will kill me?  Hopefully not Check.  So you see, shelter’s not so hard, and even to people of lower ‘intelligence’ like our ancestors possibly were, it wasn’t hard to figure out.

But food—there’s the problem.  How did they know what was good to eat?  Some people posit that by watching animals you can figure out what’s good to eat.  Not always true, as it turns out, since some animals can eat everything, and we can’t.  So what it really comes down to is trial and error.  And most errors ended in touching eulogies.  Possibly. 

This is where the Biological Imperative starts to come in.  I ask you this: if curiosity is a trait that is bred into your DNA, how long do you think it will take for all the curious people to die off because they don’t know how not to shove everything in their mouths?  It’s quite possible that some people back then were so curious they’d put our best minds to shame.  Although their curiosity likely put them to death because of their lack of common sense.  So if all the curious people are dying off, they’re likely dying off young, and therefore have no time to procreate and pass their fatal trait onto the next generation.

(and this kind of comes around to that third necessary thing for survival: members of the opposite sex.  Because in order so you all don’t die off before you find what’s good to eat, you’ve got to have progeny to keep going after you’re dead.  But the basic man/woman ratio isn’t usually that hard to keep going, so this is only sort of ‘necessary’)

And it would probably only take a few generations for the curiosity DNA to get severely pruned back in a family tree.  But the legacy of this harsh weeding out is that we are genetically predisposed to be wary of new things.  It was the thing you didn’t know that would most likely kill you.  New plant?  It’ll probably kill you.  New animal?  It’ll definitely kill you.  New person you haven’t met?  He’ll steal your food, rape your wife, and also kill you.  Only the cautious survived.

So it wasn’t the curious ones who were breeding, it was all the cautious ones who hung back and let their stupid brother try that berry first.  So now we’ve got two traits that are essential for survival: caution, and the ability to manipulate the actions of others.  This doesn’t mean that curiosity was wiped out, by any means.  Every invention we have is proof of that.  But these two traits are responsible for why every single one of us on this Earth will choose to travel the road they already know to get to that place—or why someone will only eat the same food they ate growing up—or why they’ll never listen to a different form of music—or even why so many people never travel or move away from their home town.  The human animal is most comfortable amongst that which is known—that which is safe. 

But we’re thousands of years away from the time when what was different could kill you.  Why aren’t we any different?

Well we are.  Sort of.

Curiosity is no longer a shunned trait.  We revel in our inventors (when they’re not in middle school.  They’re such geeks) we create new works of fiction by the hundreds, we change our fashions weekly, we are all about the new experiences. 

But what about the hikers who go into the woods completely unprepared because ‘they’ll be all right.’  Or the ones who provoke an animal because they don’t know any better.  Or hey look, there’s a cave.  Lets see what’s inside.  There are plenty of ways for our natural curiosity and lack of common sense to kill us, even now. 

All this is to say, there is nothing wrong with our biological imperative to be afraid of what is new and different.  That’s the little thing keeping us alive sometimes.  But there’s also nothing wrong in overriding it and telling it to be quiet when we want to do something we haven’t ever.  We’re human, which means both that we’re large bundles of chemical interpretations of instincts, but also that we have intelligent minds that can overrule what our bodies tell us.  We are the dichotomy of fear and curiosity, the juxtaposition between the new and the different.  We are curious cowards and reluctant explorers.  We are the uncomfortable middle.  We are human.  No more no less.

Also, I'd like to wish Richard Dean Anderson a Happy Birthday!  We love you MacGyver!

It's finally snowing!

You know, I didn't think it would even snow this winter.  I mean, it's been three months since our last freak snowstorm in october and it's the middle of January and all--so where was our snow? 

Somewhere else, obviously. 

Also, I had an inside track to know how bad this winter was going to be, and lots of snow was not forecast.  And I remember winters with hardly any snow, and after last year, was I going to complain?  Nope.  Shoveling snow is evil.  Evil I tell you.  Especially when you're doing it every three days.  And your snow piles have turned into snow mountains.  And you just can't fling it up any higher so you don't really have a path any more b/c all the snow avalanched down off your snow mountains. 

Anyone else have a winter like that last year?

So when our oak tree told us that this winter would be a light one, I was relieved.

And yes, you heard me right: our oak tree told us.  No I am not crazy.

~Liar.
Don't you start with me right now.

As I said, not crazy, just clever.  :)  Because every year our oak tree drops a proportionate amount of acorns to how hard a winter we're going to have.  Big evil snow winter?  We have to sweep the acorns off the lawn and wear helmets out our front door to keep from getting brained.

--You didn't.
I didn't what?
--Wear a helmet. 
I was speaking metaphorically, it's supposed to be funny. 
--But you didn't.
Sigh.  I'm speaking to the wrong one, aren't I?
~'snicker.'  Yup.  Helmet--funny--check.  Though what you did do was even funnier.
It worked.
~Delusional.
Two years it's worked.
~Do you know what she did?
!Acorns!  I love acorns!
Acorn whistles are the best.
!I know!
~Back to you being so embarrassingly odd--
Fine.  But I command you not to say anything.
~That only works on Mr. Logical.  Anyway, what she did was this: at the start of acorn dropping season, she had a talk with the tree. 
Do we have to do this?
~She stood in the yard and told it not to drop any acorns on her head or else she would get really mad.  But if it didn't, they were all right.
So?
~You stood in your yard and talked to your oak tree.  I believe you were saying you weren't crazy...?
It worked, didn't it?  Two years, and that tree hasn't dropped a single acorn on my head.
--Odds.
What?
--It's just the odds. Big tree, big yard, you're only walking to and from your car in a short span of time, so the odds were in your favor.
Raindrops hit me all the time from that tree.  Big drippy ones that go splat.
!Splat!
Exactly.
--If we were to do the math on the amount of acorns dropping from a tree on an average year vs. the amount of rain in an average storm--
Number one, not an average year for acorns last year.  Number two, be quiet.
--...
~So she stood out in the yard and--
I think we're done here.
!I like the oak tree!  It got hit by lightning and is still alive! 
Sigh.

Back to the oak tree being smarter than weathermen--this year we hardly had any acorns drop.  And when I mean hardly any, I mean we saw one or two on the yard and heard stories about tree scientists getting worried about why all the trees weren't dropping acorns this year, and if it meant something was horribly horribly wrong with the ecosystem.  I am happy to tell the tree-scientists that there is nothing wrong with the oak tree population.  They're just smarter than we are and don't see the point of seeding out too much if the winter is mild.

And when I say mild I mean still cold but without all the evil amounts of snow.  'Cause it's January already and this is our first snow of winter.  (October doesn't count).  Here's hoping February is correspondingly nice.  (I hate February).

And happy birthday James Earl Jones!  You're 81!  Please don't die on us.  What would the world be like without Darth Vader?

Today you get a poem

Because I was super busy this morning and couldn't write anything so I'm sorry.  

And happy birthday Jon Lasseter!  Yay Pixar!  Pixar Forever!  (I think 'Pixar' would make a great battle cry.  I mean, it's got that special something that makes it easy to yell at the top of your lungs, and it's even intimidating because it ends on 'arrrrr!!'  and if someone is running toward you with pointy weapons while shouting something you can't quite hear but ends in 'aaarrrrr!!!' you're going to be pretty freaked.  Just saying.  Oh, right, back to poem)

Big Top

Formed in a freefall moment of inattention
The wire-walker desired a change to occur
Spontaneously
Heart-spiked in dramatic tension
Like he used to feel under his toes,
A flexing farce for children
Who cannot know how safe
This is
This act of all pretend to gasp
While the wire-walker
Transporting immortality to earth
Cannot keep a quotient for himself
How fair how fair how fair fair fair
The fairy tales that no one wrote but should have read to us
Explaining why a high dive is inappropriate behavior in the circus. 

Happy Birthday Hiyao Miyazaki! (and Robert Duvall)

It’s a very simple fact that I am far more excited about wishing Miyazaki a happy birthday than I am about Robert Duvall.  Part of that has to do with the fact that I still cannot forgive Duvall for ‘The Apostle.’  Or rather, what I can’t forgive him for is being a great actor.  In The Apostle. 

Perhaps I should add to my list of people I can’t forgive for that movie the people who forced me to watch it in the first place.  ‘Shudder.’  But Duvall still makes my happy birthday list because he made Secondhand Lions. 

!Michael Caine!  And Robert Duvall!  And a nearly grown Haley Joel Osment!  And a lion!  And the What Every Boy Needs to Know About Being a Man speech!

--That is far too many exclamation points.

!What do you mean!  Exclamation points are fun!

~’snigger’

--Stop that.  Don’t encourage her.

~What, me?

But Miyazaki gets a completely unconditional Happy Birthday!  This is the man responsible for so many good/beautiful movies over the years that we owe him a great debt.  My personal favorite is Howl’sMoving Castle (the one instance I can recall where a movie is better than the book.  Sorry Diana Wynne Jones).  But I know many others who would swear that Spirited Away completely blows Howl out of the water.  And then there’s Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa, Totoro—and so many more! 

(by the way, if anyone could find me a bobblehead of one of the forest spirits from Mononoke, I would be forever grateful.  And poorer.  But gratefully poorer)

 (see, so cute!)

What’s your favorite Miyazaki?  And do you dare defend the status of The Apostle?  (I will allow you to defend Duvall).