21 December 2009

If you're a concerned, pro-censorship parent when it comes to the inappropriate-due-to-awfulness Star Wars prequels, or even just someone who likes awesomeness, this long, seven-part, crazy-great dissection of The Phantom Menace is long and very much crazy-great and I watched the whole thing with far more thrills of delight than I experienced watching the actual Phantom Menace. Don't let the extra silly opening minute throw you off. It quickly becomes a perfect description of how everything in a movie or story can go horribly wrong.

Click for Part 1

(Not safe for work, btw)

20 December 09

For years now, my father has substituted the opening words of "Away in a Manger" with a quote from Yoda: "Away put your weapons, I mean you no harm", to the point where I inwardly sing the Yoda lines whenever I hear an instrumental version of the melody.

17 December 2009

Max, an indoor cat for seventeen years, enjoys the outside-in phenomena of Christmas trees and spends much of his time on the nearby couch, sniffing ornaments and needles, seeming to believe he's out in the wild.

15 December 2009

Often when I mean to say "I'm just thinking out loud here" I end up saying "talking out loud here," which makes me sound as if I ought to keep my thinking/talking more of a private thing, like the time I asked to borrow a pen and pad to "jot down a mental note".

Aside from that, it is astonishing that the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, and that the sun's distance from the earth is roughly 400 times as far as that of the moon, making Earth the only planet in the solar system capable of experiencing a nearly perfect solar eclipse. Also that the moon travels in a spiral, orbiting Earth orbiting the sun, so now you've got a spiraling object that manages eclipses. I'm definitely driving south in August, 2017.

14 December 09

Ominous rumbling outside and you check the window and see this across the street, and it's intimidating, but also kind of cool and impressive, and humorous in at least two different ways considering the sign. (Click to enlarge.)

1 December 09

Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmas Time, that holiday equivalent of the ceti eel Khan puts into Chekhov's ear in Star Trek II, grows more detestable with each passing season, but I find that my loathing of the song has acquired a warm, nostalgic glow.

30 November 09

Party in the U.S.A.
A Journey of Discovery
Based on a true story by Miley Cyrus

I disembark at the Los Angeles International Airport with an optimistic agenda and a cardigan sweater. I am greeted by a locale typically associated with celebrity worship and superabundance, and I consider the likelihood of assimilating into such a milieu. Once I've settled into a hired car--this being my first visit to the area--I glance out the driver-side rear window and see what is undoubtedly the district's most recognizable landmark: a lettered sign that tells me, both literally and symbolically, that I have entered an exotic new world. A feeling of senselessness surrounds me. Each citizen, however ordinary, has an air of specialness or renown. My stomach rolls with nausea and I experience a vague longing for my native environment. An excess of mental strain leads to anxiety, but at that precise moment, the driver of the car turns on the stereo and I hear a composition by a popular hip-hop artist...

The driver leaves me at an establishment for evening entertainment. Inside, the patrons assess my appearance as if to say, "Who, pray tell, is this young woman wearing boots of a common, nay rural working class, style? Surely she must be visiting from a vastly different locality." I find that merely being in attendance presents a considerable challenge without the support of my closest female acquaintances. This is decidedly not the variety of social gathering to which I am accustomed in the southeastern city I call home. My attention focuses on the other women's footwear, particularly the long, thin heels that are aptly named after a type of dagger. I think to myself--wryly, I admit--that I must have failed to receive some widespread notification regarding mandatory sameness of shoe. Yet again, I suffer nausea, displacement, and mounting apprehension, until the disc jockey selects a song by a former child star turned teen idol...a song I happen to enjoy a great deal.

I raise my hands overhead, both delighting in the familiar music and, in a way, claiming it as part of my identity. The fluttering sensation in my stomach departs. I nod my head in affirmation and, curiously, rotate my pelvis in concurrence with the aforementioned nod. It occurs to me, in near-epiphanic fashion, that my well-being is now and always has been secure, and that in spite of geographic and socioeconomic differences, this specific gathering is, thanks to the commonalities of music and dance, universal, and, indeed, representative of the country at large.