Author: Heather Meadows

Today Ruth has the following thought on her blog:

I always liked this no frills festival. There is no canned music in shops whispering ‘My product will absorb all your loneliness’ to the tune of Jingle Bells, no guilt-laced tinsel at the edge of your vision starting two months beforehand, no fairy-lit high streets draining the earth’s resources and beckoning you to spend, spend, spend…..

No, rather than steal from the Earth, there is a meal shared, a holiday taken, and a grand giving of thanks for Her bountiful gifts. Religious it may not be but spiritual it certainly is.

I’m feeling a little prickly due to a conversation we’ve been having here, so my first reaction was a little sour. I love Christmas, and it makes me happy to have special events and beautiful decorations all around.

But I can certainly appreciate Ruth’s sentiment about Thanksgiving. It’s a lovely holiday, a time for appreciation of family and food and the richness of life.

This year, Sean and I will enjoy rotisserie chicken, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and peach pie with Cheryl and Reid, sharing each other’s company and experiencing the beauty of an Old South town.

I wish all of you similar Thanksgiving happiness :)

XD

Well, there isn’t much of interest to post today. We drove for a few hours, got to Charleston, straightened out a problem with our reservation, parked, set up the camper, made dinner, ate it, and watched Revenge of the Sith. Exciting!

I’m not actually sure what we’re going to be doing this trip. Antique stores and “old town” have been mentioned. Pictures, of course, will follow.

Hello my faithful readers!

Sean and I are going with his parents to Charleston, South Carolina for Thanksgiving. We’re leaving today and will be returning home on Sunday. As we will be staying at a campsite, we probably won’t have Internet access. (There’s a slim chance of Wi-Fi, but we’re not counting on that.)

So, if you don’t hear from me until Sunday (or Monday!), that’s why.

Happy Thanksgiving!

When I saw that a new episode was out, I thought, “I hope there’s some good plot stuff in this one.”

Sheeeeeeeeeesh, I need to be careful what I wish for! :D

So, like, does Wolfram carry the key to one of the boxes? Is it his ear, maybe? If not that, then what?

And it’s Gwendal‘s left eye! So, all three brothers…!

What is this all building up to?

Who carries the fourth key?

Who are those guys who kidnapped Wolfram?

What is Wilma/Belma doing in the next episode?!

XD

I was using the Internet Archive to see if I could find some of my old websites, and I came across the first incarnation of pixelscribbles. Back then I called it Pixel Scribbles, and it was hosted on my QX.net homepage. Here’s a screenshot:

I was ecstatic to see that huge list of my writing…but then I tried clicking on the links. Archive.org did not archive my writing!

Grr.

Fortunately, all the poetry listed there is still here, and AJ gave me his copy of The Vukin Project…but the rest of it is gone.

So, here’s the list of writing on that page, and a brief description of each thing, as best as I can remember.

Short Stories

“Jack” – This was a vignette about a guy getting shot. I used the phrase “the bullet impending to his arm”, which is grammatically incorrect, but I thought it was a revolutionary and perfectly acceptable use of the word at the time. Written while I was in high school.

“The Beginning” – This was a Star Wars story, about how Leia decided to join the Rebellion. Or maybe the next one was. I forget which was which; their titles suck. Written (I think) during or after my first year of college at UAH.

“The Decision” – Another Star Wars story. If this isn’t the Leia one, then it’s the one with Yoda and Obi-Wan carting the newborn twins away from Vader. Obviously this was written before the prequels came out. Written (I think) during or after my first year of college at UAH.

“The Definition of Love” – I was very proud of this story. It was pretty dark. I actually don’t want to give a synopsis, because I might rewrite it someday. Originally written during my first year of college at UAH, and later formatted to look like a magazine article for my first Creative Writing class at UK.

“A Slip of the Tongue” – This was a vignette about how it feels to say something that hurts someone else’s feelings. Written during high school, I’m guessing sophomore year.

“Double Date” – This was a true story, written for my Advanced Writing class at UK, about Sean and me going to Outback with our friends William and Michelle. Written in 1999.

“Replace the Carpet” – In one of my writing classes at UK, the professor said it was impossible to write a story in second person. So, I wrote a story in second person. (It was actually in first person, but you couldn’t tell that until the very end.)

Novels

The Vukin Project – This is the story about that bald guy, and the REVOLUTION!, or something. ;> I started this when I was a teenager and continued it during my first year of college at UAH.

Warrior – This was the first of what was supposed to be a string of fantasy novels, although I didn’t really have much of an idea of where the story was going to go. This first installment involved a young man growing into a hero. The second story was about his daughter (who of course didn’t know her father was a hero). I started this when I was around 15.

Essays

All of these essays were written for classes at the University of Kentucky. I had some nice linguistics papers that I didn’t put online because I didn’t want to mess with the IPA fonts, and I had a huge set of essays written for my 2001 Japan trip that was also never put online. Oh well, it’s not like I have any of them now, anyway :>

“And God Saw That It Was Good” – This was an essay I wrote for film class, about the movie Dark City. In it, I argued that the movie presented a call for atheism. It really didn’t, but that was how I perceived it. In a nutshell, I was angry that John wasn’t going to tell any of the survivors that they were on a spaceship. Instead, he just set himself up as God and remade the City the way he wanted it. I felt that this was a metaphor for the Christian god. Obviously I had some issues at the time. Written in 2000.

“Self-Reliance” – This was an essay for Advanced Writing about Thoreau and Emerson, I think. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything interesting. (This may be the essay where I basically lashed out at my professor’s “go into the woods to find yourself” ideals.) Written in 1999.

“Shaw and Feminism” – This was my review of George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession, for English Lit. In it I basically said that Shaw was not preaching feminism with this play, as my professor would have had us believe. As I recall, I had some pretty compelling arguments, but I don’t remember what they were. (Can you tell I enjoyed contradicting my teachers?) I think this was written in 2000.

“A Call for Equality” – I have no idea what this is, but it sounds boring, doesn’t it? It’s probably a literature review.

“Horrible Responsibility” – I’m gonna guess this was another literature review…but this may possibly have been written for Human Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective, 2000. Not sure. (Come to think of it, the previous essay might have been for that class, too. Who knows.)

Journal Entries

All of these journal entries were written while I was in college at UK.

“The Way It Is” – This might have been about infertility. I don’t remember.

“On writing and fame” – You’ve seen me talk about this enough in this journal!

“Paranoia; or, an average day in the life” – This one was interesting. I was sitting on the floor in Whitehall Classroom Building on UK campus, writing in one of my notebooks, and I started to get this really paranoid feeling. I have an overactive imagination sometimes, so I started coming up with things that might happen to me, and how I might defend myself. Then I wrote about it.

“On being barren” – Now this was definitely about infertility. It’d be kind of nice to see what I had to say back then. I think I remember it, vaguely. It was what I wrote right after my first endocrinologist told me how high my FSH levels were. I wrote something like this:

“I didn’t want to have a baby right now,” I told Sean on the phone later that night. “But–“

“But you wanted to know that you could,” he finished for me. I love him so much.

I wrote this poem in the same sitting as that journal entry.

“Life for Dummies” – This was just a short, cute little thing I wrote as a reaction to the Today show. An Asian woman was interviewing someone about economics and acting like a ditz, so I wrote about how next they’d be hawking a book called Life for Dummies. There was a guy I met doing night desk in the dorms…I forget his name, but I thought he was very cool. He wrote essays for the school paper arguing Palestine’s side. Anyway, I showed him this essay one day at the Ho and he thought it was funny.

///

And that’s not all I ever wrote, not by a long shot! There were plenty of short stories and college essays that I didn’t put online, either because they weren’t finished or because I thought they sucked. There were also the Ninja Turtle and Darkwing Duck stories I wrote in middle school, which only existed in hardcopy (they were originally on 5-1/4″ Apple II floppies, but I have no idea what happened to those. There was also a story about a girl named Gwendolyn who got sucked into another world on those floppies; I don’t think I even had a copy of that story at the apartment). I also remember writing a story about a mystery in Venice when I was in third grade–that may still exist, actually, at my parents’ house.

So while I certainly haven’t been as prolific as some people, I did lose quite a bit of writing in that stupid fire.

MSNBC: 75-year-old jewel thief looks back

Never did she grab the jewels and run. That wasn’t her way. Instead, she glided in, engaged the clerk in one of her stories, confused them and easily slipped away with a diamond ring, usually to a waiting taxi cab.

She is, says retired Denver Police Detective Gail Riddell, like a character from a movie — a female Cary Grant, smooth and confident.

“She is very good at what she does,” said Riddell. “She has the style.”

And she has been very, very successful. Every month or every other month — no one knows how many times over more than 50 years — she strolled into a jewelry store and strolled out with a ring worth thousands of dollars.

Occasionally, she was caught. Mostly, she was not.

Reuters: That’s incredibly beautiful…give me a hammer…

“Great works of art, at a deep level, bring about a feeling of destruction, an urge to destroy which also many artists have. Michelangelo himself destroyed some of his own works or parts of them.”

But the will to destroy is not just caused by a subconscious link between creating and destroying. The David syndrome is also caused by people’s deepest fears and desires, by sex and death.

Magherini has interviewed gallery visitors who are fixated with and disturbed by the physical attributes of David, considered by art critics to be a vision of male perfection.

“There’s a great force, an impulse of an erotic and sexual nature, not just in women, but even more so in men. Men of 35-40 year of age who are attracted by the extraordinary masculine beauty and at the same time are also agitated.”

The David syndrome has links to the somewhat better known Stendhal syndrome, a term Magherini coined more than 20 years ago, which causes viewers of art to be physically overcome by their reaction to art, sometimes leading to hospitalization.

The Cynical Traveller goes to… A Cheerleading Competition

While the benefits of being able to wrap your own legs behind your head may not be immediately apparent, a little careful thought can bring up several situations where it might come in handy. Such as scratching an unwanted itch, or escaping from the deathtrap of a supervillian.

I think tagging is great. It’s awesome to be able to categorize stuff so I can easily find it later. Adding tagging to its robust gallery featureset was one of the best thing smugmug’s ever done.

But boy is it a pain to actually do the tagging.

I’m not psychic. I can’t predict what is going to be interesting to me later when I tag my photos. Worse, back in the beginning I used as few tags as possible so I could hurry up and be done with it. This means that every time I think of a new tag set, I have to go back and edit pretty much all of my photos. (By “tag set”, I mean stuff like what month the picture was taken in. Today I’ve spent a few hours tagging all my photos for month and season.)

It would just be easier if I was psychic.

Actually, a nice option would be if I could select groups of albums and give them all the same tag(s). That would be awfully convenient.

Another thing I would like is to be able to exclude tags when I’m browsing. For example, I’d love to be able to look at good pictures, or pictures of me, while eliminating anything tagged as wedding. There are a lot of wedding pictures, after all.

But that’s beside the point. The point is this:

The idea of tagging = awesome.

The reality of tagging = a pain in the ass.

That is all :)

MSN has a review of Goblet of Fire up that poses an interesting question:

Will Fourth ‘Harry Potter’ Stop Series’ Descent?

So far, most critics and fans would agree, every Harry Potter movie has been better than the last one. Statistics, however, suggest a disconnect.

The first one, “Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone,” released in 2001, grossed $317 million in the United States. No. 2, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” released in 2002, made $261 million. The third and most acclaimed entry, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” released in 2004, grossed “only” $249 million.

All were immensely successful, of course, and they collected many more millions overseas, where the studios now make most of their money on theatrical releases. Yet the pattern holds there as well: No. 1 is far and away the biggie, with a combined domestic/overseas gross approaching $1 billion, while No. 2 trails and No. 3 is nearly $200 million behind No. 1.

It does seem that the more inventive and interesting the adaptations are, the more audiences dwindle.

I personally sometimes find it difficult to watch a deeper movie again right away, and sometimes I’ll only see it once before getting the DVD. (Please bear in mind that I hardly ever go see movies anyway.) When I saw Azkaban, I enjoyed it, but it put me through the wringer mentally, trying to follow the action and think about what had been changed from the book and just keep up with the frenzied pace. I felt like I was too tired after all that to go see it again, so I didn’t.

Goblet of Fire‘s pacing wasn’t slow by any means, but it was much easier for me to follow. Maybe that’s because the story’s better. Maybe the screenplay or the direction is better. I have no idea.

What I do know is that this movie seems to be infinitely rewatchable. I would watch it again right now if I could :)

:D

Here are the relevant stories:

The Guardian: Geneticists claim ageing breakthrough but immortality will have to wait

• Organisms live six times longer in laboratory tests
• Cells genetically ‘tricked’ into slow-ageing mode

New Scientist: Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless

Via, of course, Slashdot.

Feel…terrible.

Want…to pass out.

Or eat everything I can find.

I don’t know if I’m getting a little sick, or if I’m just dissatisfied with life (that happens to me a lot, it seems ;P). I do wish I was doing something.

Bleh.

If you can’t tell there are going to be spoilers in this post, you are a fool!

Goblet of Fire is my favorite of the Harry Potter books…I think because it’s a huge turning point. Things happen that forever change the world. None of it, really, is unnecessary. It’s a tight story that just happens to be jam-packed with information and character development, and is thus fairly long.

Which is why I wasn’t sure how in the world it was going to be made into a movie.

I wondered if the Quidditch World Cup would simply be omitted. That turned out not to be the case. Instead, it was shortened to not much more than a prologue, and the whole House Elf subplot was lifted right out. This greatly simplified things and removed quite a few scenes. And to be honest…I didn’t miss the House Elves one bit! (And I didn’t miss SPEW, either.) Apparently people knew about this beforehand, but I managed (without really trying) to avoid “spoilers” before seeing the film, so it was a surprise to me.

Without Winky, there was no need for the main characters to be in the top box, so they weren’t. This meant there was no Ludo Bagman…which meant that the twins did not bet with him that Ireland would win with Krum taking the Snitch. (Actually, the game isn’t shown at all, and it’s unclear afterwards who even won–there’s only one line that indicates Ireland.) I think this is important to note because Harry didn’t receive prize money at the end, and therefore he didn’t give it to Fred and George to make up for their being cheated by Bagman. How they start their joke shop will have to be explained in some other way, I suppose.

There were a couple of other things that were shortened or explained differently or just done differently. Ron knew about the dragons. Hagrid and Madame Maxime didn’t have their fight, and Rita Skeeter didn’t out Hagrid as part giant. Cho didn’t save Harry from Filch in the Owlery. Hermione’s Yule Ball dress wasn’t blue ;P The Goblet of Fire was tricked by a Confundus Charm, rather than simply by having Harry’s name thrown in with the name of a different school. The Marauder’s Map does not come into play. Our heroes do not meet up with Sirius in Hogsmeade; the fireplace is his only appearance. Karkaroff is shown to be a Death Eater, but it’s not mentioned if/when he flees.

There was only one Pensieve memory, and Barty Crouch, Jr. acted maniacal in it rather than frightened. Junior was also in Harry’s dream at the beginning of the movie; this simplified matters immensely (and was necessary in the absence of Winky). The Barty Crouch, Sr. Imperius Curse subplot was missing; it looked like it was going to be there when he was found fallen in the woods (not by Harry and Krum but by Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Hagrid), but then nothing else happened with it. Also, Beauxbatons was an all-girls school, and Durmstrang all boys. I don’t remember them being that way in the book. It’s a little annoying, actually, because Fleur is the most useless of all the Champions, and I at least liked to think that she’d beaten out some guys to earn her position.

One other, small thing I didn’t like was Sirius’ head in the fire. I thought that was kind of silly. I always imagined the face as appearing over the fire; since Floo Powder is used for this kind of conversation, it just made sense to me that the head would be semi-corporeal, if orange.

I was pleased, and I’m sure commenter K will be too, to discover that they fixed the gravestone discrepancy.

Voldemort’s gloating scene with his Death Eaters is much shorter than I’d expected. I think they probably could have cut down the huge dragon fight to add to this, because it’s the scariest part and there should probably have been more weight to it. (Plus, Harry’s supposed to have beaten the dragon the fastest.) I would have liked some foreshadowing of Bellatrix Lestrange; she’s probably the creepiest and most evil character in the books other than Voldemort. It also would have been nice to have the subtle references to Karkaroff and Snape.

I do think that Ralph Fiennes made a fantastic Voldemort, because you can tell he’s pretty under all that makeup :> I thought the Voldemort special effects were really neat–the way his robe moved, making him seem to slither. The “Kill the spare” line wasn’t issued the way I expected at all, but that’s minor.

I did wonder if they would show Cedric fully spread-eagled. In retrospect, that might have been a bit ridiculous. The framing of his lifeless face, frozen forever in shock, was far more powerful.

I didn’t cry until Harry made it back, and he was sobbing, and it was just like the book.

I’ve pointed out a lot of things that were done differently from the book and a few things that I didn’t like, but really, I loved this film, and the only change I would make would be to extend the Harry vs. Voldemort scene.

The music was fantastic. It didn’t interrupt the film at all. I loved the way the introductory music played on John Williams’ original theme, perverting it, making it creepy. I was actually kind of surprised to see that Williams didn’t do the score this time. This Patrick Doyle fellow is good…he probably did better, I’m sad to say, than Williams would have.

I sat through all the credits, partly because I was enjoying the music and reading the names, and partly because I was sorry it was over, and I was hoping there’d be some amazing sneak preview of Order of the Phoenix–never mind that filming hasn’t even started for that :> Then, finally, when the film reel stopped and “Widescreen Radio” came on, I stumbled out of the theater and into the bathroom. (I’d been holding it for at least an hour. My two breaks before the movie didn’t help!)

Goblet of Fire = good. Right now, all I really feel like doing is watching the movie again.

Ah well. Reality bites ;>

I watched the first two films shortly after we moved into Cheryl and Reid’s house. Last night I bought the third one at Target and watched it while the new Smallville was on (I was trying to avoid the temptation to spoil the story for myself). It was interesting to me, all three times, to note the differences between the movies and the books. Now that I have read the books so many times, they’re easier to spot.

I’ve mentioned previously that I have no problem with remakes, and even with taking a new direction with established characters and storylines. The Harry Potter movies make an attempt to follow the books, and really only make changes for the sake of brevity and cinematography. I imagine that quite a bit of story will be left out of Goblet of Fire, which I will be watching in approximately one hour.

(Wh00t!)

Seeing Azkaban again was enjoyable. When I saw it in the theater, the people I was with didn’t care for it much, and that always tempers my enjoyment of a movie. I really prefer to watch a movie with people who are going to enjoy it, because if I like it and they don’t I’m always second-guessing my experience. Last night I watched it by myself and liked it very much.

I’m hoping that will be the case with Goblet of Fire, which is my favorite Harry Potter story to date. That’s not why I’m going to the movie alone, though; Brooke doesn’t like going to movies on opening day, and I’m pretty sure Mari and Kelly have their own plans to see it. (Plus, as far as I know none of them can see it at 10 am on a Friday ;>)

Now, off I go to wolf down some cereal before heading to the theater :)

Read it, love it.

Brooke and I walked from the golf course around along the river and back over the recently reopened older section tonight.

Some fish, frogs, or both were hopping up out of the water like crazy. I tried to get a picture of one, but luck wasn’t with me. Here’s a picture of some of the ripples they left behind.

On Saturday we’re hopefully going to the Canal :)