Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Imaginary Crime

Due to my overexposure of television crime (thanks L&O!) I have been known to suffer from the odd bit of irrational paranoia. I was walking home from work tonight, in the darkness of an early winter evening, in the rain, listening to listening to some Robyn, and I saw the shadow of a person walking swiftly behind me. My initial reaction? To be terrified. I glanced back at the shadow and saw that they were using an umbrella and I relaxed immediately.

I don't know why the knowledge that the person behind me was using an umbrella was such an immediate comfort to me until I reached the following hypothesis: Muggers don't use umbrellas. I don't know any muggers so unfortunately I can't ask them about it. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. If you were to mug someone, wouldn't you need both hands at your disposal? I imagine it would be hard to be very frightening if one hand was trying to control an umbrella on a windy day. Wouldn't it also be an easy way to identify someone to a near by patrolman? "What did she look like ma'am?" "She was about 5'5" brown hair, average weight, oh yeah, and she had a giant Hello Kitty umbrella."

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Re: Dumb ideas for blog posts

I want to start out by saying that had your Candyman soundtrack post actually made it onto the interweb, I would've enjoyed it IMMENSELY and I'm a little sad that your vision was never fully realized.

To be honest, I wouldn't say I have "stupid" ideas for posts. Not to imply that my posts are of the highest intellectual level,  I just think it's more accurate to say I have incomplete ideas for blog posts. And by incomplete, I mean I have only thought of what to title the post. For example, I've had one floating around in my head since May called, "When Your Bus Driver Thinks You're Lazy." Some day that post will be written, and it will be awesome.

On second thought, is it too late to retract my claim that my ideas for blog posts aren't stupid? I forgot that I intended to write a post comparing my cat to Pocahontas. 

What I Think When I Plan a Post

I think that one of the reasons I do not post often is because most of my spur of the moment blog post ideas are really, really stupid. For example, I was thinking about writing a whole post about the "Candyman" soundtrack. That would probably be doable, since the soundtrack was composed by Phillip Glass and is totally awesome, but my post idea was mostly going to be about how I know all the words. There are no words. My post was going to mostly consist of "dododododododododo" and "hohohohohohohoho."

I wanted to post this so that you would all know that I do think about this blog, even though I don't write in it much. I want this blog to reflect how clever and funny I am, so I have to edit my thoughts heavily. Don't worry, I have an outlet for my bad ideas. Basically when I think up a blog post like the one about the "Candyman" soundtrack and then realize how stupid it is, I tweet it instead. Man, I hope the cool celebrities I follow don't read my twitter.



What was your stupidest idea for a post, buddy? The time it takes you to answer my question will say something about your dedication to iftheycandoitsocanwe.blogspot.com.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Noooo! Dobby!!!!!!



Happy Harry Potter Day, everyone! What better a day to start blogging again than the day of the most anticipated movie event of the season (at least among 16-year-old white kids who like to underage drink, if last night's crowd was anything to judge it by)?! Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One is a Harry Potter movie that will get you excited about the franchise again. By far the darkest of the series, this movie is legitimately scary in parts. The very first scene, a meeting of death eaters planing a feasible time frame in which to kill Harry, involves the movie's first, but not final, explicit scene of torture. This scene also made me want to give Snape a big ole' hug, but maybe that was just me.

The series has never really had action-packed action sequences before. The movies, at least as far as I remember them, have always focused more on Harry's metaphorical journey than his literal journey. That's cool I guess. But a chase sequence involving Hagrid's magical motorcycle is also cool. Don't worry, this movie didn't skimp on long, drawn out scenes in which our three heroes talk aaaa loooooot. It just added some more exciting chase scenes and some pretty awesome jump scares for viewers who already know where the Sword of Gryffindor is and don't want to spend 2 hours hearing the characters talk ad-nauseam about where they might find it ("No, it's not in Godric's Hollow, but go there anyway because something awesome and scary will happen!").

The movie also had some pretty touching moments. Don't worry, I definitely didn't cry during the scene with Dobby. Definitely not. No sir... But it was pretty touching. And the kids are finally good actors, so the emotional moments were pretty easy to get in to, rather than painful to watch.... DOBBY, WHY?!?!?

In case you can't tell, I have never been wildly impressed with one of the movies before. I love the books, but the films have always been just boring enough to underwhelm me. Not this one. It was exciting, it took me on a roller coaster of emotion, and it set up the final installment perfectly. It also featured a kick ass animation sequence about the origin of the deathly hollows. If you are not excited about Harry Potter anymore, go see this movie so you can recapture the magic! Was that a good pun? If it was, then it was intended. If not, then what pun? What are you talking about?

Also, Daniel Radcliffe takes his shirt off a lot, which is neat if that's the kind of thing you're into.