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")

I've had about sixteen ideas for blog posts in the past three or four days. I can't remember a single one of them. Obviously they weren't very interesting after all.

So I think I'll write about the reasons I don't have a digital camera.

First of all, I am occasionally a tightwad, and when I have 3 perfectly good (okay, 2 perfectly good and 1 that died, mysteriously ressurected itself, and cannot be trusted not to die again) cameras already, why would I buy another one? Yes, it might be cool to upload pictures onto my computer and send them to family and friends instantly. But I don't have kids yet, so I'd be sending them pictures of what? Cowboy and myself cooking supper? Woooo, that's exciting.

Second, I like not knowing instantly if a picture I took will turn out or not. There's that tinge of mystery, the suspense of wondering if I've gotten a brilliant shot of that old ramshackle barn. The anticipation when I drop the film off at my one-hour photo developer, and have to wait to pick them up. Or, back when I was actually the one working in the photo lab, the joy of feeding little cartridges of rolled-up secrets into the developer and having them come out as long curly strips of memories, then sliding them into the printer and watching them turn into tangible images.

Also, taking pictures with a digital camera takes away some of the magic, some of the art and spontenaity. How often haven't people I know taken a picture with their digital camera, looked at it, then said, "Uh-oh, we need to reshoot that, so-and-so blinked." And they end up taking nineteen more shots, by which point most non-camera-lovers want to strangle them. With real film, you take two shots, and pray one of them turns out.

Third, I love the noises my 35mm cameras make. It's like my attachment to my old computer keyboard. I have this ancient keyboard that came with my parents' first computer, a 386 or something. It makes lots of noise. When I type, it clicks, kind of like a typewriter actually (I remind myself of "that nut that's in love with his typewriter" from You've Got Mail sometimes). This keyboard doesn't make the swanky swooshy noises of modern keyboards...it clacks and clicks and taps. If I type fast enough, it almost sounds like percussive music. It's so old I had to get an adapter to hook it up to my newer computers, but I refuse to replace it until it dies. Anyway...back to cameras....

My Kodak PaS (Point and Shoot) makes a particular winding noise that is like an old friend clearing their throat when they just wake up in the morning. I've had that camera since I was about 11--it's just a cheap thing my parents got me for Christmas, to replace an earlier even-more-elcheapo camera that went kaput (sometime I'll tell you about the related Sault Ste. Marie Camera Tragedy). I've dropped it, sat on it, taken it to Ukraine where it got fogged upon...I don't even remember how it got the scar on its lens cover. But this little junky Kodak PaS takes lovely photos with really devine colors. And I can load it with my eyes closed. And it makes that winding noise.

Gabriel, my first SLR (Single Lens Reflex), is the one that died back when I first started this blog. Then when we moved here, he magically came back to life. He makes cool noises too, especially when he focuses for me--it's a zeeeeeet zeeeeeeeet sound, and then he chirps when he's satisfied with the focus. When the shutter closes, it makes a satisfying chuh-chuh-chkkkkk.

But the coolest-sounding camera I have is Marlowe, my Chinon SLR I picked up at a pawn shop when I thought Gabriel was no more. He's fully manual, which means I have to do all the focusing myself, and also that its easier to control his aperture and shutter speed, at least for me. He makes that fantastic loud chk-CHK noise that I always associate with "real" photographers. Also, he smells like old mechanical things.

Digital cameras are too sleek for me, too stylized. They're an accessory, not a tool. It's like stilletto heels versus sneakers. The mystery and enchantment of wondering what that shot you just took will really look like--that's gone. And it's too simple to manipulate digital photos. Sure, you can center things, crop out unwanted intruders, fix red demon eyes...and what else? Fix your hair? Shed a few photo pounds? Whiten your smile? The possibility to lose truth is just too great for me.

This is not meant as a slam on any of my friends or family members who own digital cameras. I love the pictures I get of my neice and nephew, of my friends's kids, etc. This is just an explanation of why I do not personally at this time own a digital camera. Who knows? I may get one in the future. I've been known to change my mind, after all...

Do you know what an Easter Egg is? I don't mean dyed hard-boiled eggs, or Cadbury eggs, or things like that. I mean little hidden goodies on dvds (and cds and video games sometimes). They're amazingly fun! The Housekarl first alerted me to their existence when the third Lord of the Rings extended edition came out. But then the site mom of the place where I post my fanfic told me there were some on the first two LotR extendeds too, and that there are Easter Eggs on other dvds too. Some of them are lame, but some are brilliant! The Kieth Richards interview on Pirates of the Caribbean is particularly adorable...

Anyway, here are a few sites that tell you how to access Easter Eggs on various dvds. Happy hunting!

Hidden Features
Easter Egg Archive
DVD Dungeon

My writing process is a coffeemaker. The little bits of ideas for a story are the coffee grounds, and I dump them into my brain, where my hot-water imagination flows into the ideas, initially just mixing with them and percolating, getting the ideas to mix together and get warm and tasty. Then slowly the story itself starts to drip out, leaving the idea-grounds behind and forming a pot of steaming story. When other people drink in my story, they can add their own cream and sugar if they want to, bringing their own perspectives and preconceived ideas with them, or they can just imbibe it fresh and black--undiluted and potent.

I watched two amazing movies this 'weekend', and I've got to blather on about them for a bit...

First, Equilibrium. Whooo! That one blew my socks off! (At least, it would have if I'd been wearing socks when I watched it; I was barefoot, however, as usual) It's like taking the basic premise of Fahrenheit 451 and tossing it into a Matrix-style setting. And with Christian Bale and Sean Bean, how can you miss? Not nearly enough Sean Bean for my taste, but at least for once he wasn't completely eeeeeeeeevil. And okay, the religious references were a bit overt (what with a character called 'the Father', people called 'clerics', and that reference to the 'opiate of the masses'...). But still, it was a totally energizing romp. Thank you, Rescue Ranger (aka The Banana Stalker) for recommending it to me!

Second, Ordinary People. Oh my word! Timothy Hutton is gut-wrenchingly amazing! The dude was like 19 or 20, and he was acting more intensely than most 'grown up' actors ever ever ever do! No wonder he got the Oscar that year--I'm surprised they even nominated anyone else. To some of you young squirts reading this who have never even heard of this movie, let me say that I think Matt Damon and Ben Affleck watched Ordinary People a lot before writing Good Will Hunting. Robin William's character in the latter is especially reminiscent of Judd Hirsch's in the former, right down to those saggy blue-grey sweaters.