I needed a movie to watch while folding laundry. While I have Mouchette and L’Avventura from Netflix, they both demand attention since a) they’ve got subtitles I’ll have to read and b) I haven’t seen either one of them before.

Instead, I decided to break into my DVD collection and watch City of Lost Children (La Cité des Enfants Perdus) since I haven’t seen that in a good long time. I’m 12 minutes into it and remembering all the reasons I love this friggin’ weird-ass movie.

A) A talking brain in an aquarium - it tells bedtime stories!

B) Adorable French children running around wearing striped sweaters and clothing designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier:

C) Ron Perlman playing a strong man, speaking pidgin French and referring to himself in the third person.

D) Dominique Pinon doing his usual weird-looking guy thing, but as multiple versions of himself - and singing!

E) The lack of light. What can I say? I love the doom and gloom.

F) The scariest Santa Claus EVAR.

All of these things, plus the story is good (weird), the use of color and sound is awesome, and the non-traditional casting decisions and unusual characters make it even more interesting to watch. It’s been a while. I’ll have something more concrete to say when I finish watching. I’m only 12 minutes into it right now, after all.

Cold, dry winter air wreaks havoc on my skin. I feel all alligator-like and am constantly searching for a lotion that works well as an after-shower moisturizer that:

a) won’t be totally greasy and gross

b) won’t feel watery and immaterial, and…

c) doesn’t cost a fortune because moisturizing arms, legs and back requires much lotion

Well… Trader Joe’s to the rescue! The moisturizing cream at left - Trader Joe’s A Midsummer Night’s Cream Moisturizing Cream, Extra Dry Formula - meets all these criteria. It comes in a regular version and this extra dry formula. It’s unscented, but it still has a very faint herbal scent which is not at all unpleasant. It’s quite rich and thick, but not greasy or slimy. It absorbs into the skin quite quickly (at least for me) and lasts quite a long time.

I was wearing a thick and itchy cowl-neck wool sweater earlier in the week and it normally irritates the hell out of my neck (while keeping the rest of me warm and toasty) but the irritating effects were greatly lessened by being moisturized beforehand with this stuff. I sometimes use Aveeno, but it isn’t as rich as I would like and I find myself having to reapply a few times before I really feel the effects.

Later today, I’ll be going to a Trader Joe’s location I’ve never been to before and I’m willing to bet they will have larger selection of TJ’s craziness than my smaller local TJ’s. Excitement!

As a point of curiosity, this lotion shares its name with a porno flick (A Midsummer Night’s Cream) but that’s a connection very few people are going to make. And I am one of those weird people because I read too much.

There was an article in Reason magazine several years ago about controversial porn studies courses in universities. The piece mentioned that film, which is an actual retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (safe proof from IMDb!):

One needn’t be a prude or a hidebound academic traditionalist to roll one’s eyes at the earnest assertions of porn studies champions. Amherst English professor Richard Burt, among others, has said that pornography should be treated no differently from any other genre of film or literature.

In a way, this is a reductio ad absurdum of the postmodernist creed that no “text” is truly superior to any other. In a 2001 article in the Los Angeles Times, Burt boldly declares that no study of film adaptations of Shakespeare can be complete without a look at hard-core porno flicks like A Midsummer Night’s Cream.

If porn studies and events like “Revolting Behavior” take intellectual content out of the academy, they also take human content out of human sexuality (and perhaps sexual content as well). “Transgressive” acts and identities are celebrated for their defiance of social norms.

Honestly, I don’t have a problem with it. If such a course was offered back in my college days, I probably would’ve signed up for it. What people fail to realize is that pop culture analysis has become a part of most college course workloads and the work that results from these studies is legitimate and just as labor-intensive as writing a paper on Proust or Nietzsche. One thing my college education taught me was to look at EVERYTHING as a “text” -whether that text is a movie, a television commercial, TV show, book, play, poem, painting, sculpture, photo, song, opera, etc. It can all be taken apart, analyzed, deconstructed and viewed in that way. You can do a close reading of a porn flick just as seriously as you can do a close reading of a paragraph of Hegel.

I took a (straight-up serious) philosophy course my freshman year at NYU that looked at philosophical ideals and tropes in dramatic works–a few Greek tragedies, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but also the movie Blade Runner and episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. We discussed those works in terms of what they say about being human - what makes us human. Deckard from Blade Runner (who at that time had not yet been revealed to be a Replicant by director Ridley Scott) and Data from Star Trek were the subjects of a paper in which we had to answer the question, “According to [Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzche], is [Data, Deckard] human?” based on their statements about humanity, morality and ethics.

Interesting stuff.

Aw, crap. I guess I’ll be spending some time tomorrow playing with CSS and making sure this site lays out the same way if you’re viewing it in IE or Safari.

I know it’s Firefox compatible, but I opened it up in IE today (don’t know why - it just seemed like a thing) and noticed the entire sidebar shifts down below the posts. It’s probably a CSS/IE issue since there are some elements that IE doesn’t recognize/work with correctly.

And that’s where it’s at. Boo. Tomorrow, though. I just started watching Season 3 of “Lost.”

Yes. That’s a gnome in the new header art.

He’s actually a garden gnome, but he lives indoors. His name (I swear - it was on the box) is Flör, the Reading Gnome. Here is a slightly fuller photo of him on a bookshelf. Because that’s how he rolls.

And those are NOT sunglasses in his hand. Nope. Reading glasses. Reading glasses to make him look distinguished.

And gnomes make me think of Amelie, which I will now watch. Here’s a Yann Tiersen song from the gorgeous Amelie soundtrack - Les Jours Tristes.

Please to enjoy, thank you.

I’d offer points to the first person who can name the song and movie that line is from, but it’s so easy to cut and paste a phrase into Google, that would be way naïve of me.

In the meantime, here’s how the snow is shaping up around these parts:

One of the benefits of not being wealthy, not being involved in a multitude of investment opportunities and not being a homeowner/married person/parent is that my taxes are so easy to do. Really. I used TurboTax this year and last year because it makes it so redonkulously easy, but I’ve done it the old school way, too. And an even older school way before I knew any better — going to an alcoholic accountant/family friend who used to do my taxes until the fear of an audit made me think better of such things.

I guess I’m a reluctant fan of TurboTax. The end part of the process (just before you file) is annoying because they try to sell you on their professional tax review, audit-proofing, etc. (all at an additional cost) but I have to appreciate that - it’s the cross-sell. The rest of it is pretty painless so I can’t complain overall. However, I do not use them for the state taxes. While they include one free state tax return with the software, they charge an additional $17 or something if you want to e-file the resulting return through TurboTax. Ha ha. There’s the catch.

Most states offer a free e-file option through the official state website - and most state taxes are simple-simple -simple. No itemized deductions, no craziness. Just “How much did you earn?” and “Did you buy a house or spend insane sums of money on medical care?” then “OK, well you should’ve paid this and you paid this. Your return/amount owed is _____. Have a nice day.”

In any event, I’m all e-filed for state and federal and should be seeing my moderate federal return magically appear in my bank account in the next 9-14 business days. My whopping $1 return from the State of New Jersey should appear even sooner.

Guess who’s going to be putting that mad-cash-money towards a new tube of lip balm?!??!

Goody goody gumdrops!
A new trailer for the Henry Selick/Neil Gaiman production of “Coraline”! In 3-D!

Dear sweet object of lust and desire. How friggin’ AWESOME would this be???

Staircase and bookcase IN ONE!

I want to cry because there is no chance I will ever have anything this cool in my little world

Update: I cheered myself up with this font quiz from mental_floss:

So I ordered something. And it shipped. And I’ve been tracking it on the UPS website and am annoyed because it appears as though it’s just been sitting in California for almost 72 hours doing nothing.

I’m sure there’s a logical and logistics-related explanation (scheduled flights, a system for shipments going from west to east, etc.), but for me as a layperson end consumer, I am left wondering why my package is going to arrive on the 25th and not earlier if it’s just been sitting somewhere in California for almost three days at this point and not getting any closer to me.

They really shouldn’t update the tracking info at all if they’re going to tease me like this. Grrrr.

Checking my RSS feeds… eating pizza at my desk… and saw THIS:

At Toy Fair, this company had a full mini Nightmare Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas. My favorite movie blog, /film, took the initiative and posted photos of it. And I love it.

Yes, I might be getting too old for this, but I love it all the same.