Dancing Around the Four Sides

Okay, so let's get this out of the way right off the bat ...

( Two observations about last night's promo ...  )

TL;DR, I think there are mysteries yet to come, and if the worst happens, it'll happen, but it still won't be what we expect.

So. Beautiful and sunny here, probably need to run some errands but we'll see. Tomatoes are doing well although we lost some of the ripening cherry tomatoes to a caterpillar. Grrrr. Also need to clean up and tweak the fic I finished and send it to my First Readers.

And ... onward.

Hot and sunny. Watered the deck plants and discovered, resting on the bare ground beside the coiled-up garden hose, a bird's egg. I think it belongs to a mourning dove, but how it got to that particular spot I have no idea. I mean, obviously something carried it away, but was it another bird? A squirrel? An opossum or a raccoon would've eaten it. I don't know. I put it back in the grass.

Vacuuming and watching the Little League World Series. I'll bet Wilson played Little League, until his mother realized he could hurt his hands or break an ankle or get hit in the face with a ball. Remember in the episode with the bumper cars, he said his parents never let him do that (drive bumper cars)? I think it's part of my headcanon that Wilson's mom and dad were crazy-overprotective and kept him from doing a lot of fun things.

Aaaaand I'm rambling. Back to vacuuming.

Cloudy and a very damp 72 degrees (22.2 degrees Celsius). It rained almost all day yesterday, with lots of lightning and rolling thunder. Naturally, the dog hated it and hid in her den the entire time. This morning has been better -- she's chased the squirrels away from the sunflower feeder three or four times, running them up trees where they sit and chatter at her.

Watched Alan Bennett's The History Boys last night and enjoyed it, although it was certainly darker than I had thought it would be, and there were several scenes where you could really spot the stagey underpinnings left from the transition from play to film. The pace felt a bit off, and characters would suddenly "stop" whatever they were doing and make a speech (in particular the scene with Mrs. Lintott acidly reminding a boy that one of the dons interviewing him might actually be a woman -- still, it was a great speech). The coda tacked on at the end felt very artificial also, although I imagine it worked well on the stage. The acting was uniformly terrific, especially by Richard Griffiths. One of the current leads in Being Human (the werewolf), Russell Tovey, played one of the boys -- he was really the only person I recognized in the movie. I read later that the part of Irwin, the "pinch-hitter" brought in to improve the boys' chances to win admission to Oxford or Cambridge, was modeled on Niall Ferguson, which amused me. There were aspects of the film that reminded me of Dead Poets' Society, albeit with a much more twisty undercurrent of sexuality.

I've also read now that Bennett's play is quite different in some respects from the film, so I've added it to my Shopping List on Amazon. :-D

Still plugging away on Bryson's At Home -- I'm a bit more than halfway through. Mr. N gets home from Minneapolis tonight, so need to do some housely stuff, including scrubbing the muddy paw prints off the kitchen floor.

Mr. N was channel-surfing tonight and ran across Everything Is Illuminated on one of the Starz channels. We'd read the book and thoroughly enjoyed half of it (I think anyone else who's read the book will know what I mean), so we stopped and watched it.

It's a good movie. All three leads (Elijah Wood and the two Ukrainian actors, Eugene Hutz and Boris Leskin) were terrific, and the Ukrainian countryside was as much a part of the film as they were. It was beautifully photographed -- really lovely, and the old woman in the field of sunflowers with her collected memories seemed straight out of a Borges novel.

What was really interesting ... they'd changed the role of the grandfather. I guess it would have been a longer film if they'd left it the way it was in the book, but it was still an interesting creative decision. I think it would have been better if they'd stuck to the book, but at the same time, that's where I thought the book lost it's way. The search and the road trip in the book is the best part -- it was when Jonathan Safran Foer got into the history of the village that the book got really bogged down and overwritten, and yet in the movie they changed a major point in that history and (I think) lessened the impact of the story.

Hm.