Wanna be hot messes of Hollywood, take a lesson from the queen of weird: Helena Bonham Carter.
Carter at 2011 Oscars via Yahoo!
Seriously. If you’re gonna show up in a ratty, corsetted…um…dress(?) you need to bring the attitude. And the sunglasses. Oh, and an odd fan/purse thingy.
Have you seen this movie yet?
If you haven’t, you seriously don’t know what you’re missing. Megamind has quickly become one of my favorite movies. It certainly is my favorite animated flick, by far. With music from Ozzy and Guns n’ Roses, and the comedy of Will Ferrell, I promise you every single person in your household will LOVE this movie. I just picked up the DVD this weekend and we watched it Friday night. It’s hilarious!
Here’s one of the trailers.
Go rent/buy this NOW! (Oh, and today’s post title is a quote from the movie. Megamind’s fish friend “Minon” is warming up a ray gun powered by the sun, and Megamind misunderstands him when he says the gun is warming up, thinking the sun is what’s warming…which is silly, since it’s the sun.) Anyway, enjoy the flick; it’s great!
Okay, I’ve kinda been failing at this whole Post-A-Day thing this week, but I have a good excuse…or at least *I* think it’s a good excuse. I’m in the midst of writing a huge paper for school. This is the last semester of the Masters, which means that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and all I’ll have to do come April is my thesis – which makes me wonder if that light is actually a speeding train. But whatever. I’m pushing through this semester like a crazy person and it’s been a kind of all-absorbing writing project. As it turns out, I may actually use it as part of my thesis, but we’ll see, so I’m trying to be extra meticulous in the writing.
Adding to the paper writing is the music writing I’ve suddenly been doing. I was contacted by an agent this week to write a review for an indie rap/rock band from New York. Wow. Um, yes please!
So, I promise, I’m not being a writing slacker, just kind of a blogging slacker. But, if you want to see what I’ve been writing, here’s a quick sample from the paper I’m throwing together for Tuesday:
In the latter years of the American Revolution, an important strategic shift occurred. The news of America’s victory at Saratoga reached Paris on December 4, 1777, and the years of hard work by American ambassadors in the Bourbon country finally paid off. No longer believing that “America must accommodate or submit” to Britain, King Louis XVI and foreign secretary the Comte de Vergennes finally agreed to back the Americans. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, William Temple Franklin, wrote that Saratoga “immediately turned the scale” of the war, and he was right. Encountering a rebel force better skilled than they had anticipated, the British faced colonists imbued with a sense of patriotism and revenge. The Americans were armed with skill and tactics gained from years of frontier and Indian fighting, and they finally got the better of their enemy. The combination of American zeal and determination, and British difficulties in logistics and strategy led to a veritable stalemate in the Northern colonies. It was after this halt in progress that the British turned their strategy southward, where a quick return to British rule was assumed based almost solely on the uninformed reports of Loyalist numbers waiting in the Southern colonies to aid the British. During this, the most violent and fast-paced portion of the war, American General Nathanael Greene stepped into the role of commander for the Southern Department and turned the tide of the war to the Americans’ favor. Greene, a businessman in civilian life and a meticulous commander in the military, focused on a broad strategy in order to keep the Continental Army and the Patriot cause alive in the South, long enough to serve British General Charles, Earl Cornwallis up to General George Washington on the decisive battlefield at Yorktown – the last battle of the American Revolution.
And if you’ve made it through that segment and didn’t switch the page you are A) a true friend, B) a dedicated blog reader, and C) informed as to why my brain turns to mush after a couple of hours writing like this.
Have a happy Saturday! Mine here in Tejas is bright and sunny, if a little cool.
xo
The day started like any other, although I had been slightly sleep-deprived, which made everything all the more funny.
A friend of mine had been admitted to the ER with what felt like a heart attack the night before. I went to sleep that night without hearing anything about her, so I didn’t know that her symptoms were indicative of something else completely, and something non-life threatening. Thank you, God! So, it was a restless night, but I awoke still in a good mood and quickly learned that my friend was going to be a-ok soon, so life was good.
I busied myself with the morning routine, hustled the wee one off to school, and came home to enjoy my breakfast over a bit of email reading. Having to run a couple of errands, I jump in the car and head off to the local post office.
Now, I should pause here to tell you that I live in a pretty rural area. While things are slowly starting to spread our direction, it’s possible that there are still more livestock in the 20 mile radius of my house than there are people. So, when you make a run to the post office, you run into people you know from church or your kid’s school; the postal workers are actually very nice, and they pretty much know who everyone is.
So, I walk into the somewhat busy post office and as I fill out my return receipt for the piece I’m mailing, I notice that there’s a man behind the counter who is weighing individual little foot-long baseball bats for shipment. I’m watching him place each one, just out loose and trying to roll away, on the scale, type in a few numbers and then place postage on them. Mind you, there are like twenty of these things.
First of all, this is a ridiculous advertisement idea. They said “We go to ‘bat’ for you.” Second of all, why would you actually MAIL these to people? I mean, I can see a sales rep taking them with him/her to meetings and when they sell to customers (I think…), but mailing them?
I digress.
So, then I walk up to the counter to do my own mail business. What I haven’t mentioned yet, though, is that during this whole filling out the card while watching the baseball bat mailing thing, I’ve been hearing the chatter of a bunch of birds. I’m thinking, silly city girl that I am, that there are birds roosting on the top of the post office. You know, ’cause birds roost all the time during the day. (Duh)
But, friends, it wasn’t noisy birds outside. No, no, not at all. As I’m doing my thing, a man walks in and says he’s there to pick up a package of livestock. The postal employee (the one weighing the bats) says, “Oh! Are those your chicks?”
That’s right! Apparently, one can overnight via USPS day-old baby chicks. Who’d a thunk?
Out of the back comes the same postal employee, carrying two cardboard boxes of baby chickens. Their little beaks are poking out of the side, and occasionally you catch a peek at their little fuzz-covered wings through the air holes.
The man says “Thank you,” and is off with his box of baby chicks. I finish up my business and head to the car before someone brings something like a goat in for shipment. Only in the country…or was it The Twilight Zone??
My day continues with a little bit of income tax filing (why does the IRS have to be so confusing? Better yet, why do we have to have the IRS?), some research paper writing – you know, because I’ve left it until the week before it’s due, in true Meg fashion, and then I get a call from my mother.
She’s stepped down wrong at school and at very least sprained, but possibly broke her ankle. So, it’s off to the ER we go, laughing about her gimpy state. Remember, I was pretty night wacky already from the weird night of sleep, and this was at like noon. Thankfully, it was just a sprain. The giant, soft-spoken ER doctor wanted the recipe for the Indian food my mother had been making at school when she fell, and the tech gracefully wheeled Mom back to the lobby.
The doctor had prescribed my mother pain pills and told the receptionist to be on the lookout for a Chicken Curry recipe via fax. (He seriously wanted that recipe!!) We get the fax number and we’re off, just in time for me to turn back around and go pick kiddo up from school.
Kiddo had a good day, but she burst the ice pack in her lunchbox by swinging it around after school and hitting things (and hopefully only things…not classmates) with it and her pants were wet with the questionable pink liquid. She later reports that she and a little boy got into a fight that day, and he was the one who ended up crying. My E is an emotional little one most of the time, and when there’s a fight at school, she’s usually the one wiping the tears. This little revelation is just another of the unexpected happenings of the day.
Thankfully, Mom, friend, E, and baby chicks were all alright, but the day was a wash. My writing groove was gone and I probably should have just taken a nap, but I didn’t. I plugged along at the paper and then ended up collapsing in front of American Idol.
So, the moral of the story is: when walking into a post office full of bats and baby chicks, expect the day to go the way of the unexpected.
