molly_o

I swear this afternoon I had two or three things I wanted to post, but now that I am at my computer, I can't think of any of them.

RM & I saw "Strange Wilderness" yesterday, and wow, it's a bad movie. It makes most other stoner comedies seem like ... I don't know, like The Philadelphia Story or No Country for Old Men, or something like that. We did laugh, I'll admit that -- though many times it was a laugh of sheer disbelief at how stupendously dumb the movie was.

One of the characters was played by Ashley Scott, and Strange Wilderness was so bad that at the end, RM & I both expressed surprise that she'd be in a movie like that. ('Cause you know, she's had such a promising career thus far, what with her roles on "Birds of Prey" and in that movie about treasure-divers with Paul Walker and Jessica Alba.)

In other news, I am attempting to cook a Chinese New Year meal this weekend. I am painfully clueless about Chinese cooking, and today I went to a the sole remaining market in Chinatown to pick up a couple of elusive ingredients and felt like I was wandering around with my skirt tucked up into the back of my underpants.

Monday morning, flipping channels, we came upon a movie called "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil." It's an odd film, made in 1959, about a post-apocalyptic love triangle, and ( I'm going to blog about it at ridiculous length because I can't figure out what the heck it was about. )

Tomorrow: Cloverfield.

Oh, and one more thing: We saw the trailer for Ironman, and whatever they had to pay Black Sabbath, it was TOTALLY worth it.

We took the cats to the vet last week, which was pretty much traumatizing for all parties, and for various reasons they need to be fed separately. This is a surprisingly huge deal. We now have baby gates up all over the house, and all three cats are in various stages of unhappiness.

The Regurgitator is down in the basement yowling because Mark was down there!! and she tried to leave and the top of the steps was blocked!!! -- and even though he's safely upstairs now, just the thought of it happening again has her antsy. Dry Heave hasn't figured out yet that he's upstairs for good, and I am anticipating 3 AM howling. Hairball Girl has the best deal -- her food & litter stayed where they were, and she has the entire main floor to herself -- but she's hunched in a ball too, just on principle. This is not going to be a fun transition.

I have not seen any movies yet this year. (The silver lining to that is that I haven't seen any Uwe Boll movies this year. Because honestly, I think I might have to see "In the Name of the King" -- don't tell me it sucks, I'm *sure* it sucks, but it has Jason Statham(!!) and a bunch of other people, too.)

However, I have a new haircut that I am enjoying, and I got to leave early because DC is not entirely sane when it comes to winter precipitation, so all is many things are right with the world.

This DC-area comic book store has women-only gatherings twice a month:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6517856.html?nid=2789

I haven't posted since October, but why not squeeze in one more post before the end of the year?

November just disappeared on me, and December has been a blur of holiday preparations. I think we've had some sort of social event almost every day since the 19th. It's been wonderful -- exhausting, but wonderful, and a nice antidote to a disappointing Christmas with family. (My in-and-out-of-rehab relative arrived drunk, and though he sobered up the same evening, and apparently stayed sober the rest of his visit, it was infuriating and disheartening and put us all on edge, watching for any further signs of relapse.)

He also gave me Amy Winehouse's CD for Christmas -- the one with the hit song "Rehab" ("They try to make me go to rehab/I say no, no, no"). It's a great album, but it didn't seem like a positive sign as far as his commitment to recovery.

Finally, RM inspired me to put together a list of ( all the movies I've seen & books I've read this year )

The ball is dropping! Maybe tomorrow I'll have some resolutions to post! Meanwhile, happy new year everyone!

We've been on an eight-day trip to New England (about which I might post more later), and i am happy but swamped, so this is something of a drive-by post.

Some of you might know I have an Old Testament verse tattooed on my thigh. I laughed out loud when I discovered the LoLcat Bible and its translation of that verse: "Dint i say so? U be strong. U be curragous. Dont be all, OH NOES cuz i gotchoo kthxbye."

I actually like Chuck -- all the characters are great, and I'm loving seeing Adam Baldwin regularly.

( But ... )

Also, if you like fantasy novels with naively ambitious country boys going to the city and getting drawn into city intrigue that ultimately will decide the fate of the land, I recommend Karen Miller's innocent Mage/Awakened Mage series.

I have been intending to post for ages, and in the meantime I keep seeing more movies and reading more books that I really ought to blog about. (The 5-second version: "Shoot'Em Up" was great, raucous fun; "Resident Evil: Extinction" was better than you probably think; and "Eastern Promises" was not what I expected but well done. Also, you might've heard by now that there's naked knife fight, which was surprising, but in a good way. I didn't really feel like I was enjoying Robin Hobb's "Shaman's Son," but I wanted more when it was over and will probably read its sequel, and I was pleasantly surprised by Karen Miller's "Innocent Mage.")

Meanwhile, a meme, completed by assorted people all over my flist: Here are the 106 books most frequently listed as "unread" on LibraryThing. Mark bold for ones you've read, italic for those started but not finished, and strike out the stuff you hated.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: A Novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road (on my to-read list)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers