molly_o

I ditched work a little early today so RM & I could go to the movies. We saw Hanna, which was good, and not easily comparable to anything else. I wasn't expecting as much of a fairy tale as I got, but the contemporary and fairy tale elements really came together. (Though there was a scene that screamed Galaxyquest at me, and I am VERY dubious about a fundamental plot point.) I especially liked the score -- not the actual music so much as the way it shifted with the POV. Any movie with kids, though, hits me a lot differently these days than it would've five years ago.

There were some good trailers before the movie -- Captain America, and something called Priest that looks to be a cross between Underworld and Chronicles of Riddick. And then ... then there was a shot of that statue of Christ the Redeemer in Brazil, which I identified instantly as the beginning of the Fast Five trailer, because I am SO psyched for that movie and have watched various trailers online many, many times. RM made fun of me for this, and I did not even care, because Paul Walker was saying something and Vin Diesel was rumbling back at him.

We've been watching a lot of Justified lately -- it's just about the only TV show I'm into these days, at least until Sherlock is back -- I am LOVING the second season, even more than the first. The dialogue is fantastic, and there are so many really great characters. Tim Olyphant is more than capable of carrying the show by himself, but he's surrounded by strong actors (Walton Goggins, especially, but also Margo Martindale and Nick Searcy). The other night there was a scene in which Olyphant's character was drunk, and it took us a minute to realize it because he wasn't doing the usual actorly stumble and slur. His gestures were a little loose, and he was saying things that were kinda reckless, and we realized he was drunk the same way we'd realize it face-to-face with an actual drunk person, not because he had the acting equivalent of a neon sign reading "DRUNK!" over his head.

I'm sure there were other things I wanted to say, but darned if I remember what they were. (I'll probably remember as soon as I close my laptop.)

We were rear-ended this morning on the way to work/school. The car appears to be undamaged, but the BG started crying and said her head hurt, so we called it in just in case, and they wound up putting a collar on her and improvising a back board with her car seat, and then she had Baby's First Ambulance Ride, followed a couple hours later by Baby's First X-Ray, and then Baby's First Whiplash Diagnosis.

(The driver who rear-ended us got out of the car and seemed nice enough -- apologetic, the way one is -- but when Mark pulled out his phone, she got back in her car and drove off before either of us could get her plate numbers.)

This is the part that KILLS ME: We left the house, and we'd just pulled from the alley into the street when the BG exclaimed, "Guys, you forgot to buckle me in!" So I unbuckled myself, leaned over the seat and buckled her in, and then sat back down and rebuckled myself. And one block later? We were hit.

TFG she reminded us when she did -- I can't even bear to think about what might've happened if she hadn't been buckled in when we were hit.

-- Disconcerting: I've been mainlining Fast & the Furious fic for a few weeks now, so it was a little weird to see a friend on Saturday who is a dead ringer for Vin Diesel (he even has the voice).

--Disappointing: On Thursday and again on Friday, the Post ran a scary headline about the nuclear reactor emergency in Japan, accompanied by a distressing photo that had *nothing* to do with the nuclear reactor emergency. It was misleading, and they did it not once but *twice*. (Scroll down for Friday's front page. Thursday's was worse -- men wearing face masks, gloves, etc. carrying a body -- but for some reason it's not accessible on their site right now.)

-- Entertaining: Check out this very fun fanvid, Sherlock: The Musical

-- Righteous: I love this video of Veena Malik, an actress from Pakistan, telling off her detractors after she's ambushed on TV. She never gets defensive; rather, she lets loose with some passionate words you can tell she's been holding in for a long time (found via You Offend Me You Offend My Family, who I think got it from boing boing).

-- Refreshingly Drama-Free: I must admit I am not too keen on Patrick Stump's new look, but I loved his answer to this question in Details: "So you're confirming that Ashlee Simpson is no Yoko Ono?":

"I'm confirming that. Also, Yoko Ono never deserved any of the hate she got. Paul McCartney and John Lennon weren't getting along. Not that I'm drawing a parallel, because a) we were getting along just fine and b) I'm not arrogant enough to compare Fall Out Boy to the Beatles."

Thing About Celebrities #1: More than a week later, I still have not figured out why the news that Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson-Wentz are splitting up strikes me as particularly sad.

Thing About Celebrities #2: Don't -- just don't -- tweet or blog or otherwise publicly express your condolences or sorrow or whatever for the latest truly awful thing to happen to some other celebrity. Because no matter how sincere you are, it will come across as though you're using their tragedy to score a headline on People.com.

Two Worlds Collided ... I was in a meeting today, and someone referred to his P*werP*int presentation as a W.I.P. (doubleyou aye pee), and someone else corrected his pronunciation (to "wip"), and a third someone said, "I just this morning learned what that meant!" and I said, "work in progress?" and he said, "You knew that?" And somehow it didn't seem the right place to explain how.

Love, Love, Love: This photo.

The Other Princess Diana: I was confused to read in this article that Adrianne Palicki will be playing Wonder Woman as well as "her true identity, corporate powerhouse Diana Prince." "Diana Prince" is her cover identity, right? Or are they revising the story so much that she's not even an Amazon any more?

The BG: She does & says awesome things every day, and I think, "I should post that!" but then I can never remember what the latest awesome thing was. She wants to be a firefighter (and when a visitor said, "What about a princess?" she thought for a second and said, "Nah"). She calls me and Mark "guys" -- "Guys, look at this!" She says, "I'm a great finder!" -- and she is, I'm constantly misplacing things and she knows where they are. And she's a huge fan of Mumford & Sons' "The Cave"; she watches the video every night before bed and can sing along with a sizable chunk of the lyrics (though it's disconcerting to hear a 3-year-old warble some of them).

Thing the first: Today is the first day of the year of the rabbit. (Happy year of the rabbit!) This year we kept our observance small, but I still wanted to do something festive. Usually I steam a whole fish, but neither RM nor the BG likes fish, so I went with a whole chicken instead -- and since we were eating on a weeknight, I cooked it in the slow cooker. (I've made a whole chicken that way before, and it was amazing -- just falling off the bone.)

Anyhow, I got home, and the slow cooker was sitting all warm on the counter, and with the BG's help I worked on the sides, the nian gao, etc., and then once everything else was ready I opened the crockpot -- and the chicken was practically RAW. =(

Thing the second: Operation Ranch Hand was an ongoing mission to disperse the Agent Orange defoliant in Vietnam. Their motto? "Only you can prevent a forest." (Obv. I am an EVIL person, because this made me laugh and laugh.)

B.D. Wong took his mom to the White House state dinner for Hu Jintao

(If the link doesn't work right, go to photo #9.)

Thing the first: My parenting style regarding food is kinda laissez-faire. In theory, every meal has something from every food group and the BG decides what to eat -- in practice, some meals fall short. We also have random rules like "only one little bag of chips per day." Breakfast tends to be "whatever you want, within arbitrary limits determined by me on the spot." This morning she wanted cookies, and my arbitrary limit was "no chocolate snacks for breakfast," which meant the Or*os were right out, but the peanut butter cookies were in.

And y'know, I didn't feel so great about my kid have peanut butter cookies for breakfast, but like I said -- laissez-faire.

But then 15 minutes later, having taken maybe one bite of the cookies, the BG said, "Mama I don't want these." I wound up making her oatmeal instead, and doing a little dance inside my head.

Thing the second: I was at the Dupont Circle metro station the other day and somehow noticed for the first time the Walt Whitman quote carved on the wall above the escalator. And I couldn't help but think of the awesome quote about Whitman from the Trek reboot RPF A Passage that Sings:

( NSFW! )

The Post today had a moderately interesting article about a study to see whether chemicals in tears might influence people nearby.

( My favorite part was at the end, when they talk about how they got the tears. )

I very VERY rarely cry at movies, but for some reason the end of West Side Story always brings me to tears. And way-back-when I sobbed for 20 or 30 minutes after seeing David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly. The friends I saw it with were initially mortified (we were all still in high school, young enough to be mortified by things like that), and at first they teased me gently about it, but they actually got kinda freaked out when I just kept crying.

(Honestly, it was PMS. I know that's a diagnosis that's been completely devalued by being tossed around anytime a woman is ticked off, but that incident was one of a handful of times in my life that I've had a bizarrely disproportionate emotional reaction -- even at the time, I could tell it was out of proportion, but I couldn't stop -- and then gotten my period within 12-24 hours.)

I wish you all an awesome 2011!

This morning I finally got around to tackling the masses of dishes that have been piling up in the sink since Friday (possibly Thursday; I can't remember now which was the first night that I thought, "Y'know, those will just have to wait.").

I am kinda embarrassed to admit that, and in fact for much of the weekend I winced every time I walked through the kitchen. But when I actually got around to *doing* the dishes (with enthusiastic assistance from the BG, if by assistance you mean splashing water all over the kitchen), I ran across reminders of other things I did this weekend: baking cookies for Santa; preparing my favorite sweet potato recipe (not the one with marshmallows, but one from the old Joy of Cooking that calls for orange juice) for Christmas dinner at my mom's; starting a batch of apple butter in the crock pot.

The truth is, I got done all the things I really *wanted* to do this weekend, and it was absolutely well worth the transitory guilt of going to bed with dirty dishes in the sink for two (three?) nights running.

Christmas with a 3-year-old is mostly a ton of fun, start to finish -- the shopping is fun, because they like almost anything and there are a zillion good toys that are safe for three-and-up. They are old enough to get Santa, and young enough not to doubt for a second that he's real. The BG crashed a bit when she realized there were no new treats to be uncovered, but she rallied when she realized now she'd have a chance to actually play with all her loot.

I hope everyone else out there had as much fun this weekend as we did, whether you celebrated Christmas or went to the movies (if you're looking for a good one, I highly recommend the True Grit remake) or played in the snow or stayed inside with a book.

In closing, I offer two random links that might prove enjoyable:

Google Ngrams (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com) graphs the prevalence over time of specific words within a selected body of books. Hard to explain, fun to try.

John Scalzi's Interview With the Nativity Innkeeper (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/12/21/an-interview-with-the-nativity-innkeeper) made me laugh.