Stuff on my Cat

As a cat owner, I totally understand this.

Yesterday we watched The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Like Star Wars I hadn’t watched the movies in years. Now to be honest, when I first watched The Empire Strikes Back I hated it. I was 11 when The Empire Strikes Back came out, and knowing that I had to wait three more years before I found out what happened was awful. At that age three years was an eternity; I was miserable. So by the time Return of the Jedi came out I was glad to know what happened, but the magic was gone.

But coming back to these movies, I really liked them. Being able to put in the next DVD made the ending of The Empire Strikes Back perfectly fine (although I still hate cliff hangers). The Ewoks were still cute, but they weren’t as cutsey as I remembered, so I was quite pleased.

Until I got to the end of Return of the Jedi. At which point I began to scream and curse in absolute RAGE. Why the hell did George Lucas have to completely screw up the ending and stick Hayden Christensen into the last scene? It was like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, reminding me that no matter how much I loved these movies, George Lucas had to mess everything up with the vile Phantom Menace. I couldn’t just happily pretend that the prequel hadn’t happened, but he has to stick in that reminder.

Couldn’t he just has let us think that that was how Anakin *would* have looked had he not been turned into Darth Vader?

Grrr….

If anyone comes out with a DVD copy of the Return of the Jedi that has the correct, original ending–I want it, and I’ll pay good money for it. Actually, I want a copy of all three movies without the edits–no screwed up Jaba scene in the Mos Eisley space port, no extended scene in Jaba’s palace, although I’ll take the extra Cantina scenes. Those were lovely.

So I decided to play around with CSS menus.
Translation: I did something really geeky.

If you are using any browser other than Internet Explorer (Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Firefox) and you go to my main page and place your cursor over the the first three options on the left (Books, Pictures, Misc) a sub menu will appear.

If you’re using IE, which doesn’t correctly render CSS, you won’t see the pop-up menus, but the options will still work. And the boxes will look screwed up. (So you should really be using Mozilla or Firefox.)

This is quite a geeky acomplishment, and I’m rather proud of myself.

For a limited time only, authors are auctioning off an opportunity to appear in an upcoming book.

As much as I enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s offer:

“My next novel will be called THE GRAVEYARD BOOK. It’s a children’s novel, and will be published, er, when it’s published. Maybe in 2007 or failing that, 2008. It will have lots of gravestones in it. Your name, or the name of someone you love (who won’t mind) can be on a gravestone.”

When you can bid:
September 15-25

I liked Stephen King’s the best:

“One (and only one) character name in a novel called CELL, which is now in work and which will appear in either 2006 or 2007. Buyer should be aware that CELL is a violent piece of work, which comes complete with zombies set in motion by bad cell phone signals that destroy the human brain. Like cheap whiskey, it’s very nasty and extremely satisfying. Character can be male or female, but a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female. In any case, I’ll require physical description of auction winner, including any nickname (can be made up, I don’t give a rip).”

When you can bid:
September 8-18

Go while you have the chance!

In case you were curious, I’ve been somewhat busy tinkering with the website. Trying to get the Books section to be more useful, and trying to get the Fantasy page pared down so that it doesn’t take a full century to load over dial-up. (I’ve tried to make it so that even if it does load slowly, at least there’s something to read while you’re waiting.) I achieved partial success by moving Science Fiction (both books) and Graphic Novels (which is almost all Neil Gaiman right now) onto their own pages.

Michael suggested breaking the page into multiple pages, however I have made links to that page that will all be broken. So I think I may just suffer with things the way they are, although I worry some, because that page is only going to get bigger, the more books I read. I’m considering taking some of my favorite authors, whose entries are longer, onto their own pages, while leaving a link on the main page. Hmm….

I also made some superficial changes to the cats page. I have lots more pictures of the cats, but I’ve never bothered to add them to the page. Does that make me a bad cat owner? Too bad.

I’m probably due for a major redesign, however I’m lazy, and school starts in two weeks, so it probably won’t happen. So enjoy things as they are. Or not. Your choice.

I’m:
Really, really bored.
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I got a really disgruntled look from Kit the other day, when I started singning along with the radio.
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An 81-year-old Frenchman has been given a one-year suspended jail sentence for firing a hunting rifle at helicopters dropping water on a forest blaze.

David Thiel opened fire on 21 July when the low-flying helicopters disturbed his afternoon nap near Grasse in the south of France, court sources said.

During his arrest the man swore at the policemen and hit them with saucepans.

We watched Star Wars this weekend.

Despite the fact that it ranks as my all time favorite movie, I hadn’t watched it since I was a kid. When they re-released, I made a variety of excuses and never actually made it to the theater. And even though we had all three movies on VHS, I never managed to “find the time to watch them.” However for his birthday Michael got the movies on DVD, and after suffering through Revenge of the Sith I really wanted to watch Star Wars again.

I was prepared to find out that Star Wars didn’t live up to my childhood memories, but figured that it couldn’t possibly be worse than The Phantom Menace.

I glad to discover that I still love the movies, although I was less than pleased with some of the changes George Lucas made for the DVD releases. More Bantha? No thank you. Creepy little cgi creatures hanging around Mos Eisley? Ick. Han Solo no longer taking the preemptive strike against Greedo? Bad! It changes Han’s character! That’s who he was–Mister looking out for himself and to hell with anyone else (except of course Chewie).

The enhanced explosions were nice, but I wish he would have left it at that and not messed with anything else.

But that wasn’t what I wanted to write about.

When Star Wars came out I was 8, and it was the coolest thing in the whole entire world. I saw it repeatedly, probably with some encouragement from my science fiction loving father (alas, his encouragement didn’t take, because I don’t like to read science fiction, although I mostly don’t mind science fiction movies). My hero, however, was R2D2. I thought he was the coolest characters in the movie, followed by Chewbacca. The rest of the characters were fine, and I liked them well enough, but they weren’t as cool as R2D2.

But that wasn’t what struck me watching the movie now. What struck me was that Princess Leia kicks ass. Totally. Something I apparently internalized. At that age I hadn’t seen a lot of movies, and here came a movie that I absolutely adored, and the heroine shoots bad guys and stands up to evil and does everything the guys do.

So I wonder if this is the point where I developed the knowledge that girls can do whatever they want. After all, Princess Leia didn’t need rescued because she was a girl, she needed rescued because Darth Vader was a really bad guy; a boy in that situation would have needed just as much rescuing. Princess Leia had no problem telling guys what to do, and dealing with things herself. Sure she didn’t get in a fighter and attack the Death Star, but either did the other people in command.

I never thought about it in those terms of course–after all, R2D2 was my hero (he broke the rules to go on his mission, he was the one who got shot, who else could be the hero?)–but from that point on, Princess Leia was a model for how girls were supposed to be: strong and self-reliant.

And that’s pretty cool.

I figure that if a movie was going to influence my entire outlook on life, far better that it was Star Wars than some of the other stuff out there, like Snow White or Cinderella.

August Flower Pr0n!

My black eyed susans are flowering, although the flowers don’t seem as hardy as they did last year. But it could just be me.

I can’t believe how large the hibiscus flowers are. They’re huge–bigger than my hand–which is pretty amazing considering that hibiscus isn’t supposed to be hardy in this zone. It dies back completely during the winter, but comes right back when the soil temperatures are warm.

I love today’s Word of the Day. I’ve known that gruntle wasn’t the opposite of disgruntle, but it has always amused me to use it as if it was. Now I come to find out that because of “popular usage” I’ve now actually been using it correctly!

gruntle \GRUN-tul\ verb
: to put in a good humor

Example sentence:
“He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.” (P.G. Wodehouse, _The Code of the Woosters_)

Did you know?
“Gruntle” is the result of a mistaken assumption about the verb “disgruntle,” which means “to make ill-humored or discontented.” The prefix “dis-” often means “to do the opposite of,” so people naturally assumed that in order to have a “disgruntle” there must be a “gruntle” with exactly the opposite meaning. But actually, “dis-” doesn’t always work that way — in some rare cases it functions instead as an intensifier. “Disgruntle” developed from this intensifying sense of “dis-” plus “gruntle,” an old word meaning “to grumble.” “Gruntle” began to mean “to make happy” only in the 1920s, when it was assumed to be the antonym of “disgruntle.” By contrast, “disgruntle” has been around since 1682, and the original grumbling “gruntle” dates back to 1589.

Though to be honest, I tend to use “regruntle” because it sounds more ridiculous.

Had a bizarro world dream last night. I changed some small details, such as a sink full of dirty water into a fountain, for coherence. There was more to it than what I wrote, but that is the only part I remember clearly.

There were a couple of questions where I wished they would have had a “Why is this funny” in addition to, “is this funny.”

Humph.

The second test is right, I think.
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So Kat, our large primary cat, if given the slightest opportunity, likes to dash outside and roll in the dirt.

This is annoying, as he is a partially white, inside cat. But he doesn’t run far, so if he occasionally dashed out, we didn’t worry about it.

Well, we forgot that there’s a stray in the neighborhood, who likes to spend time in our yard (taunting Kat we’re sure). What I didn’t consider is that the stray has fleas. And so Kat got fleas. And gave them to our small, secondary cat, Kit.

So yesterday Orkin came to spray, and we took the cats to get a flea bath. Kat started protesting as soon as the young lady took him back, and when she started to bathe him he began yowling–dare I say caterwauling?–so loudly, you’d have thought they were attempting to tear him limb from limb. It was so bad that the lady brought his pathetic, wet self out as soon as she was done, so I could see that he was okay.

I felt terrible because she kept apologizing, saying she wanted to let me know he was fine and that they hadn’t been hurting him in the back. I wanted to apologize for her having to listen to his whining for so long and at such a volume.

Kit was silent through the whole process, although when they brought her out (we took them wet, since we didn’t feel like waiting two hours for them to dry) she was shivering as if she was freezing cold.

With temperatures yesterday in the high 90s, about 30 seconds in the car took care of that.

But the cats are clean (and smell lovely!) and the house has been sprayed, so other than the unpteen loads of laundry I did yesterday, and not wanting to touch the floors with my bare feet, we’re good. And both cats seemed to have forgiven us immediately.