Monday, May 23, 2011

I want to be a Bond villain when I grow up

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I have just been reminded by my right-hand man that the Telegraph article about you getting married at 60 (which I read and linked to before) clearly states that you got married (were getting married, at that time) in "the Minneapolis church where [fiance Guy Paul's] father was a Lutheran minister". Therefore not in England. Unless there's an original, hundreds-and-hundreds-of-years-old Minneapolis in England that I haven't heard of that was the fave haunt of the Druids and the one in Minnesota really ought to be called New Minneapolis or something.

    Obviously I need to be able to track you with a super high-tech GPS tracking device thing, because of course I cannot possibly expect myself to actually remember extremely important details about things I care about. No, indeed.

    Also, can we take a moment to appreciate how totally rad this photo of you is? I so cannot get over it.

taken from fyeahharrietwalter, again, because I love them so

Sunday, May 22, 2011

totally worth it, though

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Ohmigosh I got so wet and muddy today. Not like normal wet and muddy that one gets from stepping outside on an average spring day in the northwest but like wet and muddy wet and muddy. Like, I have to write about it to put it in its proper place in the past wet and muddy.

    So this is because Best Friend invited me over to her house this afternoon after church to go have a nice tramp-about in the massive creek-ravine-foresty place that serves as her backyard. (After making me try a piece of her mother's homemade crispy-crust gluten-free pizza with no tomato sauce and pear and chicken and curry for toppings. My horizons have just been Salvador Dali'd.)

   So we had a long hike. Got involved in a couple of beaver dams. (One of them had this awesome backwater mini-cave thing.) It started to rain after a while - spring in the Northwest, again - so Best Friend decided she wanted to practice her survival skills. She's a dyed-in-the-wool tomboy and also kind of a Boy Scout.

    We barely survived the survival.

    There was attempted fire-starting involved. A lot of it. On the creek-bank. In the rain. It involved three boxes of waterproof matches, one emergency blanket, one machete, three pencils used as kindling, one battery and one piece of steel wool, and, eventually, one tiny pan of oatmeal cooked with the water from the water bottles, having no salt or sugar and a handful of raisins mixed in. The oatmeal, being the culmination of Best Friend's two-hour struggle to keep a fire going in the rain, was so disgusting that we took a bite or two each and then chucked it into the creek for the benefit of the fish, in favor of chocolate energy-bars which we found in her backpack. (Don't worry, it was all-natural and I don't think it could hurt anything. Literally just oats, raisins and water.)

    We were a sight by the time we got back to her house. Not normal levels of wet and muddy. Wet and muddy like we instantly chucked our clothes into the wash and found the thickest bathrobes in the house.* Wet and muddy like mud up to our faces. Wet and muddy like completely soaked hoodies. Wet and muddy like sloshy rainboots containing as much water as they contained feet. Wet and muddy like muddy underpants.**


*(And then cooked and ate crepes with butter and raspberry jam and drank tea and watched an episode of "The Avengers".)
** To be fair, this might have had something to do with the fact that clambering down a large, slippery-from-rain log in order to cross the creek tore a sizable hole in the bum of my jeans, but I don't think that makes the situation any better.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

HARRIET IS GETTING MARRIET

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    it's one-ish in the morning-ish here on the west coast of north America which means it's, like, nine-ish in the morning-ish in England and you're getting married today

    i can't even deal with this right now

    (that's assuming you're getting married in England anyway, i haven't heard anything to the contrary but then i haven't heard as much as i'd liiiike)

    (hnnnngah i just want to beeeee theeerrrrrrrre)

    but anyway congratulations and felicitations and all sorts of many-headed blessings! yuss. saying i have earnest hopes for your future happiness seems like stating the slightly obvious just a leetle bit, maybe just to me i don't know, but i will do so anyway, i hope you are the happiest thing in the universe today and all days henceforth and forever amen

like this except all the time and with your husband instead of Michael Fassbender. yuss.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

either way, you'd better keep your maiden name

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    So this article from the Telegraph which I found through the aforementioned (totally awesome) http://fuckyeahharrietwalter.tumblr.com/ tells us that:

  • You are getting married in something off-white (oh my stars I must have pictures as soon as physically possible)
  • Your fiancĂ©, Guy Paul, is actually named Guy Schuessler (blimey)
  • You're getting married May 21 (oh gosh)
  • You still wear Mr Blythe's ring (FRIGGIN' AWWWWW)
  • You have been learning to ride horses (hnnnng awyeah)
    Also, I am currently so poor (and so...American...) that I'm not sure I can buy your new book Facing It any time soon. Damnation and hellfrogs. And my 19th birthday was a couple weeks ago now so I can't ask someone for it as a birthday present. Hrrrrgrarrrrarar.

    Let us conclude with a picture of your fiancĂ©, because the face of the current luckiest bastard in the world is a face worth noting. (Please ask him to wear nicer ties.)

Thank you again for finding this picture for me, JP!

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

fellowship! fraternity! fandom!

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Oh my giddy goodness and sweet merciful Sherlock Holmes on a pink moped.

    I've just discovered http://fuckyeahharrietwalter.tumblr.com/.

    Excuse me while I stand over in this corner and die of happiness.

basically my face right now.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Wimsey covers: Strong Poison

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    Somebody asked me a few minutes ago how one spells "cute". Apparently she thought it had the letter Q involved somehow.

    can i just...flail for a moment

    LET'S LOOK AT WIMSEY BOOKS TO MAKE ME FEEL BETTER ABOUT MY LIFE

    Strong Poison (1930)

    I am so excited to do this one. It's got Harriet Vane! And poison! Poison is so interesting. It's all dark and sexy and skull-and-crossbones in theory, and then in practice it's all vomiting and paralysis and methods of decontamination with distinctly unglamorous names like "whole bowel irrigation". It still makes for some fine artwork, though. Let us peruse.

    (as always, descriptions describe the pictures before them)


    Straight up, this is a couple of roses stuck into a jar of poison - maybe someone just doesn't have much of a knack for gardening - and one is getting all wilty and droopy and sad and the other is flourishing, which is some neat and thought-provoking symbolism. Or maybe the other one was already wilting and they were just now stuffed into the arsenical vase, who knows.


    Why do I keep bothering with the weird Ian Carmichael-audiobook monocle-y ones? Here we have a dinner setting with rose petals framed by a monocle which may or may not be a portal into a more restauranty world. This has got to be the least ominous or morbid cover I have ever seen on a murder mystery come on guys will you put some EFFORT into it


    In case it's hard to read, that paper says "Last Will and Testament". Mmhmm. Excitement all 'round.


    This one has at least added some nice knobbly picklocks. Good on them.



    heeeyyyy it's dinnertime again


    heeeeyyyyy it's shoes



    heeeyyyyyy it's a judge looking sleepy (seriously? Seriously, guys?)


    Ancient, gray, vaguely Ian Carmichael-esque Lord Peter who has come to haunt my nightmares! Hey look it's Harriet in the background. Is she burying her face in her hands? I can't even tell.


    Oooh! Oooooooh! Love love love love!



    Ooooooh. This one is, like, old. Like possibly 1930 old, I'm not sure. In any case it is awesome.


    SAYERS ON ACID i can't breathe




    Huh. That's interesting. I like the colors.




    Awesome. Love the inclusion of the Wimsey crest.


    This is so very frightening. I just....I can't...it's...asghdsgkhdsgijgh LORD PETER YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A CREEPTASTIC GIANT VILLAIN HEAD


    can I just crawl into my bed and tremble
    (Yes, this cover is apparently Strong Poison. Dunno what language that is.)



    I think I'm too stupefied already to do much more than slowly blink at this. I kind of love it, though.

    And now, to wrap up what has been a rather long post...


    Best.

    Strong Poison cover.

    Ever.

Monday, May 16, 2011

unfortunately I just can't see you two as a couple

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    One knows that one's Fred Astaire obsession is getting out of hand when one is typing in the url for IMDB and one sees this:

Search prompts for the letters "im".

    I'm trying to tell myself that Fred's movies just have more trivia and things but gosh I just feel dirty looking at that screenshot. Do I really look at his page that much more than I look at yours?

     Hold on, I need to count whose movies I've seen more of.

    Fred: 19 movies and the parts of Ziegfeld Follies as had him in. 19.5 total.
    Harriet: 12 movies, 6 miniseries/TV shows, 3 movies/tv shows that had you in such tiny roles that they basically don't count (Rebecca, "Marple: Sleeping Murder", "Five Days"). 18 things and 3 almost-things total.

    HRRRRRRRRRRMMM.

    That's counting all three of the Dorothy L Sayers Mysteries miniseries as one miniseries, of course, which I'm not sure if I ought to do or not. (Side note: I used to know several Romanian people over the internet who used "serie" as the singular of "series". I've looked at a couple of dictionaries and I still can't figure out if it's an additional correct form or not.)

    And besides, if I could un-see Finian's Rainbow I totally would, and that would bring the Fred-total down to a more even range. (My new glass eyeballs are a pain.)

    MAYBE I JUST NEED TO WATCH MORE HARRIET WALTER MOVIES AND RESOLVE THE ISSUE, HRRRMMMM


    Obviously my life is now a battleground between King Fred Astaire and Queen Harriet Walter.

whyyyy do I not have any quality screencaps of Queen Harriet Walter whyyy

    Obviously.

Saturday, May 7, 2011

(f)red alert!

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I've had a disgustingly busy and tiring week, but now I'm shivering at home with a cold coming on so I am going to tell you all about the three new-to-me Fred Astaire movies I've seen recently.

    (Today is also the one-year-anniversary of my having seen my very first Fred (and Ginger) movie. Huzzah.)

    Two-sentence-reviews each, I think. I'm not going to give plot synopses because they bore me.

    Royal Wedding (1951, directed by Stanley Donen)


    Charming, funny and comfortably forgettable.

    Also, Fred Astaire dancing on the walls and ceiling because he's in love.


    Silk Stockings (1957, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and also starring Cyd Charisse)



    Sometimes very funny, sometimes rather corny, I liked this movie a lot but it bothered me a bit because it has serious problems with its attitudes towards women, to say nothing of the disrespect for public utilities. The Cole Porter score is generally amazing except for the staggeringly sexist "Without Love", the lyrics of which make it hard to believe this film only came out about half a century ago.

taken from the awesome tumblr astairewashere.

    Finian's Rainbow (1968, directed by Francis Ford Coppola of all people)



    Notwithstanding the occasional presence of a charming-if-aged faux-Irish Fred Astaire, this movie is so unspeakably bad that during the two and a half hours my mother and I watched it, my eyeballs gradually withered and began to crawl back into my skull, until they realized that even the darkest darkness inside my body could never enable them to un-see what they were seeing; at that point, they attempted suicide by launching themselves through any passage they could find until they got to my throat, where they burst into flames and dived down to my stomach, hoping for sweet acidic death, but the gory flaming eyeballs proved too much for my already highly nauseated stomach and I ended up violently vomiting out my own charred, bloody eyes along with chunks of my stomach lining all over my own lap, before collapsing in a fitful heap of weeping and gnashing of teeth whilst black blood seeped out of my ears and slowly trickled down to join the oozing mess of escapist body parts already soaking my formerly nice gray skirt. Would not recommend this film.



My face during the whole thing.