Skip to main content

Monday Miscellany -- The New Year Edition

1. I saw "Harold and Kumar Went To White Castle" this weekend. It's not really my kind of movie, but it was mildly amusing and the scene where they sing "Hold On" by Wilson Phillips? Totally worth the price of admission.*

2. This? This is an awesome video:



The United States of Pop 2009, by DJ Earworm.

3. Janet Reid has this to say: The Perfect Time Is Now.

4. I don't mind winter so much,** but I hate it when my feet are cold. Seriously. I will go to any extreme to avoid cold feet.

5. Happy 2010!

~~~

* I got it on Netflix, so there wasn't admission. But you get the point.

** This is true. I spent four years in New Mexico, where there really isn't winter, per se (we would sunbathe in February, no joke) and I really missed winter. I don't mind shoveling snow, or driving in it, and I love winter clothes. And cocoa, of course. So winter's all right with me.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Love winter, couldn't live anywhere without snow...
Jay Montville said…
@WannabeVirginia W. I totally agree! I just wish I could control when it snowed, so I didn't have to drive in it. :)

Popular posts from this blog

On Mary Sue

I recently read a Very Popular Book in a Very Popular Series, which I was going to talk about here until I read the second book in the series and realized--OH NO--that the main character of the book is a total Mary Sue. sigh. For those of you who didn't spend time in the fanfic world, a Mary Sue is a character who everyone else loves. She's a stand-in for the author (fanfic is written mostly by women, which is why "Mary Sue," although there are some Gary Stus out there as well).She's beautiful (but not too beautiful), she's funny, she's self-deprecating, she's smart, and all the other characters will fall head over heels in love with her and think she's awesome. (An example, if I wrote Friday Night Lights fanfiction, Mary Sue would move to town and become Riggins' girlfriend, and Jason Street would have a crush on her, and Lyla Garrity would like her and even Tyra would must us some grudging respect, and their lives would all be better for k...

Why Are The Characters Friends?

Lately, I've been reading a lot of books where the main character and her best friend don't get along. This is confusing to me. Why is the main character friends with someone she dislikes, or is afraid of, or actually hates? I get that it happens--I've seen Mean Girls . I've read Queen Bees and Wannabes . Heck, I'm old enough to have been the prime audience for Heathers . But in order for this fractured best friend relationship to be convincing, it has to be set up. In both Heathers and Mean Girls , there's a reason why the protagonist is friends with a bunch of b*tches--she chose to be. She knows that they're jerks. In fact, she can feel herself becoming a jerk right along with them. It's part of the character arc, the point of the story, that being friends with these girls is not who she really is. But the relationships I've been seeing lately don't make that kind of sense. The protagonist doesn't have a reason to be friends with...

Meme!

That I stole from Sarah Miller : The instructions: Look at the list and (1) Bold those you have read. (2) Italicize those you intend to read. (3) Underline the books you LOVE. 1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (made it to book four, and bailed.) 5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6. The Bible 7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8. 1984 - George Orwell 9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (most of them, anyway. The comedies make my eyes gloss over, though). 15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks 18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 20. Middlemarch - George Eliot 21. ...