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My week of exciting activities – Tuesday: Twelfth Night.

Friday, November 8th, 2013

My week of culture-consuming continues! On Tuesday night I went to see the Shakespearean play Twelfth Night with Mark Rylance. Stephen Fry was also in it and I imagine most people went because of him, but I love Mark Rylance. I love him. He’s one of the most amazing actors ever. Really. I’m not exaggerating. I don’t much care for Shakespeare most times – too many words, too confusing. But when phenomenal actors perform it, it becomes clear like crystal. It should be the litmus test of whether actors are good or not. They should have to come into a room, do a soliloquy from a Shakespearean play, and if at the end I understood what they were talking about, they’re good. Here’s Mark Rylance doing Richard II in the Globe Theater in London.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M775evBE8A

Rylance was the director of the Globe Theater in London for a decade where you could go and see Shakespearean plays exactly like they did back in the 1590’s (but with probably less body odor). They often don’t use female actresses, making males play female roles (period-accurate). The audience has to stand the whole time (also accurate). The costumes they wear are insane. There are no zippers or velcro or elastic. It’s all linen and silk and cotton and fur and leather sewn together by hand. One costume took sixteen people to make because each person knew a different olde-timey skill and it took all of them to figure the costume out. Amazing. Anyway, Rylance and the rest of the actors got together and came over here and are doing a double-billing of Twelfth Night and Richard III. I have tickets for Richard III (the royal they found in a parking lot last year) which I will see next week. It is not fun. It’s about a crippled man who kills family members to ascend the throne. Twelfth Night, however, is fun. There’s mistaken identity! And silly stockings! And music! There was one song at the end that I could not get out of my head. The lyrics were, “The wind and the rain, it raineth ev’ry day, it raineth ev’ry day.” Four hours later I found myself saying, “England! It raineth every damn day!” to nobody. What an earworm. The music was really cool. They used authentic instruments and parked the musicians above the stage so they could play various tunes to make the scenes more impactful. Ever heard someone play a hurdy-gurdy? I have, now. If you have a chance to see it, I recommend that you do. It’s really a pleasant farce, and it’s so great to see super-talented people do the thing that they do so well. I’m going to buy the DVD version (which is pretty much identical).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeare-Twelfth-Night-Globe-Screen/dp/B00DEROM3M
It raineth ev’ry day.

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My week of exciting activities – Monday: StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Wednesday, November 6th, 2013

It just so happens that this week I have things planned for the evenings of Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and possibly Saturday. On Monday I went to the Town Hall in midtown Manhattan to see StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I have never listened to Neil’s podcast, so I was totally ready for whatever when I got there. He has Eugene Mirman the comedian co-host the show regularly. Neil brought on two guests – Brian Greene, the theoretical physicist and string theorist, and Michael Massimino, an astronaut who went into space twice, both times to do repairs on the Hubble Telescope. Eugene brought fellow comedian Michael Ian Black who’s been in a gazillion things. The topic of this episode of StarTalk was gravity, both the movie that just came out and, you know, the stuff that keeps you on the crust of the earth. I had a lot of problems with this because there’s very few things in nature that make my skin get all icy and leave*, and one of those things is outer space. I can’t even watch the trailers for the movie Gravity. You can fall! In any direction! Forever! Complete darkness! No oxygen! So cold! So alone! It just freaks me out down to my core. You want to know my idea of a horror movie? WALL•E. The scene where WALL•E propels himself through space with the fire extinguisher? Nightmare fuel for me. So the two hours of the show was a bit of a struggle for me to get through without curling up a ball, wrapping my coat around my head and moaning, but I made it. Neil talked about several things that bothered him about the movie Gravity. Number one: Sandra Bullock played a medical doctor sent to space to fix a gigantic space machine. Michael Ian Black’s response: “Neil, the Hubble Telescope was sick.” Michael the Astronaut did say that all the tools they used in the film were completely accurate. The space repairmen use really similar tools to what we use here, but they have those big gloves on and therefore they cannot be as dextrous, so the tools are slightly different. And we got the stamp of authenticity on the tools from a real space-tool-knowledge-haver, so that’s good.

This was a cool demonstration. Neil talked about a scene in the movie where Sandra Bullock was running out of oxygen and she had to let go of George Clooney and when she released the tether holding them together he flew backwards away. Or maybe she was the one who flew backwards away. I haven’t seen the film. Whatever, someone released a tether and someone flew backwards away. Neil brought out a dolly, the kind one uses to move furniture, and he made Brian Greene sit on it so his feet were off the floor. Neil handed him one end of a rope and he walked to the end of the length of the rope. And then Neil let go. And Brian didn’t move. Neil turned to us, the audience, and said, “THAT’S WHAT WOULD HAPPEN.” Since Ms. Bullock and Mr. Clooney weren’t on something spinning or moving rapidly and pulling on them, if they let go they would stay put. Nowhere near as dramatic as what happens in the film.

I learned so many things. I learned that Aristotle was the first guy to talk about gravity, but he thought that things will more mass fell faster. To demonstrate the incorrectness of this, Neil took off his boot and picked up a pen. Then he dropped them at the same time. They hit the stage at the same time. Neil then chastised Aristotle for not conducting that experiment, for if he had he would have known the correct answer. I learned that there was a Chinese satellite hanging out in orbit at 550 miles and the Chinese shot it out of existence for scientific reasons. We also had a satellite we wanted to destroy, but it was at 110 miles. We shot it out of existence as well. The difference is that all the debris from our satellite fell into our atmosphere and burned up and was gone. The Chinese satellite debris did not, now making it really difficult to send, like, another satellite into orbit at 550 miles. The new satellite is going to get battered with all the crap from the destroyed satellite. I had never thought of that. If we keep putting things into orbit and they explode or bonk into each other, that layer of orbits will be riddled with pointy things that can jack up our other scientific experiments. Neil mentioned something about nets, but I lost him around there. There was much talk about theoretical mathematical stuff that I simply could not grasp with my non-mathematical-oriented brain. At one point the discussion turned to black holes. I learned that if you are falling into a black hole, if someone is watching you from the outside it will appear that your gestures are slowing down, until you reach the event horizon which is what they call the rim of the black hole. To the person on the outside, it will have appeared that you have frozen. Meanwhile, everything will look normal to you, but the things around you will look sped up, so as you reach the event horizon you will see the future of the universe until the end of time. As Neil said, “You’ll notice you’ve fallen into a black hole right after you get pulled into the thickness of a piece of spaghetti. Then you’ll notice.”

The best thing I learned is that the qualities that makes a flame pointy is the hot air rising and sucking in more oxygen. In space, like in the space station, where there is both oxygen and a lack of gravity, the flame would be a ball. An orb of fire, if you will. And Neil commented that if aliens who were accustomed to a gravity-free environment came to earth, they would not understand why our chandelier candle-lights are shaped like that.

Long story short, I’m going to start listening to StarTalk if it’s a podcast. Is it a podcast? If it is, I will listen to it. And I developed crushes on all the scientists on the stage because goshdarnit I like me a smart man. And these men are SMART. Mmmmmmmm, intelligence.

*The other thing is when an insect lays eggs in another insect and then the camera zooms all up in there as the babies emerge from the host-beast. TOO MUCH. Blargh.

Posted in Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers., Nature, New York, Stuff | 4 Comments »

I saw documentaries. Let’s talk about them.

Monday, September 2nd, 2013

I’ve had a busy week at my jobbie-job so while I was working on Keynote decks I opened up Netflix on the side of my screen and watched a bunch of documentaries.First, I saw After Porn Ends, which is about the life and times of several porn actors. It pretty much is like any other career in that some people really hate what they did and have massive regrets and other performers are fine with it and enjoyed the sex and the spotlight. I did not know that porn actors worked so little. I assumed that it was like a five-days-a-week, 9-5 type job, but it’s totally not. The lower-end folk work about one day a week and if they get famous enough they film as infrequently as seven or eight times a year. They do other stuff on the other days, like signings and appearances and headlining in strip clubs, but they have surprisingly little “interpersonal relations”. I mean, what the actors do in their free time is their business, but if work is the only time they have sex, they’re not having a whole lotta sex. The other thing I noticed in the film but was not surprised by is the men seem to deal with the life much better than the women. To be a male who has worked in porn is to be a stud, but to be a woman who has worked in porn is to be a whore. That’s a bit of a disappointment to me since they did the same exact job. I hope in the future that if a woman is a former porn worker, after she retires and becomes a regular-job-owner she is treated like a person, not a social outcast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV5lSmDWk24

Then, to balance it out, I watched (A)Sexual, which is about people who don’t have any sexual attraction to anyone or anything. As with any sexual preference there are all kinds and types, but the majority of them are friendly and want to be in relationships with people. Humans are drawn to herds and companionship, and the asexuals are no different, they just don’t want to engage in any sexual behavior. It’s a fairly new movement and is different than celibacy. Celibacy means you want to hook up, but choose not to. Asexuality means you don’t want to, so you don’t. One thing I realized while watching this documentary is how snotty sexual people are to the asexuals. All I could think was, “They aren’t infringing on anything you do, if anything they’re removing themselves from the dating pool so you have more options, so shut the hell up and leave them alone.” Visit the website of fuckmeets.com to find single people you can hook up with. You may also check out free sex cams here. And if you’re looking for the best onlyfans creators to watch in 2025, then make sure to check out a list of cei onlyfans creators here.

I imagine that if I was asexual I would feel like a total outsider in our culture because so so much of what we see and what we encounter is driven by the desire to be with another person, or be seen as attractive by a specific person.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYMh9zkt6r4

Finally I watched Bully, about kids who get bullied. This is a hot-button issue for me because I was bullied mercilessly as a kid. Here’s what I realized after watching this program: there are two types of kids who get bullied. One are the kids who have no control over their predicament (an ethnicity different from everyone else in the school, short, funny-looking, mentally-challenged, poor, etc.) and there are the kids who bring it upon themselves by saying or doing epically dorky things. I was both, predominantly the latter. I dressed like a weird artsy person. I spoke before I thought. I didn’t understand social cues and made people uncomfortable. If I could give kids in school one piece of advice, it would be BLEND IN. BLEND IN REALLY HARD OR BE VERY QUIET, and then when you get to college do your thing. Don’t fly your freak flag until after you leave high school unless you’re okay with people shunning you or mocking you. People stop being as mean in college and especially after college, and there’s a reason for that. I saw a play called Well and one of the lines that I loved was, “The good thing about being an adult is you can leave.” There’s one scene in Bully where the kids are all lined up on the playground and it looks like a shot from prison. If you’re grown up and people are mean to you in your job, you quit. At a party, you go home. In your town, you move. If you’re a kid, you can’t do anything. You HAVE to go to this place and do stuff you don’t want to do all day, otherwise you get in trouble with the government. That makes school a jail-like environment, with gangs and hierarchy and bribery and blackmail, all that stuff. Two things to look for if you watch this movie:

The opening credits scene where the kid is alone on the bus and The Scala Choir sings Teenage Dirtbag, which is one of my favorite songs. Beautiful.
The well-wishing but astonishingly inept Vice Principal and her handling of two specific bullying situations. I gasped and put my hand over my mouth during one of them, it was so shocking how poorly she dealt with it. It’s got to be a gift to be that dense.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUy2ZWoStr0

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The Renaissance of Television.

Sunday, August 11th, 2013

We are living in an amazing time, television-wise. For the first time in maybe ever, everyone I know isn’t talking about any of the films coming out, only the TV shows, and specifically the TV shows on cable, not network. I don’t think anyone predicted this. I would like to talk about some of the shows I have seen recently, but because everyone watches shows in their own time the issues of spoilers is a big problem. I think if I put this here, I should be covered. No one can accuse me of springing surprise endings on them.

Since there are so many channels, I think executives are starting to allow the creatives to be creative. Creativity was never the issue. It was executives being scared of alienating viewers or losing sponsors. First there was late-night stuff, like Adult Swim on Cartoon Network, and that’s proven to be wildly popular. And then there’s the way Louie is handled, which is genius. FX said to Louie C.K. that if he could make a show for $250,000 an episode, which is not very much money when you consider how many people work on that show (approximately 70 people per episode), then he could do pretty much whatever he wanted. And Louie did, and it’s worked out well for everyone. That should be the system for tons of shows. I’m surprised they haven’t done an MST3K-type show yet. The budget on that must have been minute. It was really just funny people being funny, which is always entertaining. Anyway, my point being television right now is amazing. And I’m going to talk about a bunch of shows that I think have been amazing recently.

Breaking Bad

I know everyone and their cat has been waxing poetic on the awesomeness of this show, but I’m going to join them. Damn, this show is so good. I feel bad that Jon Hamm hasn’t been getting the Golden Globe and Emmy nods because Bryan Cranston keeps taking them, but (sorry Jon) Bryan deserves them. That role is crazy. The cinematography is fantastic. Hell, the songs they pick to go with different scenes is freaking great. I watch each episode like I’m watching a work of art being painted right in front of me. For crying out loud, did you see that train heist? I don’t think I drew a breath once during that. (Also, hey Bill Burr, one of my favorite comedians!) Now, this doesn’t mean the show is perfect. I know I’m in the minority, but I hate Jesse Pinkman. I have always hated him. I think he’s a useless tool. You know how some women are attracted to damaged men because they want to fix them or heal them or mommy them or whatever? I am not that woman. If I was Walter White, as soon as I had my connections set up and ready to go I would have dropped Pinkman like a Pizza Bite fresh from the microwave (they can be very hot). My other problem with the show is they keep killing off the characters I like. I liked Gale, the weird-music-listening-to, exceptional-coffee-drinking, vegan chemist. They killed him. I loved Gus Fring and he psycho OCD whatnot. Y’all know what happened to him. I thought Mike was a hell of a character. Surprise! Dead. POINTLESSLY dead. Totally did not need to die. I’m glad the next eight episodes are the last because I can’t deal with them introducing another super-dope character only to off him.

Will there be a Breaking Bad CD? I hope so. I would like all their musical selections in one place. Vince Gilligan, work on that.

Orange is the New Black

Yet another awesome TV thing that’s happening. Netflix is making their own shows. They made Lilyhammer, which I haven’t seen but is supposed to be great. Then there was House of Cards, which I also still haven’t seen but is supposed to also be great. I saw the original British series on PBS and that was dope, so when I get a chance I’m going to hunker down and watch the whole series in one day. There’s those episodes of Arrested Development that I need to see as well. A month ago Orange is the New Black came out on Netflix and I watched all thirteen hour-long episodes in basically a day and a half. So good. None of the actors are really famous. It’s mostly unknowns and character actors. And they are fantastic, I love them all. I can’t even name my favorite character because I enjoy so many of them. I guess my super-favorites might be Crazy Eyes, Miss Claudette and Tastee. And the old Chinese woman with the mustache. I did come to the sad realization that my personality would fit perfectly on that show. My spirit animal is an incarcerated woman in America. Wonderful realization to come to. Hooray for me. Also, there’s a prison guard that I have all kinds of feelings for. He is adorable. He ends up hooking up with an inmate who has full lips, a substantial rump and a wack dye job. I could totally be his girl. And oh? What’s that now?

OH HELL YEAH I CAN DRAW. ALL DAMN DAY. Call me.

Game of Thrones

I just watched the latest season of Game of Thrones. It was a bit underwhelming. Not bad mind you, far from it, but I have come to expect a certain amount of incest and rape per episode, and this season just did not deliver. No one accidentally touches their sister, or intentionally touches their sister. Frankly, there’s a profound lack of sister-touching. Theon gets tortured a whole lot (I called this season, “Wow, Theon’s having a crappy time, isn’t he”), and then there’s the Red Wedding, which interestingly I did not find to be the most horrible thing to happen. Don’t get me wrong, it was awful and horrendous, but the next episode when they cut off Robb’s head and sewed his direwolf’s head on his torso and then paraded around with it, that just gross and disrespectful to both man and beast. It made me feel unwell. I found out later that the producers/directors split one book into two seasons, so this season was diluted by half. People are concerned that George R. R. Martin isn’t writing these books fast enough. It takes him about five to ten years to crank out one of these tomes. In fact, at the most recent Comic Con Paul and Storm (a comedic band that I’m a fan of) sang this song live on stage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7lp3RhzfgI

And then this happened.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqcqapoFy-w

Which personally, I think is just the bee’s knees.

Now, not everything on TV is glorious, blessed by the tears of the angels. There’s an irritating trend right now of making crime shows based on Swedish and Danish originals. There’s The Bridge and The Killing and Broadchurch and Wallander. Here’s a breakdown of every single one of those shows. Dead body in the village. Anyone could be a suspect. Cops do some investigating. Everyone looks serious all the time. Eyebrows are perpetually furrowed. At least twenty minutes an hour is devoted to someone pensively staring out onto the beach/the moors/the desert. And the pace must be mind-bendingly slow. They could cram so much more stuff into an episode if they didn’t take for-freakin-ever to do anything. I am presently trying to watch Broadchurch and The Bridge because I have high hopes that the closer it gets to the end, the more exciting it will get, but I think I will be let down. I shall heed the words of my co-worker Børkke, “High hopes and low expectations.”

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Stuff and also things.

Friday, July 5th, 2013

1. KeKe Wyatt. Oh Lordy, I have an unhealthy need to see more of KeKe. If you haven’t been watching The Soup, KeKe is a singer on the show R&B Divas and she is a reality TV producer’s dream come true. There’s this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9Q904QkZHI

And that’s fine, but this, THIS, from :19 to :33, is magical:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dV1huVDLaU

Next time you see me, get ready for “Hahahaha – J. ROTH!!!” being yelled in your face for no reason. Prepare yourself for this inevitability.

Addendum 3/6/14: Best eyeroll of all time. I love KeKe SO MUCH.

2. What a great ad campaign.

http://youtu.be/xGTptt7iwj8

3. Did everyone see the Pacific Rim trailer? I was watching Monsters vs. Aliens the other night, and it occurred to me, Pacific Rim is really similar. There’s a scene in M vs. A where a giant insect fights an alien robot over a bridge. And wouldn’t you know, same thing in Pacific Rim. Look, here’s a pic from M vs A:

Aaaaaaaand here’s Pacific Rim.

4. I love this. If I’m feeling low, I watch this and things get better. Poof. Like magic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVg2QEYtdIM

And they are the same people who made this treasure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfammxKoUYs&feature=youtu.be

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The Sessions, Iron Man 3, Epic and Star Trek: Into Darkness.

Tuesday, May 28th, 2013

1. The Sessions. I really liked this movie. First of all, the two leads are great actors, John Hawkes and Helen Hunt. And it’s an interesting story based on an autobiographical article. There was guy named Mark O’Brien and he had polio as a child. He became paralyzed (sort of, he could still feel everything but he couldn’t move his muscles) from the neck down and spend a large portion of his time in his iron lung. But O’Brien was not a defeatist; He created a electric gurney he could control, covered it with mirrors so he could see where he was going while lying on his back and went to class at Berkeley University, where he studied and graduated with a degree in journalism. He wrote a bunch of articles for magazines and newspapers that he typed with a stick in his mouth on his typewriter. In 1990, despite being a devout Roman Catholic and unmarried, O’Brien decided he wanted to lose his virginity before he passed away (an unfortunate possibility: see post-polio syndrome). After much soul-searching, he decided to do it and hired a sexual surrogate called Cheryl Cohen-Greene, and the film is about that period of time. If you think the sex (or not-so-much-sex-as-awkward-touchings scenes) is uncomfortable, they are indeed. But the fact that this whole story is real and, in fact, documented in Mark O’Brien’s article “On Seeing A Sex Surrogate“, makes it sweet and poignant. O’Brien’s positive attitude and good humor in the face of what would cast most people into a pit of self-pity, beautifully portrayed by John Hawkes, keeps this from being a woe-is-me tale.

2. Iron Man 3. Blasty-explosiony-goodness! After the dopeness of IM1 and the not-dopeness of IM2 I was bracing myself. But it was super-fun! Some key points:

At first I was like why is Ben Kingley acting crappily? He got knighted with the acting, fer Chrissakes! And then in the middle is El Grande Plot Twist and I was like awww Ben, I’m sorry for doubting you, hearts and cuddles forever.
The continuity person on this movie should be shot in the face with a harpoon. There’s a big showdown that takes up the last third of the movie (no spoiler there, that’s how all these comic book films are structured) and Tony Stark gets a cut under his right eye. UNDER his RIGHT EYE, got that? Then, right in the middle of the fighting, there’s a short scene where for no reason whatsoever, Tony Stark has the cut over his left eye. It’s such a big cut that it’s doing that Rocky thing where it swells a little and pushes his lid down so it looks like he’s a wee bit sleepy, but only on one side. And as soon as that scene is over, it switches back to under his right eye for the rest of the film. This movie had as much money as the gross national product of several countries; You couldn’t deal with that in post maybe? A little CGI? Hell, just FLIP THE FILM in that scene so at least the cut is on THE CORRECT SIDE OF HIS HEAD. I found it infuriating.
I love the opening song. It’s a horrid European dance track from the ’90s (don’t click on the link if you want to be surprised) and I was so happy I sang all the words in the theater. And then after the movie I sang all the words on the way to the parking lot. I love bad 90s dance music. Started my movie experience off great.
Product placement is out of control. There’s this really sweet scene near the end and you’re all emotionally invested in it and then the screen is taken over by a giant FIOS – THE NETWORK AHEAD for several seconds and it’s such a blatant plug it takes you right out of the movie. I’m not saying get rid of product placement, but try to weave it into the movie gently, not slappity-slap people with your shilling.

3. Epic. SO CLOSE. It was SO CLOSE to being one of the best movies ever. This movie was a hodge-podge of Fantasia, Casper (the movie with Christina Ricci), Ferngully and a sprinkling of The Wizard of Oz. While in my head that sounds great, it just… wasn’t. I am so accustomed to Pixar and their breathtaking character development, so when I see something where the focus was more on the look and feel and less on perfecting the story structure and characters, it fills me with sad.

However, all is not wrong! This movie is one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. I don’t say this often, but if you can, you should see it in 3D. The scene where the queen goes off in her chariot to find a successor – gorgeous. The scene in the rings of the tree – gorgeous. The costume design – exquisite. Seriously. Look at this.
I noticed that there was a lot of pulling from a variety of inspirations. The bad guys were clearly inspired by Brian Froud. Here are some of Brian Froud’s illustrations:

And here’s the main bad guy (voiced by one of my favorite actors, Christoph Waltz). Similarities? Me thinks so.
If they could make a movie only with the anthropomorphic flower-and-bug people, I would be the first in line to buy a ticket.
Oy, Beyonce. I love you so much, but girl can not act. Her voicework was so non-emotive. She has a big important scene which is supposed to punch you right in the feels, but you don’t care. Dammit, Beyonce! Don’t be Madonna! Stick to what you’re great at! No acting for you!
If you see this movie for one reason, see it for the pug running at the camera in slow-motion. Never stops being funny.

4. Star Trek: Into Darkness. Eh. I didn’t love the first one, and I don’t love this second one. I almost dozed off during one of the battle scenes. If I had to sum up this film, I would call it “Tears and Lens Flares”. Someone cries in, like, every single scene. Uhura cries, Spock cries, Scotty cries, Benedict Cumberbatch cries, I think Kirk cries twice. I’m surprised the Klingons didn’t cry. And lens flares all over everything. Holy mackerel. Here are some examples I found online.

And here’s a lovely photoshopped image of the director J. J. Abrams. Someone does not care for lens flares.

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I’m makin’ stuff! JR jr’s Mural Part 1 and other things.

Friday, May 3rd, 2013

First, I started on JR’s mural for his kid. In case y’all have forgotten, the basic design looks like this:

I bought a whole lot of blue painter’s tape and started laying out where I wanted the trees to go. Now I need to get an X-Acto knife and cut away anywhere the tape overlaps. Then I can start painting in the white of the birch trees. I’m not thrilled with the layout of the branches, and I think I will pull down some of the existing tape and reposition it for better branchiness.

Second, I’ve been embroidering my leaf tapestry. I’ve been making frosty protuberances* emerging from the leaves, and I’m a little less than halfway done. ACCOMPLISHING GOALS HERE, PEOPLE.

*I call them “frost-horns” which sounds exciting and Norse. Also I realized that subconsciously I was totally ripping off one of my favorite childhood movies, Fantasia, the scene with the frost fairies. Disney has a lockdown on the video, but I found some nice screenshots of what I am referring to.

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Oh, cinema. What’s going on with you? Were you always like this?

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

Last night I went over to Nessa’s house in an attempt to get into work this morning at a reasonable hour (I failed, we stayed up until 1:00 a.m. then went to work at my usual time which is late). We spent the entire evening slumped on her couch yelling at her flatscreen with her apartment-mate. I don’t normally post people’s real names, but Nessa’s apartment-mate has the best name. You ready? Edward Christmas. For real. Wait, it gets better. Upon learning his name, I immediately nicknamed him “Edward Christmas-Hands”, because that’s what you do, it’s so easy. It turns out that I am the first person in his life to call him that, and he’s, like, thirty years old. Why, after thirty years, am I the first person to come up with this? Shame on you, everyone else. But I digress.

So me, Nessa and Edward Christmas-Hands sat on the couch and watched Taken, Man on a Ledge and Pretty In Pink. An eclectic blend, I agree, but that’s how it ended up. Taken was on TV and you can’t turn that movie off once it starts, so we got to watch Liam Neeson kill a plethora of naughty, human-trafficking Albanians. Very satisfying. I came to an appalling realization during the auction scene, the scene where they sell Liam Neeson’s daughter for $350,000. I said, “Yeah, I don’t think I would buy someone for anywhere near that much money, I don’t care if she’s hot, white and a virgin*, that’s too much.” Which means I have a notion of how much I would pay for a person, and that number is about $50,000, tops. And now I know I’m okay with the buying and selling of people. Awesome. Self-discovery is the greatest.

That film was followed by Man on a Ledge. OMG, this movie sucked in all directions, like an exploding star of suckery. I think it was in the theaters for a total of three seconds which, after seeing this, is three seconds too long. It felt like a crappy Syfy channel film, that level of plot development and acting, but without a sharktopus or piranhaconda to make it exciting. Here are two striking examples of badness. One, the lead actor who is from England as was attempting to sound like a New Yorker, swung in and out of a Jersey Shore and Australian accent. And Kyra Sedgwick plays a Latino News reporter. KYRA SEDGWICK. Did no one show up to the audition? The Evas, both Mendes and Longoria, they had stuff to do that day and no one could reschedule? Word to the wise: Watch this only if you are in a foreign land and it’s been dubbed over. And you don’t speak the language. And you have to guess at what’s happening. Then it might be tolerable.

And finally I saw Pretty in Pink. It was okay. Duckie is super-annoying. I decided he’s allowed to be annoying because in one shot they show him in his bedroom, this sweetly irritating high-school student, and he’s sitting on a mattress on the floor with spray paint on the wall behind, it totally looks like a crack den. Does Duckie live in a crack den? Poor little feller.

Anyway, most of the movie follows around Molly Ringwald’s character who’s supposed to be fashion-forward but basically dresses like an artsy Orthodox Jew. Seriously, I’ve seen members of FLDS show more skin than her. Then, to complete the fashion travesty, she takes her co-worker’s cool 1960’s pink dress and a nice pink poofie dress her father buys her, we watch a dressmaking montage, and then there’s the reveal… on this.

What the hell is that home ec. tablecloth potato sack doing there? She had TWO perfectly fine dresses and she managed to combine both into a singular crappy one AND she gets the guy at the end??? Is there no God? John Hughes, if you were still alive I would write you a stern letter stating my disapproval. Indeed I would. Still like Breakfast Club though. Nice work on that.

*Their criteria of valuable attributes, not mine.

Addendum – 3/29/13: Look what just popped up on Buzzfeed today! http://www.buzzfeed.com/jeslyncat/every-outfit-andie-wears-in-pretty-in-pink-82l2

Posted in Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers. | No Comments »

Some things that have recently been brought to my attention.

Friday, March 8th, 2013

1. I am tired. While I was typing the title above, I wrote, “Some things that have breen to my attention.” Then I looked at it and thought, “That’s not right.” And it took me far too long to figure out what was incorrect. I need a nap.

2. Nowadays when people say something was decimated, they mean totally destroyed. Poof, gone. I just learned, though, that decimated actually means “reduced by a tenth” (deci = ten). That’s not totally destroyed at all. You got a thousand guys attacking a village and one hundred of them die, you still have nine hundred guys! How did this word evolve to this meaning?

3. I was watching The Jeselnik Offensive the other night on Comedy Central, and I think Anthony Jeselnik is a reptile. He says a joke, and then he slooooowwwwwly licks his lips and slooooowwwwwly blinks his eyes like a komodo dragon. I feel like one day I will turn on that show one day and he will be calmly and quietly consuming an entire waterbuck.

4. Speaking of antelopes and antelope-like creatures, did you know there’s a deer with fangs? Imagine a docile, pleasant deer. Now imagine it with those plastic vampire teeth you could wear at Halloween that never fit. That’s a pretty good description. Here, see for yourself:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdxozpT8T61rlhtaxo1_400.jpg

http://25.media.tumblr.com/3e077b70d57151fb2deef602b1fc46fb/tumblr_mh1ydeKaDx1rmgx38o1_500.jpg

5. I saw The Patriot for the first time recently (Alternate title: Braveheart in the U.S.) and it was good and all that, but every time Jason Isaacs and Mel Gibson had a scene together, this is all I heard:

6. I finished all the frost around the edges of all my leaves! Yay and hooray! The tapestry now looks like this:

Now I will attempt to put extra points of frost extending out from some of the leaves to create the appearance of… more frostiness, I guess that’s what I’d call it. Extreme frostitude. Then Snorth will teach me how to finish the edges and I will have completed a project that has been a bother for well over a decade! So exciting.

Posted in Beastiesbeastiesbeasties, Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers., My Art/Design/Business, Nature, Stuff, The Telly | No Comments »

Amigurumi.

Monday, March 4th, 2013

Does everyone know what amigurumi is / are? Here’s a description from their Wikipedia page:

Amigurumi is the Japanese art of knitting or crocheting small stuffed animals and anthropomorphic creatures. The word is derived from a combination of the Japanese words ami, meaning crocheted or knitted, and nuigurumi, meaning stuffed doll.Amigurumi are typically animals, but can include artistic renderings or inanimate objects endowed with anthropomorphic features,as is typical in Japanese culture.

Amigurumi have no practical use; they are created and collected for aesthetic reasons.The pervading aesthetic of amigurumi is cuteness. To this end, typical amigurumi animals have an over-sized spherical head on a cylindrical body with undersized extremities, usually termed a chibi style outside of Japan. Amigurumi may be used as children’s toys but are generally purchased or made solely for aesthetic purposes.

An online fad for creating and collecting amigurumi began in 2003.By 2006, amigurumi were reported to be the most popular items on Etsy, an online craft marketplace, where they typically sold for $10 to $100.

Got it? Cute little crocheted figurines. Snorth made me one of a big brown rabbit holding a carrot that I treasure. If you are hankerin’ for a new skill, I highly recommend learning how to do this. If you type “amigurumi” into Image Search in Google, the plethora of designs that come up are astonishing. You want the standard insanely-adorable Japanese designed creatures, like wee bunnies and pandas? No problem. But people have gone well beyond that. There’s food:

And some not-so-typically-cute wee creatures:

There’s famous characters from book, game and screen:

Heck, someone made a house in situ:

A pack of dinosaurs:

And my favorite, the large dinosaur wall skeleton:

And then there’s whatever the hell these things are.

Someone made an amigurumi crochet hook, which is super-meta.

There are tons of book available to teach you the art, so check it out and make something snuggly and cute today! (Or weird and cute! Or horrifying and cute! Do your thing.)

http://www.amazon.com/Amigurumi-Toy-Box-Crocheted-Friends/dp/1604680458/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362355359&sr=8-1&keywords=amigurumi

http://www.amazon.com/Amigurumi-Pattern-Ladybug-Patterns-ebook/dp/B0050INUAE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362355165&sr=8-1&keywords=amigurumi+pattern

http://www.amazon.com/Amigurumi-Crochet-Pattern-Patterns-ebook/dp/B0081KI09E/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1362355165&sr=8-5&keywords=amigurumi+pattern

This one is for knitting amigurumi, but it has that amazing hermit crab on the cover, so I’m going to include it as well.

http://www.amazon.com/Amigurumi-Knits-Patterns-Cute-Mini/dp/1589234359/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1362355165&sr=8-9&keywords=amigurumi+pattern\

Posted in Movie and Book Reviews. Possibly With Spoilers., Random Art Bloggery, Stuff, Teh Intarwebz | No Comments »