Random firstliners

Mirthful 4 Comments

According to Donna, it’s an old meme. I’ve never seen it before, and in anycase I haven’t done it before, so here goes.

Step 1: Get your playlist together, put it on random, and play.
Step 2: Write down the first line from the first 20 songs that play or close to it. (I skipped those where the first line mentioned the name of the song.)
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song the lines come from.
Step 4: Cross out the songs when someone guesses correctly

(Btw – using google is cheating. Honor system, no cheating!)

It occurs to me that it’s the sort of thing one should only do with a long list of regular readers/commenters, but what the hey. I’m skipping the songs in Norwegian, btw. Perhaps I’ll do another one with just Norwegian songs later.

1. You can keep the good times, righteousness
2. Never knew I could feel like this, like I’ve never seen the sky before
3. I can’t stop this feeling
4. Girl when you hold me, how you control me
5. I met my love by the gas works wall
6. Come on, Virginia, don’t let me wait
7. When you rise in the morning sun
8. All these little rejections, how they add up quickly
9. You’re a song written by the hands of God
10. What would you think if I sang out a tune (if you also manage to guess whose cover version, I’ll be seriously impressed)
11. The blue around the morning moon, the colour of your eyes
12. I had a dream late last night, the water was running low
13. All my lazy teenage boasts are now high precision ghosts
14. I saw my love walking down the aisle
15. Happiness, it’s been no friend to me, but forever after ain’t what it’s all cracked up to be
16. You were full and fully capable, you were self-sufficient to a point
17. You can dance every dance with the guy who gives you the eye
18. I met a devil woman, she took my heart away
19. Hey, man, it’s been a while, do you remember me?
20. For a long time I was in love

*Sigh*

Mirthful

I’ve just marked two comments as “junk” that had the from-address: ads@botnet.info

Legitimate comments? Yeah. Sure.

That’s so blatant and uninventive it’s not even funny.

The links, though, were actually marginally relevant and borderline interesting. However, spam is still spam. And no, I’m not going to tell you what they were.

A daughter of Eve

Mirthful

I finally got around to seeing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe yesterday (in my defence, it opened on 26 December here), and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was absolutely lovely. As someone who loves C.S. Lewis’ seven novels about Narnia wholeheartedly and unconditionally, I have obviously been a bit worried.

First I worried about the children. Will they manage to cast someone who is young enough to be a believable Lucy and also good enough to play the difficult parts? And Peter? It’s a bit of a tall order, really. And Susan? How do you pull off that mixture of maturity and of childish and historical innocence (it was a less cynical age, after all, and Susan, though sometimes irritating, really shouldn’t be sassy)? And Edmund? Poor Edmund. Not a fun part to play, is it?

Then I saw the trailer and thought: Wow. They found them!

Then I saw the trailer again and thought: Huh? What do they think they’re making? Lord of the Rings?

So I started worrying about the soundtrack and the battle scenes, which, from the trailer, seemed to have run amock a bit. The soundtrack seemed somewhat majestic and, well, pompous. And the battle scenes seemed to be on a far grander scale than I had imagined, and involving a lot of unexpected creatures. In fact, there seemed to be a lot of Orcs. Not that there’s anything wrong with Orcs… Uhm, well, you know, obviously there is something fundamentally wrong with Orcs, but not in the sense that they shouldn’t be in movies, but they don’t belong in THIS movie. From that brief glimpse of trailer it looked a lot like the producers had been at Peter Jackson’s jumble sale to find the costumes.

However, neither the soundtrack or the battlescenes seemed out of place in the movie, and there weren’t really any Orcs. There were a lot of unusual (and butt-ugly) creatures, but none that couldn’t have been in Lewis’ mind when he wrote:

Ogres with monstrous teeth, and wolves, and bull-headed men; spirits of evil trees and poisonous plants; and other creatures whom I won’t describe because if I did the grown-ups would probably not let you read the book — Cruels and Hags and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets. Sprites, Orknies, Wooses, and Ettins.

There were echoes of LotR, but what can one expect? There are echoes of LotR in the Narina books. Or, if you like, there are echoes of the Narnia books in LotR. Lewis and Tolkien were pals, you know, and they’ve been looting (please don’t take the choice of the word “looting” to mean that I disapprove) the same mythologies for inspiration. So that was all good.

I’ve noticed some critics have talked about how the battles have been “sanitised”, presumably because of this being a Disney production, meaning that you see very little blood and that it’s therefore a more child-friendly movie than it would otherwise have been. Well, perhaps. I don’t think there was much blood. There was possibly even a little less than you might have expected to see in a real battle. But let me tell you that when two warriors in full battle dress charge each other and Warrior A drives his sword into Warrior B’s stomach, I don’t need to see blood. I know it’s not going to be Warrior B’s happiest day. If you really need to see blood, go see a splatter movie, I thought this was horrific enough. Besides, the white which is terrifying. Just as she ought to be.

So. All Good. Except the people some rows behind who were giggling (possibly at something other than the movie, but still) when Lucy and Susan are sneaking up to see what Aslan wants to go to the Stone Table for in the middle of the night. It’s not, to put it that way, the funniest movie scene I know.

More shuffling

Mirthful

Because I have nothing else to do (Ha!) I’m importing the really old blog entries from the first blog (published through blogger) which have languished in the archives since I converted to MT back in 2003. It’ll be nice to have all the entries in the same format for searching and backup purposes, besides, glancing through old entries is kinda fun. So far we have April and May 2002 (it takes a while as the only way I can figure is to add them manually as entries and alter the timestamp to reflect the time they were originally published) – which means the blog, or rather my career as a blogger, will soon be four years old. Aah, look, my baby is all grown up. Or something. Whatever. It’s too late to continue now (at least I’m getting too bleary-eyed) so I’ll stop and go do something else. Like read.

Cold

Mirthful

But, as Theresa says, probably worth it. At least the world was very pretty when I got the bus to town this morning to finally pick out a pair of new specs at the opticians (it seems I’ve gone from -1.75 and -2.5 to -2.75 and -3.5 one the right and left eye respectively over the last three years – it’s becoming a problem). The trees were all covered in frost and I got stuck on the Pooh hum lines “And hoar-frost twinkles on the trees, how very readily one sees that these are whose – but whose are these?” (read the extended entry for the rest of the hum), which would have been less of a problem if I’d remembered the rest of the hum.

At the stop by the teacher’s college a guy dressed in a bright orange turban and matching robes with a bright blue padded jacket over got on the bus. His appearance cheered me up mightily, being such a splash of colour in a rather white, grey and black world.

Voice on the stereo: Halvdan Sivertsen – H

Commenting confusion

Mirthful

I have now imported all the comments from the Little Voices blog. Unfortunately, I made a couple of stupid mistakes when importing the entries, one consequence of which is that some entries have aquired new ids and the consequence of that is that some of the comments are now tied to the wrong entry. So if something seems confusing, that’ll be why. Or it might just be the regular confusion of everyday life, of course, don’t blame me for that one… Anyhoo. Will try to fix. To start with will try to unpublish all switched comments.

Mayfly 2005

Mirthful

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Watch this space.

Lots of happiness. Not enough books. Lots of change. New (old) town. New job. New friends. New husband. New life. Eagerly anticipating the next.

(Note: I’ve edited the last “sentence” after publishing on the Mayfly site, as a better wording came to me on the bus.)

Ow

Mirthful

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

May it bring peace and love to all mankind, and lots of great books and great single malts to me.

I’ve had a good weekend in Trysil. Snowboarding was fun. We only tried a few runs before giving up, actually (being lazy, I suspect), though I managed to sprain my thumb (by catching most of my own weight on it when falling) before we were through. Not a particularly good idea, though it’s such an ignoble injury that even I find it hard to take it seriously. But it does hurt. It was my right thumb, too, and it’s amazing how many little things become frightfully diffucult when your right hand is only partly operational. Two days later it no longer hurts constantly, and I can even move it about a bit without wanting to scream, but I still can’t really grip anything with it and it still hurts whenever I tense the muscles in my hand in general, so using the mouse hurts (need to move it over to my left hand, I guess) and this typing is slightly uncomfortable.

Hence I’ll stop now.