Sentience and Other Disconnected Stuff

To start off sort of semi serious, I've been looking for blogs on eldercare and dealing with people with dementia and I'm not finding any. If you know of any, please email me them, or, well, a grammatical version of that. It seems like there's this huge mommyblog community and a huge community of adoption blogs and pretty much a community for everything under the sun out there on these wild and woolly (that community is one I don't want to join) internets but I'm not finding much in the way of communities of people caring for their older relatives. And I could use one. It strikes me that I should probably therefore start an eldercare themed blog of my own but unfortunately I a) already have a blog and experience has shown me that one is enough and b) while it doesn't bother me much to blog about the foibles of my children, despite their loud and horrified protests, I'm weirdly more uncomfortable doing it about my older relative. Plus my brothers would kill me. Anyway. That is a plea, of sorts, so make of it what you will.

In other, less serious, news I've now had an iPod for like three months and I am here to tell you that at least on my iPod, random shuffle is NOT random at all. My iPod is completely sentient or at least as sentient as Pebble and it knows what it likes and doesn't like. It loves the Ramones and Nancy Griffith and it hates Modest Mouse, although it will play them apologetically every time I threaten to shoot it for playing too much Ramones. Before I had an iPod, by the way, I didn't know there was such a thing as too much Ramones but alas, I think there is. It also likes Bonnie Raitt a lot and I'm sorry to report that there is also definitely such a thing as too much Bonnie Raitt. Do not come talking to me of mathematical formulae and how things really are random and this is all in the realm of coincidence, either, oh you my skeptical scientific friends, because this is way outside the probability matrix, as in it's like if I was throwing a quarter up in the air until my thumbs fell off and it came down 83% tails. 83% Ramones, I swear it, and no, they do not make up 83% of my collection. There's just as much Modest Mouse on there and it only ever plays when I threaten violence or get all depressed and beg.

On to the realm of bad movies! A and I watched a corker last night, to wit: The Seeker: The Dark is Rising. Now, I've read every single one of the Susan Cooper books on which that movie is based but hey, I'm not one of those people. Yes, I did give a brief parking lot dissertation on the unfortunate characterization of Saruman, the missing bits of the Ents and so on but really, I'm okay with good movie adaptations of books I love. I actually like the Lord of the Rings a lot and I love The Witches of Eastwick despite the fact that it has nothing in common with the book (which I also love) except the title. But this movie is so bad, so horrific, that the title should be removed. It's that atrocious. It's so bad that it's actually kind of good. I have made a list of some salient points, naturally, there are spoilers, if you care, and you shouldn't really, because it's that bad.

1. Why would you take a book that's completely set in England with all English people in some amorphous middle part of the century like the 60s and suddenly make it 2007 complete with cell phones that play no part in the plot and populate it with an unlikely American family (richest damn physics professor I ever saw) featuring a kid who cannot act and looks nothing like the people who are purported to be his family? Also, the flickering accents gave me a headache. Make up your minds, people. One or the other. You can't be both.

2. Please, oh god, discover the tripod. Steadicam! That's probably what the kid was yelling in the snake scene. Either that or LIGHTS! Just turning off the lights and shooting everything in the dark with a wildly wobbling camera does not make it scary, art or disguise a really small special effects budget. We know you only had three snakes.

3. Missing twin trope! Missing twin nobody ever told him about in a family of 6 kids who you might think would have noticed the missing twin! Heeee!

4. Ice attack! Water attack! Disgruntled crow attack! Photoshopped black fog attack! What's next, Pikachu?

5. It would take 15 seconds for any five year old to figure out that chick is an Evil Witch. Seriously. Maybe 10 seconds. Making like nobody gets it is insulting.

6. It's the mom from 6 Feet Under with a fake British accent and John Lennon shades! Eeeeeeargh! Just as neurotic and not as well dressed!

7. You've really grown as a person and I'm proud of you. Bwahahaha! Afterschool special dialogue! Particularly unconvincing when uttered by someone who can actually act, just isn't bothering.

8. A kid who's been raised by snowglobes is unlikely to end up particularly well adjusted. But if they put that in the sequel I will go see it.