Goodbye Google Reader

So it's finally happening, Google Reader is finished as of tomorrow.  I moved on to the Old Reader a few months ago and it's been serving me well so far, so this won't really make a huge ripple for me.  Still though, it's time to take Reader out of my bookmarks and say goodbye for realsies.  You were a good site, Google Reader! It's thanks to you that I finally started following blogs rather than reading random ones and never visiting again, and you let me follow the comics I like that don't update every day, too.  I'm gonna miss you, even if I have replaced you with basically the same thing already.  What can I say, I'm sentimental about websites.  Have a bie-bie bear, Google Reader.

Wendy Davis Is My Hero

I don't have anything new to say about Wendy Davis, her filibuster down in Texas, or the ridiculous anti-abortion law that she's dealing with, that a thousand other people have not already said a thousand times better than I ever could.  I just wanted to chime in and say that this woman is a true hero, and she will undoubtedly go down in history for what she's doing tonight.  The law that they are trying to pass isn't just ridiculous, it's hateful and inhuman, and everyone who supports it should be ashamed of themselves for being such a miserable failure of a human being.

If I ever meet Wendy Davis, I would be honored for the privilege of shaking her hand and telling her what a true inspiration she is.  If I ever meet any of the subhuman slime-crawlers who wrote or supported that bill, it would take more willpower than I have to keep from spitting on them.

My Friend Is Sick :(

I mus give him internet hugs!

I hope you feel better soon!

Mouth Fingers Are The Best Fingers

Did you know that camel mouths are filled with like a billion little mouth-fingers?  Just all those wriggly little fleshy fingers poking out from their cheeks and shit.  It's fantastic.

Leatherback sea turtles have similar stuff, they've got like these sharp spiky tentacle things that start in the mouth and go all the way down their crazylong esophogus.  Check it:

In case you can't tell, this is the esophagus cut open to show the nifty throat-spikes.

Inside Nature's Giants is just the best show.

If You Love Musicals....

Give Jekyll and Hyde a miss.  Specifically the David Hasselhoff version, which is the only one I've seen, but I assume they're all varying degrees of terrible.  I literally just finished watching it in the past five minutes, and already I can't remember a single tune from it.  I watched it thinking, "Okay, so this isn't great, but so far I've been able to find something to enjoy in every musical I've seen.  Surely sooner or later I'll hit that one guilty-pleasure song that makes the whole thing worth it, right?"  Nope, never happened.  Once or twice a song would start with one or two notes that would make me pay attention because hey, that's sort of good! Except then it would immediately go terrible again.  The lyrics were really lazy (at one point they rhymed "doorstep" with "your step," how the hell did they get away with that), and the performance was....well.  I did enjoy the first transformation scene, but not because it was good.  I enjoyed it the same way I enjoy watching clips of The Room on Youtube.  Which is not a compliment, to say the least.

I would continue with other vaguely-reviewish-words, but I don't have much else to say.  Like I said, I only just finished watching it, so I haven't had time to dwell on anything or come up with fancy reasons why not to like it.  Just...it's bad.  That's all I got.  The Hoff's acting is ridiculous, everybody else is bland, flat and forgettable, the "romance" sub plots between Jekyll, the orange lady and that stripper chick are completely lacking in...everything, really.  And I had a really hard time suspending my disbelief.  Like, I'm familiar enough with the story, as everyone is, to know that Jekyll's potion thing will work, but while he was petitioning the...medical board, I guess?  To let him begin human trials, it sounded so ridiculous that even I was going, what the hell are you on dude, this is not science. I would have agreed with the medical board that he's off his rocker and shouldn't get to do his experiment, but they were all like "You're going against God's will, you're crazy!" instead of "This is the most ridiculous theory I've ever heard, I thought you were a doctor for goodness sakes, what half-rate hotel of a school would give you a medical degree?"  I didn't care about any of the characters.  Not the stripper lady who got killed at the end, not the bride lady who...didn't?  I don't think she did, I was pretty bored by then so I wasn't watching all that closely.  Overall, it might have been the worst musical I've ever seen.  Even worse than West Side Story.  Even that had one or two songs going for it, this thing was just completely forgettable, all the way through.

Well, that's it, that's pretty much all I can think of right now.  Maybe in a day or two when I've had a chance to let the experience stew in my brain for a bit I'll have something more clever to say, but it's all I've got for now.  Bad musical, did not enjoy, do not recommend.

"Being Needy"

Look, it's fantastic. I have to find out where this thing came from.

There's this huge stigma against girls being "needy" and most women I know (including myself!) jump through so many hoops so we're not considered clingy or desperate when we're dating a guy, but why isn't there any kind of stigma against guys who start being really distant and emotionally disconnected and who start criticizing everything their girlfriend does or says?

True story, I once felt really crappy while dating a guy because he convinced me I was selfish and needy because I demanded too much of him sometimes.  Like, expecting him to, if not hold my hand, then at least be willing to walk down the street within ten feet of me instead of keeping his distance like I had the plague.  Or for pressuring him too much to hang out, when I hadn't seen him in a month.  This same guy decided, about six months into the relationship, that I chewed too loudly and would criticise me every time I took a bite, until once he literally leave the room until I finished eating.  This came out of nowhere.  One day everything was fine and then over dinner, "Holy crap, how can you eat like that?  It's disgusting, can you please try not to deafen me."  Where did it come from?  Why did I stay with a guy who acted like this?  Well, I don't know where it came from, other than "it turns out he was kind of a dick," but I stayed with him because by the time his behaviour got that ridiculous, he'd convinced me that ever feeling that I deserved more from him than what he was willing to give made me a needy, clingy girlfriend who nobody could love because I was just so needy and clingy, and that a good relationship meant never ever talking about negative things because then I'd just be trying to start a fight and he'd get upset and I'd have to stop talking about whatever it was and spend the rest of the day trying to soothe his hurt feelings or else the relationship was over and somehow that would be a bad thing, I don't even know.  Next time you hear a girl being described as needy, stop and look closely for a minute and think about if what she needs is really so extreme.  Maybe she's just dating an asshole.

Who Is Surprised That "The Internship" Sucked?

Now, to be fair, I haven't actually seen The Internship.  I loathe Owen Wilson.  I hate his stupid face and his stupid voice and all the stupid roles he plays.  He ruins every movie he's in.  I couldn't watch Cars because he was just hanging out there, ruining it.  I still resent him for that.  I wanted to watch every Pixar film, and Owen Wilson single-handedly destroyed that dream, the fucker.

But anyway, The Internship.  It sucks, according to Rotten Tomatoes.  Normally I'd be all "Well, comedies are especially hard to review, because instead of objectively-good or objectively-bad things like acting or writing you're also trying to review an extremely subjective thing, comedy!  What you think is dumb a lot of people will find really funny, so you can't just use one person's review to say whether a film is good or bad!"  Except Owen Wilson, so of course it's bad.

But still, I know other people enjoy Owen Wilson.  After all, he's famous for a reason.  So how did I know that The Internship would tank?  Easy: they put absolutely no work into advertising it.  I go to the movies fairly regularly, and I only saw a single trailer for it, ages before it opened.  And when they finally put up posters for it in the theatre, they didn't give a single clue what it was about.  Seriously, it was just a giant poster of Owen Wilson's face looking as doofy as humanly possible with the word INTERN plastered over his forehead in forgettable font.  It said nothing about the film, and the trailer had been so long ago I'd forgotten about it already.  So I didn't know what the hell it was or why I should watch it, other than "look, this famous person is in it!"  Which is not exactly a ringing endorsement.  Seriously, if Hollywood can't even manage to advertise a comedy about two idiots trying to scam their way into a job they aren't qualified for while hilarity ensues, and Hollywood loves shitty comedies like that, then what hope does it have of being any kind of quality film?

And no, seriously, look at this friggin' poster:

What the hell is that expression supposed to convey, other than "I don't actually remember what this movie is about, but I'm in it so you should probably go see it"?  It doesn't even say Google anywhere to jog your memory.  It's just, LOOK! FACE!  Can you be any less creative?  If the movie is even half as uninspired and bland as the posters for it are....then it's a pretty shitty movie, I guess.  See, that poster is so bad it's sapped my ability to mock!  WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME, OWEN WILSON

The Princess And The Frog

I rewatched The Princess And The Frog last night.  I turned it on and was like, man, I forgot how fun this movie is, why'd I delete it from my computer in the first place?  Then they got to the bayou and I went, oh, now I remember.  It's a really great movie, except for all the annoying parts.

   Yeeeah.

It feels like every time I watch it I start thinking about things that are actually kind of awful.  Like, for example, Tiana's mom.  That poor, poor woman.  Her daughter vanishes from a party, nobody sees or hears from her for like a week, and can you imagine the conversation when she finally makes it home?  "Hi Mom!  Sorry I was gone, but this guy turned me into a frog and I only changed back after I married him.  Meet my new husband!"  I wonder how long it took to convince her that Naveen was really a prince and not just a freaky abductor/rapist.