(no subject)

1. Sigh, not sure what is up with the heating in this building. Was perfectly comfortable last week, but suddenly, starting this Sunday, it won't get past 64 degrees. Sent an email to the landlord asking WTF? I hate being a pest...and maybe I'm crazy, but isn't 60-64 degrees, and 74-82 degrees a bit extreme? How hard is it to do 68-72? Or even 66-70? That was last week - worked fine.

2. Okay, I don't think I can continue reading the Immortal Life of Henerietta Laks....it's gotten far too dark, and I'm only 30% of the way in. This poor family. This dirt poor black woman dies painfully of cervical cancer, before her death her doctors - without telling her - harvest cells from the tumor in her cervix and uterus. Then after her death, she leaves behind four kids, three of these kids are horribly abused by a cousin, who hates her guts. One, Deborah, is molested by the cousin's husband and beaten up by the husband in front of her father - who does nothing at all. Meanwhile the white researchers who harvested her cells and are growing them like gangbusters...have made quite the reputation for themselves in the world, and made millions. Also her cells have helped heal polio, smallpox, and various other ailments - mainly for white folks.
Reading this book not only depresses me, it frustrates me. Yet for some masochistic reason I continue reading it.

Considering shifting to either Jim Butcher's Cold Days or Louisa May Alcott's Little Women or Guards!Guards! by Terry Pratchett. Thinking Les Miserables by Victor Hugo may be too dark.

3. Just have to make it through two more days...

(no subject)

1. The problem with the heat in the building is I live with three men...sigh. They keep fiddling.

2. So..My bro took his daughter (age 8) and one her friends (age 8) to the Hobbit, and was very upset and disappointed. He'd just read the book to his daughter and was well expecting something more in line with the animated version or the play version that I appeared in way back in 1981, which was only two hours and a fairly straight-forward adaptation of the book.

Apparently, Peter Jackson found that version sort of boring, and well got ambitious.

He railed about the film to my mother, who as a result now has no interest whatsoever in seeing the film - dang-it. Wish she'd told me on Friday, so I could have seen it this weekend - although, not sure I'd have managed it - no time. Dang brother. His reaction? The film was three hours long with a lot of material that was not even in the book, and the film was scarier and more violent than the book - and if he'd known, he would never have taken his daughter to it. She attempted to reassure him - by reminding him that she had taken us to Exclaibure in 1981, at the ages of 9 and 13 respectively or thereabouts. And that was worse - it had a sex scene. (Actually it was a violent rape scene in the first 15 minutes...Uther raping Igraine, while Merlin murmered in the background.) My parents apparently didn't think a fantasy could be well so...adult at that time? We dealt with it well or better than my parents did at any rate - both squirmed throughout the movie.

Hmmm...it's admittedly been a while (25 yrs) but I remember the Hobbit being fairly violent and not exactly a children's book. More pre-teen (I read it at 12/13 years of age or however old you are in the 6th grade). Granted, I know that Jackson added a bunch of material from Tolkien's appendixes. Things most people haven't read. Mainly because it requires a somewhat industrious and obsessed reader to hunt down and read the appendixes - which aren't in the Hobbit, they are at the end of the Return of the King and the Lord of the Rings books. Plus, very small print. Personally, I'm curious about the appendixes...because I haven't read them, and it would make The Hobbit new and shiny to me - I don't need it to be like the book or play or animated film versions - I'm fairly low maintenance when it comes to film adaptations, apparently. As long as it adds something new to the party, I'm happy. But my brother went into the film not expecting to see anything but what was in the actual book. How he managed that I don't know. Was pretty common knowledge - all the reviewers mentioned the added material and it's been a controversy for about a year now.

Still is a controversy. So far on my flist - only selenak liked it. Everyone else...not so much.