Daily Squee

Hee hee.
Daily dose of cuteness, without the bad grammar.

Oh how I like!

Mash it up. ooh ooh...mash it up.

I stumbled up on this lovely website, where Ray Dunlavey has made a number of mash ups of comics and films. My favourite of the lot:
I love the mashups, mostly because there is even a Bloom County Mashup...and Peanuts + XMen. I love Bloom County...expecially Opus.
Tee hee.

This headache is brought to you by the letters G and R and R and R...

The only thing more fun than writing a rushed project proposal (17 pages with references. Ahem.) is having to redit and spellcheck it because Word crashed. Again.
Woo.
I can't help but be excited though. If it all goes well I have some exciting news to share very soon. Hold onto your bowlers my peeps. It's cool, x factor 5.

Now that my screaming and gnashing of teeth (and editing) are complete I'm off to lalaland. Me and my pillow, we're going places...:)

Chemical Brothers ft Richard Ashcroft - The Test

Not much to say today...this song has been in my head all morning. It's an old favourite of mine.
Listened to this CD driving home late on the highway on sunday...and I felt quite nearly perfect :) Great way to end a great weekend. Driving fast down the highway listening to great music...makes the drive go by in a blink of an eye. Great weekend - good friends, Star Wars party and all the goodness that goes with it.

Have a great day!

Be Seeing You

The Prisoner was a 17 episode British television show that aired in the late 60's. It starred Patrick McGoohan and was set in "the Village".

A man with no name (you never do learn his identity-he is only referred to as #6) resigns from the secret service, and as he prepares to leave his home is gassed, waking up later in The Village. As Number 6 tries to learn where he is, why he is being held captive and escape the Village, those in charge there try many methods to break his mind and learn why he resigned and what he knows. Many others are trapped in the Village...some broken and some still resisting. All cannot leave. It is a place where"Questions are a burden to others. Answers are a burden to one's self."
Set in the strange town Penrhyndeudraeth, North Wales, using the Hotel Portmeirion for a lot of it's set...well this show is quite strange. There is a great amount of social commentary and it's always been a favourite of mine. I pop the DVDs in every once in a while and get lost in strange spy science fiction. I love it.

I am quite curious, as this weekend the first episode of a miniseries remake of The Prisoner is airing on sunday. We shall see just how they manage to improve on a classic science fiction program. They'll have to reach very high to impress me...Patrick McGoohan passed away a few years ago and this show really was his creation...without him around to keep the project in line I really wonder just what the new show will be like. I'm excited...can't help myself.

Apparently it has been changed somewhat - which in my mind is good. If you're going to directly remake a show you fail right off the bat in my mind - what's the point? If you can take the main idea and spirit of a show and make something incredible out of it - well I'm all in. It worked for the remake of Battlestar Galactica- soyou just never know. Good Sci-fi really is rare and we need mroe of it. Apparently a few huge differences will include the fact that the villagers (including the Prisoner) have been made to forget about the world outside. Add in a different location, and lack of the strange village costumes and it will be a different animal. There will be 6 episodes in the new miniseries, all based on the better episodes of the original show. Originally they'd thrown around the idea of Christopher Eccleston for the role of #6 which quite honestly got me so excited I could have peed, but the person they finally chose is somewhat unknown to me, so that may also be a good thing...we shall see. Ian McKellan as #2 certainly can't hurt...

I'll be setting the machine to record it and it had better not fail...or you will be able to hear me howling from miles away when I settle down later in the evening to watch it (I refuse to reschedule my life around TV) if it failed to record for some reason. I'm quite excited. I do so hope it does not tank. If you see it, or you're a fan of the original, let me know what you thought of it!

Have a great weekend :)

Dulce et Decorum Est

Remembrance day is a time to remember those, like J's grandpa, who went to war and ended up giving their lives for our freedom. J's grandpa was gassed in WW2...he came home sick and never recovered. Many others never got the gift of being able to see their families again after leaving to fight for freedom. In our modern age people fight wars for their family's freedom...others for things like oil and greed, and I wonder if we here in Canada forget what it was like to live in a time when we gathered to fight for our freedom as a people. I wonder if we truly have a concept of what this means anymore...As the veterans fade from our lives we will not have memories of that time to draw on. Phrases like "Never Again" are easily said but hard to live and mean less and less as time goes on if we do not take the time to remember. Christmas marketeers cannot even have the ounce of respect to leave the stores uncluttered between Halloween and November 11...the respect deserved is fading.
J is currently at work, working with the TV crew to put the local Remembrance Day program on the air so that those of us who cannot make it down there can have the chance to offer respect and memory on this day. I am at home where I can watch it. Watch his small gift of remembrance. Last year I was able to attend and it was a very moving thing...to see adults and children remembering family and friends and unknown people who served to keep us safe both then and now...very moving.

I have been thinking about poetry from the time of World War One. I love In Flander's Fields - I had memorised it in high school. I got to wondering what other well known poems were written around that time...what other thoughts came out of World War 1 in particular. They can't all be pretty inspiring words...and I came across this poem. It is very striking and I wanted to share it with you, because it's different. It speaks a lot of how senseless I feel war can be...

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; "Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori".

Wilfred Owen, written between 8 October 1917 – March, 1918

DULCE ET DECORUM EST are the first words of a Latin saying from an ode by Horace. The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean “It is sweet and right.” The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – it is sweet and right to die for your country.

Poem and other things taken kindly from here.

I think that's all I have to say on that for now.
Take the time to Remember my friends...

Wait till Otis sees us! He loves us!

I've had this great old song in my head since I woke up this morning.
Otis Day and the Knights...a classic. This whole soundtrack has some great songs on it...Twisting the night away...Hey Paula...Wonderful world(still one of my all time favourite songs)...Tossin and Turnin - great classic stuff. I keep pulling this CD out every year or so and swooshing around the room to it with a big grin on my face. Not particularly attached to the film...more the music :) I'm going to pull it up on my iPod right now and have a listen in the lab. Good stuff...

Have a great day!