I’d heard for a long time that Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire series was getting made into an HBO series. September it shall debut in a series created by the Six Feet Under guy and starring Anna Paquin. Pretty cool. Their marketing however, has cracked me up. They’ve got two sites, one advertising TruBlood, the Japanese synthetic blood product that (in the series) is released on the market and allows the vampires to come out of hiding – as they now have an palatable alternative to manslaughter. The other is BloodCopy, chronicling the unfolding drama of vampires trying to integrate with humans. Both websites take themselves absolutely seriously, and it’s pretty much a riot.

The concern I have is that imdb makes no mention of Eric Northman, the jerky vampire with a thing for Sookie who is probably my favorite character in the series, and no mention of *gasp* Bubba. How can you have the Southern Vampires without Elv- whoops, I mean, Bubba.

Just got back from it. The first five minutes of the movie has some of the most well done character development I’ve seen in a long, long time, and it does it with a robot, a cockroach, and no dialogue. Color us seriously impressed. It also manages to make me embarrassed to be human and incredibly hopeful about the human race within the span of an hour and a half. According to Steve, who heard a radio interview with writer/director Andrew Stanton, Stanton didn’t mean for the show to be a political agenda piece, although it’s incredibly easy to take that way. Pixar does a great job thumbing its nose at big business (although one big business with a spokes-fairy never made time as a punching bag) in scenes showcasing what must be the love child of a warped three-way between Wal-Mart, Costco, and McDonalds. They mock the inherent laziness of humanity. And, of course, you can’t have a movie that starts off with a world destroyed by pollution without having at least a smidgeon of condemnation for our less than green ways. But even though the movie poked at our foibles, it doesn’t give up hope, and that is absolutely beautiful.

How does Pixar do it? The movie’s about a robot, for crying out loud. I didn’t exactly fall in love with the robot (unlike that “foxy” Robin Hood; a wrong affection that I still can’t explain), but I do think I want WALL*E for my son and (it ain’t much of a spoiler, but just in case) Eve for my daughter-in-law. So, go to the movie. Feel embarrassed and proud to be a human, and then come out with a renewed sense to DO something about it.

So, sometimes I stumble upon an old blog entry that strikes my fancy. Here’s one. http://dglm.blogspot.com/2007/11/jim-mccarthy-is-excited-that-3-out-of-4.html

My favorite parts:

When the AP did their recent poll on literacy, they found that one in four Americans didn’t read a book last year. I know a lot of people who found that news depressing, but my own reaction was more, “Rock! Three out of four people read a book last year!”…

So 25 out of 100 people didn’t read a book last year. At least one or two of them must not be able to read, right? (Note to self: look up American illiteracy rates) And then you have people who just don’t like to read. I’m not thrilled with that fact, but I’m at peace with it….

What I do find unnerving is that other poll from a year or so back that indicated 80% of Americans wanted to write a book. First of all, that means that at least 5% of people who want to write a book didn’t read one in the past year.

Rock on.

Sorry. There’s a free chapter for a book called Gargoyle on Amazon. It’s this literary fiction piece that I think got recommended to me because it involved reincarnation, but g’damn; I can’t stop reading it. And I don’t usually like modern literary fiction.

And, OK, this one does have the usual things that make me roll my eyes like a protagonist that had the shittiest life on planet Earth and then got burned almost to death in a car accident while he was high.

Yesterday I learned how to tile a floor. It wasn’t bad; no breathing breathing strange dust and I could sit and work at my own pace, and at the end, I had end-product progress I could see.

We’re adding an addition onto our house and we’re doing the finish out (i.e. everything after the drywall) ourselves. Scott’s currently working on the staircase, building the railing, making the treads, etc, and I’m tiling the bathroom. We’ve been working on the addition for about a year and nine months, and living in it for a year of that (or it will be a year next week). Scott’s a real trooper about working; I must admit I’m less enthusiastic. Now that it’s summer vacation, though I’m trying to be more helpful. Hence, I’m tiling the bathroom. My in-laws, who LOVE house renovation so much that they own several rental houses so they can spend their lives knee deep in sawdust, seemed very pleased with my tiling. I love them dearly, but I think they’re crazy.

There are several things I have learned from this experience.

1. Painting the exterior of an all wooden house is approximately as painful as paying for a college education. Is it then coincidence that the likely next time the house will need painting is about when our not-yet-conceived children will be wanting to attend college? I think not.
2. If painting an interior wall is excrutiatingly painful, you’re painting it the wrong color. Stop, get your color chips, and refigure before you waste more time.
3. Avoid your husband when he thinks he’s made a mistake that costs money. It doesn’t matter if it’s $500 or $0.05. Your marriage will be better for an hour long wide berth.
4. If somebody says it’ll take four months, they mean something closer to four years.
5. Sawdust does come out of carpet, but if you vacuum it up every time you see it, you will spend your life with a nozzle attached to your hand and mental cats. Just deal.
6. Cement does come off your kneecaps. With enough scrubbing.