Saw Pirates of the Caribbean 2 this evening. Admirably pirate-y, but could have been more tightly edited. A fun, fantastical romp, but I didn’t love it the way I do the first one. Actually, I really want a crack at re-editing it…

The Magic Castle Disney icon that comes up before the movie troubled me this evening. I remember when Disney was all about magic and goodness and the only movies worth watching were made by Disney (except for The Land Before Time; surely a fluke). Somewhere in growing up – roughly around Pocahontas or The Hunchback of Notre Dame – “Disni-fied” became a pejorative. I think Hunchback showed me more about formula and structure than I realized at the time. I couldn’t find the pacing that I associated with Disney, based largely on Beauty and the Beast, Aladin, and maybe The Lion King. You have the introductory number, the big song and dance, the villian’s big number, the love song, etc., etc., and they’re all very singable. I don’t remember a single song from Hunchback. I also remember crowing afterwards that I had known all along that Esmerelda couldn’t really die – not in a Disney movie! I think that was the last animated Disney I saw in the theatre.

Dad and I had been reading about the founding of Jamestown the summer that Pocahontas came out. I didn’t see it until much later, on video, but I remember comparing things I heard and read about the movie to what we had just read in National Geographic, and saw Disney grasping at straws. And while I find the presentation of noble Indians and money-grubbing, exploitative white settlers preferrable to older stereotypes of savages and civilizing Europeans, the characters are still very flat. At least the Seven Dwarves had personalities!…though I would argue Snow White does not. Nostalgia, it seems, has become so weighted.

Speaking of old things trumping new ones, I’m a bit frustrated that no one seems to make combination mixer/blenders anymore. I know people who adore their KitchenAid stand mixers, but it just seems such a waste to have to store that monster of a mixer AND a stand-alone blender. And really – how often would you use both at once? Seems more efficient to use the same motor to operate both. What was so disasterous about my mother’s mixer that it has completely disappeared from the market? No fair! I want one!…at least, eventually. For now, I have a hand mixer of my grandma’s that must be from the sixties or seventies, to guess from the color scheme.

edit: well, maybe someone does: the Bosch Universal Mixer-Blender.

Categories: home, movies
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I think your new theme song for your troll experience should be Blink 182’s “What’s My Age Again?” – casting your troll as the singer, of course. (I believe it’s on Consus if you don’t know it.) It just keeps going through my head and it seems appropriate! Other suggestions, gang?

Have you got the twit blocked yet?

Categories: miscellany, music
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I don’t know if any of you are Garfield fans, but I have a nostalgic appreciation for the old fat cat, dating from days when the comics had to be read to me and I pronounced his name “Garflee.” Yes, really.

Sadly, as anyone addicted to the funny papers has noticed, the comic has been on the downhill slide for a while now; possbily ten years or more. And you can read more about that courtesy of The Comic Strip Doctor. (And if you like that, check out this second half of this article, in which he talks about the Garfield Radomizer.)

So, dork that I am, I still read the Fat Cat, and here’s the revelation I have for you: Garfield has made me laugh. And not once, but twice in less than a week.

All this was preceeded by (first) an interminable set of strips involving a trip to the vet (on whom Jon has a huge crush, but who is way out of his class) and (then) another interminable set of strips involving that involved Jon calling Ellen to ask her out and finding that she has amnesia.

But here’s the strip from July 20.

I think Garfield’s silence here helps a great deal.

Here’s what has followed: July 21–26. The last one also makes me giggle.

Categories: comics
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I’ve been staring at this for a few days now in case I changed my mind, but I still think it’s a bad idea:

Composer wants to create a Harry Potter opera cycle.

Okay, give the lady credit. From the quotes in the above article, it sounds like she wants to use HP’s immense popularity to revitalise opera and make it interesting to kids. But I just get the feeling that some things should not be set to music. They talked about making a Star Trek musical at one point, after all. Not to mention the fact that opera singers are stereotypically middleaged and overweight for a reason: the voice doesn’t finish maturing until you’re about thirty and opera music is demanding. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done. But I don’t think it would be a service to the stories. The composer likes that HP is “pure epic” — but I don’t think epic and opera are as analogous as she would like to make out.

Fortunately for all involved, both J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers have denied permission for the project.

In other Harry news, I really want someone to remind this guy ['Harry won't die' says literature expert] that JKR has explicitly told us that Neville is NOT the chosen one. Voldemort made Harry the chosen one when he tried to kill him as a baby…because he percieved Harry, not Neville as a future threat.

I also think that the first point quoted in the article is bogus. YES, like in Dickens’ work, good has to win in the end, but that doesn’t require Harry to survive the book. He just has to take Voldemort with him if he does die.

I think what really gets my goat about that article is the way Prof. Krasner talks about Harry as though he’s got all the answers. Snape is “really fighting for good despite all appearances,” he says. Well, yes, the thought has crossed most of our minds, now hasn’t it? No call to sound presumptuous about it.

Categories: Harry Potter, books, music
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As Pug and I began to wander around downtown Savannah last Friday evening, one thing quickly became quite clear. Despite hearing tales from Tae, we simply didn’t know the first thing about the first thing about this city.

What’s this “Bird Girl” Thing, Anyway?

I’m sure I had heard about a book called Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but I haven’t read it, so I didn’t know that it is set in the fair city of Savannah, and man, are they trying to make a killing off it. Any gift store you wander into is guaranteed to have a large corner devoted to “The Book,” related books, and replicas of the Bird Girl statue in various sizes. The statue itself is in a museum these days; we saw it, but photography was not allowed.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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Categories: travel
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Gone to Savannah with Pug for the weekend. Back Monday!

Categories: travel
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(Looky! I finally discovered the “more” tag! The Peak becomes readable again! And believe it or not, I just posted real news, too. It’s down here.)

We are in desparate need of some comedy. Fortunately, a few episodes of Family Guy after a dinner of some fabulous, Carmen-made spaghetti Tuesday night helped to resuscitate us.

The suspects: Crash, The House of Sand and Fog, and Proof


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Categories: movies
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The title line refers to last Saturday.

Pug and I spent the afternoon at the Florida Museum of Natural History, which turned out to be considerably bigger and cooler
than I expected. One of their big attractions is a large butterfly
enclosure, very nice, and we managed to be there during their butterfly release at 2pm. Since there are so many species, they just don’t have all the right plants that the various butterflies want to lay their eggs on, so nearly all of them are bought from “butterfly farms” and shipped to the museum as chrysalises, and a cageful of new butterflies are released into the main enclosure every few days.


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Categories: home, music
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And here begins the tale of another summer internship. So let’s start with the point where I walked in the door yesterday morning. I had been told to come at 8:30 on Wednesday so that another intern and I could get the all the introductory explanations at the same time. We sat down with an assisstant editor, to get a run down of the steps that a book goes through while it is in the hands of the editorial department. We also met the managing editor and the woman I had been in contact with. (A nice lady, she is older, Australian–judging from her accent and her posters–and seems to be, like me, the sort of person who is awkward when talking to people she doesn’t really know.)

The other intern is a grad student in history from the Univ. of Mass. of all places. (I suddenly felt like such a local! –which turned out to be somewhat fallacious; he is originally from Louisiana. However, I DID feel less absurd for having gone all the way to NH for an internship last summer. It’s really nice to have a fellow college kid, a big contrast to being the only person under about 35 last year.


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Categories: internships, travel
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Bragging, bibliophile style. And I wish it were a little more nuanced: I thought Animal Farm was interesting, but in no way did I love it the way I did Harry Potter or Pride and Prejudice. However, that’ not going to stop me from going overboard on this. Hang on to your hats. Real content tba.

And of course you can always…

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Categories: books
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