bits n bobs

* I really enjoyed I Love You, Man. Laughed pretty much constantly the whole way through. I had all the qualities I enjoy in the Apatowian experience: (one-sided but) frank sexuality, decent story-telling, men who talk, a sense of fairness. It also manages to find yet new ways for the girl to be (interesting and cool and still) just The Girl and can't avoid the need for a big public denouement (why? always? why?). And the Rush conceit...I can't decide if the attitudinal problem was a generational one, or a class issue or what, but it struck a slightly false note with me. Rush fans worship Neal, not each other (I'm thinking about the concert here) in my experience. Anyhow, it was really funny. Jason Segel's way better as a flavoring agent (this movie) than a main course (Forgetting Sarah Marshall)--his repertoire of facial expressions is good but limited/kind of one side of the spectrum.

Major problem in movies these days, that! I think Hollywood should pretend that it is suddenly out of sound recording material and we're going back to silents. Make everyone re-learn how to communicate emotions with their face. One reason I regularly light a candle at the altar of Judi Dench.

* As of 11:00 a.m. yesterday morning I completed the last of a baker's dozen or so of appointments with il dentista, a huge and incredibly boring narrative arc begun sometime this fall comprising thousands of lost Gs, many numb rubbery lips, a lot of dental panic and/or the occasional Diazepam and my first root canal. Although really the whole thing started about eight years prior, of course, when I stopped going to the dentist (as Laura Ingall Wilder wisely put it, "The minute we need a thing, we begin paying for it whether we buy it or not"). Anyhow, THANK YOU JEBUS. I am still as gap-toofed as ever, but all the other teeth: workin fine until the next Jujube accident. Thank you to some much-squeezed stress toys and to Dr. D. I am eating popcorn in a brazen act of celebration.

* I wish I had had these (left) when I attended the Ring. Fabulous for the awake-staying, especially the "70" variety. And really yummy, yummy texture.

* I was sharing my lunch with the river birds today (sparrowspigeonsgullsducks) when there amongst the other birds suddenly appeared a cluster of red-winged blackbirds! I gasped audibly in nerdly shock. Must really be spring, despite the sodden sun-free 47-degree weather.