Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

Ghostbusters was originally released in 1984. I missed it in theaters… UNTIL TONIGHT! Ghostbusters is arguably* the most quotable movie ever made. I have seen it dozens of times. I know it practically by heart. It’s one of my top 5 favorite movies. Given all this, there is no reason why “big screen magic” should have any effect on my enjoyment of this movie.

And yet…

We saw Ghostbusters in the theater tonight and it’s STILL one of the best movies – enjoyable, sweet, funny, well-written… Despite it being released 27 years ago and seeing it on tv, vhs and dvd so many times since its release… despite knowing all the best parts so well I can recite them by heart…

I really, really, really loved seeing Ghostbusters in the theater.

Loved. I’d go see it again on the big screen.

I mean, I expected to enjoy it. I expected to chuckle at my favorite lines. I expected to enjoy the nostalgia.

I did not expect to be fully sucked into the movie in a way I haven’t been in years… the big screen, lack of distractions and maybe my laid back lack of expectations (since I already loved the movie): everything converged for one of the more enjoyable movie theater experiences I’ve had in ages. It was lovely experience of rediscovery, pure enjoyment and relaxation not to mention glee.

The movie does not appear to be altered or cleaned up… or fundamentally changed like some re-releases… And you know what? It’s still awesome. Ghostbusters is still crazy good after all these years and viewings. If you’re a fan, catch the re-release in the theater if you can. It’s fun and we won’t be the target demographic for this kind of thing forever so we need to enjoy it while we can!

This yet another reason why my husband rocks… he probably was looking for a new movie to go see tonight but, when he saw Ghostbusters, he knew I’d want to see it and offered to take me.

Hey, Fop? It’s playing next Thursday at the same time. Just sayin’…

*I say “arguably” because it’s immensely fun to discuss the most quotable movies and always devolves into movie quotes!

Coffee is good stuff. In fact, I’ve been so productive this weekend that I’m going to make the big pot of coffee this week to see if I can continue the momentum. Friday was Social, Saturday was Creative and today was Productive. Monster Cat is done for the week though I’m still prepping the posts. Laundry is, of course, on-going but big box store and grocery shopping is done. The kittens have been good this weekend and, of course, Mr. Paw has been a love dove.

I’ve re-started Nanowrimo. I’m vaguely on track if I stick to a revised pace.

(soft-core spoilers for The Fourth Kind ahead)

We went to see The Fourth Kind last night. I would have enjoyed the movie more if I’d kept up with scuttlebutt around the film. I’d only seen a couple of trailers earlier in the season. So I spent most of the movie dissatisfied with their sources, wanting to follow up on their data and see their bibliography, so to speak. I left less convinced of alien visitations than before, despite Milla Jovovich’s not-so-gentle prodding in the other direction. A few quick searches once I got home and my suspicions were confirmed. Disappointing, but I guess in part it was my own fault for not keeping up with my movie gossip.

coffee, the fourt kind, the fourth kind, weekend, movies, writing

The kittens are growing quickly but there’s still quite a size difference. Tasha is also the smaller of the two kittens so she looks extra-dainty next to Monster Cat. The girls are getting more bold as well. They slept on the bed with us for a while last night. Okay, they slept on the bed with Tennyson last night and we just happened to be there too. Details. Tasha did nap on my desk by herself for part of the afternoon, so at least my piles of paper rate in the kitten world.

The Known World Pointing Things event (Rapier and Costuming classes) is next weekend! I have coordinated the merchants, wrangled most of the final details with the hotel, and built the mostly-final draft of the event booklet. I have lists and things appear to be under control, at least in my tiny corner of the event, which is, in fact, quite tiny.

If you are coming to KWAR/KWCS, there will be an A&S Exibit!

A&S Exhibit: Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the 2nd Floor Terrace. You are welcome to stay by your work or drop and run. This will be a costuming- and rapier-focused exhibit. Please come display your garb, armor, weapons, acccessories, etc. It is suggested that you have either 3×5 index cards or preprinted sheets for your documentation, as there will be a limited amount of cards available. (Rain location: outside Rosemont)

Okay, back to the geeking…
I love Pages. My 8 year old copy of MS Word just wasn’t cutting it for booklet layout so I went out and bought iWork (which I’d been planning to do eventually anyway). It’s like magic. I used an older version of Pages a few years ago but didn’t really take to it. I’m happy to announce that the application is easy and intuitive to use. I was able to layout the booklet quickly and easily. It was straight-forward to make changes to the formatting. I was able to place text and images the way I thought I should. Just a giddy experience of tools working really, really well.

Yes, I’m a bit of a giddy geek about this.

This weekend included kittens (cuteness), Boondock Saints (sequel coming soon!), Pandorum (interesting concept, forgettable movie), too little sleep (yawnness) and pies (yum!). Not bad at all.

bengals, iwork, kittens, kwar, kwcs, monster cat, movies, pages, sca, tennyson

A week after the first rose bloomed, the rose bush is fiercely exploding with blossoms and buds! It’s a gray day here today so the colors are definitely influenced by that. The rosebush out front which is much newer and smaller also has its first buds on it!

This week has been a series of ups and downs and round and rounds. A major highlight was going to New Hope, PA for the first time with spinpsychology! We had great fun wandering about, buying disembodied heads and chocolate covered strawberries! Naturally we did not acquire the heads and the strawberries from the same establishment, but would you have really been surprised if we had? There was also yarn shopping and yummy lunching. A good day.

Now if only the washing machine wasn’t fighting with me each and every load… yes, I will be calling the repair people tomorrow. Yes, I will be annoyed if they tell me it’ll be 2 weeks before they can get here. Yes, I will keep trying to do laundry until it’s fixed. After 2 days of wimping out on the spin cycle, just this morning it made it all the way through a full cycle without my coaxing! Go washing machine, go!

We went to see Star Trek last night. My expectations were fairly low as I haven’t ever really loved Star Trek movies. Like most people who’ve chimed in, I was pleasantly surprised that it was so good and I enjoyed it so much. It was a great deal of fun and a clear beginning of a new Star Trek storyline. The casting was excellent – Simon Pegg as Scotty… totally spot-on. Perhaps the writers were a little obvious or simplistic at times but all in all it was a very enjoyable movie. I might even consider seeing it again in the theater on IMAX!

This has also been the first week of grilling! I have sent the Fop out into the backyard to play with fire for dinner twice already! I’m not a big hot dog fan usually, but when they’re grilled they are oh-so-yummy.

And now, back to my irregularly scheduled laundry wrangling…

garden, house, miscellaneous, movies, roses, star trek

“With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie,” he [Woody Harrelson] said. — Source: CNN

Harrelson just wrapped a movie called “Zombieland” in which his character (named Albuquerque) is constantly attacked by zombies. Potentially cliche premise aside, Harrelson’s claim is that he was still very much in character when he arrived in the New York airport and clobbered a photographer, damaging his camera and resulting in a report to the police.

Mr. Darwin would like to strip the photographer of his evolution points for continuing to follow the angry, violent, zombie-hallucinating actor all the way to the parking lot.

Harrelson gets points for the proper singular form “paparazzo” but loses points for failing to use “whom”. Misuse of the phrase “quite understandably” gets a pass as it has been saved by its giggle-worthiness.

I guess it’s lucky Harrelson didn’t have any similar run-ins after filming “Natural Born Killers.”

Why no, I don’t read CNN for real news anymore. That would be silly.

movies, woody harrelson, zombies, absurd, paparazzi

I do exist! Well, I do exist beyond the boundaries of Monster Cat episodes at least. I know, I know, I haven’t posted anything outside of Monster Cat in ages. Did you miss me? No, I didn’t think so. My cat is pretty darned cute, you don’t need me.

Jon was in town the end of this week and teaching a class in the city. We had dinner with him 3 nights in a row which was great fun even if it involved going into Philly so many times! Last night involved a great deal of silliness and beer as well. Merricke and Siobhan joined us Thursday night and last night which made for additional enjoyment and general spreading of the joy of beer.

My news is that I have remembered to knit. I did some scarves to remember how to follow simple instructions. I’ve been doing little hats for one of the baby charities to remember how to work with double-pointed needles. I am not a fan of metal DPNs but I happen to have a lot of them in very convenient sizes. I asked my mother for a recommendation of a book with lots of little projects in it that could keep me busy and make me try new techniques. There is now an over-stuffed flat rate box in the mail to me. I should have known this would happen, I guess, but I really did just ask expecting a book recommendation! I’m working my way up to bigger projects, I guess, but I really enjoy doing the quick little stuff. Instant gratification is pretty darned awesome.

In other news, I am still a slacker employee of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, otherwise known as unemployed. I have a lead or two but the market is more than a little dismal right now so I’m not stressing about the lack of opportunities. I look at a couple job sites, laugh that employers want people with 10 years of highly specialized and/or technical experience but only want to pay as if the person is fresh out of school, and move on.

I think my writing class this term is going pretty well. It’s a bit small – just 3 students – which is both good and bad. I’ve gone through a phase of “oh no, I can’t actually write anything good at all” and I’m coming out the other side now, which is, as you might imagine, a huge relief. I’m renegotiating my use of adjectives as well as learning a lot about the conscious structure and intermingling of stories and characters. The class is over in 3 weeks and I’m starting to look around for another writing class to take me into the summer. UARTS is great – 3 hour classes, great instructors, credit – but expensive.

I also started twittering recently… it’s rather random and disjointed, but you can now follow me on Twitter if you really want to. It’s more of an experiment… again. I tried Twitter ages ago when it first came out and was not interested enough in it to remember my login/password.

By the way… we saw “Knowing” today. It’s a horrible movie barely worthy of my words. There was some horrible acting, terrible dialogue, a completely pathetic plot and an un-compelling resolution… all crowned with bizarre religious overtones and other crap. There are a lot of forced and illogical jumps not to mention a failed attempt to imbue a sense of urgency by having the characters run around like chicken with their heads cut off. No spoilers here, but there are 2 major aspects of this movie that should have ensured I enjoyed it. Alas, I now add it to the list with The Spirit… the title of that list is “Movies I wish I’d skipped – 2009.”

knitting, knowing, movies, twitter, work, writing

People in the Philly area are a “little touchy” and well-armed.
People in Philly are possibly the rudest people in theaters ever.
The result:
A 29 year old man asked the family in front of him to be quiet. They did not. He threw popcorn at the kid, came around the row and shot the father.
The lesson? Behave yourselves as appropriate for the venue you’re in and be careful to whom you’re rude or you might get shot.

We stopped going to the theater in this article because other members of the audience seemed unaware that movie theaters are for watching movies not for socializing with your friends and talking on your phone.

While I’m NOT condoning random acts of violence in movie theaters (and I am tempted to condemn the shooter for throwing precious popcorn), I am hopeful that this scares people in to realizing that they should learn to behave appropriately and be quiet in movie theaters. A whispered comment here and there is one thing, a full-length narrative of what’s going on on-screen or, worse, a conversation about your boyfriend’s ex-girlfriends son? Unacceptable.

*This is what I turned around and said to the (adult) family behind us one night at the movies who would not be quiet after an hour of shh-ing and glaring at them. It worked. No handgun or other acts of violence required.

movies, philadelphia, rude, theaters, violence

If you haven’t seen Dr. Horrible yet, you should go check it out. Joss Whedon, Neil Patrick Harris and a web mini-series of epic proportions of silly. It starts July 15th. Hurray for NPH!

Opening August 22nd: there’s a (sort-of) remake of Death Race 2000 coming called Death Race. There’s a trailer up here. And yes, that’s Jason Statham, saint of driving and eternal hotness. It looks like they’re spending a good chunk of money on this remake/sequel and the trailer actually shows promise. I won’t be getting my hopes up too high though – it’s unlikely that Death Race will jump from “Death by Double-Feature” to “international blockbuster”. It does look like it’s going to be fun and explosive.

Jason Statham really does do a lot of driving movies, doesn’t he? Transporter 3 is in post-production according to IMDB, as is Crank 2: High Voltage. (Okay, I admit to having contributed to the box office success of the terrible movie that was Crank, but it mostly because it involved Jason Statham. I probably won’t spring for Crank 2 in the theater.) And finally, The Brazillian Job, the third movie in The Italian Job series, was announced a few weeks ago. (The Bank Job, out earlier this year, didn’t actually involve much driving but it was a hoot.)

death race, death race 2000, dr. horrible, jason statham, joss whedon, neil patrick harris, movies

I did not get enough sleep this weekend. I even went to bed around 10 last night (though I did end up watching tv for 2 hours). This does not bode well for my day. Hopefully I’ll catch up tonight. *yawn*

I had a good, busy weekend. Dinner with cool people Saturday night, a bustling birthday party all Sunday (which started me down the slippery slope of not enough sleep by keeping me out until 2 a.m.) and puttering and Indiana Jones yesterday. The weather was beautiful all weekend though it started to warm up a little too much for my taste yesterday. Today we’re back to gray and wet, though it’s not due to be cooler until tomorrow.

The new Indiana Jones movie was fun. It lacked some of the coolness, plot complexities and plausibility of previous movies but Harrison Ford can still kick ass. I didn’t go in expecting too much so I wasn’t disappointed. It could have been much much worse.

indiana jones, movies, socializing, weather, weekend

If you’re like me and only remember/care about the dream sequences from The Cell and though they were glorious, you might be interested in the interview with the director, Tarsem, up on the AV Club. Tarsem himself admits to only taking the job so he could do the dream scenes. He’s got a new film coming to theaters: The Fall. I’m curious to see it as it sounds fascinating. Take a look at the stills or watch the trailer. It just looks like such an awesome trip.

In other news, I have 3 rose blossoms going full force in the garden and I’m considering starting construction on an ark. It’s been gray and raining here for what feels like a couple weeks. The basement seems the perfect place to test prototypes too. I really wish the washer and dryer were on the drier side of the basement. I don’t mind a wet basement but I do mind not being able to do laundry!

ark, house, movies, photography, phtographs, rain, tarsem, the cell, the fall, weather