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07.20.03 ~ The Healing Power of Pizza

The redesign, strange dreams and my irritation with sequels

Okay. With any luck, you are now looking at the new design for Soliloquy which should, if all goes to plan, involve some photos of a very cool hedge maze, purple cell blocks and an Enya song lyric. I have abridged both my links page and the about section. The former has been shortened to a mere half-dozen of my favorite online journals, the latter has been shrunk from a rather ponderous group of pages to just one page, which covers everything that I felt I could not leave off this time 'round. 

I am fairly pleased with this particular design, though no doubt I will discover things about it that irritate me in the weeks to come. I sat down two nights ago to whip up something simple and easy to place-hold for now while I worked on getting all my files back where they are supposed to be and whatnot, but I realized fairly quickly that the idea of setting something new up just to tear it down and replace it irritated me, so I went ahead and worked feverishly on what I hope will be a design that lasts for a while. I was thoroughly sick of the old one. At this rate, the title "Soliloquy" will have more redesigns to its credit than entries.

I have already written about the new design itself for my new about page, and don't feel like doing it again, so I am just going to copy and paste:

The graphics on this page were made by me, though the photo of the hedge maze is actually a screencap from the movie "Labyrinth" which I have shamelessly appropriated for my own evil purposes. The muppet people can send Kermit and the gelflings to get me if they feel that I have in any way offended. The song lyric is the beginning stanza of Enya's "Anywhere Is" which in turn comes from my favorite Enya album "A Memory of Trees". I chose both picture and lyric for the following reasons:

a) I thought they complimented one another and made a statement I liked about the concept of wandering, direction and discovery which I thought applied well to my journal. Also the lyric sounds deep and meaningful, which is always a plus.

b) I like the song, and the movie (in spite of David Bowie and his painted-on pants)

c) I think mazes are cool

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Ursula writes about her bizarre dreams a lot, and while I have always had rather strange and vivid dreams, I have never had one that quite matched Ursula's for sheer "Where did that come from?" value. However, last night, I had a contender. It involved helping some doctors to treat victims of a disease linked to smoking. The disease was not cancer, as one might suspect, but some kind of wasting ailment exclusive to those who had smoked a great deal for most of their lives. The patients were very thin and weak, and all around the room I was in, doctors and nurses were lifting their patients from their beds and carrying them to examining tables and back, so they must have weighed next to nothing. Thus far, the dream was not all that odd, however, the treatment of these patients apparently involved feeding them a large quantity of pepperoni pizza. All around the room people were making pizza and storing it in these huge refrigerators to one side. Even at the time, I remember thinking "Pizza?" It was truly surreal. 

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We went to see "Pirates of the Caribbean" again yesterday, and enjoyed it just as much the second time 'round. Excessive and unlikely sword fighting, gorgeous actors, a lot of British accents, Brilliant Plans and one truly ridiculous hat. What's not to love? One of the girls at the office said she was planning to see it again this weekend as well, and added that she had heard they might make a sequel since this one did so well. Since I have been very badly treated by sequels lately, I feel I am justified in hoping that they leave "Pirates" alone. 

It certainly has been a year for sequels, and almost all of them have disappointed me. First there was Two Towers (which is technically not a sequel and more of a continuation, but still) with Lothlorien archers at Helm's Deep and Evil Farimir going all Slytherin with the ambition and the upsetting re-casting of all his best lines from the book so that he says the same things but somehow makes them sound all sinister instead of sounding like the noble person that he is in the book. Of course, Gollum was cool (even if he was played as more comical than he really needed to be) and it was nice to see Frodo show some guts, finally, and I did get to see Legolas say "You would die before your stroke fell!" which was one of my prerequisites, but still. Bah. 

Then we had the interminable slog that was Matrix: Reloaded. Again, some cool things, like any part that involved Trinity and motor-vehicles and the little key-maker guy and Samurai Morpheous, but honestly! Did we need to spend the first half hour of the movie talking...and talking...and talking? I know there was a lot to cover, but for the love of tater tots! We came to see action! Not a protracted rave scene with frequent cuts to our heroes doing things that no one wants to see two vitamin K deprived people with bolts up their spines doing! Ew! Just ew. 

After that (or maybe before that? I can't remember) we saw X-men 2, which was very cool and entertaining but also rather long and filled with a great deal of drama centering around Jean Gray, who is my least favorite X-person next to Cyclops who is a useless whining little toe-rag. Again, too much talking. Why are we talking? We could be kicking ass and rocking the nutty mutant super-powers, and we are talking. I don't understand. 

And now, just because we are on the subject of comic book movies, I am going to take a moment to wench about Daredevil, which was not a sequel at all, but was a horrendous disappointment. I don't even know where to begin. Ben Afleck? Too fat to be the man without fear, and also not red-haired. Jennifer Love-Hewitt? Not at all Greek, and playing an Elektra so dumbed-down she is almost unrecognizable. Colin Farrell? Waddup with the on-again-off-again accent? Very annoying. 

Then, of course, we need to spend a few moments on "Terminator 3" because I feel very very short-changed on that score. I do not care about Nick Stahl. He is whiney and pointless. The last best hope for mankind and he is of no use whatsoever. Why bother saving him? Also the Terminatrix chick was not scary, her demise was anti-climactic as was the ending of movie, which simply screamed "To Be Continued!"

The only sequel this year that did not disappoint me was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and that was because the first movie was such an abysmal shock of a disappointment. In order to fall short of my expectations, they would have had to toss out the manuscript completely, and instead base the movie on that infamous piece of cross-over fanfic in which Voldemort kidnaps Harry and Draco Malfoy and takes them to the Death Star where he makes them wrestle in a vat of lime Jell-o while he roller-skates around them singing the theme for "State Fair". 

Don't get me wrong here, I still enjoyed myself at all these movies that I've been ragging on, but every one of them failed to live up to their predecessor in some way and that gets on my nerves. If you are going to make a "coming directly to VHS and DVD" quality movie as a sequel, then why even bother?

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Ah.....I feel much better now. I have missed the ability to vent my spleen on any given subject and then foist a pointless rant on an unsuspecting readership. I love online journaling.