Harry Potter Race Update and More Mental Diarrhea

Update on The Great Harry Potter Race of 2014: Isaac is ahead of me in Goblet of Fire by about 2 chapters. This is bad, but hopefully it will give him confidence to stop reading and relax for a bit while I catch up and get ahead of him and leave him in the dust, begging for mercy.

Isaac said the Goblet of Fire movie was messed up today, and I told him that I'd heard him the first billion times he said that, and I feel a bit guilty for that, but whatever. There were bits of the movie that stank hellishly, and there were bits of the movie that were brilliant. Whether or not you think the movie was good depends on which bits you pay attention to.

I need to expel some mental diarrhea, so if you're reading this, you can stop now, because the rest is just me saying what I'm thinking to get it out of my head.

My family and I watched a movie the other night, and everybody was laughing all through it, but after it was done they all went, "Meh, that was all right." I think they didn't want to say it was a good movie because it was pretty much filled to the brim with stupidity, even though most of the stupidity was brilliant. I just think, if you get something out of a movie and if it makes you laugh, then that's enough to make it a "good" movie. If you're able to tune out whatever rottenness there is and focus on what's good or fun about it, then it's good enough. And the same goes for books. I heard some adult people talking about Harry Potter 7, and one person said, "wasn't it good?" and the other person said, "it was a page-turner." Even if it could have been written better, doesn't the fact that it's a page-turner make it good enough? People aren't going to think you're a moron if you say it was a good book. If you like something, you're allowed to say it's good.

Like, for instance, my dad didn't like The Hobbit very much and thought that Walter Mitty was way better. I loved Walter Mitty, but I still prefer The Hobbit. No particular good reason, I just liked it better. I think likes and dislikes don't depend on good reasons, they just come from the gut, and people shouldn't have to back up their likes and dislikes with concrete reasoning, if that's a thing. Sometimes when people ask me, "was this movie good?" I say something like, "I liked it. I dunno if you're going to like it, but I liked it." And if they don't like it, that's ok, it doesn't make them superior than me for having better taste, it just means our guts told us different things.

Like I said, I'm just saying this for my own benefit, because it's been in my brain for a long time and I want to stop thinking about it. When people make fun of music or books or movies that I like, a bit of me thinks that they think I'm inferior for liking what I like, and so I mentally start defending things that I like to convince myself that it's all right to like them, and it goes around in a loop and doesn't stop until I blog about it, which I've now done, so I'm going to stop now and have some coffee.

Ye Olde Blogge Poste

My dad is watching Master and Commander, and Russell Crowe just said "Clap him in irons!" I'm not a huge Russell Crowe fan, but him saying that was tremendous. I wish I had a reason to say that. But I don't, because we don't have any irons and not having irons sucks.

Now a guy just drowned himself. That's bloody depressing. Word of advice: don't drown yourself, because it makes people sad. 

Hey that's Pippin! 

Now one guy accidentally shot another guy trying to shoot a bird. That's embarrassing. I think he's going to die now. But he's going to see the lizards first. Oh wait, no, they're just going into a tent and they're going to take all his insides out so they can find the bullet. 

Changing the subject completely, I think I'd like to open a shop or hotel and call it something like, "Ye Olde Booke Shoppe" or "Ye Olde Bedde and Breakfaste" or "Ye Olde Richardde Armitage Fanne Clubbe." And I wouldn't be a posh Englishgentlewoman, I'd be a quaint hobbitty lady. Or Batman. I could wear a Batman costume all the time to throw people off. How awesome would it be to have breakfast served to you by Batman? Whatever job I have, I think I'll dress as Batman every day. 

That's one thing I don't understand. Batman was so set on justice and order, so why didn't he just become a policeman? I suppose he would be bogged down by rules and regulations, and he wouldn't get to pretend to be a bat and fly and stuff, so there wouldn't be much of a point. 

How To Turn Yourself Into A Chicken

I still can't sleep. So here's the Elizabeth Method of How To Turn Yourself Into A Chicken.

1. Eat a chicken.
2. You are what you eat.
3. You are a chicken.

Mind you, you've got to eat the entire chicken. If you eat a piece of fried chicken from Ralphs, you'll just turn into a piece of fried chicken from Ralphs. You've got to eat the whole chicken, feathers, intestines, legs, rubbery red stuff, all of it. And you've got to eat it raw, otherwise you'll turn into a cooked chicken, and cooked chickens are dead, and it's much more fun to be a living chicken than a dead chicken. And now you're probably thinking, "if I'm a dead chicken, then I can be a chicken-zombie, and that would be fabulous" but it doesn't work like that. If you want to be a chicken-zombie, you have to eat a real chicken zombie. If you eat an un-animated dead chicken, you will just turn into an un-animated dead chicken. But if you eat a chicken that has been bitten by a zombie, you will turn into a chicken-zombie.

Now you're probably thinking, "I ate a pizza today. Why am I not a pizza?" There is a very simple answer: humans are simply inferior to pizza and therefore cannot become pizza. If you go on Pinterest, you might find a meme that says something along the lines of "people disappoint, but pizza is eternal." This is called Backing Up Your Claims With Concrete Evidence. If the food you eat is vastly superior or inferior to a human being, you cannot become that food. And, since the food we eat is mostly delicious and unhealthy, you cannot turn into that food.

And now you are probably thinking, "wouldn't an entire dead chicken be disgusting? Doesn't that make it inferior to me and therefore nontransformationable?" The answer is no, because, like the chicken, you also have raw meat, intestines, blood, and other disgusting things I do not care to mention, so you too are disgusting, and that puts you and the chicken on the level.

Believe it or not, there is a point to all this. People in the world have expressed a desire to become chickens. Larry the Cucumber once said "I've always wanted to be a chicken. Do you think God would turn me into a chicken?" (I believe that was in Dave and the Giant Pickle). 

But what, you ask, are the benefits of becoming a chicken? There are, in fact, several.

1. Chickens are fabulous.

I've forgotten the rest. And I'm tired now. Good night!

Miscellaneous Insomnia Brain Excrement

Nothing to report, just that I can't sleep and I've been reading The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and let me tell you, Tom Bombadil rules.

Also, I have been racing my brother Isaac in reading through all seven Harry Potter books, and he is one chapter ahead of me in book 2. Updates and developments to come anon.

Note: crushing Isaac in the Harry Potter Race will leave little time for reading Tom Bombadil and The Letters of Tolkien. As much as I love Harry Potter, I'm more in a Tolkien mood, and I'd rather be reading without the pressure of wanting to crush my brother to a pulp.

Speaking of Tolkien: I just read somewhere that the next Hobbit trailer will probably come out July 20th or later, which is a bloody outrage, because I want it to come out now.

Annoying Problem: my brain feels like thinking, but I'm too tired to actually think words, so I literally have "Blah blah blah blah blah" running through my head. Literally.

I'm going to put on Desolation of Smaug to tune out my brain, and try to get some sleep.

Good night, and may the hair on your toes never fall out.

Movie-Narrating

I have a challenge for movie-directors: try making a movie set in a school that is not narrated by the main character.

Of course now that I've said that, I can think of a couple movies that aren't, like She's the Man and I think 17 Again isn't narrated either, but I didn't see that whole movie. Also Freaky Friday. And Harry Potter. Dang it, I can't get anything right. I was thinking of Flipped, Mean Girls, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. And Spider-man. And I was thinking, they're all narrated by the main character, is that a high-school movie thing?

I find too much movie-narrating a bit annoying. Of course too much of anything is annoying, you need to have the right amount of anything for it not to be annoying. The thing is, I like to try to infer what the characters are thinking by their faces and actions and general what-not. I watched Flipped a couple of weeks ago, and I was thinking, "yes, we know you're sad about the tree. I sort of gathered that when you started crying and wouldn't come down from the tree."

I wish I had a lot of money. Then I could hire actors to add narrations to movies they were in, but only in movies where narrations don't work at all and it would be just wrong. Like, for instance, I could hire Christian Bale to narrate The Dark Knight in his guttural Bat-voice and say things like, "I couldn't decide whether to save Rachel or Harvey. I knew Harvey was important to the Gotham, but Rachel was important to me." Or Pirates of the Caribbean. I could hire Johnny Depp to say things like, "I looked at Will, and I saw the disappointment in his eyes. I wanted to tell him that I was on his side, but that would have to wait," and stuff like that in his drunk-voice.

I want to watch that movie again. I haven't seen that in a long time.

Good night!

Dreams

I'm having a very weird night. I've been about two-thirds of the way asleep for about an hour, but not completely asleep, and I've been having a lot of weird dreams. I'm sharing them with the cyberworld mostly because I want to tell my big sister about them and I'm afraid I'll have forgotten by tomorrow.

First, I was watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets with my family. My brothers kept making all kinds of sound effects, which was really annoying my big sister Mary, so she yelled at them and they walked out the room ashamed with their heads bowed.

Then Mary and I paused the movie to get a snack. Mary stuffed a tremendous amount of food into her mouth and then started saying the Our Father for no apparent reason. Only, in the dream, the Our Father had the word "whore" instead of "trespasses," so Mary said (with her mouth stuffed with food) "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who BOO, YOU WHORE. HA HA HA HA!"

Then, in the dream, I was trying to go to sleep. I was in a ginormous movie theater, and The Hobbit 2 was playing. There was a close-up of Thorin, and I thought, "gosh, Thorin's so handsome. I could eat a miniature version of his head in a bowl with salad-dressing, along with all the other miniature dwarf-heads."

Then, I was on campus at school, and it was dark. There was a large bridge connecting the science building to the art building. I was in the science building trying to get to the art building when suddenly, I and my Nameless Faceless Colleagues were attacked by a lot of Wood Elves (I think). Right before they attacked us, the Wood Elf Leader said something like, "All right, men! Are you with me?" The first two said, "Yes sir!" but the third one said, "No, I'm scared." Then they charged. Some of my Nameless Colleagues ran to the bridge and quickly assembled some kind of Bear Trap Made Out Of Swords. then the Wood Elves stabbed the Bear Traps, which were triggered and clamped onto their swords, thusly rendering them weaponless, so they had to run back.

When I got tired of that dream, I decided to switch to a different one. Mr. Bean was at a public restroom, except for there were a lot of men in the restroom with him dressed in drag, so he got really scared that he had gone into the women's restroom by accident.

This is why, as I said before, I never refer to my goals and aspirations as "dreams." It's just wrong.

This Is Why Brains Are Overrated

I hate it when I watch a movie and everybody watching with me points out everything that's wrong with the movie, and then I start inwardly hating on everybody hating on the movie, and then I inwardly punish myself for hating on everybody, and then I inwardly defend myself for liking the movie even though it has flaws, and then I have imaginary conversations with the haters in which I brutally defeat them in defense of the movie, and then I inwardly punish myself for brutally defeating people who aren't actually evil, and then I wonder why this movie is causing this much inner turmoil, and then I feel stupid for making such an internal fuss over just a movie, and then I start defending the movie again to justify my stupid turmoil, and then I feel dumb for being so "obsessed" with the movie, and then I try to stop thinking altogether, and then it doesn't work, and then I go write poetry so I can think about something else.

But then I like writing poems, so logically, I must like it when this happens. Hooray!