Daily Blog Thingie
I'm feeling in a rambling mood, but I'll try to keep it under control.  I've been in the mood for writing (fiction) for a few days, but haven't gotten around to actually doing it.  So I'll probably take it out on this blog, when it would be better for all concerned if I'd do this quickly and actually do some writing.

So fine, be that way, maybe I'll do just that!  *He said righteously*

This is a very weird page, that I tripped over today while surfing for nothing in particular.  It's Swedish, and has nudity, so don't look if you'll be offended by either of those things.

You look yet?  Well anyway, it appears to be 9 women, with their personal info and descriptions, like a dating sort of page, but all of the shots are close ups of their naked groins.  Their minge, their bush, not to put too fine a point on it.  I have no idea why, or what, or if it's serious, but it's very weird and somewhat troubling.  I don't find it at all sexy, it's just... unsettling.

They all look relatively cute, if you can really judge by such a small portion of their anatomy.  None with big bellies or anything, at least.

I'd understand it if the pics were porno style, like gynecological poses, but they are angled to be just the opposite of that, showing nothing of any actual genitalia.  I guess Playboy reading guys would find them sexy, or young boys (same thing?), but my reaction was much the same as a friend I sent it to, who said, "wtf?"

Exactly.

And now, pointless and semi-funny humor.  These were seen on another site, but I don't remember where.  They had like 17 of them, these are the funniest (for what that's worth) of them.

Why Fishing is better than sex:

• You don't have to hide your Fishing magazines.
• Your Fishing partner doesn't get upset about people you fished with long ago.
• When you see a really good Fisher person, you don't have feel guilty about imagining the two of you Fishing together
• When dealing with a Fishing pro, you never have to wonder if they are really an undercover cop.
• Nobody expects you to Fish with the same partner for the rest of your life.

I might add something about no one really caring how long or stiff your pole is, or the necessity of keeping it elevated during the action, but that would be tasteless.

Books vs. Movies.

More specifically, movies made from books.  I recently read Silence of the Lambs, after having seen the movie probably a dozen times over the years.  It reminded me of seeing the LotR movie, after I'd read the books 3 or 4 times.

In both cases, I spent much more time just mentally cataloguing the differences between them than actually watching/reading and enjoying the material.

Silence of the Lambs, the movie, was remarkably faithful to the book.  Dozens of lines of dialogue were directly lifted from the book; many of the best ones, in fact.  The screenplay was also expertly adapted, since virtually every change in the movie was an improvement on what was in the book, and things that were glossed over in the movie were things that the book described in more detail than we really needed to know.  The description of Hannibal's room in the asylum was dumb in the book, with bars and some sort of nylon screen keeping him back from it.  I couldn't visualize it; I imagined like a giant pantyhose sort of material blocking him off.  The Shamo pool plexiglass in the movie was much more effective and logical.

I did like in the book seeing a bit of Hannibal after he escaped.  And there was some more reality in him having to disguise himself.  (He's described in a plastic surgery hospital, wearing a big nose bandage, not from surgery, just for disguise, and he's there since he won't look out of place with that on his face. It's absurd in the movie(s) that he can roam around with no disguise at all, and no one recognizes him, when he'd be on all of those America's Most Wanted shows every week, covers of every tabloid, etc.

The book had more long dialogue than I can recall reading outside of a screenplay, and it was at times hard to follow who was saying what.  It's always harder to read dialogue and follow it than it is to hear it spoken.  So the long orations Hannibal gives when talking to Clarise were often hard to grasp the full nuances or menace or intimidation of.  Things that are abundantly clear in the film, with Hopkins' surpassing performance.

However since 95% of the dialogue in the book is replicated almost exactly in the film, I found myself hearing Hopkins saying the lines, which I know more or less by heart after seeing the oh-so-memorable film so many times, and I would just hear the scene as it was in film, rather than actually going by the words on the page.

I think I have to give the film praise, since it was an interesting book but nothing all that amazing.  I wouldn't have found it very remarkable as anything more than a slightly more literate than normal horror story.  While the film is amazingly good, elevated far above the quality of most movies, and certainly above that of horror films, which are by and large dreck.

As for LotR, it's a harder comparison.  The books are so old-fashioned, with the very verbose and technical Tolkien's prose, and slow moving, stately even.  The film is very studied and paced as well, and it's a long movie, but still skips over tons of stuff from the book.  I didn't miss the Tom Armadillo stuff, he always seemed really weird in the book, in a, "What the hell is this singing guy in the funny clothing doing here?" way.  I did miss the exit from the town, and the Prancing Pony stuff.  Them buying Bill the pony and heading out past the staring townsfolk was an interesting scene.

However overall LotR was such an excellent movie, probably more enjoyable than the book.  And Silence of the Lambs is one of the best films ever, and based on a very good story.  So this isn't much of a comparison, picking two great movies from classic novels.  I'd be better off finding some awful movie from a great book, or vice versa.  Or if they both sucked it would be pot shot time at both.

One other book/movie I've read recently is rather a different note.  Cinderella, which is in my Grimms' Fairy Tales book, and is about 5 pages, like every story in it.  The book version of it is relatively similar, though Cinderella's father is just an idiot asshole in the book, standing aside while his daughter is punished and beaten and disgraced, rather than being entirely absent, as in the Disney movie.  There aren't cute singing animals to such an extent either, just birds.

An amazing amount of these old fairy tales have a challenge portion in them, and like 75% of them involve the bad character throwing some huge amount of small objects onto the ground, which the hero must then gather up by some allotted time.  The hero is then invariably saved by small animals, or ants, which he/she has befriended earlier, usually by dint of nothing more than not squashing them arbitrarily.  The small animals then labor for hours to gather all of the tiny seeds/pearls/grains of rice/millet/stones/etc, thus accomplishing an impossible task for the hero in short order.  Always the challenger throws down the objects, and leaves the area, confident in the impossibility of the task, rather than staying to see how or if it's completed.  So don't think it's just in stupid modern films where the bad guy has the good guy seemingly defeated, and rather than watching to be sure, leaves him to (narrowly escape) his horrible fate 

I guess it's a reasonable challenge, in the pre-shop vac age, but it's not exactly mandly.  I tend to think of such things more along Herculean tasks; you know, like holding up the earth, or diverting a river, or slaying a Kraken.  I can't see Hercules having to pick up every bit of a bag of flour.  It's beneath him.  (literally)  Yet like every other Grimms' tale has that in it, so maybe that was all people could think of in the Middle Ages, or they figured their clumsy, lentil-toting readership would identify.

Anyway, back to Cinderella, she has to pick up all scattered dishes of lentils like three times, and they are thrown in among the ashes in the hearth, not just on the ground.  And after her helpful birdy friends do it all three times, the step mother still won't let her go.

In the story the royal ball stretches over three days, and there's no midnight rat to coachmen curfew; Cinderella just runs off and ditches the pursing prince each time, in increasingly absurd fashion.  I mean she climbs a tree and then leaps down the other side while Prince Dumbass is looking for her on this site.  What sort of tree has sides?  It's got a trunk and limbs in a circle, how dumb is the prince to not be able to see her in it?  And she's wearing golden slippers (yes, golden, not glass), some super ball gown, hair just right, etc.  Real tree-climbing gear there.

The oddest thing is the ending, where the prince comes around with the slipper.

Now anyone who has seen the movie has no doubt noticed the stupidity of the test.  Does Cinderella have the smallest feet in the kingdom?  And is that a highly sought after trait?  Shoe size isn't exactly a finger print, surely one third of the women in the kingdom would fit into a shoe, unless her feet were just grotesquely small.

The authors of the story weren't clever enough to just make them enchanted slippers that wouldn't let anyone else fit into them, so they had to go for smaller feet, I guess.

In the story the prince comes first to Cinderella's house, and tries the shoe on both sisters.  The sisters are pretty in the story, just less so than Ella of the cinders. The first one can't fit, so her mother urges her to cut off her big toe to fit into the shoe.  She does it, and crams her blood-gushing stump into the shoe, and the prince is satisfied and takes her off on a horse.  He's not real bright, as I mentioned earlier.  He can't recognize the woman he slow danced with for hours three days in a row, and then doesn't notice that a woman he thinks is her is bleeding from an amputated toe in a golden slipper that he's trusting the fit of to identify his true love?

However as they go under some trees two doves call out:

Prithee, look back, prithee, look back
There's blood on the track.
The shoe is too small;
At home the true bride is waiting thy call.

The prince then notices that the trail is covered in blood, from her gushing foot.  Now was the shoe like a clog, and solid?  So I mean is the entire slipper totally filled with blood, and it's sloshing out the top around her ankle?  God that's gross.

So he takes her back to her house and takes the shoe away (washing it out, I hope to god) and then lets the other sister try it.  She can't fit and cuts off part of her heel!  God, that would hurt.  Besides being impossible, I mean the heel bone is there, and you'd need a bone knife to cut that off.  Anyway, sister #2 does the cutting, and then she can fit into the shoe.

The prince takes her off, no questions asked, and no examination made, until they get to the same tree and the same doves, who say the same thing.  And Prince Shiffer then notices the gushing blood from his blushing bride.  I'm no prince, but I think after the first act of self-mutilation to fit into the shoe, I'd actually watch bachelorette #2 put it on an unharmed foot, making sure it's really a nice fit, eh?

So after #2 is found out by her gushing, potentially fatal wound, he goes back and asks if there are any other women in the house.  Trusting fellow, eh?  I'm surprised #1 didn't have her stump cauterized by then and hobble back out with a couple of penciled in beauty marks and a scarf around her hair.

Then of course Cinderella eventually comes out and fits into the shoe perfectly.  Let's hope it was washed out at some point. The stepmother and sisters are furious, but Cinderella still invites them to the wedding.

As they enter the church for the wedding doves actually fly down and pluck out one eye each of the sisters!

Now I'd think that would put a bit of a pause into the service.  Doctor's attention, perhaps?  They didn't just get a scratch, they had their actual eye balls ripped from the sockets by birds.

Nope, nothing unusual, they sit through the service, no doubt having some depth perception issues, and then on the way out the same doves pluck out each sister's other eye.  Yes, right out, while everyone else walks along with them after the lovely service.  Think of that next time you notice how unrealistic some plot element in a modern tale is.

<-- Previous -- Daily Main Page -- Next -->

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.