Ah, San Francisco… We fancied a trip to Baker Beach yesterday and took a long walk barefoot through the edge of the surf, having the enchanting experience of watching porpoises breaching the waves just offshore.
At one point a sea lion pup watched us before slipping back under the water, while dogs chased birds and each other, a perfect jellybeansofdoom kind of day.
Continue reading “Traveling with pets: additional musings”
“The fall” – (117 minutes, India/USA, 2006 – rated R)
In a Los Angeles hospital of the 1920s, a 5 year old Romanian girl named Alexandria (Cantinca Untaru) is recovering from a broken arm she suffered picking up oranges with her migrant workers parents. Relieving the monotony of long days in this adult world is her accidental meeting of another patient, Roy Walker (Lee Pace), a young movie stuntman.
Roy is bedridden after performing a stunt he intended to impress the film’s female lead. The opening sequence of “the fall“, a gorgeous black and white montage using Beethoven’s 7th symphony, reveals what happened after Roy plunged off a railroad bridge on horseback into the river below, killing his horse and wrenching his back.
As it turns out, Roy is not only just as bored as Alexandria, he is contemplating suicide, the hopeless romantic…
Continue reading “Midnight Movie Madness: “The fall” (2006)”
“The girl with the dragon tattoo” – (158 minutes, USA, 2011 – rated R)
I wanted to like this. Great cast, great director, great story… But like Steven Spielberg, David Fincher hits it about as much as he misses, and the opening sequence of “the girl with the dragon tattoo” is the best part of the movie.
Steven Zaillian is credited as screenwriter for this adaptation and described on imdb as a veteran scrip doctor. Here, it appears the doctor killed the patient. You very seldom get a strong female character matched to a strong female lead as was the case with Salander and Noomi Rapace. To say this version adds nothing to the original Swedish film is true but incomplete: the character treatment of Lisbeth Salander amounts to character assassination, although at 158 minutes it’s more like a prolonged torture session.
SPOILER ALERT BELOW.
When Lisbeth rescues Blomqvist from the killer and chases after him, she actually asks Blomqvist for his permission to kill the bad guy. In Fincher’s “girl with the dragon tattoo”, Lisbeth subordinates herself to Blomqvist, which is not just contrary to the source material (book and film), but bizarre…
The book’s original title, Män som hatar kvinnor, means “men who hate women”, and makes me wonder at the guys involved here. Too bad, so sad, avoid this stinker. This gets no beans.
UPDATE BY Rudha-an
Here is the opening title sequence that Lastech mentioned. It’s the best part of the movie.
“And they call it kitty love…”
That’s where the cuteness ends: Jenny starts by kissing on Tito, they exchange a few licks, and settle down for a minute, maybe a few seconds.
Then the wrestling begins. The headlocks and body slamming, what every Trekker recognizes as the Klingon mating ritual, somewhat different from the Vulcan mating ritual which also involves ass kicking, but of a Starship Captain.
As I type this, for instance, Jenny is still greeting me home, dancing figure eights under the chair, pawing at my leg and grabbing my arm to rub against. With purring and claws. I’m already bleeding in three spots. I got bit. Not too hard but firmly.
Must be the Tortie (Tortoiseshell) in her, the little brute. As a wrestler, she has a very solid stance: wide with hind legs bent. We saw her more than once using this position to wrap Tito in an embrace before slamming him down. Then again, he gives as good as he gets, and even has her retreating often, though never for long. Never for long.
I’m bleeding from a fourth scratch now.
Jenny will also walk on my pillow stopping just long enough to nom on my skull. If I pet her, which I always do, she farts. If my wife leans over to nose bonk her, Jenny’ll cough in her face, like Carol Beer on “Little Britain”:
Her newest trick: not a cough, but a vurp (a burp which sounds vomitous). All I can say is thank Ceiling Cat she doesn’t eat mice. Things are gross enough. Annnnd, I’ve got an eighth scratch… Well, a puncture, more like… Still, I feel like one of Jack the Ripper’s playthings.
Nothing like a good meal followed by a… a good proper “recycling” session, if you know what I mean… In between both, though, flossing takes longer, what with receding gum lines etc…
Your mouth becomes a Walmart with monstrosities lingering in the aisles.
I had a particularly irritating bacon bit wedged between two teeth earlier today. One of those clingy, rubbery bits of bacon fat which seemed oddly attached to a molar, and considering how long they’d known each other I thought the relationship had a whiff of co-dependence…
Ultimately though, all good things must end, and food stuffs must separate from enamel.
Where do I begin
To tell the story of how great a love can be
With her first chew
She gave new filling to this cavity of mine
She fills my teeth with very special things
With angels’ songs , with wild imaginings
She fills my mouth with so much flavor
Andy Williams – “Love Story”
No. No, actually it really is more like this:
They say that when you’re young, you know what you hate and that as you get older, you know what you love and shift your focus.
I think that’s true but I hate disease more and more, disease of any variety, which diminishes those you love until it kills them. I can’t get used to it, and I’m not certain Kitsy’s passing has sunk in even now.
Maybe it’s because he was so much larger than life, that I have trouble thinking of him as truly gone.
Everything about Kitsy was superlative and he was a hell of a model, even though he never managed to hold a pose quite long enough. One thing he liked was getting petted roughly before I blew raspberries on his gut. He’d get up, fold his big flappers of ears back and leap off.
What we had for the past couple months or so was a wasted version of him.
Lately, he had appeared to make some improvement. The weight, however was located in his gut and his spine and ribs continued to show. His muscle mass continued to diminish and he had more trouble jumping in the last few days.
What confirmed what we were afraid to know and discuss, was what the other cats did. They nestled with Kitsy to keep him warm at night, Jenny checked on him constantly, and Tito would lure me to the bathroom were I’d sit on the edge of the tub and pet him on my lap.
New behavior which I took as offers of comfort from the big cat.
As to Jenny, she accompanied Kitsy wherever he went, literally shadowing him. By then she also looked much bigger than he.
So we had him for two years, and that seems like a very short time…
The vet told us that the disease affected mostly young cats, and what a rotten thing that is.
I will miss his excesses and countless transgressions. I used to joke he was like a shark, an eating machine constantly looking for food to steal, and last night it struck me to see bacon strips on a plate in the kitchen left unmolested. Yet I can’t help thinking that even though he’s clearly not here he is not in fact gone.
I will miss our arguments, me calling him names and him probably demanding noms. He was a great outlet for my frustrations the fearless little bastard who never had a bad mood and would make Tito and I exchange disbelieving looks.
I can’t wait to dream about him.
“Oh let the sun beat down upon my face, stars to fill my dream
I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been
To sit with elders of the gentle race, this world has seldom seen
They talk of days for which they sit and wait and all will be revealed.“
Led Zeppelin “Kashmir”
Every so often I search for some Space Opera movie I haven’t yet seen or perhaps forgotten, and every time the list comes desperately short.
I ended up watching “forbidden planet” again last night, and an internet search this morning yielded zilch.
One story which will unfortunately never make it to the screen is one of my favorite sci-fi, Alfred Bester’s “the stars my destination” from 1956, itself an adaptation of “the Count of Monte Cristo“, and a pretty good one at that.
That said, we still have real life and the ISS, with footage helping us remember why NASA is so important, perhaps now more than ever. So, turn up the volume and bask in Ceiling Cat’s everlasting glory.
I have no clue what the pointy eared people believe, and I really have no idea whether they even believe anything. I do know that they think. The confusion, or subterfuge, is in their attitudes towards the ‘unknown’.
Like a simple, harmless, charming even… Water fountain.
In our efforts to help Mazuzu re-hydrate, we bought a pet water fountain which recirculates water and increases the oxygen content in it.The collective reaction? Avoidance. And in Tito and Jenny’s case apparently, fear.
Tito in particular, hates appliances like vacuum cleaners and fans.
Tito has always had odd habits, like pawing water to drink.
As to Jenny, she kills toys for no other reason than she thought the thing looked at her.
Both she and Tito have approached the fountain suspiciously, lifting a paw and smacking it to put it in its place, whatever that is. As to Mazuzu, the pattern on the pot to his right makes him dream of the void between the stars. That and cosmic calamari with an unpronounceable name.
So what goes on in their head as they encounter eebil majjik? What thought, what incantation do they think of..? Well. While we still have no clue what it means, I did have a sort of revelation ( yeah, deeper than an epiphany) when we hiked an old battery on the approach to the Golden Gate bridge.
What their mantra is, their conjuration, appears here:
That is all. Keep calm and carry on. Just remember the words…
Time for Mazuzu and Jenny to share the limelight, since Tito isn’t so much into posing. Maz continues to improve, even though it will take time to recover the weight he lost, and Jenny helps him along.
When he sleeps under covers, she likes to dart in and out to check on him, farting as she goes. We call that “trailing mines”… But she’s oh-so cute.
As for Tito, his influence runs deep…
“It’s a mystery to me
the game commences”
Dire Straits – “private investigation”
Another Friday the 13th rolls around, time again to look at some baaad luck, double-matinee offerings from foreign parts.
Here we have two works of fiction, inspired by the same (mostly true) story, and yet they couldn’t be more different. The song at the heart of both stories has a haunting quality, and provides a very intriguing starting point for these mysteries.
The piece.
In 1930s Paris, a Hungarian songwriter named Rezső Seres composed a song entitled “the end of the world”.
Without speculating as to Seres’ inspiration, it was widely regarded as a downer. A downer of such proportions that despite various interpretations and growing popularity, the song was blamed for causing several suicides.
Continue reading “Friday the 13th double matinee: tales of a killer song”
