Honest Scrap Award

Crystalee Calderwood has nominated me for the Honest Scrap Award, passing it on from Vivian Zabel

The guidelines for winning this award include the following:1. List 10 honest things about yourself (make it interesting, even if you have to dig deep)2. Pass the award on to 7 bloggers

10 honest things about myself

1. If I had been a boy, my name would have been Amos Abraham.
2. I have been to four  sci-fi/fantasy cons.
3. Bon Jovi is still my all time favorite band.
4. I know how to make a slip knot.
5. I once got bit by a camel.
6. I collect Hard Rock Cafe bears
7. I can spit shine shoes and boots.
8. I have most of the prologue to canterbury tales in old english or middle english or whatever it’s in memorized from the 11th grade still.
9. I wanted to be in the Boy Scouts so I could climb mountains and rappel and go spelunking after they showed a video in elementary, and was denied.
10. I have a collection of POGs in an old fishing lure box.

.i nominate.

anyone on my blogroll who reads this 🙂

My First Post in Bulgarian

Аз ам сара. Аз обичам Радо най много на света. Радо е моита маимунка. Аз ам мишка и коте. Аз говоря малко Български. Аз искам да науча повиче.

Здрасти от София, България

one word- gloss

i tend to gloss over the unpleasant memories. it’s not like lip gloss that can heal chapped lips. glossing over memories doesn’t heal anything, it only buries them deeper inside. until they well up to full and you have to explode. my intestines will shine with a glossy sheen…

Home

i want to play clarinet THIS good

ivo papazov and his wedding band, from bulgaria

i started playing clarinet in the fifth grade. i picked clarinet because my cousin jaimie played it. i played from 5th-10th grades in the concert bands and took private lessons from 6th-8th grade. I stopped playing for two years, then took private lessons at mount union college, focusing on jazz and blues, improvisation, and reading music in the key of c in the key of b flat so i could play it. Stopped playing again for a year or two, then started playing again, blues, mostly. Pads got chipped and moth eaten so sent to a friend to fix, but she never did, two years later i got it fixed at volkweins music in pgh, got it back yesterday and started playing klezmer music. still playing on my size 4 reeds, but i dont last as long as i used to! i’m still decent and remember all the notes and such, so i’m hoping to improve and improve and improve. i doubt i’ll ever be as good as ivo papazov, tho….

i can play my clarinet with rado playing accordian, just like ivo papazov and petar ralchev!

Spirit Noir

Review of the Spirit film (2008)

Spirit is based on a weekly comic series penned and illustrated by Will Eisner in the 1940s. This is one of the first comics to establish the conventions and standards of comic books and graphic novels still used today. The movie felt like a film noir hard boiled detective film. The main character is not a detective, per se, but an ex-cop who died and came back to life and is now apparently invincible/immortal. Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht) is now known as The Spirit, he is the spirit of the city, and her protector. In order to serve this role, Denny has decided no names, no personal connections, no relationships so he can do it right. The city is his love. In the movie, Denny Colt’s childhood sweetheart, Sand Seref (sounds like Sans Serif, a type of font without feet) played by Eva Mendez, returns to the city. Sam Jackson plays The Octupus, the movie’s villain. The police commissioner and his doctor daughter (who was denny colt’s love interest before he “died”) also play important roles. The movie felt like a 1940 city until I was jarred out of it when a cell phone with video feed was used. This pulled me out of the movie because it made me wonder what year it was, and if it was current, it must be in some alternate reality where most everything else is still like the 1940s, and on and on my mind ran away from the movie. Other than that, I really got into the movie. Spirit was written for the screen and directed by the Frank Miller, who directed Sin City, and the visual styles were similar. There was a lot of diachromatic scenes (black, white, and red), and some animation was used so it felt like a comic book come to life. Sam Jackson’s performance was incredible, and he definitely brought a old school funk feeling to the character. The interactions between his character and Scarlett Johansen’s character, Silken Floss, were filled with a great rapport and banter.  The movie has been accused of having cardboard characters and ludicrous dialogue, but I felt it was witty, sometimes bordering on the absurd (especially with all the -os clones and Sam Jackson appearing as a samurai and a nazi), but thoroughly enjoyable.

Sam Jackson as a Pimped-Out Octopus

image from ComicCon 2008 magazine, availble http://www.comic-con.org/common/cc_magazine.shtml