Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Trey wanted to see this movie, and I had heard good things about it, but ooooowweeee! It was a stinker!

I've never seen the original, but I read the book, so I do have something to compare it to. The movie fell short on a number of counts;
Number 1: Johnny Depp was definitely channelling the spirit of Parker Posey in "The House of Yes," so instead of coming across as someone's extremely eccentric uncle, the way Willy Wonka did in the book, he came across as a moonbat flamer. He had all the mannerisms and all the brattiness of Parker Posey down pat- you expected him to put on Jackie O's Chanel suit shortly. This was, shall we say, distracting.
Number 2: The acting overall was poor. The actors in Roald Dahl's sordid little essay on 4 of the seven deadly sins kept forgetting that they were in a movie, and needed to be reminded; They delivered their lines like someone was constantly hissing off-stage, Your line! Your line! None of the children who met unfortunate fates really seemed sufficiently loathsome to merit it; they seemed to keep forgetting that they were supposed to be loathsome and were normal. They were vaguely annoying but then again, I've been forced to spend time with children who would make most people's hair curl (now you know why my hair is curly.)
Number 3: The pacing was leaden, and didn't really seem to go anywhere; There wasn't any suspense building at appropriate times; there wasn't any suspense building at inappropriate times; there was no suspense at all. Once the scene began, for example, the one in which Veruca Salt tries to catch a squirrel, you wait for it to drearily end. The entire film is joyless.
Number 4: The effects, as usual, detract rather than add to the imagery. A fair number of them are unrealistic computer generated crap.
Number 5: The general plot of the story is thrown overboard halfway through, as though the filmmakers realized they had 60 minutes of footage and another 30 minutes of film to make, by a bizarre plot about Willy Wonka having had a dentist father who didn't let him eat candy and who wouldn't talk to him anymore. Then the two are more treacily than tearfully rejoined. Gagging was inevitable.
I wish that I had more time to spend on making this a really good, rip it to shreds sort of review, but I lack the motivation. The movie was tiresome and dispiriting, not at all fun or whimsical. It was like a bad Swedish movie, sullen and leaden.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

How to Tell You Are Getting Old!

Yes, kiddies, I am getting OLD, and not the good kind of old, not the kind of old that means I can retire and enjoy the rest of my days somewhere sunny on a cruise ship, but the kind of old that means that I am no longer Cool or likely to set any Trends. Yes, I am the kind of old that is the broken-down Ford Tempo on the Shoulder of the Highway of Life while everyone else, the Young and Beautiful, pass me by. *sniff* Well, you'll be there too someday! And Young People (defined as people who are not You) will ask you what school was like in the days before electricity, and you will have to hit them with your Medicare forms.
So just so you know, I thought I would come up with a short guide to getting older so that you all will know what to expect.

One sign that you are decrepit and ancient is that Christmas ceases to be about Loot and is about People. You no longer care what people give you, probably because you have become finally numb from years of receiving craptastic gifts. You no longer really care about what you get people either; you're more interested in their company. Also at this point you have a house full of stuff anyway.

Another sign that you are getting older is that stories about projectile vomiting induce expressions of sympathy from your friends instead of hysterical laughter.

9 A.M. starts seeming like a good time to get up on Saturday morning rather than go to bed.

You pay more attention to stock charts than to your favourite band's chart placement.

Your clothes no longer reek of cigarette smoke because you don't spend time in smoky bars anymore.

What kind of food is served at parties starts to take precedence over what kind of drinks are served.

Waffle House is no longer one of the four food groups.

You can carry on conversations with other people at parties and be heard above the music.

You have been inside of a furniture store of your own volition and you may have even purchased something; the furniture you picked up from the side of the road returns to its rightful home.

You start caring about what gets spilled on the rug.

You are acquainted with the produce section of the supermarket, not just the beer and chips aisles.

You start going to the dry cleaner because you can no longer get away with wearing jeans and a t-shirt every single day of the week.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

More Reviews Of Things

I recently read Joan Didion's book (no, not her RECENT one! Do I look, um, not poor to you?) The Last Thing he Wanted (I would underline this but I don't know how to do that).
It was something of a departure from her usual work in that it featured the usual wealthy idle middle aged lady as the main character, and a journalist alter ego-other person to go with her and they were in South/Central America with jacaranda bushes, but it also featured a Tom Clancy plotline, curiously enough. It's as though she were retelling the story of one of his original characters. Very strange and very successful, but somewhat jarring. This gave me an inspiration; I could parody famous writers by retelling a simple story, such as humpty Dumpty. Yes, I know it's been done, but I could do it again.

I also got a Netflix subscription a couple of months ago so we have seen many movies; Trey also got from somewhere (I refuse to believe it could have been I, but he claims I got it) Evil Dead 2, which was, well, completely unlike most of the movies I watch. Trey loved it. I don't know which one is likely to kill more brain cells, watching Next! (a really inane MTV show written by 11 year old girls) or Evil Dead 2, a really inane movie written by 11 year old boys. I will say that Evil Dead 2 takes more acting talent, because I should think is very hard to convincingly portray emotion when playing against foam rubber props, and artificial rednecks. Next! at least has a few so-bad-it's-good moments; such as when a young man tells a young woman, I'd like to go out with you again, you're hot as balls. Next is much less messy than Evil Dead 2, which features oceans and oceans of fake blood, vomit, etc; Evil Dead 2, however, has "special effects" featurings, well, oceans of fake blood and rubber creations whirling and menacing the unfortunate protagonist. Trey said that there are some more Evil Dead movies after this, and proceeded to explain what Evil Dead 3 was about, but all I will say is that I got some good grading done while adamantly not watching the movie. Trey is so strange like this; on the one hand, he likes Evil Dead 2, and wanted to see some more of them; on the other hand, he reads my Economist and liked The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Unpredictability itself.

Well, we saw Dead Ringer, starring Bette Davis, and that was excellent and had many twists and an interesting crime-does-not-pay story; it took what might have been a fairly conventional story about a twin who murders her twin and added a lot of drama to it. Also I saw Happy Endings, which was excellent; a real Romantic Comedy for people who cannot convince themselves that Julia Roberts' life on screen has any relevance to their own; and we saw Lost Boys of Sudan. Trey objected to the last because he did not like it when the Sudanese people talked about how they thought all American blacks were thieves. It was OK but not as good as I had hoped. Not necessarily worth the time.

I did a Good Thing last week; The car was acting up once again and would not start at the Sam's on Mountain Industrial. It clicked but would not turn over. I thought it was the battery; so we went back inside. If we purchased the battery, then they wouldn't put it in that day, because they were all backed up. This irritated me. So what you're telling me I should do, I told the service person, is I should buy the battery, get the car jump started, take it home, and then do what exactly? It doesn't do me any good to buy a battery if you won't put it in. This argument was moot as they did not sell that sort of battery anyway. Of course, this car takes some kind of SPECIAL battery for some reason, that only 3 stores in the world sell on alternate Tuesdays from 1-3 PM and they are all located in Germany. Then we tried Pep Boys, as it was on the way home. They had the battery, but it would cost $90.00 and they did not seem willing to install it, and I just don't feel like doing it. We went to one AutoZone, which had the battery, it cost $66.00, but they would not install it for "security reasons." The AutoZone near me on Columbia was friendlier, but they did not have the battery. A gentleman (and in using the word "gentleman", I am stretching it far beyond any meaning ever intended for the word) came out and looked at it and reminded me that the battery was a 6 year battery and that there was no sense in replacing it, especially as it had been replaced when I had the transmission switch replaced about a year ago? year and a half ago? and that it should go back to the dealer. I was girding my loins for a battle with the dealer (for those of you who are wondering how exactly one does that, it meant that I was trying to convince Trey to let me have his car to drive to work on Monday and he could get the car towed and then I was trying to think of how I would retrieve it). It could be the alternator, I thought, and then I remembered that the battery posts were very badly corroded. Sunday, I cleaned the battery posts, and that was all it needed! So I am happy about that! It does pay to be smart.

Another Real-Time Post

There are students outside my classroom intermittently studying and having other discussions right now, and I thought I should mention:

They have had at least a 5 minute discussion concerning when New Year's Day is. The Blonde girl, who before this had insisted her hair would be gray, "I would look like a gray haired mouse!" she insisted, if I didn't do anything with it, thought that New Year's Day was the 31st. " 'Cause, she said, you're all partying and stuff on the 31st, and all, like, Happy New Year!" This girl has also indulged in an extensive discussion of her hair, highlights, lowlights, etc., and her Odyssey to achieving Hair Nirvana. One of them has just suggested that a major technological innovation was the outhouse.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

New Joke

I have a new joke that I thought I would share. Note: This is still a work in progress.

Don't you hate it when, in reminiscing of high school days, your apparently successful, attractive, and responsible friends tell you things like, "O, I don't really remember senior year, I was drunk and skipped school with the cool kids" And your memories of high school center around, say, Algebra 3 homework, because you were a total geek and BELIEVED what patently unsuccessful people, like your guidance counselor, told you about the value of working hard in high school? You wasted your best opportunities to be completely idiotic without major consequences, unlike, for example, adulthood, when stories in which projectile vomiting features highly are no longer really entertaining, and instead of laughter, provoke sympathy.
Yes, I was a total geek in high school; except for one really unfortunate incident when I made a desperate and pathetic attempt to fit in-
I had seen some movie in which the Thing to Do was to go through your parents' medicine cabinet and share their prescription drugs with your friends. The problem with this was that at my house, my mother had read enough Nietzsche to believe that What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and as a result, we didn't have any prescription drugs. We didn't even have Tylenol. The only way I could think of to get some would be to have my wisdom teeth removed, but that seemed worse. But I thought about this, and thought about this, and being the resourceful person I was, decided to make my own prescription drugs.
No, I wasn't going to set up a lab in the kitchen; the internet, you remember, had not been invented yet, so I wouldn't have had any way of getting recipes. I would take Tylenol and pretend it was prescription drugs. So I went to Phar-Mor, and bought some generic tylenol. The problem with this is that the caplets were imprinted with exactly what they were, so I took a razor blade and shaved off the imprints.

You have to give me credit for trying, right? I was all excited the next day when I went to school, and I showed them to my friends, claiming they were codeine.

My friends refused to touch them, because after they had been altered, they "looked funny."

I was not about to let all that work go to waste. What I needed was: stupider friends.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

What Made Me Laugh Today

What made me laugh today was the obnoxious Korean-Italian boy and the fat obnoxious boy were arguing, and they wanted me to teach them curse words, but of course I refused, and so what the obnoxious Korean-Italian boy finally came up with was this withering insult- Tu es el gato en el bano, which is Spanish, not French, and means: You are the cat in the bathroom.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Study Guide, French 1 Final 1st Term

Study Guide for 1st Year 1st Term Final

You should be able to :

Tell time in French
Count from 0-100
Ask someone how they are doing, and tell someone how you are doing. Point out different people and identify them as a man, woman, girl, boy, teacher, friend. Ask someone what their name is and ask what someone else’s name is. Identify members of your family. Tell how old you are and tell how old someone else is. Order food in a café, say that you are hungry/thirsty, discuss what you want to eat. Discuss the weather.

Write the numbers from 0 to 20 in French

Write the following numbers in French: 22. 27, 33, 38, 41, 46, 54, 58, 65, 69, 71, 75, 83, 88, 94, 97, 100.
Give the following times in French: 2:04, 8:30, 4:55, 6:00, 5:30, Noon, 3:45.
Ask and answer
What day is it today? What time is it? Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? How old are you? When is your birthday? Would you like to go for a walk with me? Would you like to play tennis with me? What do you want to eat? What do you want to drink? How much does it come to? What is the weather like today? What is the weather like in Miami in July? What is the weather like in Michigan in winter? What is the weather like in London in spring? Do you like to travel? Do you like to speak French? Do you like to sing? How well do you sing? How well do you dance? Do you like to swim? How old is your mother? When do you watch television? What are you watching now? Where do you usually eat dinner? What do you do on the weekend? With whom do you study? What are you doing right now? What are you doing Saturday? Where is your brother? Of whom are you speaking? Who do you call in the evenings? Do you want to visit Paris? When do you want to visit Paris?


Translate.

We are in town. You (all) are at the cinema. They are on vacation. You are here. I am in Paris. My mother is at home. My sisters are in class.

You are making a pizza. We are taking a walk. I am making a crepe. They are doing their homework. She is making a salad.

Sylvie would like a soda because she is thirsty. The students pay attention in class. Jerome is at the movies now. Sunday, we are going to have a tennis match with

Julio and Guty. John’s friend is 43 years old.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Eurythmas Wishes

I've been very depressed recently so I haven't posted much- I'll get into some of the reasons later but it does have a lot to do with my job. One of the reasons I enjoyed teaching is that I had a high degree of autonomy, but that has vanished; couple that with 12-hour days and weekend work and I'm reconsidering. I get here before the sun rises, leave after the sun sets, and am still not done with work. If I'm going to work this many hours, I might as well be a lawyer and get paid good money, and have some more prestige. I'm going to have to go back to school ANYWAY to finish certification and I still need to get a Master's if I did want to continue so I have made what I think is a Good Decision today. Since one of the hurdles for me is taking the LSAT, I think what I will do is bite the bullet and ask Leah how much it would cost for me to take the class through Kaplan, and then pay whatever it is just to have it done. I need to get Serious because I'm not getting any younger, and when I graduate law school will be competing with people 10 years younger than myself. I don't think I can take too much more of this. Then again, I've heard that barristers have one of the highest incidences of both alcoholism and depression, which I'm already subject to - - - Sigh. I'll just have to manage that when I get there.
Part of the problem is that I hate working, period. I don't like getting up in the morning and when people are all chirpy at obscene hours I want to smack them. After that things are more or less OK but ooh, the getting up out of bed. I love puttering around the house and doing Martha Stewarty things. I would NEVER get bored if I stayed at home all day. I LIKE doing nothing.

Speaking of which, that's more or less what I want for Eurythmas. I do very much still want an unmolested 1987 Buick Grand National with less than 60,000 miles and t-tops, but if I could find someone to buy one of those for me I wouldn't be whining about my job. I want to move very badly, but there you are again, and then I want to go to law school. I would like a replacement camera for the one Trey lost, and I signed up for SunTrust's new CD- start it with $100, and then you can have as little as $50 deducted each month from your checking account! I put in $25/week, because I figure I can cut back that much each month in one way or another (watch out for any moist, brown, meaty canapes at the next dinner party) and then by this time next year I will have $1,400! If Trey does the same thing, then we will have enough money to go on a nice vacation to Mexico; if we do it two years in a row we will have enough $ to go to Germany. I haven't bought the Eurythmics Boxed set yet, and the more I think about it, the less I really feel like forking out that kind of $ all at once. I don't really have the time to enjoy listening to the cd's either. We have a Netflix subscription. Trey wants a TV/DVD player, but I really can't stand to have one in the house. I would probably like any of the Joan Didion books I don't have already- (I have the Book of Common Prayer and Slouching towards Bethlehem); Ruth Rendell's The Lake of Darkness or The Rottweiler (Trey may get that for Eurythmas, continuing the tradition of giving people things I want) One Across, Two Down. Or Thirteen Steps Down. O and a large bottle of Citadelle gin is always welcome. Other than that, I have plenty of clothes, even with Happy Bunny on them, and don't need more; and I did get one large glittery piece of jewelry from Eva so I shan't really be able to afford any more for a while, and we can't fit anything else in the house.

O and Trey made a joke yesterday that I thought was hysterical. You wouldn't know how to take care of children, he said. You'd leave them out in the sun all day, and they'd get sunburned, and then you'd say, They're supposed to be like that, they're red babies.
Well, I thought it was funny. I guess you had to be there.

The reason conservatives have been up in arms so long about the P.C. movement is that so much of it has become mainstream- not so much the terminology, but the ideology. Pre-P.C., most people might be offended, but probably wouldn't take action because someone says something "offensive." Nowadays, people lose their jobs for making allegedly "offensive" comments, or those comments/stances are used to justify witch hunts. Example, courtesy of opinionblog.com, courtesy of Instapundit;

Massachusetts chief justice apologizes for 'red state' remark
By Denise Lavoie, AP Legal Affairs Writer December 2, 2005
BOSTON --Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, author of the landmark ruling legalizing gay marriage in Massachusetts, on Friday apologized for a remark she made about "red states" during a commencement speech at Brandeis University last spring.
Marshall's apology resolves a citizen complaint filed against her with the Commission on Judicial Conduct.
In greeting the audience at the Brandeis commencement on May 22, Marshall commented on the hundreds of blue and white balloons held in nets tied to the rafters. "No red states here," Marshall said.
In her apology Friday, Marshall said she regretted making the comment about "red states," a term used to describe Republican-leaning states.
Marshall called the comment "an unconsidered, spontaneous attempt to connect with the exuberant celebratory feeling in the audience, reflecting the balloons I had seen."
"The reference to 'red states' was not part of my written, prepared speech. I regret the comment, and I apologize for it," she said.
"I did not intend to say anything of a political nature. The comment did not reflect what I had intended."
Marshall's attorney, Hugh Scott, emphasized that the commission did not bring any charges against Marshall.
"After the complaint was received by the commission, there was a series of mutual discussions between the commission and the chief justice, and she concurred with the commission that this was an appropriate way to resolve the matter," Scott said.
Jill Pearson, executive director of the commission, would not comment on the complaint against Marshall.
After the SJC issued its landmark ruling on same-sex marriage in 2003, the justices -- particularly Marshall as its author -- were criticized by opponents as an example of "activist judges" who allowed their political views to influence their decisions.
"I hold sacred my oath to decide every case fairly and impartially and according to law," she said in her apology Friday.


I'm deeply offended that this judge was censured (that's correctly spelt) for making a simple comment about a lack of Republican/right wing influence at some semi-private gathering. She made her comments at a COMMENCEMENT speech, not in a professional setting, and if she had, so what? We all know that judges are either political appointees or elected officials and usually serve one party or the other, and have their own individual ideologies- they can't be entirely unbiased. If their work reflected a bias, that would be another matter, but this is thought/speech control plain and simple, and it's absolutely terrifying. In the future, no one will be able to express any opinions of their own, unless the Culture has vetted them; example, a comedienne might be allowed to make this comment, but no one else would. I simply cannot believe that anyone thought it was worth taking action that she said something so inane and meaningless. Sigh.