Zooey, Tin Man.

I see another TV conflict is coming up.

Most Sunday nights I sample from the following: the cartoon block of shows (Simpson’s, Family Guy, American Dad) on Fox, ABC’s Desperate Housewives (no, I can’t stand Ty and Extreme Makeover or Grey's), (and if I'm doing well in the pools) football on NBC, Amazing Race on CBS, Planet Earth on Discover, Dexter on Showtime, plus whatever movies are on cable.

I’ll be watching the Tin Man on the Sci-Fi channel (at least the beginning - it's a mini-series - hope it plays out well). It’s gotten mixed reviews and has been mentioned as being very dark. Sounds interesting to me. Plus, Zooey's in it. I enjoy most of the parts she plays.

I’ve seen her in a couple movies and have always liked her odd, quirky characters she plays. She seems to have a “there’s no tomorrow with tons of confidence in herself” attitude about her. She reminds me of Jodie Foster's character in Stealing Home.

Her more well known appearances have been in Weeds, Elf, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and Almost Famous.

Someone who seems to agree with me and puts it much more eloquently is Ginia Belafonte of the NY Times reviewing Tin Man:

Quoting from her review:

Nearly from the first glimpse, DG, a woman-child with pigtails and a soul-squelching job as a waitress in a rural nowhere, seems like someone who would be happier almost anywhere else. She has a sketch pad and some vague artistic ambition, slouchy trousers and a voice so flat you could lay a lounge chair on it. “This town, that job, taking other people’s orders,” DG tells her parents like an emo-style Stella Dallas, “that’s just passing time.”

DG occupies the psychic center of the mini-series “Tin Man,” the Sci Fi Channel’s splashy, high-tech refashioning of “The Wizard of Oz,” which begins on Sunday. She is played by Zooey Deschanel, an actress whose expressions so vividly convey someone peculiarly out of sync with her surroundings that those words almost seem redundant.

Ms. Deschanel is a pleasure whenever she pops up; her brief tenure on “Weeds,” as an accidental kidnapper and keeper of spirit pets, only created a hunger for more of her. She has made a mark portraying young women whose oddness the world cannot quite accommodate, and “Tin Man” would be a lot less — or perhaps, more accurately, way too much — were it not for the presence of her disillusioned placidity.

By the way, if she seems like she looks familiar, her sister, Emily Deschanel is Bones on the TV show Bones.

Tin Man Trailer:



Tin Man Promo, SciFi Channel




Almost Famous, as Anita Miller.



Weeds, Showtime as Kat. (R-rated cut)


Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Trillian.

Fall and deadfall.

Watch out for the truck Gage. Oh well, fate is fate. If he was George of the Jungle it would have been a tree.


Poor Gage. Poor Winston Churchill.


Not related but by the way, Aimers came home with a little black kitten last week. Said she was watching it for a friend (Amanda) who was going to be out of town for a week.

That fabrication fell apart when my brother in law saw Amanda at work a day later. We have a new kitten.

I have to admit he is cute though dangerous. He has almost tripped me twice running between my feet while I'm walking in the house. I wish I had that energy.

Keeping with Amy's local sports team nomenclature (Cubs and Chicago Bears), he is named Teddy Bear to go along with her dog, Cubbie Bear. And ironically, the Bears are in a stretch where they are playing like Teddy Bears.

It had pretty much quit drizzling Sunday afternoon so Cubbie and I went out to the backyard to take some pictures.

Our backyard borders a field that will eventually be developed. (One good thing about the slow housing market.) The land is sold, but until houses are built, farmers lease the empty land. They rotate corn and soybeans each year. This year it was soybeans.

I took a bunch of pictures of this plant. I grew up on a farm and should probably know what it is but I don't. Help. I'm betting it is something really common and I'll feel stupid. Until I started taking pictures of them, I didn't even notice the pretty little things. They remind me of crowns or wrapped candy.

At the end of the garden I have a large burn pile. We throw all yard waste on it and usually burn it in the spring and in the fall. This summer, morning glories grew wild on it almost covering it. I am holding off burning till it freezes and kills the flowers.

With the pieces of wood and branches, along with the growth, the burn pile reminds me of the deadfall from the movie Pet Sematary. Mine is only as wide as a burn pile would be, but I could imagine it being over twenty some feet wide as in the book.

To me, that was one of the scariest parts of the book. Below, I've included text that mentioned and described the deadfall as found in google.

Excerpts and notes:

Louis experiences what he believes is a very vivid dream in which he meets Pascow, who leads him to the "sematary" and refers specifically to the "deadfall," a dangerous pile of tree limbs that form a barrier at the back of the cemetery and warns Louis to not "go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to."

Louis wakes up in bed the next morning convinced it was only a dream, until he discovers his feet and the bedsheets covered with dirt and pine needles. Louis still dismisses the dream as the product of the stress he experienced during Pascow's death, coupled with his wife's lingering anxieties about the subject of death

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Its a this point that Louis notices the deadfall on the far end of the Pet Sematary which separated these woods from the Indian woods. It occurred to Louis that this deadfall seemed too "convenient, too artful, to perfect, for the work of nature."

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deadfall - a tangle of weather whitened old branches at the back of the clearing. It's maybe twenty-five feet from side to side and about nine feet high. At either end are thick knots of underbrush that look impassable.

Tony, Weeds, Poppys.

Just curious: was I the only person with HBO that didn't watch the season/ show finale of The Sopranos last night?

I added HBO and hi-speed internet to our cable package last November because it was on special. I never saw one show of the past five seasons because of not having HBO. If I ever do watch The Sopranos, I would want to start from the beginning with either reruns or DVD's.

In fact, I'm doing that with HBO's The Wire. I'm about half-way thru season two. That is a fantastic show. Very realistic (I think?) - I'm more rural. We don't get the big city crime out here. (Irony: we are about 20 miles from Delavan, Wisconsin where 6 people were found murdered this last weekend.)

The only premium channel we had was Showtime with its excellent Weeds and Dexter - a pot selling soccer mom and a police forensic analyst serial killer. A little dark but much better than shows I've gotten sick of: Desperate Housewives, Gray's Anatomy , etc.

Below is my veggie garden. Peonys and some buttercups are blooming next to the little white fence. Its harder than hell to get the fence straight so I purposely put it in crooked to give it a whimsical look.

This wouldn't be a bad place to bury a body either, right Tony?



Buttercups with aperture mode setting. This was easy with my old film camera. I am just learning with digital. The focus seems to jump out of manual mode. Its probably something I'm doing.



Wider view of the back yard. Its a little dark but it was taken at dusk. I just like the look after mowing.



The wildflower sand box below. The poppys hopefully are starting to take off. (and I was wondering how I could tie in The Sopranos and Weeds with garden pictures.) Poppys. They just sound illegal.



Below is a peony taken in macro mode.