Our long national nightmare is finally over!

Last night, I watched the last… oh Lord, that word never tasted so good in my mouth… The Last Installment of The Twilight Movie Saga – BREAKING DAWN (Part 2)!

[The Twilight Saga - BREAKING DAWN (Part 2) DVD cover]

I suffered through those five movies… a dozen or so hours of my life that I can never get back… and now it is finished.

OK, here’s the deal… Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy and nine or so other actresses who portray Renesmee as she grows up), the half-human half-vampire child of Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) is maturing at an alarming rate. In a matter of a few months, she grows from infant to about 9 years old.

Mayhem ensues when… The Volturi [1] find out about Renesmee. To them, she is an abomination and must be destroyed. Aro (Michael Sheen) and Jane (Dakota Fanning) are particularly enthusiastic about killing the Cullen tot.

My two cents… For all my whining and whinging, Breaking Dawn (Part 2) is not awful. It’s not great but it definitely not dreadful. Unless you’re already a fan of the Twilight Saga, don’t bother seeing this movie. But if you are already a fan, you will probably find Breaking Dawn (Part 2) the best of the bunch.

Bottom line… Not as wretched as I thought it would be.

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[1] The Volturi are the largest, most ancient and most powerful coven of vampires. They enforce the laws of the vampire world. They equivalent of royalty in the vampire world.

Reblogged from The Year of Halloween:

Monday is once again at our doorstep, darlings, and there's nothing to start the week off right than a good cup of coffee. If you take yours as the 17th century Turks apocryphally suggest, "black as Hell, strong as death, and sweet as love," these lovely skull and bones sugar cubes by Snow Violent may be just what you need for the perfect cup.

Read more… 47 more words

Sweet as Death: Skull and Bones Sugar Thanks as always to the beautiful and always wonderful Eva Halloween for this sweet treat!   You're the best, sweetie!

In a Christian Bible, this is usually referred to as the Feast of Weeks. It occurs seven weeks after Passover.

Shavuot celebrates and commemorates the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

Take care, my little geeks and nerdlings. I’ll be back before you know it!

This weekend, May 11 and 12, they started to bloom.

Not all of them are open but they’re getting there.

They go as high as the second story windows (i.e. my apartment)!

They haven’t started giving off that wonderful lilac smell yet. Any day now, I am sure.

Those two weeks in May when the magnolias bloom followed by the lilacs… simply heaven!

• NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sent back images of a hurricane on Saturn that measures 2,000 kms;

• A bioengineered windpipe made with stem cells was transplanted into a two year old girl;

• A study found that inflammation in the hypothalamus may be the cause of aging;

• A possible reason was identified for why embryonic sand sharks eat their siblings in the womb;

• Researchers 3D print an ear from cells. It contains the electronic components that will allow it to work as a functioning ear;

• Researchers re-sensitized antibiotic resistant superbugs using a complex found in human breast milk.

Also…

Kissing facts!

Longest kiss!

Reblogged from The Year of Halloween:

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Kittens, today's gallery of abandoned amusement parks is a particularly eerie one. There is something so disquieting about these decaying rides, standing forlorn in a field or being slowly swallowed by creeping forests. Perhaps, like creepy kids and evil clowns, it is the juxtaposition of the joyous things of childhood with the looming inevitability of death and decay that is so very unsettling.

Read more… 176 more words

Reblogging 'Burty the Carnival: 50 Eerie Photos of Abandoned Amusement Parks' by the amazing Eva Halloween! Delightfully creepy! Deliciously eerie! Enjoy! :)

It is a post apocalyptic journal entry novel on Twitter.

When I blogged about it last year, I called it My Twitter Experiment.

Each entry is no more than 140 characters… the maximum allowed per tweet.

I post daily journal entries from the second year in aftermath of the Zombie Apocalypse.

Only a relative handful of people have survived the first year. Food, vehicles, gasoline, medicine and supplies were relatively abundant during the first year. By the second year, gasoline (a highly refined product) has ‘gone bad’ and vehicles no longer run on it. Most of the ‘easy picking’ supplies have been exhausted. Specialized ‘city folk’ are now forced to exist in a hostile environment. Our world, at best, has been plunged back into the Dark Ages. For some survivors, they have been thrown back to the Stone Age.

Please check it out on Twitter and Follow it, if  you like it.

Reblogged from Playing in the World Game:

Found at Reddit, these are photos of a mind-bending piece of artwork. The contributor described it thusly: “I got this from grandfather before he died. First used by hidden Jews during the inquisition, it is shaped like a teapot, but contains many secret Judaica pieces. The Hidden Synagogue.” The original photos are at Imgur. I cannot adequately express in words how beautiful this is.

I’d read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit when I was in my final year of college. I confess, looking back on it now, it seems that particular stage of my life was a kind of daydream, peopled with characters not unlike a Tolkien novel.

But I digress somewhat.

I am going to presume that everyone reading this article knows all (or enough) about J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle-earth trilogy, The Lord of the Rings and its ‘prequel’ novel, as it were, The Hobbit. It would just be too difficult explaining this vast, intricate and complex fictional world to a total newbie. Sorry. If you’ve never before encountered hobbits, orcs, ringwraiths, dwarves, elves or ents, that’s just too bad. If you’ve never heard of The Shire, Mirkwood, Lothlórien, Rivendell, Gondor, Moria or Mordor, I feel sorry for you. If you have no idea who Gandalf, Bilbo, Frodo, Smaug, Gollum, Galadriel, Lord Elrond, Saruman the White or Thorin Oakenshield are, you are all the poorer for it.

And… if you don’t know what The One Ring is or was… I pity you.

There.

Now, on with the movie! Or rather, the first installment of what is to be the Hobbit film trilogy. [1] 

OK, here’s the deal… as per The Gospel According to Warner Brothers…

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey follows title character Bilbo Baggins, who is swept into an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor, which was long ago conquered by the dragon Smaug. Approached out of the blue by the wizard Gandalf the Grey, Bilbo finds himself joining a company of thirteen dwarves led by the legendary warrior Thorin Oakenshield. Although their goal lies to the East and the wastelands of the Lonely Mountain, first they must escape the goblin tunnels, where Bilbo meets the creature that will change his life forever… Gollum. Here, alone with Gollum, on the shores of an underground lake, the unassuming Bilbo Baggins not only discovers depths of guile and courage that surprise even him, he also gains possession of Gollum’s “precious” …a simple, gold ring that is tied to the fate of all Middle-earth in ways Bilbo cannot begin to know. — (C) Warner Bros

Mayhem ensues when… well, pretty much from the start, really. As soon as Bilbo decides to join Galdalf and the dwarves on their quest, it pretty well goes from one frying pan into an even larger frying pan into the fire then into an even larger fire, and so on and so forth.

Visually, it is stunningly beautiful. The sets, costumes, props, CGI effects, everything is simply gorgeous. The cast is also well-chosen and well-played, including several of the cast members from The Lord of the Rings films. The novel The Hobbit was written primarily for young people and it shows in the film adaptation. Parts of it are silly and cutesy. There are songs in several scenes. I found them annoying in the book and I found them equally annoying in the movie.

The problem with films that are intended to be a franchise is that there is a burden on the first movie to set up the next two. Not that The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is the ‘Basil Exposition’ [2] of the Hobbit trilogy. But still. Some things need to be laid out.

My two cents… Good movie. I really did enjoy myself. And even though I think that making The Hobbit (not the longest book in the world) into a trilogy may end up being a miscalculation, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is definitely worth watching and appreciating for its own sake.

The bottom line… Good movie. If you loved The Lord of the Rings movies, you’re going to like this one. Glad the next one is coming in December and that we only have to wait until summer 2014 for the third one. Let’s hope they match and exceed our expectations.

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[1]  The second installment, The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug, is scheduled to be released December 14, 2013 and the last installment, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, is set for release in the summer of 2014.

[2] Ask your parents.