New Dream

You're going to have to excuse me, but I've drunk the better part of an entire bottle of Momokawa Pearl tonight and watched another Disney princess flick and I fear I am not completely responsible for what follows.

Regardless of how much you may imbibe, the inescapable reality is that when you have kiddos under 12 (and an outlet to electronic entertainment) you will perforce watch a freaking great bolus of kidvid.

This will range from truly entertaining in it's own right ("Avatar", or "Korra") to sort-of-bleh to downright eye-searingly awful.

If there is a hell, it will consist of being forced to view repeated showings of fucking "Santa Buddies" or, worse, "Soccer Dog: European Cup". a horrible nightmare which made me want to both laugh hysterically and pound my head against the wall over and over again.

Oh, God, the fucking horror of Soccer Dog: European Cup. I could weep.

Seriously.

But this week has been truly special for kidVid; the cable Disney channel has been showing "princess" movies 24-7, and I have a six-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and so you know what that means.

Tonight's offering was Cinderella 3: A Twist in Time, the second direct-to-video Cindy "sequel".

And y'know what; I almost hate to say this but...it wasn't horrible.

For one thing, it actually had a laugh with some of the ridiculous premises of the original.

There's one point where the Prince - who actually gets to be a person, a real guy, in this one, as opposed to a stuffed dummy who represents "love and marriage" - is enjoying a bout of fencing with his dad. King Dad - and Charming - get some good lines;

King: You think there's only one woman in the whole kingdom who wears a size four and half?

Charming: It's all I have to go on here.

One of the "ugly stepsisters" got a chance to step out of the caricature and become more of a person and a rather endearing one, too. I actually ended up with a certain amount of affection for Anastasia Tremaine.

Girl's got some feet. I like a gal with some sturdy, real-womanly sort of feet. We can't all be size four-and-a-halfs, y'know. She's sweet, and sort of lumpy, and gauche, and I like that in a woman. Hell, I AM that.

Anyway, the writers and voice-actors do a nice bit of work with her, Cindy, and the Prince.

Of course, Lady Tremaine is her usual terrible self and the flick is all the better for it. She's delightful to watch as a sort of black hole of badness, a singularity of pure self-absorbed evil. Such a darling, really, she just needs a couple of minions and a fortress of doom. I'd take her dancing just to see when she'd try and put the poison in my shandy.

And, yeah, there's the fucking mice, but the film actually goofs with the mice; Charming gets some face time with them and then proceeds to tell Dad that the "talking mice" have told him that his real inamorata is about to be sent off to the antipodes or where-ever.

You can imagine King Dad's reaction; imagine your reaction.

Yeah, that's it. Well played, Disney.

Plus Cindy gets to grow out of the slipper a bit.

In fact, the saving grace of the thing is that it actually gets a sort of humanity out of all the most cardboard characters of the original Cinderella cartoon; Cindy gets to be a little cutting and a little clever, Charming gets to be kind of offhand and, well, charming, and even the damn anthropomorphic animals are tolerable for a change.

The point of this post is that for all that these damn direct-to-video Disney sequels get a lot of stick, I actually had to watch this one and it wasn't genuinely painful; truth told, it was rather sweet, a bit clever, a trifle snarky, and even had some truly pleasurable moments.

Seining gold nuggets from the filthiest stream, perhaps, but, still...I ended up liking Disney's Cinderella and her paint-and-ink pals better after this one than the original.

And that is, perhaps, not something to be idly dismissed, I think.

But this may be more than the maunderings of a more-than-tipsy Friday evening.

We will see what the cold light of the morning brings.

Oh, great Heat Tab!

First, a bit of Army trivia.

Back in the ooooooold Army (you know, when Henry Knox was our Chief of Smoke...) of canned C-rations we were issued these purple-colored trioxane bars wrapped in foil. They were usually called "heat tabs", and were generally considered right up there with sex under the Christmas tree as one of life's little pleasures.Because of its association with warmth and pleasure the sun was often referred to as the Big Heat Tab in the Sky, and GIs were sometimes heard to invoke this deity when the weather was crummy; "Oh, great Heat Tab, bring us light!". This sometimes involved sacrificing some Ham and Eggs, Chopped; not that great a sacrifice. That particular main meal was usually referred to as "Yellow Death".

Anyway, the3 point is that we haven't seen much of the great Heat Tab until, suddenly, this weekend it was absolutely lovely.

We went and played in Overlook Park, we worked outside and just generally spent more time outdoors than I think we have for the past five months altogether.The kiddos are beginning to pick up daddy's old sport, lacrosse. Here's the littlest LAX player in Portland:What she lacks in technique she makes up for with ferocity. Her brother still enjoys his soccer, though, and wanted to have a kickabout with his mom and I:The Girl wanted to take some snapshots, so here's a sampling of her subjects, in no particular order:If you look very carefully in the last photo you'll see a woman walking on a tightrope; we spend a bot of time watching her, and agreed she was very good:The whole of Saturday and Sunday were like that (well, take away the awful beating at Jeld-Wen Field Saturday, but let's not bring that up, shall we?) - lots of lovely idle time just fooling around doing nothing of note and enjoying it thoroughly.

So, thanks, Great Heat Tab! It was a nice weekend!

Hard Drive Housekeeping

Mojo is feeling poorly and has taken to her bed clutching her vinagrette, the Boy with his PS2 is being a mighty slayer of pixels, and the Girl is waiting impatiently to go to our little rock and gem shop to purchase some agates.

I am trying to do some light housekeeping, cook breakfast for everyone, and do a little gentle browsing.

Among with my other tidying I've been tidying my image files and ran across some odds and sods I saved just...well, just because I liked them. Thought you might, too.

I just liked the contrast of lights and darks, and the composition of the image:OK, this one was just strange. Not even erotic, unless your eros revolves around circus contortionists.Like they used to say about Nike: it's gotta be the shoes.

This was just for the prettiness:and nothing more.

I wonder how they find these pictures?Mind you, I suppose that if I had a camera and the opportunity to point it at some shapely woman's backside, I'd probably do it. Yes, yes, I know. I'm scum. It's true. Sigh.

A friend took this little snapshot of a chickadee getting a last bit of evening suet.Just liked the colors, particularly.

This was just...odd.Although did you know that there's a whole sub-genre of porn involving cooking and eating women? Google "Dolcett cartoon" sometime. It's beyond weird. But I will never underestimate the kinks that lodge in the folds of the human cerebrum.

One of my favorite characters is Sun Wukung, the Monkey King; here he is, from one of the talented illustrators at deviantart.Tough guy, huh?

It must be hard to sit in a hole underground with multiple megatons of nuclear devastation. It must help to have a sense of humor about it:An empty silo, one mushroom-shaped cloud, and it's Miller Time.

Just for the pretty:Now THAT's a speeding ticket:And speaking of pretty:Another in the wonderful series of images produced by Brent Diskins as part of "Diskin's Timbers Propaganda". Rose City 'Til I Die!In case you don't get this, the point is that she's wearing her PT uniform; she's supposed to be exercising, not gutsing pogie bait:One more funny:And one more just for the pretty:Looking this stuff over, I have to accept that I have a very pack-ratty sort of mind. I have no idea what binds these together, other than my peculiar tastes in pictures.

Oh, well; off to find some agates. Hope you're having a peaceful and pleasant Saturday.