Celebrity worship in America is second only to celebrity bashing. We want desperately to be them, with their beauty and their wealth and their perks, yet we hate them because we aren’t.
That’s generally speaking, of course. I don’t worship OR bash celebrities as a group, but I do have specific ones that I simply adore. Here's one more reason to do so.
It’s great when someone you respect and admire lives up to it (and that goes for non-celebrities, too), and it’s even better when it happens unpublicly—note that this article is in the Badger Herald, not People magazine.
I’m getting really tired of critics complaints about movies being too long.
They said that about Pirates of the Caribbean, and I couldn’t see it. I wanted MORE of that movie. They say it about a lot of films I’ve wished didn’t end (though no one could really say Lord of the Rings should have been shorter).
They’re saying it now about Elizabethtown, which is two hours and 13 minutes. I think that’s a good length for a movie that costs $8 to $15 to see, and that’s really the bottom line.
I haven’t seen any movie in the theater that I really could say was too long, unless by too long you mean “should never have been made.” If I don’t like a movie, making it shorter wouldn’t have made a difference. If you cut all the bad parts out of War of the Worlds, you have a 15-minute alien-introduction sequence and nothing else. Making it shorter wouldn’t have given me any better feeling about spending the money.
A lot has been made of the summer box office slump, and the discussion mostly centers on the high price of tickets and concessions and the inconvenience of sitting near talkers and chair-kickers. But making movies shorter will only make those things more important, because we’re getting even less for our money in the place it most counts, up on the screen.
Many of the Blogger blogs I’ve been frequenting have adapted the rather simple Word Verification tool to keep spam from hitting the blog. Someone commented on the coolness of her "word," and that made me look more closely at mine.
I just posted a comment, and my confirmation letters were rjnofabl. It reminds me of my husband’s favorite road game, coming up with words from license plate letters. You just say the first word it makes you think of, even if it doesn’t make complete sense.
Rhino Fable sounds like a cool title to me, though not for any book I’d write. Still, it makes me think this tool for avoiding annoyance and inconvenience can be so much more. Anyone who gets writer’s block can just hop around a whole bunch of blogs, checking out word verifications to stimulate their creativity.
Try it! You never know what might come out of it!
I’m listening to my favorite scene in the whole series again. Book 3, The Prisoner of Azkaban, in the Shrieking Shack, as Lupin and Sirius explain to Our Heroes about their past. I’m not sure why it’s my favorite, but I think it’s because of the purity and depth of the friendships involved in that scene. Everywhere else they are complex and rife with the negative aspects of life—poverty, immaturity, desperation. But in that scene, they are all about love, and what people are willing to do for those they really care about.
Anyway, it got me to thinking. The Big Stuff right now all centers around Snape’s murder of Dumbledore and what those repercussions will be. There are varying thoughts on Snape’s true intent. Intellectually, I think it’s possible that he’s evil and really on the side of Voldemort, that Dumbledore made a mistake. Rowling has said that no one is infallible, and Dumbledore himself admitted such in Order of the Phoenix.
But emotionally, I believe Snape is good at his core, that whatever attraction the Dark Side has had for him, he has overcome it in a way Anakin Skywalker had no hope of doing. I think he was trapped into doing what he had to do, and that he will be instrumental in helping Harry, somehow, bring down Voldemort.
But I also think he has to die.
No matter how noble his ultimate goal, no matter how ready Dumbledore was to make the sacrifice, I don’t think in the end Snape can live with what he’s done. I think he, too, will have to make the ultimate sacrifice.
I also think Hagrid will die. Rowling said in an interview that the hero has to go on alone, and I don’t think she really means that Harry will be totally alone, but that all his guiding adults will be taken from him. It’s already happened with Sirius and Dumbledore. Hagrid is the only father figure left, and though he’s been more childish than Harry, Ron, and Hermione have, I think he’ll be the last one Harry has to watch die.
I love these books, and I adore JK Rowling, most of all because of how much she’s like me. I “knew” when I read Sorcerer’s Stone that Ginny would wind up with Harry in the end, because that’s how I would have written it. I “knew” when I read Prisoner of Azkaban that Sirius wasn’t evil, because that’s how I would have written it. I “knew” Fred and George would succeed in their defiant, laugh-filled way, overcoming oppression (Umbridge) and misunderstanding (Mrs. Weasley) because there is no one right way to live a good life, and because that’s how I would have written it.
I certainly do not claim to be as clever as JK Rowling (I didn't, of course, "know" how these things would come about, just that they would), and I will never be as good a storyteller as she is. But I have ultimate confidence that I will obtain absolute satisfaction in my reading of the final book…because of the way I would have written it.
Summer seems so much shorter now than it used to be, because my kids, unlike when I was in school, start the week before Labor Day, instead of the Wednesday after. One of my kids has already started soccer practices, and next week we have to have a reading assessment for my first-grader, and do school shopping and stuff.
I was oh-so-ready for this summer, after a late spring jam-packed with stress. But I’m looking forward to this fall, too, even more than usual.
What Fall means to me in 2005:
1. Football season, watched at home every week, every game, with our new satellite dish and NFL Sunday Ticket purchased for this sole purpose.
2. Gorgeous days of perfect temperatures and still plenty of daylight.
3. After a summer of truly mediocre or worse films, an influx of really good ones (well, we can hope):
Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, starring Orlando Bloom
Everything is Illuminated with Elijah Wood
An apparently funny film, Waiting, with my new heartthrob Ryan Reynolds
The really big one, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
4. DVDs! Kingdom of Heaven, which I think was much better than anything I’ve seen since. Also Crash, Fever Pitch, and Mindhunters (which might not be a good movie, but it has Christian Slater in it). Even bigger: Season One of LOST and Season Four of ALIAS on DVD, with all those yummy extras.
5. The return of LOST!
6. The return of ALIAS!
7. The start of KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL!
I adore LOST, the entire cast, the mysteries, the drama, the humor, the hunks…and I can’t wait to get some answers. But even more, I want to know, who the hell is Michael Vaughn???? And I missed Bradley Cooper, Will on Alias, very much last season, so I’m all about his new comedy.
So, what do YOU like about Fall?
I never had a problem before. In fact, I never ever used eBay before. The only time I ever even WENT to the site, it was to do a search for the word “erotic” when PayPal started giving erotic romance web sites a problem about using their services (hypocrites—for those who don’t know, eBay now owns PayPal, and they had over 3000 items on the site under the word “erotic”).
Several wonderful people have donated books and manuscript critiques for bid to raise funds to help Marianne Mancusi, an author whose house was struck by lightning and burned down while she was away. These items are up for bid on eBay, so I went to check them out. Some of the things I would like to have had fairly low bids so far, so I went ahead and set up an account and started bidding on them. I don’t really care if I get the critiques or not, but I wanted to drive up the bidding a bit. It’s for a good cause.
So I bid. And I’m told that I’m outbid. ALREADY. Before my bid even goes IN. And this is where it gets bad. I increased my maximum bid. TWICE. On the same item.
Luckily, the very satisfying message that I am the high bidder came up before I remortgaged my house or something, but man, that gets real addictive, real fast.
Now, I just have to ignore those pesky notices in my e-mail box.
Once in a while, I get hash browns from this Burger King that’s right near my favorite coffee place. I’m not much of a breakfast person but when I do it, it’s always best to have fat-laden, high-calorie, barely-recognizable-as-food potato products that enhance the caffeine high with their shot of energy.
Anyway, this nearby Burger King normally only has one person working the counter and/or drive-thru at that time of morning. She’s always exasperated by how much she has to do, and always full of excuses for why she ignores me at the counter for five minutes or why it takes 10 minutes for one car purchasing one small product to get through the drive-thru.
But now it's summer. College kids are back. High school students want jobs. Now, when I go to Burger King, despite the Sunday Funnies spread all over the counter demonstrating their lack of “real work” to do, I get my food immediately.
Icing on the cake? I get it efficiently, with attentiveness and a smile, from a young guy with gorgeous green eyes.
Summer is almost over. I may have to increase my BK frequency, just to offset the imminent return of frustration.
Stolen from Shannon Stacey:
Total numbers of films I own:
Probably well over 100, even not counting the kiddie stuff.
Last film I watched:
Good Will Hunting, a Netflix selection, preceded immediately by Napoleon Dynamite. GWH—nicely done. ND—just “huh?” Not award-worthy, IMO.
Five favorite films I either watch frequently or that mean a lot to me:
2. Aliens— Ripley is one of the original Bombshell heroines: “Get away from her, you bitch!
3. Princess Bride—Which was also a book I loved—totally romantic.
4. Lord of the Ring—all three, for a hundred reasons
5. Pirates of the Caribbean—Because it’s possibly the last summer movie good enough for me to see multiple times. Plus…duh, Orlando Bloom!
Worst film you’ve ever had to endure:
They All Laughed for older movies and Catwoman for modern movies. Yes, Catwoman beats out Gigli, but only barely beats out War of the Worlds.
Favorite movie quote: See above. :)
Favorite movie adapted from a book:
Lord of the Rings. Before that came out and forever superseded any previous and future films, it was The Hunt for Red October, because for once the movie was so much better than the book.
One book I’d like to see made into a movie:
Mine
Well, for right now, I have just one big thought.
Voldemort is pronounced “Vol-deh-more.” End of discussion.
It’s how Jim Dale pronounced it in the first four audiobooks. How the Scholastic pronunciation guide on their Harry Potter web site says it should be pronounced. And, per the report of several interviews of JK Rowling since the release of Book 6, aka HBP, it is how JK Rowling pronounces it.
It’s significant. “Mort” in French is “death” and is pronounced “more,” not mort. It bothered me a lot when they pronounced it wrong in the first movie, and I still don’t understand how JK Rowling could have allowed it. But it drives me nuts that Jim Dale changed his pronunciation in his performance of Book 5 (and now 6).
Pllleeeessse, in the last book, can we have it the right way?
In early February of this year, I and millions of other New England Patriots fans were jubilantly celebrating our third SuperBowl win in three years, and looking ahead with apprehension to the 2005 season.
It’s so much worse than we could have foreseen.
Success breeds loss in this game. Offensive Coordinator Charlie Weis moved on to head coach at Notre Dame; Romeo Crennel became head coach of the Cleveland Browns. Both deserve their new positions, but it left the Head of the Beast fractured.
Which wasn’t considered that much of a problem. Personnel changes were made within the Patriots’ overarching philosophy, with staff who understand that philosophy and are committed to it. So okay.
Early on, things seemed all right. Goodbye Ty Law, we didn’t need you or your big mouth anyway. We lost Troy Brown, but always knew, in our hearts, that he’d come back. The draft and free agent acquisitions all looked to make our team stronger, despite other losses like Joe Andruzzi and David Patton.
Then things started to fall apart. Richard Seymour’s holding out. Tedy Bruschi is sitting out the season to finish recovering from the stroke he had in February (likely, to see if there is any hope of ever returning to the game {sob}). And now my wonderful, fabulous, beautiful Ted Johnson is retiring.
It’s one thing to fragment the head—ripping out the heart is something completely different.
The beauty of the Patriots these last four seasons has not been the winning, it’s been the way they’ve won. Not by buying talent and the attending egos. Not by bluster and hate, threats and challenges. But simply, quietly, by doing their jobs. By supporting each other and the entire team on every level, in hundreds of ways.
That way won’t change. We’ve lost players before, excellent players, leaders, players who were considered the heart of the team. We may yet have a chance to win three championships in a row.
But I, for one, will never be the same.
