TECHNOLOGY:
Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer?
“Iron Man” stills
Q. How many televisions do you have in your house?
Two.

BIOLOGY:
Q. Are you right-handed or left-handed?
Relentlessly right-handed.
Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
Blood, gall stones, gallbladder, bone spur (shoulder) and a baby
Q. What is the last heavy item you lifted?
An iron futon bed, fully loaded
Q. Have you ever been knocked out?
Only in the surgical sense.

BULLSHITOLOGY:
Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
Nope
Q. If you could change your name, what would you change it to?
Rain
Q. What color do you think looks best on you?
Earth colors
Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item?
Yep.

DAREOLOGY:
Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100?
Sure
Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000?
Depends on whether I needed the money and for what.
Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000?
Probably
Q. Would you pose naked in a magazine for $250,000?
*snort* That’s a safe bet, since no mag would ever want me. But no, anyway.
Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1000?
No. Gonna have to up that bet significantly and agree on the size of the bottle.
Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000?
No

DUMBOLOGY:
Q: What is in your left pocket?
Nothing
Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good movie?
Never seen it. Don’t want to see it.
Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house?
Yes.
Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower?
Sitting wouldn’t be a problem, but getting up might. Stand.
Q: How many pairs of flip flops do you own?
None, I think.

LASTOLOGY:
Q: Last person who texted you?
Nobody. Don’t do the text thing.
Q: Last person who called you?
My daughter
Q: Person you hugged?
My husband

FAVORITOLOGY:
Q: Favorite number?
13 and 42
Q: Season?
Fall, then spring. Then winter. Then, way back in the distance where you almost can’t see it, summer.
Q: Color?
Green. But any deep jewel tone.

CURRENTOLOGY:
Q: Missing someone?
Not particularly
Q: Mood?
Sleepy. Didn’t get enough last night.
Q: Listening to?
Kitchen clock ticking. Windchimes outside. Puppy yipping in his sleep
Q: Watching?
Just finished watching the Ghostfacers ep of Supernatural again. Funny stuff.
Q: Worrying about?
Either nothing much or vast questions about my right to take up oxygen.
Q: Wearing?
Jeans that are too big. Ole Miss Rebels tee that’s too big. Barefoot. A really tacky big rainbow butterfly hair clip holding my hair up. Summer is here. (See question above for feelings about summer.)

RANDOMOLOGY:
Q: First place you went this morning?
Living room to get leash and take the pup out.
Q: What can you not wait to do?
Y’know, I honestly can’t think of anything. It strikes me that that’s pretty pathetic.
Oh wait! I am looking forward to seeing the Iron Man movie.
Q: Do you smile often?
I do.
Q: Are you a friendly person?
I think I am. I mean to be. Reticent, though. Some people call me aloof, but that’s inaccurate. I don’t bite, at least.

March wasn’t quite as media-heavy as  Jan. and  Feb., partly because I’m  finally climbing out of  winter depression and partly because I’ve actually been forcing myself to get away from the computer and out of the house more, including working out at the nearby wellness center three times a week.

But… For what it’s worth, here’s the March total:

* A Mighty Heart (Angelina Jolie) - Better than I expected, to be honest. Jolie’s depiction of Marianne Pearl is subdued but utterly fearless, not hesitating to depict both the impressive and the less than admirable aspects of Pearl’s attempts to find and save her kidnapped husband. Well worth watching.

* Dead Wrong, by J.A. Jance – It probably tells you something that I read this about a month ago and have no memory of it. Hmmmm.

* Body Double, by Tess Gerritsen – The female forensic examiner discovers she has a twin sister, unfortunately by finding her shot to death outside the examiner’s house. Bummer. Pretty interesting story about how she finds out who her birth parents are/were and all that good stuff.

* In the Valley of Elah (Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron) - Okay, this is a movie that everyone needs to see. It kept me interested from beginning to end, anchored by a sense of palpable reality and most of all by a heart-wrenching performance by Tommy Lee Jones. I can’t really say anything much about it other than… it should be seen.

* The Seville Communion, by Arturo Perez-Reverte – I like this dude’s books. So sue me. In fact, one of my goals is to learn Spanish well enough to read one of his books the way it’s supposed to be read. Oh. Right. This one’s about a ‘problem solver’ sent out from the Vatican to help settle an issue involving an ancient church in Seville, a couple of murders, and some high-finance mucking up. It made me want to visit Seville. … But not in the summer.

* For Those I Loved, by Martin Gray – I can’t figure why I’d never heard of this book. If not for the ”We Recommend“ section on Perceval Press, I still wouldn’t have. This is an astonishing autobiography by a man who lived in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, worked for a while in Treblinka, fought with Polish resistance fighters and then joined the Red Army. Later, he emigrated to the U.S., met and married a Dutch woman. They had four children together and were very happy, when his entire family was killed in a sudden wildfire at their home in France. And yet he still didn’t give up living. It’s a heart-breaking but ultimately life-affirming and hopeful story. I highly recommend it.

* Dan in Real Life (Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche, Dane Cook) – It’s reached the point, these days, where I approach anything labeled comedy or (god forbid) romantic comedy with extreme trepidation. I don’t honestly think I’m losing my sense of humor. I just think that most comedies nowadays aren’t so much funny as they are stupid and mean-spirited. But that’s just my opinion. This movie, thank god, is nothing like that. It’s actually funny, with a believeable premise and no complete asshole characters. I love it. I’ve watched it twice now, and will probably watch it again. ;D

* Into the Wild (Emile Hirsch and some others) - Excellent recreation of the Jon Krakauer book, about an upper middle class young man who gives it all up to wander the country, ending up in Alaska. I recommend reading the book first, then you can relax and just enjoy the scenery and the pitch-perfect depictions of all the secondary characters in the movie.

* My Left Foot (Daniel Day-Lewis) - DDL’s first Oscar-winning role, and it’s a good one. He does the loud, blustery performance as well as any actor working right now. But Brenda Fricker as the main character’s mother made this movie. She was awesome.

* No Humans Involved, by Kelley Armstrong – Oh hush. It’s a guilty pleasure. I have to read one of these or one of the Rachel Morgan supernatural P.I. books every now and then, just to keep the old overdone fantasy tropes bubbling away. This one stars a necromancer. Fun times.

* The Road to Guantanamo – Documentary about three British men who got caught in a battle-type thing in Afghanistan and ended up being sent to Guantanamo. They had done nothing. I weep for my country.

*  The Fountain (Hugh Jackman and some other people) – Nobody needs a plot synopsis for this one, I figure. I love this movie. I love the total hippy-dippy psychedelic acid mind trip of it all. And Hugh Jackman. Dude. I must own this eventually.

* The King Must Die, by Mary Renault – Mary Renault writes the very best historical fiction based in and on ancient Greece. This one is about Theseus, of Minotaur fame, and I love how she manages to make the fantastical downright plausible. My favorite of her books is still ”The Persian Boy,“ but this one is well worth reading.

Onward into April…

Okay, not really a hideout. But I’ve been posting things pretty trustingly over at LJ for several years now, and while I don’t give a damn what anybody does with or about my posts, I’ve finally started getting a little nervous about my fiction.

My “friends list” has gotten unnervingly large, and the vast majority of the names on it I don’t even recognize. That’s… scary.

I’m not leaving LJ, and I may continue to post fiction there – short term. But I won’t be leaving any up in the long term. I’ve also started moving my old, existing, fiction to this space, along with fiction I’ve not posted anywhere before. All my old LJ-posted fiction will eventually vanish from there.

This site is not a VigOrli nor an LoTR fanfic site. It will hold some VigOrli fic and some Lord of the Rings fic, but it will also contain original fiction of all kinds. I hope you’ll enjoy some of it (and feel free to let me know your opinions, for good or bad).

Come on in. Take a chance on something different. And if you want to recommend this site to someone… maybe ask first, okay? I don’t like being paranoid, but right now I am.

Hope to see all or at least most of you here, though. And you are very very welcome here.

Rain

Well. Here I am, alone in a new place. Again. But maybe things’ll work out better here. I can hope.

I’m so tired of feeling impotent when it comes to my government. So here’s one tiny way I’ve come up with to try and let myself be heard. Please feel free to copy and paste, forward, do whatever you like with this. Also, the icon is totally for taking. No credit needed.

—–
Wednesday, March 19, is the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I won’t get into anything else about that, as we all have differing opinions. But one thing most people agree on, with the benefit of hindsight, is that the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq were a mistake.

It frustrates me that we, the average citizens, the people to whom t his country theoretically belongs, have so little say in this military action. So my challenge to us all is to make a statement on Wednesday, March 19, by flying a U.S. flag upside down.

Yes, that is an international distress signal. But if ever there has been a country in distress, whose leaders are not listening to our voices, it’s us. So here’s our chance.

Hang your flag upside down that day. Wednesday, March 19 as a symbol of the distress in our nation.

Pass this challenge on to everyone you know. Media outlets would be an excellent place. Let’s make this a grassroots thing. Use bcc when sending this onward, if you choose. We have a week, and on the internet a week is forever. Spread spread spread.

And on March 19, we the people, will have a say.

I challenge you.

Tend the fire. Pass it on.

Borrowed respectfully from pennyarcade.com because it’s just perfect.

I couldn’t resist. So sue me.
The Birthday Quiz: December 16

You are fun to be with and have a good sense of humor.� You are very ambitious and hate it when people try to bring you down.� You are logical, social and loyal.

Positive Traits: technically brilliant, innovative, creative, analytical, original
Negative Traits:emotional repression, misanthropy, irrational, cynicism, coldness

Books and movies that made the cut for February digestion. Some have mini-reviews, some don’t. Enjoy or skip: I’ll never know. ;D

* Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst and others) – Well, I saw it. So now I can say I saw it.

* Anatomy of a Murder (Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara and a ton more) – Wow. This one starts kinda slow, but before you know it, you’re fully invested in this murder trial. A granddaddy of the genre, and well worth a rental. Although the crazy way crimes were investigated back then might make you wonder how anybody ever got caught.

* The Brethren, by John� Grisham – Not bad. Standard Grisham.

* Thank You For Smoking – Not a documentary, this is the story of a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. It’s cringingly funny at times.

* Mazes and Monsters – A guilty pleasure from years ago. Anybody who’s ever gotten excited by a roll of the dice letting your magic user evaporate a Deadly Slime Mold might get some gentle, wistful enjoyment from this story about college students who get tooooo caught up in their D&D. Stars a baby big-eyed Tom Hanks, back before he was anybody.

* Stardust - I love this dippy movie, unapologetically. The seven dead brothers are totally awesome, as is Captain Shakespeare.

* Sister Theresa, by Barbara Mujica – Fascinating novel about Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, a wealthy and spoiled young woman in Avila, Spain, who goes on to become Sister Teresa of the Discalced Carmelite order. Barefoot Carmelites. After a tumultuous life of faith in the late 1500s, Theresa was beatified in 1614 and canonized in 1622.� Saint Theresa was also, later, named one of the Doctors of the Catholic Church, a rare honor. The fictionalized account of her life draws on many historical sources and is very well written. Based on the way she’s portrayed, I think I would’ve liked her.

* Interworld, by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves – A kid’s book, basically. Took me about a day to read. Nothing special.

* Off the Black (Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Trevor Morgan) – I don’t even recall what brought this movie to my attention, but I’m so glad I watched it. I truly enjoyed the off-kilter tale of an old drunk and the friendship he strikes up with a teen-ager he catches vandalizing his house. Completely unsentimental but oddly affecting. Oh, and one thing that made me want to scream: This movie has no violence, no sex, no nudity, very little talk about any of those things. And yet it’s rated R. Hello? In scanning through it again, the only thing I saw that could POSSIBLY be offensive is that one time the old guy tells the young guy to quit being a pussy. Is that enough for an R, when movies that featured blood, gore, violent death, exploding city buses, multi-car pileups and cannibalism can get a PG-13?

* The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Absolutely excellent movie. I have no idea why it didn’t draw the raves that other movies did last year. Maybe it’s because it’s slow moving. But it’s the flat-out most gorgeous movie I’ve seen since Out of Africa and Alatriste. You could just about freeze any frame and put it up for sale as fine art. Casey Affleck is totally creepy, and Brad Pitt is disturbingly heart-breaking. A terrific character study, and not a shoot-em-up at all. Maybe that’s why it sank.

* Persepolis – I couldn’t believe this actually came to a theater near me. It’s a subtitled French animated movie about a young woman’s life, growing up in Iran during 70s. It’s stylized and in black and white. It’s wonderful.

* There Will Be Blood – An inflated mess of a movie that works desperately overtime to try and cover the fact that it isn’t really about anything. There’s not a single likeable character in it, and by the time it (finally) clunked and groaned and screeched its way to the final scenes, I was hoping a Transformer or Grendel or the Balrog would explode through a wall and devour the whole distasteful mess. And people who compare it favorably to Citizen Kane have clearly not seen Citizen Kane.

* Clara Callan, by Richard B. Wright – An online friend (Hi, Jacks!) sent me this for birthday/Christmas and I’m really glad she did. It’s the story of two sisters from a small Canadian town, and their lives during the 1930s. Sounds dead boring, doesn’t it? And yet I couldn’t put it down. Excellent, excellent book.

* The Day of the Jackal – Made in the ’60s, this thriller about an attempted assassination of Charles deGaulle sorta sucks you in by surprise. I mean, you know nobody’s gonna kill deGaulle, so you know the attempt will fail before the movie even starts. That given, this movie manages to work up a totally unexpected level of suspense. Well done all around.

* Three Days of the Condor – Thanks to Turner Classic’s 31 Days of Oscar, I saw this and Day of the Jackal end to end. (Pause for a big shoutout to TCM!) I have to admit that my inital reaction to this was ‘God, I’d forgotten how gorgeous Robert Redford was, back in the day.’ But once I got that out of my system, I could settle down and enjoy yet another very well-made thriller. Director Sydney Pollack knows how to tell a story, no question about it. About the only downfall to this movie, IMO, was the total lack of chemistry between Redford and Faye Dunaway. Fortunately, it’s not a romance, and their dalliance mid-movie serves more to chug the plot along than to light up the screen. Good movie.

Other than that, did stretches today. Also wrote some.� I’m determined to crawl out of the hole I’ve been living in. Wish me luck.