Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Poney

You won't understand unless you have a child ensnared in the wiles of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Trust me, though; it's freaking brilliant.

From the rather awe-inspiring pen of Amy Mebberson (whose Pocket Princesses I have raved about before at this joint...). Run, don't walk, down to your local comic store and buy her Disney Princesses, coming out in February. I would say more, but there are not enough words. She is simply a comic goddess whose Sharpie I am not worthy to uncap.

Spit Spot

By purest happenstance the Bride and I watched Saving Mister Banks last night.

To get the film itself upfront let me say that we both enjoyed it and Tom Hanks' and Emma Thompson's work as the two central characters Walt Disney and P.L. Travers despite the reality that both portrayals were, shall we say, less than full realizations of the actual people portrayed.

And that the story itself played more than a little loose with the truth. We weren't watching it as a documentary but as an entertainment and as an entertainment it succeeded.

But I'm not here to review the film. For one thing, I certainly couldn't do better on the subject than Lance Mannion already has, so if you're interested in more about the film, the actors, and the Disney-Travers imbroglio itself let me direct you to his two posts on the subject, here, and here.

For another, what I wanted to talk about is what the film made me think about the peculiar relationship between books and films - specifically children's books and children's films - and the relationship between them both and the adults whose children encounter them.

I've talked about my general approach to cinematic adaptations of beloved books when discussing the ongoing Peter Jackson adaptation of The Hobbit. I'm just not a purist about the whole business of "book versus film". Perhaps it has something to do with having tried to write both "literary" stories, plays, and screenplays. They're very different, and the sorts of things that work well on the printed page often fail disastrously on a stage or a screen. Perhaps its just that there are very few books I'm "passionate" about to the point of being seriously arsed if someone changes bits and pieces of them to make a flick out of them.

Whatever the reason I just don't have much trouble with a screenwriter, or director, or playwright, making changes - even big changes - in a book or story to adapt it for the screen or stage.

But I do look at the results this way.

Making those changes make the resulting play, or film, a different work, and sometimes a very different work.

So the film version of The Hobbit isn't "The Hobbit", a story written by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's a film by Peter Jackson that contains many likenesses and ideas from the Tolkien story, but it's not the same story. It's "based" on the story. It may have a few, or many, critical differences. You can be pleased, or disappointed, by characters or scenes or dialogue or storylines added or dropped (get me going some time on the whole Disappearing-Faramir-Eowyn-Romance business from the Jackson Return of the King segment of his Lord of the Rings cycle) and your love or loathing for the film adaptation may well be affected by that pleasure or disappointment.

But it seems foolish to me for the reader or viewer to be incensed by the changes existing. It's a film, it's not the book. It's going to be different. You can like or loathe the sort of changes, but not that there ARE differences. Difference is as certain to follow a film adaptation of a book as the night the day and railing at them is cursing the darkness - and the candle for not being the sun - instead of appreciating the candle for what it is.

Now.

That said, I can understand an author being arsed enough to forbid giving permission for her or his work to be adapted for the screen, in that there WILL be those changes. The author has only two choices after selling the rights; to be in charge of overseeing those changes (as, for instance, J.K. Rowling is said to have been with the Harry Potter series), or to be so un-wedded to their work as to be unconcerned how it is changed and how it affects their written work.

Because there's a very great danger that the film version, being louder and brighter and more kinetic than the written version, will become the work itself, the commentary will become the canon, and copy will eclipse the original in the minds and hearts of the viewers.

That happened to my own spawn with the film version of Cressida Cowell's How To Train Your Dragon.

They luuuurvvvved the movie. Loved it, loved it, loved it. They watched the much-lesser television series with drooling enchantment and dragged me off to see the second installment of the film at the movie house; fortunately I enjoyed both films well enough to find them tolerable and in places genuinely enjoyable. But something in me prickled at the thought of leaving the porch-monkeys there.

Being a bookish sort of daddy I thought that we should go to the well, so I picked up a copy of one of Cowell's "Dragon" books (it was the fourth in the series, How To Cheat A Dragon's Curse, if I recall correctly) and announced that this was the next in the "Bedtime Story" series.

[Let me insert here that the Small One loves to be read to at bedtime. She reads well enough one her own and could read the sort of young adult/middle reader/"chapter books" we choose. It's not the stories, it's the act of reading; the selection of the book, the cuddling together on the grownups' bed, the reminder of where we left off the evening before...and then the performance art of reading the story, with Daddy acting out the voices of the characters and Little Missy asking all sorts of pointless questions that Daddy will invariably answer with the caustic reply "Why don't we read the story and find out?" applied over the rim of his reading glasses. It's a sort of performance art, and Missy loves it well beyond the value of the stories themselves, and I have to admit I enjoy it, too.]

The result?

Disaster.

"Ewww! I hate this book!" "Its sooooo boring!" "I hate that Toothless!" (this was The Boy, who never really got past the fact that in the book his beloved film version giant-black-cat-like dragon was a petulent little serpent about the size of a fox terrier)

We never got past page fifty or so; the kiddos just flat-out refused. For them the film version was the "real" story, the canon; the genuine, original story was for them a sort of poor reworking of what they'd seen on the screen.

Whatever Cressida Cowell got from selling the rights to her story, what she didn't get was the affection of my kids for it but the complete opposite; they now consider her work an inferior version of the film.

After seeing Saving Mister Banks the first thing I did was go to the computer and reserve a copy of Mary Poppins, She Wrote, Valerie Larson's biography of Travers...and the original Mary Poppins.

Because, you see, I've never read the book.

The only "Mary Poppins" I know is Julie Andrews, singing and dancing cheerfully through the primary-colored Disney version of the story. Mannion has read the Travers book and loathes it, but I'm not sure whether my taste will run with his. But now I'm curious to find out what Travers was protecting.

Because she was protecting it, and not from her fantastic fears or her daddy-issues, but from what it has become since 1964; a piece of incunabula, something more spoken of than read, the lost source of what became the great river of Disney-Poppins merchandising. From the coating of sentimentality that the Magic Kingdom lays over everything like sweet venom. From Julie Andrews sunnily playing the character Travers wrote like this:

"What did I say?" said Mary Poppins in that cold, clear voice that was always a Warning.

That isn't - as Hanks' Disney claims in the film - "letting the story finish itself". That's a whole different person in a whole 'nother story. And I suspect that Travers knew, complex soul that she was, that now that she'd sold her soul for 5% of the gross that she was going to have a very, very difficult time living with that.

Friday Bad Cartoon Trivia Bomb

So here's what happened.

I billed something like 59 hours this week.

That's billed. God knows how many hours I actually worked.

This was a hell-week, and finally Friday arrived, and I was able to get back to the shop, drop off my truck, and punch off the clock. Opened up the corporate timesheet program and started knob-dicking in my hours.

(Knob-dicking? Never heard that before? For some reason that was the term we used in the field artillery to describe typing entries into the battery fire control computer system. Knob-dicking. I have no idea.)

As you can imagine, I had a LOT of knob-dicking. Took me probably half an hour to knock all my time into the timesheet application. I was on my last line or two when...

The fucker locked up on me.

Now I'm a total devotee of the "save early/save often" school of computing. But it was late, I was in a hurry, so I didn't.

Yep. The fucker ate my fucking timesheet.

So - punctuated with a LOT of creative profanity - I re-created the vanished timesheet, and as I did for some reason I took breaks thinking about some of the bad cartoons I watched as a kid.

I was a kid in the Sixties and early Seventies, so there was a lot to go to, there. Underdog. Speed Racer. Whacky Races.

Not that there wasn't some classic comedy; you had Rocky and Bullwinkle, the old Bugs Bunny cartoons (though I had to get to adulthood before I got to see some of the really out-there stuff like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips...).

But it got me thinking; it's kinda sad, how much useless information I know about those old Sixties and early Seventies cartoons.

And what's the use, if I don't put it to some use?

So here's your Friday Bad Cartoon Trivia Bomb.

No fair using Google unless you're REALLY stumped.

1. When Underdog says "the secret compartment of my ring I fill..." what's he got in there?

2. What sort of container does Henry Cabot Henhouse III drink his Super Sauce out of?

3. Why does Speed Racer wear a "G" on his shirt?

4. In the anime series imported to the U.S. as "Star Blazers", the spaceship "Argo" was originally the...

5. What kind of animal did George of the Jungle think his elephant pal was? (Bonus point - what was his pal's name?)

6. What was Jonny Quest's dad's first name?

7. What was the name of the explosive compound that Bullwinkle hid inside a banana? Why was it so awesome?

8. What was the actual title of the original cartoon that has recently been remade as "Mister Peabody and Sherman"?

9. Speaking of Mister Peabody, what did he call his time machine, and why?

10. What was the name of the character that Dick Dastardly and Muttley of "Whacky Races" were always chasing in the show they were later spun-off in? (Bonus point - what was the name of the spin off?)

Have fun.

I've almost got that goddamn timesheet fixed.

A'maelamin*, get me rewrite!

Came across a - to me, anyway - fascinating little piece of literary trivia over at Mannion's site today the sheds some rather different light on the whole issue of J.R.R. Tolkien's work and the Peter Jackson adaptations that I've been sorta-reviewing here (for Part 1 of The Hobbit) and here (for Part 2).

If you remember, The Boy and I pretty throughly enjoyed Jackson's first installment; good Middle-Earth thud and blunder and some clever character development, in particular Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins.

The second film, however, seemed to go off-track quite a bit more, especially in the roaring under-the-Mountain action sequence at the end and, as I observed particularly, in Jackson's insistence in making the Ring the Ring from Lord of the Rings instead of, as I saw it, a pretty gimmick for Bilbo to sneak around and trick others. Regarding that I said:

"I see Bilbo as Ringbearer as completely different. He's a bit of a wideboy, indeed, to him the Ring is nothing more than a nifty gimmick he uses to turn invisible to steal stuff. It's a burglar's tool to him, and he uses it as nothing more than a tool.

He spends the years between The Hobbit and the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring using it to duck local busybodies and prank his neighbors.

That's how he manages to stay free of the corruption of the Ring; he treats it like a shiny gold lockpick.

He's not a hero, not hungry for power. He's a retired wideboy, a former-burglar in slippers with his pipe, and his comfort, and his gold gimmick to play tricks and outdeal people. A tragic hero? A Boromir? An Isildur?

Not our Bilbo."

Hmmm.

Well, as if to prove that no matter what we think we know we never know as much as we think we know, Mannion's post has a bit of incunabula that suggests that Tolkien himself was a little more like Peter Jackson that I knew. He cites Corey Olsen's work Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (which I now absoultely HAVE to read...) as showing that the old professor himself ended up making the Ring more like the Ring from Lord of the Rings and, in the process, Gollum more like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, as well.

I apologize for quoting so extensively from Mannion's work, but this entire bit is pretty important to get the sense of Mannion's argument. The emphasis in bold in the following, however, is mine:

"In the original version of The Hobbit Tolkien published 1937, Bilbo doesn’t steal the ring from Gollum or trick him out of it. According to Corey Olsen, in Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Gollum gives it to him as the prize for winning the game of riddles. And it is a prize. Tolkien himself didn’t know the ring the Ring because he didn’t know yet what he was going to do with it when he got down to writing the story that became The Lord of the Rings.

When Tolkien set down to write The Lord of the Rings as a sequel to The Hobbit...(h)e wanted...some link that he could establish between the story of The Hobbit and the later story, some seed that he could take from The Hobbit and grow into a new story.

The link he decided on was Bilbo’s magic ring, but in the process of developing the story of The Lord of the Rings, he decided that Bilbo’s ring would be much more than just a very useful invisibility ring. That change in the nature of the ring did not conflict with all of The Hobbit** but it did require a significant reconsideration of the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter, and of the character of Gollum in particular.

When Tolkien sent his publisher some corrections to the text of The Hobbit in 1950, therefore, he made some very important changes to his original depiction of Gollum, making him much more like the [wicked and miserable] Gollum that we read about in The Fellowship of the Ring and finally meet in The Two Towers.

Thus, though the story of Bilbo and Gollum’s meeting was published twenty years before The Fellowship of the Ring, I think it is fair to say that the Gollum in The Hobbit, as it now stands, is actually based on the Gollum of The Lord of the Rings, and not the other way around."

Howboutthat?

**[Note: I'd argue that while changing the ring from a shiny gimmick to the Great Ring of Power doesn't really change the Tolkien Hobbit it does change the Jackson Hobbit due to the relative importance to the whole Necromancer storyline in the latter.

In the original the Necromancer is a very shadowy figure that primarily functions as a way to get Gandalf out of the story so that Thorin & Co. can get captured first by the spiders of Mirkwood and then by the sylvan elves.

The film version makes the Necromancer the Phantom Sauron Menace and an important plot point, so you can't really have the One Ring being the One Ring and not introduce that to the story of the Hobbit. You can argue that as such it distorts the story - in fact, you can argue that it distorts the story past the ability of the original to sustain the distortion - but you can't really argue that its not appropriate to make the change...]

So perhaps Jackson's interpretation isn't quite as wrongheaded as it seems to me; Tolkien himself retconned the original meeting between his two characters, the hero and the villain (or perhaps the tragic victim, depending on how you see ol' Slinker/Stinker...), to make his older story hew closer to his larger work.

At the very least it makes me willing to think a little harder about all of that.

Now.

The whole giant-dissolving-molten-gold-dwarf-statue bit?

THAT still sucked ass.

*[A'maelamin: Elvish for "beloved"; in other words, "Darlin' get me rewrite!"]

There and Back Again, Again

Last year I - well, "reviewed", I suppose, is the right term - the first Peter Jackson installment of The Hobbit.

If you recall from that (and you probably don't; I think that post has been viewed something like eight times total...) I rather liked Jackson's version, noting that the one question I had was how he was handling the overall "tone" of the story. Here's what I said then:

"The one thing that did irk me a bit (as a writer, tho, rather than a parent) is that I don't think that Peter Jackson really has a handle on what "tone" he wants to set for this series.

Lord of the Rings is Middle Earth as drawn by Victor Hugo; stern, tragic, monumental - and Jackson got that perfectly; his flicks are ol' Prof. Tolkien's "yea, verily" language in film.

But The Hobbit is Middle Earth as drawn by A.A. Milne with a touch of Georges Feydeau; confiding, jolly, romping, and a trifle twee - a children's book written by an Oxford don in the arch style of the kid's books of his day.

They're very different."

With the second installment The Desolation of Smaug Jackson clearly thumps down on the "yea, verily" side of the question. There's no gray here; this is not The Hobbit. This is The Phantom Nazgul Menace, the prequel to the Lord of the Rings.

Now I'm not entirely opposed to that, OK?

I'm not some sort of Tolkien purist and I can enjoy these films as films, as one man's vision of Middle Earth, without feeling the need to bitch about every departure from the Canon. Because the Canon itself is far from perfect.

Lance Mannion - who wrote a fine review of this film - sums up some of the issues with The-Hobbit-as-written:

"The Hobbit was written for children but to be read by grownups who believe children need to be and want to be protected from life’s harsher realities.

The narrator’s jolly, confiding, chummy tone is meant to fool adults listening to themselves as they read out loud at bedtime that the story they’re telling won’t give the kids nightmares. They hear The Hobbit as a merry little fairy tale about a funny character with pointed ears, furry feet, and a pot-belly who goes on a treasure hunt and has some comical adventures along the way before coming home, safe and sound and rich, to live happily ever after in his snug little house in the ground in that cheerful and protected place with the comfortingly bucolic name the Shire and name that insists this is a place where nothing scary ever happens.

Children listening aren’t fooled. They know better.

The Hobbit is about what Terry Pratchett says all the old stories are about, sooner or later.

It’s about blood."

And y'know what?

That's fine. It's one artist's interpretation of another, and I can work with that. I can enjoy "Peter Jackson's The Hobbit" alongside J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. One is different from the other, but much as I enjoy Tolkien's work it's not without flaw (get me going on the whole pointlessness-of-the-entire-Tom-Bombadil-episode-in-The-Fellowship sometime...) or without the possibility of improvement by others' hands.

And while I was initially not particularly pleased with Jackson's treatment of the entire captive-of-the-Sylvan-elves segment and the inclusion of the character of Legolas in a story that seems well-off without him, Mannion makes some good points about that as not at all a bad emendation. I'll reserve judgement on that bit, then, until the final installment.

However.

A couple of Jackson's choices seemed a trifle ripe to me; several minor and one that seems to me to be a very large misunderstanding of both the story and its main character that, in turn, does significant damage to the story and Jackson's telling of it.

First, the small stuff:

Evangeline Lilly's Tauriel character and her budding romance with Aiden Turner's Kíli. Call me a cynic on this one. Lilly and Turner both do adequate work with their characters in this film, but unless Jackson plans to simply rewrite the casualty list from the Battle of Five Armies we already know where this one is heading; both these two might as well be showing their pictures of each other around to their pals in their respective squads, "Tauriel" being the Sylvan Elvish and "Kíli" the Dwarvish for "deadmeat".

Call me a curmudgeon, too. It kinda irks me that after the Eowyn-Faramir romance, one of my favorite bits of byplay from the Lord of the Rings, got cut out of Jackson's version he manufactures this hot-hot-hot-elf-on-dwarf romance out of whole cloth knowing that it's gonna end about as badly as any romance can.

The entire sequence between Smaug and Bilbo (and then Thorin & Co.) in Erebor. In the original Bilbo's conversations with Smaug are one of the better pieces of writing that Tolkien ever did, from Bilbo's slippery verbal fencing with the great wyrm to his discovery of the weakness in Smaug's armor (and subsequent role in the dragon's fall...) to the not-laughing-at-live-dragons as Bilbo dashes back up the secret passage. I was anticipating a terrific, ominous, creepy scene complete with the verbal talents of Martin Freeman's Bilbo and Benedict Cumberbatch's Smaug while the delightfully-scary CGI dragon looms over Bilbo and us.

Well, what I got was, frankly, a fucking mess.

Mannion had the same issue I had with the Smaug character. Instead of the dangerously cunning serpent - all the more dangerous for holding that immense power in check as he riddles with Bilbo - we got a standard-issue D&D dragon complete with standard-issue voice. The dangerously cunning serpent is reduced to a thug.

Meh.

But worse yet was the completely unnecessary extended chase-scene between the dragon and Thorin & Co that followed. That was a complete fucking clusterfuck, a Warner-Brothers-cartoon level piece of idiotic slapstick and action-movie thud-and-blunder culminating in perhaps the most moron-grade "special effect" I've ever seen - the dissolving-molten-gold-giant-dwarf-statue thing.

From beginning to end that entire bit was a disaster.

First, because as a sequence it was loud, incoherent, and useless. And, second, because it overwhelmed and undercut the earlier Bilbo-vs-Smaug scenes, poorly conceived as they were.

Bad, bad piece of filming; one of the worst I've seen from Jackson yet.

As for the remainder of the changes, well, like I said; I'm fine with the notion that this isn't "The Hobbit" but Peter Jackson's take on the original work. I wasn't pleased with what he did with the Beorn sequence, or the fight against the spiders in Mirkwood, but his version wasn't entirely discreditable to my mind and I can live with what he filmed. I would have done things a little differently, but I could tolerate his vision.

Same-same the orc-fight during the barrel escape from the Elvenking's halls; not what I would have done with the scene but not entirely unworkable.

But.

This episode of the film series introduces one theme that, I thought, was a complete misunderstanding of the entire Hobbit-LotR cycle and a big, big, mistake.

That's how Jackson treats Bilbo's relationship to The Ring.

Now this is not a universal opinion. For example, it seems from his review that Mannion actually likes Jackson's version a trifle better:

"We know Bilbo kept the ring. What we maybe didn't know or maybe only suspected or knew in our hearts but didn't want to believe is that Bilbo didn't make a mistake because he didn't know better. Jackson is showing us that Bilbo knew and kept the ring anyway.

Right away after he finds it in An Unexpected Journey, Bilbo senses there's something odd and disturbing about the ring. In The Desolation of Smaug it's dawning on him he needs to get rid of it. Since we already know he's not going to, we know that what's ahead in There and Back Again is Bilbo's moral failure. The hero-hobbit is going to fail to resist the temptation the hero-king Isildur failed to resist, the temptation the hero Boromir will fail to resist, the temptation Aragorn can only resist by letting Frodo continue to suffer on his and everyone else's behalf. With what he's doing with Bilbo, Jackson's effectively gone back in time to set up the need for the Fellowship and the need for its being Frodo who carries the ring.

This is what really makes The Desolation of Smaug more than a bridge between An Unexpected Journey and There and Back Again. It's the chapter in which the plot of The Lord of the Rings really gets underway."

But that's where Mannion and I disagree and what I see as Jackson's biggest screwup. I don't see that Bilbo keeps the ring because he's a hero, because (as Mannion says) the adventuresome Tookish side of him is coming out, and he's drawn to the sense of Power and Danger he feels from it.

I think he keeps the ring because he doesn't feel it.

It's the shrewd, hardheaded Took in him, the guy who finds that he thoroughly enjoys getting the better of other hobbits (and dwarves, elves, and dragons, come to that) by trickery.

Frodo as Ringbearer is Christ-with-his-cross; I agree - he is as Mannion describes him, a saint and martyr. He feels the power and dread of the Ring intensely and is ground down by it as he's drawn into it.

But I see Bilbo as Ringbearer as completely different. He's a bit of a wideboy, indeed, to him the Ring is nothing more than a nifty gimmick he uses to turn invisible to steal stuff. It's a burglar's tool to him, and he uses it as nothing more than a tool.

He spends the years between The Hobbit and the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring using it to duck local busybodies and prank his neighbors.

That's how he manages to stay free of the corruption of the Ring; he treats it like a shiny gold lockpick.

He's not a hero, not hungry for power. He's a retired wideboy, a former-burglar in slippers with his pipe, and his comfort, and his gold gimmick to play tricks and outdeal people. A tragic hero? A Boromir? An Isildur?

Not our Bilbo.

I understand why Jackson gives Bilbo a Frodo-esque frisson of horror in his handling of the Ring, why he shows us the Lidless Eye (And, incidentally, why he makes Smaug a sort of super-orc, a minion of the Dark Lord in this film, instead of just a big ol' dragon greedy for loot and furious with competition); he's using the theme of the One Ring to make The Hobbit into a genuine prequel to his LotR films.

But to my mind that diminishes The Hobbit.

And that's too bad. The Hobbit is a genuinely great story in its own right; a dark and bloody tale of adventure and war, of heroism and cowardice, of high intentions and low cunning, of vaunting ambitions and blind groping around in the dark.

I want Jackson to make that book into a movie; I want him to respect the story for its own worth, to do it justice on its own terms.

But by making the Ring in The Hobbit into what it will become in The Lord of the Rings, into the Great Matter that is the center of the greater story, he makes what is on its own a damn good little story smaller and lesser; in my opinion in this Jackson shows a lack of understanding, and lack of respect, for his own source material.

And that's a damn shame.

Squirtle Unchained

The grandparents are here this weekend, so it's been all socializing and entertaining and doing things that will produce grandchild adorability to entrance grandparents. So you can imagine how little of "everything else" I'm getting done.

One thing that did occur to me while I was doing all this kid-and-grandparents stuff.

I really hate the hell out of Pokémon.

You're familiar with this kid thing, right? It's basically a card-combat game that has franchised out into movies and television. There's about a gajillion versions of Pokémon crap; cards, books, movies, and a television show. The Boy is a semi-regular Pokémon consumer. He "plays" the card game tho he cheats like a goddamn investment banker (he just ignores rules he doesn't like) and he watches the movies and the television show.

It's not the incoherent "plot" or the ridiculous characters that get me about this silly thing; it's the entire premise.

Which is about enslaving fictional animals and forcing them to fight each other.

Sound nasty? That's because it is.

I've mentioned this to the Boy who agrees, shrugs his shoulders, and goes off to watch another episode. He gets that this is a goofy Japanese anime' series and geez, pop, quit being such a derp.

But the whole Pokémon macguffin drives me kinda nuts.

The premise, if you've never encountered it, is simple, as the Wiki entry says:

"...a Trainer that encounters a wild Pokémon is able to capture that Pokémon by throwing a specially designed, mass-producible spherical tool called a Poké Ball at it. If the Pokémon is unable to escape the confines of the Poké Ball, it is officially considered to be under the ownership of that Trainer. Afterwards, it will obey whatever its new master commands, unless the Trainer demonstrates such a lack of experience that the Pokémon would rather act on its own accord."

And what these mooks command is that these critters fight each other.

So this is basically Spartacus only with freakish little cartoon monsters. To make it a little more palatable the little buggers don't fight to the death; they are "knocked out" - by getting blasted with lightning or fried with fire. Tell me that you get your ass zapped by a Pikachu lightning bolt and see how "knocked out" you feel.

And don't get me started on Pikachu, the Vidkun Quisling of the Pokémon universe. He pals around with the TV series hero kid and helps him zap and beatdown the various people and critters he meets. He's a Judas Goat, betraying and helping his buddy Ash enslave new gladiators.

The entire notion squicks me out.

I won't put the thing off-limits, but I do try and make the point that the central idea of Pokémon is based on a notion that civilized people pretty much tossed into the trash heap of history hundreds of years ago.

He nods and smiles and ignores me completely.

I still want to think that there's some alternative Pokémon universe where Squirtle gives Ash the finger, kicks Pikachu's little rat ass and stomps off down the road vowing to fight for his own Pokédamned reasons or never again.

Friday Jukebox: Gangnam Style, Brony! Edition

Two of the obsessions seizing various crewpersons in the Fire Direction Center:

Techno music (that would be me), and ponies (that would be Little Miss)...

Enjoy.

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.

There and Back Again in One Night

Well, last night's The Hobbit was a success.

The Boy enjoyed the film overall and was very brave; it's hard not to be a little scared when you're not really sure that Baltimore Woods might not be full of vicious wargs, but he brought his stuffed friend Leo the Lion to hug and covered his ears during the loudest and scariest parts and so did quite well.

Although the film is long it doesn't drag once you've got past the opening scenes, and the story moves right along from one bit of action to another. The party of dwarves led by Thorin is sturdy, the goblins/orcs are reliably nasty sword-fodder, and the principals acquit themselves well, notably Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Martin Freeman as Bilbo, and Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield.

Going in I couldn't help by wonder how Peter Jackson was going to manage to get a three hour film out of nothing more than the first third of a 300-page "young adult" novel.

Well, you do it by dragging in bits and pieces from the author's other works, including the appendices of his magnum opus as well as posthumous publications such as the Silmarillion.

I was frankly baffled by the appearance of Azog the Defiler, having completely forgotten the "War of Dwarves and Orcs" from the appendix of Lord of the Rings. No matter - he was a good, frightening "bad guy".

I do want to stop and give a deep nod of respect to Cate Blanchett, who manages to continue to provide her character with true gravitas and magic.

I never "got" Galadriel from the Tolkien stories. She seemed to be a nice Elvish lady and not the wonderous creature that dazzled the other characters. Blanchett's Galadriel, though, convinces you that she really is the ancient and luminous being that Tolkien wanted to portray.

Bravo, Cate.

The one thing that did irk me a bit (as a writer, tho, rather than a parent) is that I don't think that Peter Jackson really has a handle on what "tone" he wants to set for this series.

Lord of the Rings is Middle Earth as drawn by Victor Hugo; stern, tragic, monumental - and Jackson got that perfectly; his flicks are ol' Prof. Tolkien's "yea, verily" language in film.

But The Hobbit is Middle Earth as drawn by A.A. Milne with a touch of Georges Feydeau; confiding, jolly, romping, and a trifle twee - a children's book written by an Oxford don in the arch style of the kid's books of his day.

They're very different.

And a good example of this are the differences in how each story draws its bad guys.

In LOTR the forces of Evil are genuinely Evil; they're dangerous and frightening and they'll kill you if they can. And they do - several of the important Good characters are killed or badly injured through the course of the story.

In fact, that's a huge theme of Tolkien's story; that sometimes in defeating Evil you suffer the loss of the very things you're fighting for. Frodo never recovers from the burden of the One Ring and his wounds at Weathertop. While he returns to the Shire he cannot remain. Through his suffering and pain he has lost the innocence and joy of the place he loves forever.

Pretty much all the goblins in the Hobbit are comedy bad guys, the the three trolls (Bert 'Uggins? Really?) are an outright joke. They don't really scare you. And while there are deaths - several of the dwarves including Thorin are killed in the Battle of Five Armies that ends the story - the overall tone is a jolly adventure. No deep sorrows are engrained, no hopeless losses endured.

This same pattern follows with all the other character types. Hobbit dwarves owe more to Snow White than to the Kalavala or the Norse sagas; they're a more than a bit roly-poly and cheerful compared to the grim axes of the LOTR dwarves. Hobbit elves are noble and graceful but can get drunk and foolish or cruel, a far reach from the austere, elegantly noble creatures of LOTR.

Jackson tried to reproduce the kid-lit tone of The Hobbit with stuff like the slapstick Radagast bits, the trolls, and the Goblin King's banter...but I think he had a hard time pulling his head out of the Grand Epic mode. It made the film uneven, veering from goofiness to gravity and back. Hopefully he finds a more steady approach to the next installment.

Mind you; he did do himself and everyone else a HUGE favor cutting the goblin's "Fourteen birds in five fir trees" song from the final fight at the end.

Now songs and poems are all through Tolkien's works, and The Hobbit is no exception. And generally the film did a fairly good job handling the singalongs as part of the story and not a sort of musical-comedy full stop. But had Azog and Company burst into song it'd have immediately turned the whole enterprise into Bored of the Rings and, while I'd have laughed my ass - getting slightly numb after 170 minutes of movie - off, I think that might not have been Jackson's intent at all.

So we emerged, satisfied and hungry for a late-night snack before bed. The Boy hugged his little stuffed friend, engulfed his french fries, brushed his teeth and tumbled into his bunk full to overflowing with even more stuffed buddies. I promised to "check on him" in a moment or three.

And when I returned to his darkened room he was unquietly asleep, his head moving and eyes darting under their closed lids, surely journeying with Bilbo and his party over the high peaks of the Misty Mountains.

I stroked his hair and spoke quiet nonsense until his movements stilled and his breathing steadied.

And kissed his head. And went to sleep.

Pump, 4M, Glass, 1pr.

Actually, I spent the evening with the family last night and DID find something that inspired me to blog about.

It's completely trivial and kid-centered, so if you're looking for more ire on the subject of private weaponry, prepare to be disappointed.

Anyway, the Girl is going though something of a Princess Stage.

It's not horribly awfully mawkish in the way I feared it might be, with her demanding to dress up in princess garb 24/7; yes, she loves all things sparkly and pretty and cute but retains an underlying snark about it all which saves us from disappearing underneath the quicksands of Terminally Cutesy. But, still - for the Girl, Princesses Über Alles.

So the other night when we came across the cable broadcast of the original 1950 Disney Cinderella we HAD to watch.

(The Boy, for all that he pretends to mock these princessy puff-pieces, watched - though he was able to throw in the occasional smartass comment when the whole macguffin got too ridiculous. The Cinderella royals really believed there was only one girl with size four feet in the whole damn kingdom? Riiiiight.)

The show actually entertained me, too, since it has been years since I actually watched it. We have all sorts of Disney Princess storybooks and picture-books and even the odd princess doll around the Fire Direction Center (though the ladies tend to shed their clothes rather quickly before ending up in the Tub Toy bin; along with that tramp Barbie I'm beginning to suspect that the Disney royals are a trifle naughty) but not the movie. So my recollection of the actual ur-Cindy was pretty vague, and the cartoon was kind of a surprise on several levels.

The first thing I had forgotten is how little Cinderella actually occupies the screen.

The damn flick should really be called "Animals in Clothes", since probably half the run time or more is taken up with the adventures of Cindy's animal pals, the mice and songbirds that she befriends and seems to have had time to sew teensy little shirts, hats, and shoes for.

Where she finds time or materials to do this heaven only knows, since she's portrayed as the overworked and impoverished slavey of her wretched stepfamily, but that's the kidVid biz for ya.

I found these animal antics rather flat but, then, I was raised on the old Warner's cartoons, where cat-versus-mouse or rabbit-versus-hound had a real nasty edge to the humor. I tend to like my anthropomorphic critters with a bit more bite to them. Sorry, Jacques. Sorry, Gus. Just sayin'.

Between them Cindy and Prince Charming got less on-screen business than the comic Grand Duke, or the comic animals, or the comic King; it was as if ol' Walt knew that his audience didn't care about the lovey-dovey stuff as much as having a bit of a larf. Or knew that his prince and princess were pretty...and boring...so he stuffed the story with everything else under the sun. But it certainly didn't make our heroine any more compelling, and that's even without all the sobbing.

Anyway.

The other bit I didn't recall was just how delightfully eeeeeevil stepmommy-dearest Lady Tremaine is.

Even the Disney Wiki mentions this at length, so, clearly, it's not just me. Lady T is a terrific villain in the classic melodramatic sense, in that she hurts and twists our heroine for no better reason than her own personal enjoyment. She's a colossal bee-yotch and - since Cindy is a bit of a drip and not really much of a character - her pure evil is about 85% of why you root for Cindy; because she's NOT a bitch like her stepmother.

The "ugly sisters" are nasty and spiteful, too, but no more. They're just cat-scratches, irritations, naethings. Cindy and the viewer can just ignore them.

Lady T is a deadly steel dagger hidden inside a silken sheath and never lets you forget it, and she never lets her stepdaughter forget it, either.

What I had also completely forgotten was the terrific voice work of the 1950 Lady T, Eleanor Audley. She's perfect and makes the original Evil Stepmother work on vocal strength alone; cold, controlled and controlling, but with a sort of frightful majesty that makes you afraid of her even when you know she's armed with nothing more dangerous than a mean backhand.

She's an unusual Disney baddie, too; she's got no magic, no powers, nothing but an iron will and a consuming, implacable selfishness. She's not even really "ugly" in the Cruella de Ville/Malificent tradition; she's not humpbacked or bug-eyed or snaggle-toothed. Her skin isn't green, she doesn't turn into anything nastier than a scary relative, and she can't command lethal huntsmen or flying monkeys.

Yeah, she's got that hook-nosed aristo face, but if you put her in a slinky drop-front black satin gown and quirked those lips into a sultry smile she'd be a sort of purple-gray-haired Step-MILF, a bit of grown-up sexytime for the fella that likes his ladies slim, arrogant, and evil.

Nope, she's frightening because she's just a regular human woman; her power comes from her pure malevolence, from her lambent hatred of her lovely stepdaughter.

She's the animated female Khan Noonien Singh; "From hell's heart I stab at thee!".

She's the Mother from Hell, every boyfriend's worst nightmare.

Can you imagine her as Charming's mother-in-law? Brrrr. I'll bet getting the whole family together for Christmas dinner at the Tremaines was a fucking nightmare.

I mean, the woman is a tartar. Even after she's lost the game, after it's all up, after her daughters' ginormous feet have defied every attempt to shoehorn the glass slipper, Lady T is by God going to screw over her stepkid or know the reason why. She trips the page and breaks the slipper, and it's not her fault she hasn't foreseen that Cindy still has crystal loafer #2. She's still in there swinging, horrible woman that she is, and I felt a certain affection for her because of it.

She's a wonderfully awful character and I have this mental picture of her post-defeat, lounging at the edge of the swimming pool in the expensive tropic hideaway she's fled to escape royal vengeance, sipping something with a paper umbrella in it as though she owns the place.

The way she arches that long predatory body and eyes the cabana boy makes him hunch over his groin protectively. And all the while her vulpine smile bodes very ill for the next encounter with that ungrateful stepchild of hers.

She's defeated, not beaten, and the loathing she feels for the entitled little bitch will ensure that her brain is still racing, still plotting a dire fate for the Happy Couple long after they've "moved on".

Lady T doesn't do "moving on". Fuck that shit. Lady T does "Revenge is a dish best served cold."

Good stuff.

The kids liked it, too.

Well, tonight the Boy and I are off to see what Peter Jackson makes of J.R.R. Tolkien's children's tale. I daresay I may have something to add on that subject when we return.

Don't bite any poison apples, now.

Sunday to Monday: Random Runnings

The merely-gray Sunday promised us by our weather mystics (whose work, admittedly, is nastily complex in the autumn and spring around here - form does not hold in the Northwest between April and June and then again between October and early December) appears to have slid sideways into a drizzly and chilly morning. The small ones are mesmerized by something on the phosphorescent screen (called "Winx Club" and involving, I believe, fairies, though the title clubmembers appear indistinguishable from standard-issue television glamor girls so far as I can tell) and my bride appears to be stirring restlessly, though to what end I cannot tell.

I sat down here with the intent of writing some sort of post, but I have spent at least fifteen minutes just farkling about, so I am coming to the conclusion that an actual coherent post on a specific subject is not in me. All the same, I do feel the urge, like a chum salmon swimming through the barest purl of fresh water in the cold darkness of the Humbolt Current and feeling the neural spark of need to return to its natal freshet, to write something.

Sadly, the cool, sweet inspiration of blogging is not upon me.

Part of this is pure frustration. I cannot think of what earthly good I am doing talking about politics or military affairs. Based on the state of U.S. politics and foreign affairs we seem bound and determined to find a meatgrinder labelled "Return to the Gilded Age" and jam our collective (insert pendulous body part here, depending on your gender, dear reader...) into it. Better bloggers than I have pointed out the Madness of the Republic Party in insisting on a return to the social and economic paradigm of 1895, and the craven fecklessness of the other political party in refusing to shout "Fire" as the teabaggers set the social contract we have lived with since 1932 alight.

And the preceding post is a speaking example of my frustration with our supposed foreign policy. The U.S. 2012 is a de facto empire. A "soft" empire, but, still, we share a lot of similarities with the imperial Great Powers of history. So I think to just assume that we will NEVER intervene in places around the world where our "leaders" believe that U.S. interests demand or will benefit from military intervention is unrealistic.

But ISTM that our rationales for many of our more recent interventions has been increasingly iffy. Libya baffles me - what was the point there? Even a "successful" intervention, as it was organized, wasn't going to do anything but decapitate one side of a civil war. How we figured that would end well - when the OTHER side was a mixture of shambolic, vicious, and Islamic - completely eludes me.

I understand that there will always be mistakes - the government of the RVN probably looked no worse in 1965 than the government of Lebanon looked in 1958. But some situations are clearly impossible; look at 1983.

One the one hand you had a "perfect case"; Grenada was tiny, isolated, and weak. It was an irritant, no more, but an opportunity to remove that irritant with minimal cost, and it worked as planned.

On the other hand, Lebanon was clearly a mess; open intervention from untouchable foreign powers (Syria and Israel), an utterly incompetent "government", a multi-sided civil war that we were somehow going to "stabilize"...who the hell COULD have thought that was a good idea?

And ISTM that our recent run; A-stan, Iraq, and Libya - share a lot more with Lebanon than Grenada. Just seems like we've lost the ability to think coherently about how to parse these out, lately...and I have no idea how my writing anything more about this clusterfuck is actually "helping".

And here Sunday has drifted into Monday, and I'm still adrift. So I will turn to the last refuge of the outmatched blogger, the random free association. So.

My little girl had a birthday last month, remember?

Err, maybe not - I'm not sure I blogged it. Anyway, she did and is now a proudly grown-up six-year-old.

For her birthday several of her little girl friends gifted her with Barbies. Those Barbies, I am proud to say, have already been tossed into the lascivious tangle of naked Barbies heaped in the bath toy cistern. The Girl is frou-frou in some ways, but Barbies are not one of them.

Although this particular Barbie made me grin;

Oh, speaking of kiddos, I have been remiss in my update of KidVid tastes. The big news is that the Star Wars Era is now officially Over. We're done with all things Lucas. The latest faves are; My Little Pony - Friendship is Magic and The Legend of Korra.

Here's the most awesomest cool part about that, though; both of these are actually fun for adults, too. Yes, I'm admitting it; I likes me some ponies.

The thing is, these aren't your and my ponies. A freelance graphic artist named Lauren Faust reimagined the old Seventies ponies (that really WERE an awful, helium-and-cotton-candy-stuffed atrocity right up there with the other eye-gougingly-cute Seventies crap like the Smurfs^TM and Care Bears^TM) and came up with a witty, fast-thinking take on the earlier fucking disaster.

Her Ponies are still cute. But they're cute in a smart, funny way. Pinkie Pie is delightfully, completely, nuttily utterly random, Fluttershy is painfully shy but occasionally mad butch, Rainbow Dash is waaaaay too cool, Rarity is the complete Drama Queen, and the other two pals are there to be the ballast. They can make me laugh until I cry, and that's pretty damn rare for me outside Young Frankenstein and a handful of old beach movies.

And that's not even going into the fun that other people have with the New Ponies.

Ponies. Heh. Good stuff, and you can say I said so.

Now, Korra...

I think I mentioned the last time we talked about the kiddos' viddy stylings Avatar; The Last Airbender? Okay, well, Korra is by the same people who did the original Avatar. It's not in the same broad style. It's darker, more grown-up. There's (yuk!) kissing.

But outside those it's just as well-written and entertaining as the old Avatar. It's exciting without being vicious, gentle without being sappy. And the writers have already hooked me with their incredible cunning five minutes into the first episode; what the hell was the incredible story that happened to Zuko and Asula's mother!?!

And - just off the top of my head - who the hell thought it was such a good idea to make a movie, a ginormous, full-length feature film, of the forty-year-old board game Battleship?

I mean, really?

Speaking of awesomely shit movies, we caught another kaiju movie the other day; Godzilla vs. Megaguirus.

(Reeeeally bit, just for the record, and I say this as a lover of kaiju movies and the Big Green Guy in particular, although I can't not mention the incredible "kaiju ferachio" scene where the G puts this ninja move on the evil Megaguirus just as the big meanie is about to spear him with his protuberant tail-stinger and clomps down on Mega's poker-pecker and...well, let's just say I winced at the big finish. Yeeowch.)

But I can't just pass this one by without giving a shout-out to the leading lady, boss of the G-Graspers played by one 田中美里 (Tanaka Misato), and, specifically, her ears.

Because this gal has one frigging ginormous set of cranium fins. Seriously; this picture give you an idea but just doesn't do them justice. I shit you not, Ms. Tanaka has one prize-winning pair of earflaps.

Like sails, this girl's listening lugs. Worth the price of admission, if you ask me. Amazing ears. Really. Life of their own, those ears. That and kaiju ferachio, with biting.

Joe Bob says; check it out.

Speaking of women who can do amazing stuff, the trickster above is Patty McGee, a giant of the early skateboarders and the first woman to make national news for riding the asphalt waves. The website at the link has this brilliant telephone commercial (remember when landlines actually advertised?) with Patty skating through the house.)

I think what I like about the whole magilla is the homemade feel to everything, from the crude skateboards to the bare feet to the do-it-yourself story of how Patty pretty much invented her own craft.

The other interesting thing, to me, anyway, is how fragmented our culture has become since 1965. I mean, there are LOTS of skateboarders today; you see skateboards everywhere. But there's no broad impact on us, skateboarding, like so much else we do, is a subset of something and for some people - it's a little cul-de-sac of pop culture. By professionalizing and sleeking down and mainstreaming Patty's craft it seems a lot more...trivial. Does it, or is it just me? But I can't think of a skateboarder making the cover of People magazine or USA Today or getting his or her own commercial.

Hmmmm.

For some reason my hip has chosen to be vindictive today.

It always aches, at least a little, but that's pretty much a given when the ball-and-socket at the top of your right leg is fairly thoroughly rusted out. But some days it just seems to enjoy giving me a little extra kick in the ass.

And I mean that literally; my right quad, and hamstring, and gluteus, ache and burn like...well, like you'd think your leg muscles would feel when your bones decided to quit on you. And deep inside the little fucker roars and hammers and does its level best to make me sour and angry.

I think I'm starting to understand what chronic pain does to people. It's...difficult...to be happy and friendly when your ass is aching.

I learned as a kid, and have always believed, that difficulties and pain are to be endured, at best, with dignity and at least with silence. And, really, what good would a long whine of complaint do for me? There's nothing to be done, short of surgery, and that best left until this can not be endured a moment longer. And it's not to that point yet. The good days are decent and the bad days not unbearable.

But when the damn thing decides to be miserable it sure tends to make for a long, long day.

Mojo, too, has had a bit of a long day.

She's caught the griping cold that has been meandering through the kid's school, smacking a kid here and there and a parent or a teacher unwary enough to forget for a moment that elementary schools are the Industrial Age version of the pesthouse, full to bursting with pathogens of the rankest sort.

She managed in her usual undramatic way; fetching kiddos from school, entertaining, disciplining, feeding, and supervising the small ones until I got back from a long day at work. But then she pretty much folded, and was a wan shadow of her usual self until collapsing into bed.

You have to feel pretty tender towards a sleeper not to feel at the least, a trifle superior to them. Sleeping humans are not generally lovely objects. Movies lie; the most gorgeous woman and the studliest man are ridiculous in sleep; they snort, they twitch, their faces are slack and uninhabited, an open invitation for the waking being to feel a nasty little desire to tweak some part of them or play cruel tricks on them.

If we feel any sort of human empathy we feel no such pettiness in the presence of the Big Sleep of death. We are, most of us, silent, humbled, and belittled by the end of all things, the terminator of delights.

But sleep, the petty cousin of death, brings with it no such awe. A stranger sleeping is a hand waiting to be dunked in a pot of warm water, or a nose to be pinched, or at the very least a buzzing snorer to be afforded an irked glance.

But the sky changes when the sleeper is someone dear to you.

My little girl is a very neat sleeper. She is usually curled into a comma, her wild tousle of midnight hair at one end while the other is lost in the tangle of soft blankets she demands. She seldom stirs, and never, to my knowledge, makes noise.

The Boy, on the other hand, is a sprawl, all long arms and legs buried amid the mountain of stuffed animals that share his bed, or, rather, dominate it. He mutters and tosses, restless even asleep, his limbs moving in the slow locomotion of dreams.

My bride is neither graceful nor akimbo but, rather, like her waking self a very compact, purposeful sleeper. She has recently made a soft, plush throw for herself and is swallowed within moments of unconsciousness, a small bundle of warm blue velvet.

Tonight, though, her sleep is troubled; perhaps the effect of the cold medication, or perhaps some random uneasiness sparking the cold synapses inside her dreaming head. I sit with her for a moment, and speak quietly, and she settles quietly, whatever the trouble was receding, her breathing slowing and deepening.

For just a moment I sit beside her. All that is visible is the curve of her head, the perfect bowl of skull softened by her short dark hair, all scattered by her tossing and the shot-threads of gray shining in the light from the kitchen across the hallway. The faintest hint of jawline disappears into the welter of blankets and sheet below.

For that moment I'm seized by an enormous tenderness, a deep and passionate shiver of desire for her; not as a woman but as this woman, my wife of a decade and mother of our children, this woman sleeping next to me, her unruly shock of gray-black hair, her sharp nose and pale-fire eyes that are already beginning to look like her mother's at forty, her sure, short, slender fingers and skin like pale satin that tans poorly and burns like flash paper. With her touchy need for respect and the way she jumps and shrieks at sudden sounds, with her strength and her fears, her rough desires, her uncaring of the immediate and the transient, and her deep well of knowledge.

On the top of the blue plush blanket her hand twitches once and relaxes into the motionlessness of deep sleep, her fingers releasing the passing evening. As I turn to go she sighs, sinking into the smooth black river of night and drifting through the darkness towards tomorrow's daylight.

Save the date

Barbie and Ken's wedding album.Perfect.

Worth a moment or two to enjoy the absurdity.And, Jesus, Ken, what? You can't wait for the wedding night at the Dream House? The least you could do is keep your hand off the poor woman's ass in public. You horndog; if I didn't know you weren't anatomically correct...

(h/t to Glamour mag for the sense of humor...)