Guilty Pleasures

Heavy Weights

This movie, with Ben Stiller, is one of my guilty pleasures.  I love watching Ben Stiller, as the psychotic fitness entrepreneur, versus the misfit kids at Camp Hope Fat Camp.

Christopher Moore

With this author, nothing is sacred, even angels. I have read most of his books, from Practical Demonkeeping to Sacre Bleu with enjoyment, but also a little embarrassment, because well...you wouldn't want to read any of these books aloud in front of nuns. I especially enjoyed the latest, Sacre Bleu, which will show you some of the great painters like Toulouse Lautrec in an entirely new (blue) light.

Second Life

My entry on Second Life has been moved over to "Warty Bliggens"

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

This is a Japanese manga translated by Toshifumi Yoshida and published in America by Dark Horse comics. The manga is about young students at a Buddhist university whose skills - channeling, dowsing, ESP, etc...are not in great demand among the living, so they make a living carrying out the wishes of the dead.  Not for the squeamish, but not just a blood-and-guts bash, either. Volume 13, for example, includes translations from the poet Rimbaud, and information about ancient fertility goddesses, and about the Japanese jury system. Great endnotes with information that makes the manga more accessible to western readers.

downloaded from online manga site

My Review of the New Hobbit Movie (Spoiler Alert)

We saw the new "Hobbit" movie yesterday, and I wanted to make some comments. I haven't read any other reviews yet, and I suggest that you see the movie before you read my review so as not to be prejudiced in any way.

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My one word review would be "Bloated".  I had wondered how they could make a one-volume book into three movies. Now I know. Perhaps they listened to the people who complained "They left out Tom Bombadil" in the first Lord of the Rings movie and decided nothing should be left out. Then they added dialogue and actions and whole new sub-plots until what could have been a nice hour-long movie became over two-hours long and was not necessarily better. In fact, I predict that at some future point someone will edit this and the next two movies so that they become one movie and it will be much more entertaining.

I especially disliked all the added violence and the "should have been fatal" collisions and falls and near-escapes that kept happening until I came to the conclusion that the dwarves and Gandalf must have been made of titanium. My Mom's one comment after seeing the movie was "I thought The Hobbit was a children's book".

And did they need to change the plot? My husband says that Steven Colbert explained that this was the way Tolkien would have changed it after he wrote the LOTR trilogy. Hogwash.  The book The Hobbit is the story of Bilbo, his adventures, and how he got the ring. If there are contradictions in Middle Earth as depicted in the book The Hobbit and the books The Lord of the Rings, so be it. We are humans, we are very good at having contradictory opinions.

Perhaps the producers/writers/directors/financiers (I wasn't sure who to blame) thought that they could improve on Tolkien? If so, why not make an entirely new movie, perhaps "Further Tales of Middle Earth" to include the scenes with Saruman and Radagast and the high elves?

I also noticed at least one scene where the dialog didn't seem to synch to the actors' lips. Were these scenes left over from the LOTR movies that were repurposed by adding voice-overs?

I do not know why the original book was expanded into three long movies. My husband's guess is that the financiers realized there would be greater profit in putting out three movies, rather than one. I am thinking that perhaps someone kept saying "Wouldn't this scene look great in 3-D!" I also suspect there is a component of "I am too great a genius to be edited" involved.

Random thoughts: Gollum has the greatest range of emotion of all the characters. The dwarf king is much too young.  The orcs and the goblins could use a good dermatologist.

And who am I to curmudgeon about what has the core of a great movie? No one - just a Tolkien fan who is hoping that some day they make a movie of the book The Hobbit.

Recommended Read

I would like to recommend the book Building My Zen Garden by Kieran Egan. The author was born in Ireland, schooled in the U.S., and was teaching in Vancouver when he wrote it. He had already published 15 academic texts, but the zen garden project started out as a hobby. The book was published after recommendations from blog readers. I got the book from the library, but you can read the original at http://www.sfu.ca/~egan/Japangardenhome.html. In some ways I prefer the blog, because it has color pictures.

This is not a 'how to' book, rather it is an exploration of how you can turn an idea into reality, and is full of humor, philosophy, poetry, and observations on everyday life.

The Democracy of the Roads

Earlier this year I was driving along a Southern California freeway when a small red roadster with two passengers passed right in front of me, left to right, and proceeded to cut across lanes and traffic until it got to the diverging route on the left. In a brief flash of concentrated attention - the "life passes before your eyes" moment - I saw the passengers' identical platinum manes blowing in the wind, their mouths open in laughter, and the too-smooth-to-be-natural skin of the passenger's face and neck.

After regaining my composure my first thought was "Those people must have either fame, influence, or money to drive so recklessly. " That led me to think about how one of the very few places where "a cat can look at a king" are our public freeways.  Jaguars share the space with hippy vans, but I have noticed that the less pretentious cars tend to make way for the more expensive ones - you wouldn't want to ding those Mercedes - their owners probably have lawyers. I also suspect that the owners of the luxury vehicles probably don't get ticketed as often - otherwise why would "Famous Person X was given a traffic ticket." be newsworthy.

And I have also wondered about what happens to those cops who have ticketed or even arrested governors and other influential people.  Do they ever get promoted or do they find themselves in some dead-end job somewhere?  In fiction the maverick who upholds the law is often made the hero, but I suspect not so much in real life.

Watch out for small red roadsters.

Why I Don't Watch A Lot of Television

I don't watch a lot of television. It is not just that I know that real-life problems can't be resolved in the space of a half-hour, hour, or mini-series. It just seemed that I had seen it all before. While I was net-stalking Torley I found a wiki called T.V. Tropes. It explained a lot. See if you can find the elements that make up your favorite programs.

"Please Step Away From Reality With Your Hands Up"

This post has been moved over to my blog "Warty Bliggens".

Another Diet Fail

I read a recent article in WIRED magazine about the changes in the Weight Watcher's program and decided to try it again, online.  I only lasted eight days*. While the new points system is designed to steer you towards more healthy and more filling foods, their online food tracking program is clunky and difficult to navigate. I was spending over an hour a day using their online points calculator, and a lot of the food I eat regularly is not on their lists and I had to calculate the points from the sum of the ingredients.
I tried to simplify the counting by trying some of their frozen meals.  Their food products are marked with the points value and this made counting points easier, but the meals did not taste as good as similar frozen meals that (according to their labels) seemed to have almost the identical nutritional value but cost a lot less because they didn't have the Weight Watcher's label on them.
I met some nice people in some of their forums, but overall, I did not find the support or ease of use I expected. Weight Watchers is one of the biggest commercial weight loss companies in the world. Their income is in the trillions, and they spend millions in advertising. They should have spent more money improving their online site.
For me, a good diet program needs to be one I can use without thinking a lot about it, and it needs to be accessible when you do not have a computer or other electronic gadget.
I know that the Weight Watchers program has helped many people, but I cannot recommend signing up for their online program.

*because some of these days were in March, and some in April, they charged me for two months when I cancelled. According to complaints I've read on line, it could have been worse.