Hamlette's Guide to Surviving Spider Attacks

Spiders are everywhere! Yesterday alone they attacked me three times. It is important to remain constantly alert, so as to avoid being caught unawares by their fiendishly sneaky onslaughts. Routinely inspect all suspicious markings on the walls and ceiling of your home to ascertain whether they are new enemies or simply the remains of eliminated attackers.

In the event of a Spider Attack, follow these simple steps:

1. Sound the Spider Alarm. Simply open your mouth and emit a loud naaarg naaarg naaarg noise.
2. Step a safe distance away from the spider (about 5 feet).
3. Point to the attacker while continuing to emit the Spider Alarm.
4. If the spider is above you, cover your head with one arm.
5. Wait for Cowboy to come dispose of the spider.

Of course, you don't have access to Cowboy, so you'll have to find someone else to eliminate the threat. But the steps remain effective, regardless of the name of the Spider Squasher.

Here are my Bottom Ten Least Favorite Movies Of All Time:

10. House On Haunted Hill (1999)
9. I Accuse My Parents (1944)
8. Time Bandits (1981)
7. The Troll (19??)
6. The Last Panzer Battalion (1969)
5. Cruel Intentions (1999)
4. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
3. El Condor (1970)
2. Final Destination (2000)
1.Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Some of them are dumb, some are boring, and some are just plain gross. And all of them are things I never ever ever will see again, and I advise you to do the same! Just think: those represent about 20 hours of my life that I totally wasted! Grr...

There are a couple lines in the middle of "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning that I've always felt apply to me. These are they:

...She had / A heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad...

That really describes how I often think of myself, except I don't see this as a flaw. I enjoy my rampant joie d'vivre and I don't intend to ever permanantly lose it. I like the fact that I am quick to be delighted, that I can enjoy simple things like a daffodil or a fresh dusting of snow. A well-turned phrase or an unexpected-yet-perfect description in a book. An actor twitching their eyebrow just so, or leaning against a wall. The exultant soaring of a trumpet. Playing a song on the piano exactly the way I wanted to. Cowboy when he first wakes up and has that pleased flush of childhood lingering about his face. There are infinite and myriad things that cause me to delight and rejoice. I don't have to wait for a Creed concert or visiting the Louvre or attending a live performance of Hamlet or visiting John Wayne's birthplace to be really, indescribably, overflowingly happy. (BTW, I've done two of those things, can you guess which two?)

This subject comes up because the theater here in town (only a few blocks from my house!) got the new film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera for one week only. I saw it on Sunday night, before going to work. And it enthralled me! Enchanted me! Swept me off my creative feet and carried me to new heights of artistic ebbuliance! In other words, I adored it. It wholly delighted me. I think I'll have to put it in my top 15 movies of all time, at the least. I think I'll go see it again before it leaves on Thursday.

But all the reviews of it that I've read, before and since seeing it, have been...less than complimentary. One person thought it would have been great, without the music. Another hated the music and the plot and the acting and the entire concept. Another liked the concept, but found it poorly presented. I was left wondering if they even saw the same movie I did!

And then I remembered that I am delighted by things that cause others to turn up their noses. It seems to me that a lot of people think that denigrating and pooh-pooh-ing something (be it a movie, book, play, poem, painting, photograph, idea, whatever) makes them sound knowledgeable. Discerning, even. More intelligent than those around them. To me, however, they just sound stuck on themselves and unwilling to enjoy (or admit they've enjoyed) anything.

This doesn't mean I like everything, however. I dislike a good many things. But I am willing to like things too, to enjoy life and its accouterments.

I've got two more Combat! fanfic stories posted! One of them, "Far From the Reason", is new, and intercuts lyrics from the Hoobastank song "The Reason" with internal dialogue during the first-season episode "Far From the Brave". The other story, "Shepherds Watch", is a Christmas story that I wrote in December, but didn't get posted until now. It's dedicated to my mom.

Also, check and see if those quotation marks in "Searching" are working better now for you, Housekarl.

I have a new second-favorite Shakespeare play! Obviously, Hamlet is always my favorite, but I periodically decide I really like another of his plays. For a while it was The Merchant of Venice. Then Much Ado About Nothing, then King Lear. Now it's Henry V. I haven't read it yet, but on a whim I picked up the Kenneth Branagh version at the library last night. I mostly got it cuz Christian Bale and Dame Judi Dench are in it. Whenever I'm not watching a Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare movie, I always have this "who does he think he is?" attitude toward him. And then when I'm watching one of his movies, I realize who he is--a guy who really likes bringing Shakespeare to the big screen. Which can be way fun--I love his versions of Much Ado and Love's Labour's Lost. His Hamlet is okay, but some of the cameos annoy me.

Anyway, last night I watched Henry V and I adored it! Any play that begins with "O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention"--yeah, that's just gotta rock! And people talk all the time about the St. Crispin's Day speech...there's a reason they do that.

I'd ramble on some more, but Cowboy wants to go grocery shopping...

I have just successfully completed a very delicate operation...on a vhs tape. It's the third such surgery I've performed since we moved here. My first was just a simple transplant of the little flippy plastic flap that shields the tape. Those are really easy. My copy of Support Your Local Sheriff got a bit broken during the move here, so I just took a flap from a blank tape and put it on my good tape.

I kept the crippled blank tape just in case I ever needed it, never thinking I really would. Turns out it's a good thing I did, cuz last spring my copy of The Searchers had some internal damage--one of the bits of plastic that holds the tape in place broke off, and obviously the tape wouldn't play after that. So I opened that cassette, removed the spools and film, and put them inside the intact cassette that I'd taken the flap from. I put the good flap from the original Searchers tape on the new cassette, and was good to go!

And finally, yesterday I was watching a tape that my work buddy recorded for me (he's my NCIS, CSI: Miami, Battlestar Gallactica, and now Numbers provider), and suddenly it went clunka clunka clunka and stopped working. I pulled it out, very relieved it hadn't gotten stuck inside and killed my vcr. The right side of the tape had wound crooked, with a big lumpy loop in it. I shook the tape and it rattled--obviously something inside had broken, and a piece of it got caught between the tape and the spool. I had to go to work in about ten minutes, so I didn't have time to fix it then, but I knew I wanted to try, because there are still eps of NCIS and CSI: Miami on it that I haven't seen yet!

So tonight I rewound the tape, which it fortunately could still do, then got out my trusty tiny screwdrivers and opened up the cassette. Sure enough , two little nonessential bits of plastic fell out. I put it back together, screwed it tight shut, and now I'm watching Battlestar Gallactica. Hooray! I love fixing things successfully!

Here's a list of my ten favorite poets, and in parentheses the title of my favorite poem by each poet. I'm currently working on saving each of these poems on my other blog, so go there if you're interested in reading them ;-) You can dialogue with me about them via the comments here or at that blog if you want to!

My Top Ten Favorite Poets
1. Kenneth Koch ("Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams")
2. Robert Frost ("Nothing Gold Can Stay")
3. Langston Hughes ("Mother to Son")
4. Shel Silverstein ("It's Dark in Here")
5. Robert Browning ("Porphyria's Lover")
6. T.S. Eliot ("The Hollow Men")
7. Walt Whitman ("Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day")
8. Carl Sandburg ("Love Is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely")
9. Shakira ("The One")
10. Louis L'Amour ("I've Never Read Gone With the Wind")