Ioan movies

I've been Netflixing lots of Ioan Gruffudd movies lately, wanting to see his acting (and, admittedly, his face) in a variety of contexts.

Last week I watched him in a BBC/Masterpiece Theater production of Great Expectations, in which he played Pip. Now, as many of you know, this is my favorite Dickens book, so I was excited to see how Ioan did. From a purely objective standpoint *snicker* I thought he was quite good. I have to take issue with the writing, to an extent, although I wasn't as upset by it as many of the online reviewers I've read. But I did think that Ioan did quite well in the role, with what he was given.

The next one I watched was Very Annie Mary, which is set in Wales -- I was excited to hear Ioan speaking in a Welsh accent, and I was not disappointed, not in that respect. The movie wasn't that great, overall. The writing was pretty silly and see-through. And people just kept doing stupid things. But Ioan played a gay shop-keeper, along with his best friend Matthew Rhys, and they were hilarious. Probably the best part of the whole movie is the scene where they are having singing lessons from Annie Mary, and they rehearse "You Can't Get a Man with a Gun," from Annie Get Your Gun. And ever since then, I keep getting lines stuck in my head in that great Welsh accent: "Ah, poo-r little Bethahn Bevahn" or "He eats twoo full sahndwiches with ehvery mee-al" or "You're sittin' on a gohld mine, lass."

My next Netflix movie is The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain, with Hugh Grant. I've always liked that film, though I haven't seen it for some time, and I'm curious to see how the accents stack up.

"As he pretended not to see me, I pretended not to see him." (12 points)

The last quote was from Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody series.

go Shep!

I have been subscribing for over a month now to the "Fox News Flash" video podcast. They put out about three of them a day, hosted by different Fox News anchors, and they sum up in about a minute the stories that are making the rounds on Fox.

I especially enjoy those hosted by Shepard Smith.

This morning, I've been catching up on this week's News Flashes, and Shep had a story about a coffee producer in Panama who is making a 750-gallon cup of coffee, in hopes of breaking the world record for the largest cup of coffee. When he was finished with the story, Shep looked straight into the camera and muttered, "That's stupid."

Thanks, Shep. Thanks for making my day just that much brighter.

Love has a most unfortunate effect on the brain. (62 points)

Today's quote further explicates my feelings about Shep. :) The last quote was from Milton's "Paradise Lost," which I recently read for the fist time ever. Enjoyed it. But that's a post for another day.

Caernarfon, Seattle, and Kansas

I am compeltely obsessed with Welsh. During the last few weeks I have checked out pretty much everything on the BBC Learn Welsh website, so I've learned a lot of the same things over and over again. I've finally found my favorite "course" (it's called The Big Welsh Challenge), but they've only got 4 lessons up so far, and I'm more than ready to move on ... but I expect it will be a while. So, in the meantime, I'll keep playing with Colin & Cumberland and eavesdropping on the Lloyd family -- my next favorite "courses."

I have also decided two things that I want to do with my life.

First, I want to go to Wales and take a Welsh course there. I've decided Caernarfon sounds nice. It's in the North-West, which has the highest percentage of Welsh-speakers in Wales, it's next to the sea, and it's got a nice, cheap little youth hostel. Oh, and a castle -- those are always fun. I've been working on pronouncing the sentence "Dw i'n byw yng Nghaernarfon" -- "I live in Caernarfon." (It's got this nasty nasal mutation, but I'm getting it worked out.)

Second, I've decided that I really want to be -- not a college professor or even a stylistician -- but a language-instruction assessor. You know, like a secret shopper, only for language instruction courses. I would go around and sit in on all these language classes and learn new languages and then assess the course and instructor(s). How fun would that be? It would give me a great excuse to move to Wales and take a Welsh course, not to mention courses in Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Egyptian heiroglyphs, Laotian, Maori, Czech ... the list goes on and on. Now I just need to find someone who actually offers a job doing that kind of thing ...

Meanwhile, it looks like I will be in Washington state for about two weeks this summer. I will be going out to help one of the linguistics professors here at UNT, who is starting her own business offering English-language-instruction summer vacation tours. This year they'll be in Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula, and I'll go along to provide more native English input for the Japanese and Chinese speakers and to offer some language instruction along the way. I'm pretty excited for it. It will be a paid position, I will get to see Washington, and I'll have something pretty nifty to put on my resume and CV.

And, much closer to home, I'm going to Kansas next weekend to visit Margo. I am very excited for it. It's the beginning of Spring Break out here, and Margo and I are planning to watch some movies (see today's quote), hang out, sing a musical number for her singles branch, and shoot some guns. (Perhaps -- I'm not sure what else we decided after the musical number, so I don't remember whether or not guns ended up in the final plans.) After that, I'm flying out to Utah for the rest of the week to see my family. I'm planning to help my sister paint and take my Dad out to a movie for his birthday. Oddly enough, I love the painting, but taking Dad out is a Herculean task. I really want him to see Amazing Grace, though -- I think he'd love it, and he needs to learn to spend time with his family.

A la batterie!! (101 points)

Oh yes, the last quote was from The Great Muppet Caper. I Netflixed it a while ago, and it's still here -- I love enough that I keep wanting to invite people over to watch it with me. Charles Grodin is wonderful in that movie. I'm always impressed with his ability to play passionate love scenes against a pig made of styrofoam.

Alfred and Welsh

Since Kimberly has resorted to begging, I decided I'd go ahead and post a new entry so everyone can see the source of the last quote. It was a toughie -- I only know one person who would have gotten it, and she doesn't read my blog -- which is why I gave it such a high point-value. It was Elder David A. Bednar, during a BYU devotional entitled "Quick to Observe."

I have taken a deep interest in King Alfred. After translating a short passage of his writings from Old English into Modern English last semester, I was deeply impressed with his personal morality. This semester, in a medieval literature class, we are reading several of the important sources on Alfred, both those written by him and those written about him by others. For tonight's class, we're supposed to write a character sketch of him, with references to the sources, and I just can't help but be more and more impressed by him. He was a warrior, inventor, statesman, innovator, scholar, translator, philosopher, hunter, supporter of the arts -- and above all, a deeply pious man. A true renaissance man if ever there was one, and he lived a good half-century before the Renaissance even took place. I will be very excited to meet him in the next life.

Another recent interest is the Welsh language. I've thought for years that Welsh would be fun to learn, and I really wanted to do so at BYU, but never managed to fit it into my schedule. The BBC has some Welsh language webpages, designed for teaching basic Welsh to both children and parents (and particularly to help parents keep up with their children, as there is a big Welsh-instruction movement on in the schools these days). They'll do, but they're certainly not the best language instruction activities. In the meantime, I did find a page on Omniglot all about Welsh pronunciation, which cleared up a lot of confusion I'd been having. Like the fact that Ioan Gruffudd's name is not pronounced "grufud" or even "grufuth," as I had been saying it, but "grifith" (with a voiced 'th' at the end) -- in fact, Ioan Central has a sound clip of him saying his own name, which makes me wish that it was much easier to find clips of him speaking with his lovely Welsh accent. *sigh* The poor Welsh really get overlooked, you know.

So if you've a date in Constantinople, she'll be waiting in Istanbul. (15 points)

Amazing Grace

Margo and I went to see the movie "Amazing Grace" yesterday. We went largely so we could see Ioan in period costume again (which was well worthwhile), and it turned out that Rufus Sewell was also in it (which made me all the happier, especially since he was one of the good guys). Personally, I thought it was ... well, amazing. I very nearly cried about five times, I kept wanting to clap or cheer out loud in the theater, and when they showed the Scots Royal Dragoon Guards playing the song in front of Westminster Abbey at the end of the film, I just about bawled like a baby. The film was not quite what I had been expecting, and it wasn't the best film I've ever seen, but it certainly was moving, at least to me. I told Margo I now want to name a son William Wilberforce. (Joking, joking ... but I have planned on William for some time, so why not just throw in the Wilberforce while we're at it?)

The film made me remember one of my own personal experiences with the song "Amazing Grace." When I was living in Switzerland as a 14-year-old, we had mandatory choir classes, and one day when I was bored, I got looking through our choir book, just to see what else was there. "Amazing Grace" was in it (in English, should you be wondering), and so I took a few minutes to memorize some of the verses. I wasn't particularly familiar with it at the time, but one verse in particular struck me at the time. It's one of the few verses I actually know, although I never hear it sung, apparently since it wasn't originally written by John Newton, but was added later by another author. I tried googling the verse yesterday, and didn't find it online anywhere either -- though I did find one brief allusion to it -- so I wanted to post it here:

Shall Jesus bear the cross alone,
And all the world go free?
No, there's a cross for everyone,
And there's a cross for me.

Since yesterday, I have purchased about five different versions of the song from iTunes, partially in hopes of finding the same version that was used at the end of the film (no luck yet). Again, that's just what I do. :)

The last quote was, indeed, from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (I think you spelled it right, Kimberly -- at least I hope so, since I spelled it the same way). And, yes, that means that I've started re-reading them. Well, at least Book 6, that is. I'm not sure whether I'll really have time for all of them before July -- I know I don't have time for the chapter-a-day strategy espoused by wahlee and susy_gwen. But I would at least like to re-read HBP. The other day, I got thinking about the profundity of Dumbledore's remark, but from the reverse angle. That is, I was intrigued by the thought of how terrifying something is when we don't have a name for it. So, we give it names -- the Boogie-Man, the darkness, Satan, Nessie -- and somehow things are easier to get hold of that way, easier to fend off from our rampant imaginations.

The issue was not the earrings. (125 points)

super geekin' out!

Gosh, I can't even explain how obsessed I've been this past week.

But I'll try.

I've been reading more and more of the Amelia Peabody books that Kimberly has lent us. She did give me due warning that they get pretty intense. This past week I found myself entangled in the midst of a four-book "story arc," as Kimberly calls them (I don't know where she gets that term, but it works; I always wonder whether it's something she picked up during her English degree, which would make sense, since I have not spent much time in the world of English academics). One night, I had been reading later than I should have, and as the clock neared and passed midnight, I decided I'd better stop soon -- I would finish this section I was on and then go to bed. But then something immensely important happened. So of course I had to keep reading. And then in the next section something even more important happened. And so on, for the next several sections. I'm not just talking mild importance, either -- I'm talking major revelations and conflicts and resolutions that turn into even bigger conflicts. So then it was close to 3 AM before I finally made myself put the book away and lie down to sleep.

But that's only the beginning. The truly alarming thing is that it was another two hours or so before I was actually able to sleep. I was so thoroughly concerned about what was going on, and so completely at a loss as to how it would all resolve itself in the end, that I couldn't manage to get my mind to stop whirling. Even when I managed to force it away from thinking about Amelia and her family, it then immediately turned to some similar problems, of an equally vexing and equally fictitious nature. The last time I looked at the clock, it was past 4 AM, and it took me quite a while after that to finally sleep. I had to force myself to stay in bed -- to not camp out on the couch that night and read myself to sleep. Finally, I drowsed off, but even then I dreamt about Amelia. The odd thing about it was that I didn't dream about it in movie style, where you see the things going on; rather, I dreamt about myself reading about the situation and its resolution.

The last time I remember being so distraught about a book was during my senior year of high school. (There have been plenty of other obsessions since then, notably a semester at Ricks College when I devoured the Anne of Green Gables books, but none of them had quite the same emotional impact on me.) At the time, I was reading George Eliot's Middlemarch, and my mom and I had gone to Utah for some reason or other (quite possibly My Brother The Chiropractor's graduation from BYU) and were staying with my aunt. I was sleeping on the couch, and as I was determined to finish that book if it killed me, I read for several hours before going to sleep. As I went, I kept getting more and more involved in one particular plot (the main one, concerning Dorothea Brooke Casaubon, her crusty and pedantic husband, and his nephew, Will Ladislaw). [Mild spoiler ahead, inviso-texted between the asterisks.] *** I started to think to myself, "If only that nasty Mr. Casaubon would die!! That would take care of everything!" And then, at the end of that very chapter, he did die!!! I felt like I had personally killed him. It was terrifying. And no, it didn't solve everything (as one might have expected), so of course I had to continue on for another chapter or two. *** The chapters I read that night are among my favorites in the book, largely because my emotions were so highly involved in the development of the plot.

I've also become more and more interested in the ancient culture of the Middle East. I've long been interested in the languages (and thereby also the cultures) of the ancient civilizations of that region, and with the Amelia books being set in Egypt book after book after book, it's hard to curb my desire to learn Middle Egyptian, anything written in cuneiform (Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian ...), and even Arabic (though it is, of course, a much more modern language than the others).

In the midst of all this, I'm becoming increasinly annoyed with my program here. I feel very much as though I am ready to just strike out on my own and do my own research. I'm having a hard time deciding what I ought to do next in all of this -- transfer somewhere else (like the U of Chicago) where I'd be doing less English and more Linguistics, get going on a dissertation by distance from Lancaster, or just stick it out here. Some of the projects I'm interested in will take much more time than I can give them in a semester, or even in a few semesters with coursework going on, and I'm not very interested in most of the classes I have to take. (Except, of course, for Old English and Historical Linguistics this fall!) If anyone has some helpful advice, or even not-so-helpful advice, I'd love to hear what you think.

In the meantime, here's one of my favorite quotes from this week -- On Sunday, the Bishop mentioned that he'd like to talk with me for a few minutes, but said he didn't have time that day. Then he asked, "Will you be in town this week?" "Yep, all week," I told him. To which he promptly replied, "I'm not." Hmmm. That might present a slight problem, then. :)

Words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them. (20 points)

geekin' out

I've been re-reading The Scarlet Letter during the past week. I read most of it in high school for my junior English class, and I remembered really liking it, but I had forgotten most of it. So I thought I'd give it another shot and see what I think ten years later. So far I'm really loving it. There were plenty of things that just didn't hold the same meaning for me earlier. I'm anxious to read some commentary about it (my favorite site for that is SparkNotes) and see what insights they may have that I've missed. But I can't read anything yet, since I don't want to spoil the ending for myself.

WARNING: Spoiler ahead. I have "inviso-texted" the following paragraph, since it deals with an important plot spoiler. If you would like to read this paragraph, please use your cursor to highlight the text between the asterisks; otherwise, just move on, my friend.

***

I'm especially interested in the way that Hawthorne treats the character of Arthur Dimmesdale. I remembered from last time that he was Hester's partner in sin, so I didn't experience the shock of figuring that out as I read this time. But Hawthorne drops that information in with such subtle pervasiveness, I had to wonder when I would have realized it if I hadn't already known. There are several subtle clues along the way, and they grow stronger and stronger, until -- without ever saying anything quite explicit -- the conclusion becomes inescapable.

***

I'm also struck by the simplicity of the story. The plot involves so little -- so few characters, so few twists and turns -- but at the same time it is a deeply complex novel, dealing with deeply complex themes of the human experience.

Oh, and there's also the question of onomastics and reference, which I've been really interested in lately. There is so much characterization that an author can sneak in with this seemingly harmless technique, just by the choice of what to call his characters and what to have his characters call each other. I'd like to do a short paper about this sometime soon, probably using some short stories of James Thurber's. But I've found it very interesting in SL as well -- for example, Chillingworth is almost exclusively referred to as "old Roger Chillingworth". And the narrator so rarely refers to anyone by just their first name, except for Pearl.

We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing. (20 points)

new boyfriend

When I was at BYU, right after my mission, I had a really cool roommate, Beth. Beth was cool enough that she could get away with all kinds of dorky things without seeming dorky at all. One of those things was her multiple "boyfriends." Beth had a basketball boyfriend, a movie boyfriend, a commercial boyfriend, and a TV boyfriend. Like I said, with her it didn't seem desperate or dorky, although with others it probably does. Like me, for instance.

When I was living with Beth I decided that my TV boyfriend was Jeff Corwin (from Animal Planet). I haven't seen much of Jeff lately, though, and the other night while watching The History Channel with Erin, I decided on a new TV boyfriend -- one who's much cooler, much more my style, and wasn't around back when I first met Jeff.

His name is Josh Bernstein.

Josh hosts the History Channel original show "Diggning for the Truth" (DFT). It's a documentary-style show, about mainly archaeological stuff, but with style. One of the best things about watching it, in my opinion, is Josh himself. Not just because he's so darn cute (although that ceratinly helps), but because he has this great personality. He is a very curious, very passionate person, and he's not afraid to get himself in the middle of the action.

One of my favorite episodes is about the Nasca lines in South America. His tour guide takes him out the coast to watch these fishermen at work, explaining that they still do the fishing in much the same way that the ancient Nasca would have, so this is supposed to give Josh some insight into the lifestyle of the ancient folks. So Josh and his guide are standing there watching these dudes walk out into the water with all their nets and other gear, and out of the blue, Josh pulls off his sandals and hat, hands them to his guide ("Hold these, would you?"), and runs out into the water with these dudes. They have no idea what he's doing, he has no idea what he's doing, but there he is, waist high in the ocean, pulling on these nets to bring in the fish. Later in the same episode, he walks through part of this long aqueduct from one access hole to another, talking all the while about the importance of this aqueduct to the ancient Nasca people.

Just today I learned that Josh is also the President and CEO of BOSS, Boulder Outdoor Survival School. It's this school in Boulder, Utah, that has been around since 1968, where they teach people how to survive in the outdoors without all the modern conveniences of camping supplies. How to make a fire witout matches, how to hunt your own game, how to keep yourself warm on a cold night, and so on.

*deep, drawn-out sigh*

My boyfriend is SO cool!!

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. (32 pts)

Same author and book as last time, but I'm waiting until we get a winner.