Events I’ve planned to blog about in the last month, but didn’t:
-The writer’s strike.
-The rally in Harvard Square for the writers’ strike, which I didn’t take time off work to go to, but my roommate did and got to meet Joss Whedon. Actually, I did too, briefly, because he was signing stuff at a little sci-fi bookstore after the rally and was still there when I got off work. It was pretty awesome.
-The Golden Compass and the brouhaha that the Christian right managed to create around it. I highly recommend the book, by the way, very highly. The movie is a pleasant enough way to spend a couple of hours but is not an acceptable substitute.
-Mitt Romney’s speech about why his religion shouldn’t matter to his presidential campaign. I didn’t see the speech, I just read about it and meant to read a transcript, but haven’t. If he continues to look like a contender, I’ll get around to it eventually. He worries me, and I can’t put my finger on why, except to be flip and say that he looks like the evil Mayor from season 3 of Buffy. (Source. Not my cleverness; though I think the whole list is hilarious.)
-Alex and the Ironic Gentleman by Adrienne Kress. A fun and funny YA adventure — and its author was one of three who were fantastically nice about letting me ask them questions for a paper I was writing on author blogs. Definitely another recommended read.

Enjoyable things that happened while I was home for Christmas:
-Two lovely Christmas dinners in one day.
-Going ice skating.
-Laughing at my brothers’ oddly decorated gingerbread cookies (One that stands out is a bell that B. frosted in white and spelled out “E.A. Poe” on the top in little chocolate sprinkles. (”Hear the sledges with the bells, silver bells, silver bells, what a world of merriment their melody foretells…” Yes, the poem gets darker; it is Poe.))
-Getting to hang out with Liz before her move and see Elf in the new digs.
-Teasing Mom for calling it a “white Christmas” when it hailed on Christmas morning.
-Beating my brothers at ping pong. Sometimes.
-Getting to show off my beautiful ring…did I mention that we got engaged?

My dad and I had been planning to find a release party of some kind since I decided when I was going to come home this summer, so the only question (and not one we were quick to answer) was which bookstore to go to. We learned that B. Dalton in the mall would open at midnight only to sell the book; that all Books-a-Millionses were opening at 9p.m. with various festivities, etc. So we picked a Books-a-Million in town. At the last minute, Middle Brother decided he wanted to come too, and Youngest Brother suddenly caved in to peer pressure. We all caved a little more when my mother (who was not going) suggested that we should go in costume. I hadn’t been planning to, but we pulled out gowns from a couple of college graduations (mine and my cousin’s) and the accessories from a Harry Potter costume Mom made for one of the boys sometime in the last decade. We looked quite fetching.

Youngest Brother’s choice of headgear reflects his personality and the back of his shirt has a Dumbledore quote about how music is a magic greater than anything taught at Hogwarts.

Off we went. Books-a-Million was packed when we got there a little after 11 p.m. We were “sorted” when we came in the door (stuck our hands into a Sorting Hat full of house badges) — I was in Hufflepuff for the night — but after a few minutes, we realized that there was really not much going on besides a couple of massive, snake-like lines. We let ourselves be pushed into one by a Gestapo Kindergarten Teacher of a store manager who seemed to have created her own personal hell. We stood there in line in the middle of the romance section (of all places), not sure we really wanted to be there. When we realized (around 11:30) that the main line was for people who already had vouchers (others must wait in a different line to get a voucher at the cafe counter, then re-join the main line), we decided that we could do better. We swept out in our wizard’s robes and drove down the street to the mall.

There were maybe thirty people standing around the mall entrance. The boys found friends to talk to, as they had in B-a-M, and we had only fifteen or twenty minutes to wait until a pleasant, smiling security guard came to open the doors. Quick, easy, short line, no fuss. Brilliant. This was at B. Dalton, by the way. Can I plug B. Dalton a few more times? They’re part of Barnes & Noble and I’m not generally a huge fan of huge chains ’cause independent bookstores are cooler, but this week, I’m pretty happy with B. Dalton.

And then Dad read us the first chapter on the drive home. I have lots to say about the book, of course, but that’s for another post. Coming soon.

I opened my door this morning after getting dressed and found a mouse staring back at me from about three feet away. I closed the door again.

This is the part where I look like a wuss. I don’t mind rodents outside; I don’t even mind the mice that sometimes scurry around the subway tracks. My brothers used to have gerbils, for crying out loud, and I held them all the time. Poke had a mouse for a weekend once and I held him, too. But this morning, I let an animal smaller than the palm of my hand barricade me in my room for about twenty minutes while I worked up the courage to go do something about it. And yes, when I cracked the door open at the end of that, the mouse was still sitting there.

By that time, I could hear my roommate and her boyfriend getting up and I was starting to run late myself, so I picked up my trash can (sans trashbag). The mouse was finally starting to move into the living room. This was doubly good: it wasn’t coming toward my room, and I could see that it was limping. When the gerbils got out at home, they were tough to catch, being fast and skittery. And then at least we didn’t mind picking them up.

The mouse had headed for the card table and cowered, making it, in the end, fairly easy for me to plonk the trash can over him. Jack slid a flattened paper bag under it and we carried bag, can, and mouse outside and released it. Probably going to be cat food pretty fast, but I’m inclined to cheer on the cat.

I saw one of our friendly maintenance guys while I was outside, and he said he would come by while I’m home during the day tomorrow — he was talking about traps; I want to figure out how it got in and plug whatever holes we might have (and I know there are a couple around the radiators). We’ve never seen mice in the apartment before and we haven’t noticed droppings or anything, so I’m more interested in prevention. Besides, as my roommate pointed out, if we woke up and found a mouse in a trap, we’d be pretty squeamish about that, too. (Unless it were something like a bucket trap…which might not be a bad idea. This version drowns the mouse — ew, wet mouse corpse to dispose of — but I think I’ve seen a version like that without the water, so you just have the mouse waiting for you at the bottom of the five-gallon bucket, and you go deposit him Somewhere Else. Pretty sure your average mousie couldn’t climb out of that big a bucket. And if so, get a ten-gallon bucket?)

At home, sometimes we’ll get little nocturnal lizards that slip in an open door when you come home at night and then hide in the house for days. Those are a beast to catch because if you don’t aim your tupperware (or whatever you’re trying to catch it in) quite right, the tail pops right off and you’ve got a writhing tail stuck to the wall. Ew, ew, ew. The mouse was lame, but he was all in one piece.

As a fun little coda, the word of the day from yourDictionary.com (yes, I’m a nerd and I get those e-mails) is abulia, which apparently means “a loss of volition or the ability to make decisions” (new one to me). Picture me peeking around the door and shuddering at a poor, helpless, lame, little mouse.

Night at the Museum was great fun as long as they kept to the museum. There was a minimal amount of stock background involving the main character’s kid, disapproving ex-wife, and ex-wife’s dorky but dependable new husband that could have been pulled out of The Santa Clause (for example), only plus cell phones. But inside the museum, our hero must appease Attilla the Hun, not get eaten by the lions, babysit the fire-obsessed cavemen, and deal with the manifest (though miniature) destinies of both U.S. frontiersmen and a Roman legion. And check for his keys, because the monkey has probably made off with them again. Robin Williams makes a surprisingly good Teddy Roosevelt, who quickly becomes an important ally. TR’s puppy-love crush on Sacagawea is a cute gag, as is the fact that Lewis and Clark are so intent in arguing over their map that they seem not to notice that they’re locked in a glass case with a beautiful woman.

I’ll try not to spoil the entire movie, but I can’t resist this: Dick Van Dyke (yes, really!) is the boss fight and Chekhov’s maxim about the gun is put to good use…only this loaded gun is a pharoah’s mummy. Oh, also that one simply must stick around for the credits; Mr. Van Dyke is very spry and still has his dancing shoes. What a guy!

So for a movie to which I originally said I didn’t care whether I saw it or not, we had a great time! I had gone over to hear about their adventures in Texas — and I have to rag on you, Stephen, my favorite detail is your using the back seat of your van for a couch. Absolute favorite; it should be on a list of “you know you live in a bachelor pad when…” Anyway. Glad you all had fun and didn’t burn anything down and all like that. So I heard stories and we had dinner at Longhorn’s and after the movie, the girls loaded me up with graphic novels (”Hey, we should get her hooked on Fable!”) and season 1 of Babylon 5 to keep me busy while the rest of my family runs off to All State Chorus for the rest of the week. I’ve even been threatened with pop quizes!

Go read today’s Get Fuzzy.

Up to the penultimate panel, I found it only amusing. But Bucky’s parting shot has me in hysterics!

Mendel was a monk. Mendel was a monk-monk. Just a regular monk. Later, he was an administrative monk.

For those who haven’t heard the story, that bit of classic eloquence entered the world courtesy of a biology instructor whose (supposedly) bimonthly lectures were supposed to earn our IB Biology class college credit, courtesy of Troy State University. He was utterly worthless and I cannot express how thankful we were that he only graced us with his presence on very rare occaisions.

However, Carmen had the presence of mind to write down certain gems as he lectured as a means of keeping her sanity, and “Mendel was a monk,” is the one I will never forget.

• read two books.
• eaten seven dinners with the family.
• gone to the doctor, nominally for a check-up, but really just because I needed him to sign a form saying I’ve had my shots and can go to school. Wound up getting a tetnus booster which must have k.o.’ed my immune system enough that I caught whatever stomach bug is going around, because of which I have…
• spent one night (Wed.) talking to Ralph on the porcelain telephone, so then I…
• spent two days (Thurs. and Fri.) recuperating.

I have also:

• seen one move (Being There with Peter Sellers, which is very funny once you get through all the exposition).
• gone to Montgomery with my dad, my aunt, and my cousin to see an Alabama Shakespeare Company production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, which was nicely done, despite being peopled by depressed Russians.
• and moved the boxes I stored at Grandma’s for the summer back to the living room in preparation of my move north next weekend. Actually departure plans are somewhat dependant on whether Ernesto comes to call at the same time.

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.

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.

Even without the new batch of flutterbyes, there were just butterflies everywhere, of all sorts of colors. One landed on my shoulder and hung out there for a while (several minutes) while we were watching the new butterflies get coaxed out of their cage. He finally flew off, but shortly after that, a gorgeous blue morpho started flying around us, and after landing briefly on Pug’s collar, finally landed on my cheek! After a while, I coaxed him onto my finger and he stayed there for a while before finally taking off. Definately up-close and personal.

Of course, “natural history museum” is always synonymous with
“fossils!!!” in my head. There were no dinosaurs here, but there were skeletons of a mammoth and a mastodon near the entrance, and there was a big room of early mammals – giant sloths and even giant-er sloths, saber toothed cats, little horses, armored armadillo-like creatures, and one huge bird that was the size of an ostrich with the head of an eagle. The biggest sloth had a hammock-sized ribcage, but this bird was the thing you didn’t want to meet in a dark jungle. Very happy with my fossil-fix.

There was also a really neat exhibit about the Calusa Indians from south Florida, and (as you’ll see on the front page if you go to the museum’s web site) a temporary exhibit of quilts depicting or inspired by “Natural Florida.” We had gotten about half-way through when we ran off to see the butterfly release, but there were some really pretty quilts – neat stuff done on machine, it looked like.

A friend Pug works with had told him about a music event that happens once a month on Saturday evenings, so the two of us and E. packed a picnic dinner and went to see what was what. They call it something like “Farm to Family” – basically, a bunch of people get together at some guy’s farm to play bluegrass music, and lots of people like us come to listen. We stayed for maybe three hours. The first act was okay because we were eating – they were good, but too much blues is really too much. We suffered through the second act. The singer/songwriter got up and admitted that he had failed at writing science fiction novels AND science fiction poetry, to the extent of having been booed off a coffee house stage…so now he was writing science fiction songs. It was bad. Best line: “I’m so out of tune…with you.” We all cracked up the first time we heard it. But the third and fourth groups were full bluegrass bands and lots of fun. Good toe-tapping music.

Sunday morning I went off to go do my liberal religion thing; E. was curious, so she tagged along, even though the sermon topic I saw online looked like it might be…not one I would choose for one to introduce someone to Unitarianism. Something like “The Sacred Act of Eating.” It turned out pretty well, though – it was a topic of interest to her.

Apparently this fellowship is just getting a new minister – or
rather, two ministers, a husband and wife pair. They’re starting in
August; all the July services are lay-led.

The service itself wasn’t so different from the UU church at home. Instead of reading off a list of visitors as part of the welcome and announcements like we do, though, they have a few minutes of stand-up-and-greet-the-people- around-you (which the Greenville fellowship does sometimes – Stacey and I hated that), only then if any members meet a visitor, they can stand up and introduce them to the rest of the congregation. There was a friendly old man sitting behind us who offered to introduce us, after which he offered the microphone to me and I said something very brief about having grown up as a UU in FWB, was new to the area, and here I was dragging a friend along to see this weird way of being religious. This is worth mentioning because a woman came up to me after the service and said that she had first gone to a UU church in Ft. Walton! I think she said it was in the 60’s and the way she described the group sounded like what I’ve heard about the beginnings of our fellowship. Remembered one couple who were particularly devoted to it and largely responsible for getting it going – I suspect she means the couple who have their photos in the back room (whose names I can’t remember…bad me), and when I described them that way, she laughed and said she was sure that was the case. And of course, she was very impressed to hear how much the fellowship has grown.

I wonder if there’s an influx of student-types during the school year? That seems to be true of anywhere else in Gainesville…

In the last, oh, year or so, my dad has joined the ranks of Netflicks customers (you know, the annoying red Flash ads?). I forgive them the ads, actually — for one, I don’t see them on my machine because Adblock gives me power over my world — but also because the service seems to be very prompt and well organized.

At any rate, there is always a movie around or one on the way these days, so we feel we are becoming most educated. (Or at least we might get a few Jeopardy questions — another current addiction.) The June line-up has included Mel Brooks, crossdressing, solitaire, apes, rockets, and genetic profiling.

Comedically speaking:
High Anxiety. Perhaps inspired by the recent reincarnation of The Producers, we’ve been going through the Mel Brooks canon. This one spoofs on Hitchcock every chance it gets — fortunately, I’ve seen just enough Hitchcock to get most of the jokes! — and is a rollicking good story about the new director of a mental institute who happens to suffer from high anxiety (think vertigo. And Vertigo.). Also features a song and dance number: Mel Brooks and a song called (what else?!) “High Anxiety.”

Silent Movie. And yes, it is. HiLARious!! Mel Brooks stars as (more or less) himself, with Marty “That’s Eeegor” Feldman as one of his sidekicks. Also lots of big names who drop in here and there. A jolly little romp around Hollywood. Pure comedy, complete with a corps of truly wicked and totally inept villains from the take-over hungary corporation Engulf & Devour.

Tootsie rounds out the comedy section this month, proving that the Brits are not the only comedians who can pull off a spot of crossdressing! Dustin Hoffman actually makes a fairly good-looking woman — all things considered — and especially when you compare him to the guys in Some Like It Hot! I appreciated the level of seriousness that Tootsie gave to the discussion about gender roles and the confusion of gender roles. But I won’t write that essay here. (Or at least not today.)

Dramatic

The Manchurian Candidate has been on my to-see list for some time, though (as often happens) it turned out to be very different from what I expected. Nonetheless, I thought it was a neat movie and enjoyed figuring out what was going on. At home, one of our new favorite lines is “Wouldn’t you like to play a little game of solitaire?”

King Kong was one that I was very sad to miss in theaters. (Snide comment away…I know it was around forever.) Most of it was great, though I could have done without all the giant bugs. I’ve never seen the original, so I can’t compare to the incomparable Fay Wray, but I enjoyed it.

October Sky was a GW pick — part of his summer homework is to write short reviews on several movies that have some relevance to U.S. history (he was given a list). It’s based on a book called The Rocket Boys, which is about the author’s childhood in a mining town in West Virginia. There’s a lot of conflict between the son, who is eager to get away from the mine, go to college, and build rockets, and his father, who knows the mine inside and out and wants his sons to follow in his footsteps. I thought there was a good balance between explosions and sentimentality.

Gattaca makes the list only because I’ve been pokey about putting this list together — I just saw it last night with Pug and Carmen. Good if you’re in the mood for 1984-esque fare. Not that it’s about a police state. Like 1984, Gattaca takes a disturbing trend in society and imagines a future in which this trend is dominant. Here, it’s genetic engineering. Like October Sky, Gattaca features a protagonist who is inherently disadvantaged, but here’s it’s merely because he wasn’t genetically engineered to perfection. A tale of warning, but also a tale of perseverence.

There’s a few more to round out this list — a couple of foreign films and a documentary (yes, really), but they’ll save a day or two. I’m here in Gainesville enjoying some downtime with my boy. Strange not to have anything that needs to be done! We’re planning on grilling for the Fourth tomorrow and maybe we’ll go find some fireworks somewhere! I can hear someone getting an early start on them already. (Not like I know anyone else who did that…we made some fire and noise at home the night before I left.)