NEVILLE! Oh my gosh, it’s Neville! Neville Longbottom! He just came out of a painting – no one else, just Neville – this is AWESOME! My Neville-saves-the-day dream might actually come true! I need to keep reading – Go Team Neville! Whoo hoo!
Archive for July, 2007
Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows – page 570.
Friday, July 27th, 2007Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows – page 430.
Thursday, July 26th, 2007Okay, now it’s vaguely starting to get interesting, but they’ve only mentioned Neville once for like, two seconds. My Neville-saves-the-day dream is going down the toilet rapidly. But no! I shall continue to hope! Go Team Neville! Longbottom rulez!
Two New York Experiences and a VH1 moment.
Tuesday, July 24th, 20071. I was walking down the street the other day after a rainstorm and it was hot and muggy and oppressive. I saw a white lump sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, like a pile of pizza dough someone had just left there, and people were stepping over it and around it. As I got closer, I realized it was an ancient obese chihuahua that had had quite enough of this hotness, thank you very much, I’ll just lay here on the sidewalk which is wet and therefore cooler and let everyone walk around me. The owner was sort of trying to get the dog to move (although I think saying, “C’mon, fat ass! Get up!” is not going to have the desired effect, and did I mention the owner was a seventy-year-old woman? Old people using bad language is funny) but the dog wasn’t having none of it, so I took a picture when the flow of people ebbed somewhat and I could get a clear picture.
2. I see many flower shops in my travels around the Isle of Manhattan. However, this other day, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a cactus. No, no, my friends, this was no ordinary cactus. It was a MUTANT HYBRID ALIEN FREAK CACTUS. I asked the flower-shop lady about it. They took one kind of weird-looking cactus and grafted another even weirder-looking cactus to the top of it, so now they are one incredibly-odd looking plant. It was $150, so I didn’t buy it, but I did take pictures of it. Imagine it being as big around and as tall as an average adult’s calf. Big. And weird. Super-weird.
3. I watch a great deal of television (I like it as background for when I’m painting or beading) and I saw a smidgen of “Rock of Love” on VH1 the other day. Short description: Aging rock star looks for skanky woman to love forever out of a pool of about twenty vapid atrocities to choose from. I was okay with this, until Bret Michaels (the aging rock star) was meeting the women for the first time and said, slowly and seriously to the camera:
The heaving, well-implanted breasts caught my eye immediately, and I knew that we were going to have a strong spiritual relationship.
My head jerked up from beading and my jaw fell open. He wasn’t kidding. It was… moronic. And kinda awful. The fake giant silicone makes you… spiritual? Ooh, you’re a deep fella there, aren’t cha? I think I will not watch this show anymore. I do not wish to become enraged and fling a shoe at my beloved television. I see that becoming my future if I watch. So no more watching.
Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows – page 177.
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007So far no mention of Neville Longbottom. I think my theory is not going to come true. But I’m going to keep rooting for him. Go, Team Neville!
Dooce’s dragon photo.
Thursday, July 19th, 2007There is a website/blog/thingie called Dooce, written by a woman called Heather Armstrong. She’s a snarky bright lady and she writes very well, but she takes PICTURES. Not pictures, PICTURES. Sometimes they are so beautiful it pokes you right in the heart (or stomach, they’re really near each other and the photo’s aim is not so good). Here’s one from today:
It’s some kind of blow-up dragon, maybe kids jump in it, I don’t know. I just thought the pointy green spikes and the translucency and the curly tail, oh, such a good picture. I’m sorry, PICTURE.
P.S. Dooce’s website is http://www.dooce.com/
The rules for me. Made by me. For me. Me me me. Also, me.
Monday, July 16th, 2007Did I ever lay out the rules I made for myself for this blog? I made myself rules because I just run HELTER SKELTER without structure, I’m CRAZY like that. Whoo, tippin’ cows and desecratin’ private property! Well, not really, it’s actually because this is a professional as well as personal blog and clients may come here and read things (sorry, boring reason). The rules I made for myself are as follows:
1. No cursing. No “S” word or “F” word or “C” word or other “C” word or “T” word or OTHER “T” word… Anyone who knows me knows how difficult this is for me. I tend to pepper my chat with a healthy dose of filth and debris. But I think keeping it clean is more professional and it definitely doesn’t hurt me, whereas cursing will most likely push some people away, which I don’t want, so this is a compromise I’m willing to make.
2. No sharing super-personal details. I like to share. A lot. The wretched and despised phrase “TMI” was invented just for me. So I’ll just keep the stories as dinnertime-conversation appropriate as possible.
3. No getting all political. I, like everyone, have views and opinions on things. I will not be sharing them here. No opinions on the government or child-rearing or the elderly or healthcare or the Middle East… we will not be discussing those things here. You want that, there are a ton of websites for that.
I hope I can keep my rules. I don’t that’s too hard. I CAN DO THIS.
More Harry Potter posting.
Thursday, July 12th, 2007Oh so frustrating. My co-worker A. is only up to Harry Potter and The Goblet Of Fire, and I just bought this t-shirt:
http://www.threadless.com/product/844/Spoilt
I can’t wear it because of the Harry Potter niblet in the middle area. Argh! I don’t want to ruin the surprise for A., but now I have to wait for him to read TWO MORE BOOKS (and those damn things are tomes, I tell you, they are Stephen King long) before I can wear my shirt. And it’s such a GOOD shirt. Phooey.
Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix Movie.
Thursday, July 12th, 2007I saw Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix last night, and my response is: meh. It was fine. I was heartily irritated by the book when it came out. It was 870 pages and the big whoo-hoo oh-my-god reveal at the end was… When Harry finally faces off with Voldemort, one of them has to die. Um, YEAH, we figured that. This is not news. This is not worth reading 870 pages for. I was extremely crabby about it and I didn’t preorder the next one and was seriously (Siriusly, har har har) considering not reading it. But all my friends rubbed my back and said, “There, there,” and I was soothed and Half-Blood Prince was great and all was right in the world. I didn’t have high hopes for the Order/Phoenix movie. It did the best it could with the crap material it was given. Poopy book ergo poopy movie.
Anyway, one of the big problems is that it is very difficult to shove 870 pages of an all-text-no-pictures book into a two-hour movie. One of my favorite moments to demonstrate this was the oft-discussed Cho Chang and Harry Potter kiss scene. Here’s how it happens: As Christmas nears and everyone gets ready to leave Hogwarts for winter break, Harry walks over to Cho, who’s looking at a picture of Cedric, the boy she was seeing who died. She mentions something about how she misses him, looks tearful, then says, “Is that mistletoe?” and they kiss. This all takes maybe twenty seconds. Wha..?
“I miss my boyfriend, who was killed by- ooh, festive holiday snogging plant!” (Smootch)
See what I mean? And the film is filled with that. Eh, what can you do. Now I’m just waiting for the last book to come out (next week!). I’ll tell you a secret: I really hope Harry Potter isn’t going to defeat Voldemort. I really hope it’s Neville Longbottom. I want the total underdog to come out and rain on Voldemort’s parade. That would be AWESOME. And highly unlikely, but I’m still rooting for Neville.
Planet Earth on the BBC.
Monday, July 9th, 2007Has anyone been watching Planet Earth? Discovery was showing it every fifteen minutes there for a while, and then Animal Planet started showing it. It’s a multi-part series filmed by the BBC and I just bought it for my parents at Costco. I watched some of it on Animal Planet, and it was narrated by Sigourney Weaver, and that was nice, whatever. But on the DVD, it’s narrated by Sir David Attenborough, and WELL, that’s a totally different cup of tea, now ain’t it? Not only does everything sound like Shakespeare, but he talks about glaciers and he pronounces it “glass ears”. What really got me hooked was I was out to dinner with my friend M. and M. said, “Have you seen the bird that has plenty of food and no enemies? Do you know what he does all day? He cleans up the forest floor…and then he dances. FOR NOBODY.” And sure enough, yes, he does.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P85LoHftEKs
I think my favorite part is when he wipes down the branches with a leaf, because, you know, those jungles get so DUSTY. And then he shakes the leaf off a plant and takes the leaf away. Damn leaves! In the jungle! And seriously, the dances the birds of paradise do, I can understand why the female is like, “No, I have to wash my drab plumage tonight. I’m busy.” The males, they try so hard. “Look at my feathery goodness!” They scream at the female. “Do not avoid the feathery goodness! It is iridescent and I look like a Las Vegas showgirl and I am hopping around like I have a thumbtack in my keister! Ahhhhhh!” I too would be a little overwhelmed.
The Origami USA Convention.
Monday, July 9th, 2007In late June I went to the Origami Convention that is held annually at FIT here in Manhattan. What a great and glorious thing, truly. I don’t even fold paper and I loved it and I’ll tell you why: you can not be a complete idiot and do origami. You have to have some semblance of not-stupid, so it’s filled with computer programmers and mathematicians and librarians and physicists. These are my people, People! I thrive on nerdity and smartitude!* And they were all so nice. About ten of them (and I) went out to dinner and you know that dead time between when you order your food and when your food gets to your table? There was a container of paper on the table and everyone was just folding away and chatting, their fingers flipping back and forth, oh it was so cute and charming. I have a friend, Snorth, and she’s been folding since she was in single digit years. She made something called Puffy Star Cereal and she asked me to make her a box. I of course went overboard and redid the nutritional information and made up a story on the back about how the Puffy Star Cereal company’s cat (Mr. Twinkles) needed a mate and there was a contest on the side to help choose one for him, etc.. It was ree-diculous. Anyway, it was on display and people loved it and I got my picture taken with it, it was a hoot. Here are some pictures of people’s work from the 2004 OriCon that was so awesome it made my brain hurt.
* To confirm my dweebiness for all eternity, Snorth and I were talking on the phone once, and she was super-psyched about an episode of NOVA coming up soon on PBS that was just an hour of cuttlefish. She loves cuttlefish so much she had one tattooed on herself. I said in a sorrowful tone of voice, “I must apologize, but the cuttlefish is not my favorite cephalopod”.
I rest my case.