Smokey the Magnificent

1. So it turns out Mother has papillary thyroid cancer. We’re all being terribly British about it, and apparently if one insists on having cancer this is a good kind to have; but still though. She comes back from hospital tomorrow, but goes back in in two weeks to have iodine splashed round in her throat and her thyroid removed. Father and my small sisters are more or less drowning in church-made soup, and the snortlepig is becoming very confident at striding around hospital corridors.

2. Sister-in-law’s baby shower was yesterday, the preparations for which involved much panic and angst. I stayed up until 1AM the night before, quilting in a frantic fashion; got up at 8 to begin again, and finished the accursed thing seven minutes before the woman herself arrived to pick us up. Not a pleasant experience. One would think that quilting was a pleasant and tranquil experience, allowing one to relax and bathe the item in a warm vibesy glow of love and contentment. Not so. I swore like a sailor, broke four needles, jammed two more deep into my thumb and felt, during the hairiest moments, a great oneness with Stalin and Hitler. If inanimate objects do indeed absorb karma, the poor kid will grow up with an unexplained psychotic twitch.

Fortunately the baby shower was a success. Sister-in-law liked the quilt, and one of her friends even asked if I made them to sell (fortunately Mother-in-law, who also sews, interrupted sternly with a well-timed homily on Recouping Costs of Time before I could respond with the sort of pithy epithet only the events of the previous twenty-four hours could craft). My quiz went down well, even if sister-in-law worryingly insisted that the third stage of labour was breastfeeding; all the guests brought gluten-free food, for the sake of said s-i-l, so she didn’t miss out on any good eats; and nobody’s guesses as to the size of her tummy were so outlandish as to cause offense. Unfortunately, only one person signed the roster for making her a meal after the baby was born, and that was me. Do I simply move in circles with an overabundance of casseroles?

3. I have added “Write or edit fiction for 15 minutes” to my Points system challenge thing. Having been on a big non-fiction kick of late, both for reading and writing, I feel I should get back into the swing of things before I wake up at the age of eighty going “When I grow up I wanna be a novelist“. Incidentally, I am currently up to 173 points or thereabouts. Finishing the quilt gave me ten… a woefully low figure, entirely underrepresenting the time and mental anguish the proceeding cost, but I decided on the figure when the quilt was still in its early stages, and it would be unprincipled to inflate it after the fact. One has one’s morals.

4. Speaking of points and such, the chappie who was supposed to make my steampunk spice chest is proving woefully slack in getting the plans to me. Last I heard his father was in hospital, and he promised faithfully to get me the specs by the end of the week; but that was a few weeks ago and I dare not nag him via email, in case I found out I was Harassing the Bereaved or something.

5. Watched the movie version of Rent last night. Quite, er, something. I liked “Seasons of Love” and played it triumphantly for Helpdesk Man today, who started humming along and informed he used to sing it at school. Nobody ever lets me know these things… it’s little wonder I was 15 before I discovered Star Wars. But that is a dark story for another time.

6. Would you rather down a pint of watery gravy or find a live cockroach in your ear? I thought this one was obvious, but Helpdesk Man informs me he’d go for the cockroach. All the saner people I know say gravy - including Mother, who pointed out that having been fed strawberry-flavoured diabetic moosh through a nasogastric tube for a week, watery gravy would seem by comparison manna of the gods. (Incidentally, according to a book I read about the life of Mrs Beeton, during the eighteenth century cooks were much plagued by the love of their masters for gravy. Apparently the gentry insisted on more gravy than the average joint of meat could produce, and got very offended at the notion that gravy was a finite commodity limited by the juices of the beast in question.)

7. Well, would you rather never be able to eat steak again, or have to eat chicken at least once every day for the rest of your life?

I woke up today feeling surprisingly un-dead. That’s un-dead with a hyphen, meaning “didn’t die of swine flu during the night”, not undead all-one-word, meaning “heightened senses, intoxicated by the scent of blood and at one with an all-consuming darkness”, just for the record. Although that too, of course; who isn’t? Anyway I was able to do some sewing, and am pleased to report that I successfully constructed a 2-D fabric birdhouse all on my ownsome. With the little hole for the door, and everything. This quilt is proving to be a very useful training tool; I can applique like a fish now. How did the universe stagger along before the invention of double-sided interfacing?

Also, I was wondering: at a guess, how many songs do you know? Well enough to sing with, say, 80% accuracy: not just being able to hum along to the chorus. It occurs to me that counting musicals, hymns, folk songs, Christmas carols and the like I could well know upwards of a thousand. The oeuvres of the Everly Brothers and the Seekers alone make up a good few dozen, and I don’t even know all their songs. I wonder how much brain power the average joe today must use up on accidentally memorising songs: and how many of said songs he actually likes? I wonder, also, how many of said thousand songs I would be able to remember if a gangster tied me to a bridge, put a gun to the rope and told me to sing constantly for 24 hours, with no pauses and no repeats, on pain of sleeping with the fishes. Would my brain give out before my voice? Well, not currently, ’cause my voice is on the fritz due to the aforementioned swine flu. Would make an interesting film though, no? Like that one about the cellphone.. “If the signal dies, so does she”. Or not, possibly: I didn’t see it. Meryl Streep should star in it, she’s smashing. Streep. Streep streep streep. Is that her real name? “Streep Throat”, it could be called. Gosh, I’m feeling a bit ooey.

I think I’ll sit down quite calmly and blanket-stitch some wings on a fabric birdie while watching Lois and Clark.

Virtuously domestic tasks accomplished today:

• Dropped a large number of egg cartons off at a daycare to use for crafting or research.
• Dropped a large number of plastic bags off at a hospice op shop, as per the politely-worded sign.
• Vacuumed.
• Vacuumed up a sock.
• Fixed vacuum cleaner (woot!)
• Baked mandarin cake.
• Baked excitingly-shaped cheese straws.
• Cleaned microwave (hoo boy!)
• Cleaned stove
• Took snortlepig for walk, incidentally meeting and socialising with in-laws in the park. No bad thing, as it is psychologically boosting to run into in-laws while romping around picturesquely beneath tree, as opposed to answering door blearily in ill-fitting pyjama pants uttering lame and transparent lies about having had a late start that morning.
• Cooked roast chicken with Helpdesk Man for Bnonn and Smokey Night.

Less domestically virtuously:

• Read entire funny mom blog that spanned 2 1/2 years
• Read 8 pages of Cake Wrecks
• Googled tips on learning to ice-skate
• YouTubed tips on learning to ice-skate
• YouTubed clips of Torvill and Dean
• YouTubed John Denver
• Wikied John Denver
• Wikied Roswell UFO incident
• Wikied alien autopsies
• Wikied Coraline
• Googled appropriate eras for Gibson Girl hair styles and Anne of Green Gables
• Googled Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man” speech
• Read with intense interest approx. 45 pages of threads on Mothering.com discussing issues entirely irrelevant to self, such as dealing with the food allergies of an eight-year-old or the machinations of a toxic ex-spouse
• Read Empire review of newest Harry Potter film, which interests me very little

There are those who would say that knowledge is useful as a means of most perfectly expressing our appreciation of creation. There are others who think it is important in that it separates us from the beasts; others who feel it is our duty in order to most thoroughly appreciate Sacred Scripture.

They are, of course, wrong, although all these reasons are important. The primary reason for knowledge is that it allows you to recognise when movies get stuff wrong. Which is of course vital to the pursuit of smugness and the attainment of trivial conversation, both of which are very important things.

Things that bug me in movies naturally fall into my own categories of interest. Hair, for example. As any female who has spent hours fruitlessly attempting to recreate hairstyles from Star Wars: Episode 2 is aware, movie hairdressers are a devious bunch. Though they presumably know how hair works themselves, they bank on the ignorance of the movie-going public to get away with some truly unlikely hairstyles - braids that appear from nowhere, updos that require far more hair in length and thickness than the character possesses, hairstyles for respectable medieval women which blow loose in the breeze, supposed terminal lengths which are barely waist-length, and so on. The oddest example I’ve seen recently was in the animated Beowulf, in which the women sported hairstyles containing  braids that were longer than the loose hair. As any turnip knows, braiding makes hair shorter, not longer - meaning that these animated wenches must have cut one back section of hair a good foot shorter than the braided portions, which would seem to be a strange thing to do. Of course, given the other dubious anatomical features present in, for example, Grendel’s mother, I suppose it is only to be expected.

And of course, historical movies are always a blend of period accuracy and contemporary sensibilities in any case. I highly doubt actresses in Renaissance movies don actual lead makeup for the cause, or forgo using shampoo and conditioner for the duration of filming. And how many actresses conform to the physical standards of beauty prevalent at the time? It just doesn’t work - look at the BBC Pride and Prejudice. Sure, Jane probably would have been considered prettier than Lizzie at the time, but watching the film with modern eyes it seems so obvious she isn’t that all the references to Jane’s superior beauty strike a false note. Given this, I suppose filmmakers figure we wouldn’t be able to cope with a leading lady with unshaven legs or a size 14 figure, let alone wimples and bound hair.

Still, some of the circumstances in which heroines wander around with flowing tresses are quite bizarre. As the owner of flowing tresses myself I happen to know that wind and physical activity quickly turn “flowing” into “matted, dingy and beginning to spontaneously dreadlock”. Adding wood fires into the mix makes them downright dangerous. So to see Eowyn wandering around Rohan, of all places, exposing her perfectly-groomed wavy hair to the howling wind really just reinforces the fact she had a death wish. Even when she’s on the lam riding horses and hauling sacks of potatoes, it doesn’t seem to occur to her to put her hair up. Funnily enough this can be excused during her battle scenes, as neatly-braided hair would have drawn even more attention to herself amidst the shaggy-locked Riders, who apparently found through trial and error that the quickest way to a glorious death is getting hair in your eyes in the middle of a battle. Honestly, is it any wonder the Free Peoples were in jeopardy? At least Galadriel had the sanity to remain a soothing background presence for the sake of her coiffure - and one notes that the actual saviors of Middle-Earth were two of the few characters with short, sensible haircuts.

Another thing that bugs me in films is childbirth - a common peeve among crunchy seditious types, I believe. I read a study once comparing the rates of exotic childbirth complications in film and TV to real life, which was illuminating; but that’s not what bothers me so much as the general attitude of pace. Aaarggh, she’s in labour! Here’s the car! Here’s the lift! Here’s the wheelchair! Here’s the IV! Thirty seconds of screentime, tops; twenty-five hand-held shots in all. One gets the impression of someone running to the bathroom to be sick, which (although a genuine facet of labour generally unrecorded on film) is rather more sudden and urgent than the average childbirth.

Gone with the Wind (the book, not the film), for all its flaws, actually did a decent job of portraying the monotony and dreary lagging of childbirth. Films and TV, not so much. Rachel’s birth in Friends took an appropriately long time, but the realism was counteracted by the fact that she seemed to be perfectly normal and oblivious to events between contractions and had to be told when she was ready to push.

The really odd one is Star Trek. Again, I recognise that the series was made in space-time as well as portraying it; but still. How come every combination of species gives birth reclining? The Bajoran “no pain during childbirth” thing was intriguing, but in general it’s all much of a muchness - screaming, tricorders, oh-dear-the-baby’s-in-distress-we’ll-have-to-transport-it-out. Very dull of the writers, really. Shouldn’t Klingon women at least be gritty and cling to a knotted rope or something?

Another one, of course, is religion. This was brought home to me recently during an embarrassing moment in Bible study, where I was temporarily unable to distinguish between facts about the Ark of the Covenant gleaned from the Old Testament and those picked up from Raiders of the Lost Ark. But it’s the more insidious dumbing-down of religion that bugs me. Take Shepherd Book from Firefly, who responds to River Tam’s criticisms of the Bible not with devastating presuppositional argumentation but a lame line about how “You don’t fix faith, it fixes you” - in other words, it’s OK to believe a load of drivel as long as it makes you feel good. Now, religion being what it is I’m sure this is a true portrayal of the opinions of many, and I don’t object to a different point of view being portrayed per se (especially by a possibly fraudulent Shepherd); but I suspect this was Joss’ way of being terribly sensitive and enlightened about religion, and given many other references in his shows it’s clear he just doesn’t get it.

All this does occasionally hamper my enjoyment of movies. Helpdesk Man, of course, has it worse. Being knowledgeable in computers, swordfighting, science and biomechanics I’m pretty sure he feels actual pain whenever a character destroys a computer by firing into the monitor or indulges in a bout of aim-at-the-sword-not-the-opponent duelling. In this instance my lack of science education is kind of an asset - it never occurred to me to find sound in space a problem until he pointed it out, and I am deliciously free to make up my own mind as to whether replicators/transporter technology/cloaking/phasers/warp drive are possible, fictional or currently in existence.

Other things that don’t bug me include horses - which my horsey friends tell me are always switched around in movies for budgetary reasons, hoping we won’t notice, which clearly I don’t - vehicles, costume authenticity and architecture. Just think how much richer and more frustrating the movie-going experience would be if I were able to simmer about the non-period use of cotton blend, the blatant mixing of Gothic and Baroque architectural elements or the implausibly high engine sound of a…. um, car that makes a different engine sound. I could be like those mysterious contributors to IMDb who point out that a film set in 1954 features a 1955 Chevy in the background, an observation which never fails to astound me.

So tell me, Gentle Readers: what peeves you in film? Are you a doctor who cringes every time CPR is performed incorrectly; an expert in multiple-personality disorder who fins most portrayals of it inaccurate; or a psychobotanist who simply feels left out?

Say what you will about the state of this sorry world, but YouTube is pretty smegging awesome.  So for your edification and delight, I present to you a small but noble sample of clips that make me happy.  I’d call it my top five, but sadly my two favouritest of favourite YouTube clips have been taken down for copyright violation.  (Or so I assume; it’s possible they succumbed to typhus and genteelly withered away, but let’s not be naive, here, people.  It’s a dog-eat-YouTube-clip world out there.)  For the record, the ill-fated clips were a Spuffy video set to “Accidentally in Love” and a Tenth/Rose one set to “Follow Me”.  You see that beneath this callous exterior lies a heart of moosh?  It’s always useful to bear little facts like that in mind, in case you need to kill me one day.  A keen observer would also note that I have a tendency to monologue, which should make your job just that much easier.

Anyhoo.  Clip the first.  Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenowith singing “For Good” during Kristin’s final performance of Wicked on Broadway.  Hence all the weeping.  Great song, great show, great performance, it’ll melt your face.  Of course, when I say “great show” I mean “great show as far as I can tell from the soundtrack and a bunch of cobbled-together YouTube clips”, never having actually seen it.  Lack of Broadway musicals in New Zealand is a significant issue in my life, but they say suffering is good for the soul.

Did you weep?  You should have.  I hear it’s rapidly becoming the funeral song of choice, sort of a “Wind Beneath My Wings” for death, or the thinking corpse’s “My Heart Will Go On”.  Tell your friends… the sick ones.

Clip the second, you’ll be pleased to hear, is much more cheery.  This is just pure talent with a dollop of genius.  It also calms the snortlepig right down when she’s bellowing at the indignity of being put to bed.  Helpdesk Man’s method is to take the snortlepig under one arm, his laptop under the other, deposit both on the bed, place a firm hand on the middle of the snortlepig to prevent her getting up again and play this song (or alternatively Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours”, which she also likes) over and over again until she falls asleep.  It is a sight to behold, I tell ye.

Oose, no?  Moving right along to clip the third - Lea Salonga’s audition for Miss Saigon.  I love the young Lea - she’s like a Filipino Audrey Hepburn.  For those who don’t know her, she sang Mulan and Jasmine for Disney (there’s another pretty cool video of her singing Jasmine here - first run-through!) and has done a bunch of other stuff, but is arguably most famous for creating the role of Kim in Miss Saigon.  She was seventeen, although she looks about twelve in the clip.  Anyway, if you’re interested in Miss Saigon or singing or the audition process or simply watching people who are superb at their jobs, you’ll like this clip.  The way she picks up the song instantly and not only sings it with technical perfection, but captures the essence of Kim without apparent effort, is stunning.  Unfortunately I watched too much Lea-as-Kim before I went to see the show in Sydney, and as a result it was kind of a letdown.  You have been warned.

Right.  This next one contains naughty words.  Sorry.  I’m not sure why it tickles me, as I’m not really a fan of Eddie Izzard (or come to that, Lego; I’ve trodden on too many minifigs in my time).  But it does, and when I showed it to Helpdesk Man he laughed so hard humours spurted out of his ears.  Did I mention it has naughty words?

And finally… Trogdor the Burninator.

Yup.