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Movies, movies, and musical episodes.
February 11th, 2001 - 1:30
I'm Currently Avoiding:Well, I started this at 1:30 anyway. It's now about 15 minutes later. Diaryland deleted what I'd written, because Pogo decided to boot me and then use my diaryland window to load their departure screen in. I know this doesn't make much sense, but the fact is that Pogo hates me and uses every opportunity to boot me. Not only that, but I keep coming back, either because of some odd masochistic tendency or b/c I'm addicted to Poppit, Turbo 21, and maybe one of the slot games. Anyway, so I tried using the back button to solve my problems, but that didn't work, so now I have to write it over again. I don't know if I have enough time to type all that I want to say now though, since I think there's some movie I want to see on the Sci-fi channel in about 2 minutes. I think I'll come back to this in a few hours or so....
A swain is a male admirer or suitor. Near synonyms include gallant, beau, lover, boyfriend, and sweetheart.
A swain can also be a a rustic or peasant, especially a shepherd. This meaning is more directly tied to the origins of the word.
Before 1160, a swein was a young man who attended on a knight, or any general male servant. This word was borrowed from the Scandinavian.
There are comparable words in Old Icelandic (sveinn), Danish (svend), Norwegian (svenn), and Swedish (sven). All of these mean servant or apprentice.
Okay, now it's about 10 to 5, and I came back from my movie watching. I saw something called "The Black Cat," which supposedly is supposed to have something to do with the Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name, but other than a lousy quote from the story and the fact that the main actress in the film (who played an actress, amazingly enough) just "happened" to be working on a movie with that title, although that movie had just about nothing to do with the film. I put in the word of the day, which I wasn't originally planning to do, just before I left to go see my movie. I almost wish I hadn't watched that. It was done in 1990, and it was crap. The special effects were ludicrous, and the acting was worse. I don't think they showed a single emotion, either with facial features or with their voice even once in the whole movie. For about 20 minutes, I thought the movie was dubbed into English from another language. It wasn't though. Although it is an Italian-made movie in English. Bad enough, I suppose. And there was this whole thing where the characters would be speaking while they showed a picture of the scenery, from long distance, so it was like the characters were speaking in surround sound or narrating something when they were really just still takling to each other. It was quite irritating. The effects were worse than the old Vincent Price movies...in fact, I think they may have stolen a few effects from some of his movies. All I know is they were overly fond of red and green lighting/fog/whatever. And once, the moon was shown behind the house, but the moon was like 2/3 the size of the house. That would indicate the house being significantly closer to the moon than is humanly possible. Anyway, enough of that movie...on to the Infomercials!
While I was downstairs, after the movie, I decided to channel surf for a bit. (btw...there is NOTHING worth seeing on at 4 am.) So of course, I watched informercials for a little bit. One was for some "space-age" titanium knife set that could cut through cans of Spam without dulling the knife or giving the can or meat ragged edges. Why they didn't just follow the directions to open it, I don't know. Sometimes infomercials are silly like that. The other informercial I saw was for "Space Bag." This product basically saves space by vacuuming the air out of the bag you put things in. It seems like a pretty good idea to me, but I still probably wouldn't use it. Everything "seems" good, but how many of them actually turn out that way?
Ooooh, the other movie I saw earlier tonight, before I even started this diary entry was "The Usual Suspects." I had a few things I wanted to talk about in regards to this movie. First of all, this movie rocks. I mean, Gabriel Byrne (or however you spell his last name) as well as Kevin Spacey? How can you go wrong? Also, the ending is great, and so's the line about the biggest trick the Devil ever pulling off was convincing the world that he didn't exist. Anyway, the thing I most wanted to discuss, besides the great dialogue in the film, is the random inclusion scene. When the bad/good guys are going through the boat, and they show some Baldwin going through it, there's a scene where he goes through a room and there's a dog tied to a pole with a leash of some sort. He goes through the room, briefly petting the dog on his way by, and then leaves. WTF?!?! How many people do you know who keep dogs, on Boats?!?! Not only that, but this is supposed to be a boat filled with drug runners and other assorted bad people. And they just randomly decided to keep a DOG on board the ship? I don't think so! What was the writer or whoever thinking?!?! Did they just go temporarily insane and say, lets insert a random animal here, every drug dealer we know keeps dogs on their ships? And even when we discover that there wasn't really drugs on the boat, but an important person who used to be a criminal, and then ratted out on people, still...neither the guy being protected nor the guys protecting him from being shot are going to keep a freaking dog on board a ship. I mean, where would the dog go to the bathroom? If anyone has a theoretical explanation for this, I'd like to hear it.
Moving on...I thought of this question awhile ago, and was going to include it in my entry where I blame everything on Disney, but that entry got too long and I was afraid Diaryland was going to delete it for a fourth time or that my computer would explode and suddenly restart itself, so I didn't mention it. So, if you have an answer to either of the following questions (I know, I said there was only one just a little bit ago in this paragraph, but I decided I wanted to ask both of them, alright?), feel free to post the answers on my message board.
Question 1:
Okay, this fits the whole movie theme of today's entry. During the 80's, teenagers in movies like "The Breakfast Club" & "Weird Science" were played by people who actually looked like teenagers, were not too good-looking, and who were around the age people in high school actually are. But today, in so-called teen movies, like "She's All That" and others that I can't remember the name of at the moment, teenagers are played by people in their mid to late 20's and look like the "beautiful people." I was just wondering why this happened. How did we go from "realistic" teenagers to teenagers being played by Adonis-like people in their 20's? I certainly don't remember anyone like the people in the movies today attending my high school.
Question 2:
I don't know, maybe this was just a phenomenon of "Xena" & "Hercules," but it seems like every show that ends up being on for awhile ends up doing a "musical" episode, where the whole thing is in song. I don't know, maybe the writers for those shows just completely ran out of ideas and thought it would be great to do an operatic episode, but if that's true, than that would be a grave mistake on their part. Do you have any ideas why they did this? Have there been any other shows you can remember that have done this? If you have any answers, or anything at all, put a message on the message board and let me know your thoughts. Or just say hi. I don't care.
One final thought. Do you love/hate/feel indifferent towards the word of the day? Would you like to see it gone? Or do you have any word you would like to see the meaning of? Let me know, would you? Okay, one *more* final thought. Why is February spelled with 2 r's? The first one isn't even ever pronounced!
P.S. Finishing time...6:45 am.
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And I like it that way.
