Hairy woodpeckers and eyeball tongues
Mar. 11th, 2004 04:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jere7myToday's Straight Dope was very informative on the subject of woodpeckers. You may know, perhaps, that they use their long, barbed tongues to probe the holes they drill in bark and yank the grubs out. What you may not know is that some woodpeckers' heads are too small for their enormous tongues. This site has a very nifty photograph of a woodpecker skull in which the root of the tongue wraps up and around the bird's eye socket and behind the skull, terminating just above the nostrils!
(Sorry, Gene Simmons.)
I watched Freddy vs. Jason last night. It was...pretty decent, actually, from a B-movie horror perspective. There are plenty of ways to do this kind of titanomachy wrong; the writers got to the heart of what made the villains different and interesting, and that was reflected in the conflict. It's a trickster-vs.-brute warrior thing, basically a retelling of Odysseus vs. Ajax. (No, really.) And it had the girl from Ginger Snaps in it (Ginger Snaps being a fabulous, if low-budget, feminist werewolf movie from a few years ago).
F vs. J kept me up too late, unfortunately, which means I slept late, which means I didn't accomplish much today. I did make a tasty tuna noodle casserole (which sounds dull but actually involved water chestnuts, crushed red pepper, & cumin), do my laundry, finish my Bare Necessities arrangement, and read a chapter of Harry Potter 5 to a somewhat droopy Kendra. (She spent a lot of time banging her head against her dissertation today, and was feeling less hopeful than she was yesterday.)
I also watched the premiere (from last week) of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital. It's interesting, but suffered from being completely directionless—lots of disconnected expository incidents with no flow. I suspect this came from keeping the protagonist in a coma for the entire episode, and may therefore improve in subsequent weeks; we need a single viewpoint to tie everything together, methinks. Right now it's like Newhart without Bob, or Northern Exposure without Joel. I really like the creepy telepathic anteater, though. Giant anteaters have really alarming skulls, I've always thought, and I'm glad somebody is doing something with that.
Oh, yes—I spoke with my mom, too. Her car got anonymously sideswiped today, while parked in downtown Portsmouth, and she was rather distraught.
In happier news, she was invited to, and attended, a work group for writers and illustrators of children's books. She's a professional illustrator—quite a good one—who has always wanted to illustrate kids' books, but she has no faith in her own abilities. She wrote and illustrated exactly one book, back when I was just wee, about a lion who loses his mane, and it was wonderful. She never went any further, though.
This week, she took that thirty-year-old rough mockup to the work group, and all the pros heaped praise—sincerely, it seems—upon her. They got her to agree to rework it, one sketch per week, and, perhaps, submit it in six or eight months. She's bubbly about it now, but she suffers from the same ebbing enthusiasm syndrome that I do, so I don't know if she'll keep with it. On the other hand, a weekly work group, and the encouragement that comes with it, may be enough to keep her head of steam up. As the dutiful son, I will do my part as well; it would be wonderful if my mom could finally get some recognition.
I can never end these things, except abruptly.
(Sorry, Gene Simmons.)
I watched Freddy vs. Jason last night. It was...pretty decent, actually, from a B-movie horror perspective. There are plenty of ways to do this kind of titanomachy wrong; the writers got to the heart of what made the villains different and interesting, and that was reflected in the conflict. It's a trickster-vs.-brute warrior thing, basically a retelling of Odysseus vs. Ajax. (No, really.) And it had the girl from Ginger Snaps in it (Ginger Snaps being a fabulous, if low-budget, feminist werewolf movie from a few years ago).
F vs. J kept me up too late, unfortunately, which means I slept late, which means I didn't accomplish much today. I did make a tasty tuna noodle casserole (which sounds dull but actually involved water chestnuts, crushed red pepper, & cumin), do my laundry, finish my Bare Necessities arrangement, and read a chapter of Harry Potter 5 to a somewhat droopy Kendra. (She spent a lot of time banging her head against her dissertation today, and was feeling less hopeful than she was yesterday.)
I also watched the premiere (from last week) of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital. It's interesting, but suffered from being completely directionless—lots of disconnected expository incidents with no flow. I suspect this came from keeping the protagonist in a coma for the entire episode, and may therefore improve in subsequent weeks; we need a single viewpoint to tie everything together, methinks. Right now it's like Newhart without Bob, or Northern Exposure without Joel. I really like the creepy telepathic anteater, though. Giant anteaters have really alarming skulls, I've always thought, and I'm glad somebody is doing something with that.
Oh, yes—I spoke with my mom, too. Her car got anonymously sideswiped today, while parked in downtown Portsmouth, and she was rather distraught.
In happier news, she was invited to, and attended, a work group for writers and illustrators of children's books. She's a professional illustrator—quite a good one—who has always wanted to illustrate kids' books, but she has no faith in her own abilities. She wrote and illustrated exactly one book, back when I was just wee, about a lion who loses his mane, and it was wonderful. She never went any further, though.
This week, she took that thirty-year-old rough mockup to the work group, and all the pros heaped praise—sincerely, it seems—upon her. They got her to agree to rework it, one sketch per week, and, perhaps, submit it in six or eight months. She's bubbly about it now, but she suffers from the same ebbing enthusiasm syndrome that I do, so I don't know if she'll keep with it. On the other hand, a weekly work group, and the encouragement that comes with it, may be enough to keep her head of steam up. As the dutiful son, I will do my part as well; it would be wonderful if my mom could finally get some recognition.
I can never end these things, except abruptly.
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-11 11:58 pm (UTC)What chapter? :)
Aww, I'm sorry there was banging of the head against the dissertation. :(
no subject
Date: 2004-03-12 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-13 02:53 pm (UTC)P.S.
Date: 2004-03-13 02:53 pm (UTC)