Spam, Scraps, Starships and Strip Club (Carl Hiaasen's Book...)

Hehe, I love ironic junkmail. When I was doing the post at work this morning, I got a promotional flyer selling insurance from More Than, addressed to The Business. Most of you are aware I work in a bank, and I just couldn't help myself. I kindly paperclipped their information back together, popped it in their pre-paid envelope and added some of our own usual junkmail along with a little note: "Thank you kindly for your information, however we are a branch of a multinational banking corporation and as such deal with our own insurance. You could try our head office, but in the meantime I've sent you some of our promotional literature in the hopes that you should be similarily interested."

The dragons have become far more communicative between themselves, the fights becoming more spectacular as Tsam is rocketing up in size and has discovered he is male. He's just asserting his dominance, Kuleana is happy to accept, but he's not happy with simple acceptance and waves. There's been tail twitching taunts, Quagmiring (mad head bobbing), big black bearding, paddy-stamps, you name it. Physical clashes are fairly limited to Tsammy charging up and baffing Ky in the side with his chin or nose, but there have been some dramatic clashes when Ky's got fed up of it and lashed out. This leads to tail biting by both parties (in the fleshier, spinier sections, no damage) and body twisting, flattening to look bigger.

The Wall-e movie was suitably up to Pixar standards, funny when it should be, sad when it should be et al. Certainly not a waste of time, and I'm not going to complain about the price of the tickets! Starship Troopers, the original movie, was decidedly funny for a sci-fi comedy/horror, but the cartoon version is a serious let-down, it's like watching a game - no real sense of risk or danger that you get with the true movie.

I've been chewing through books at a horrific rate again, I thoroughly enjoyed Anchee Min's elegant but occasionally harsh veiw on ancient Chinese Emporism in "Empress Orchid". The richness and splendor is sharply contrasted with the squalor and famine of the time. I've read three books by Carl Hiaasen, all of which have been surrealistically funny and hard to put down - I read two in one weekend! The creation of characters is wonderful to observe, particularly the development of Garcia - it's only when you tuck into the third you actually realise he's THE supporting figure through the series. I read the Helen Fielding ones mostly out of boredom, but wasn't too displeased, they're about the same as the movies after all. I was extremely ... discomfited by "Bergdorf Blondes", so much so I gave it away as soon as I'd finished with it. It was nasty and materialistic - a blonde ditz who thought suicide was a good idea for stupid, trivial things, and left stupid, trivial things in her stupid trivial will. She didn't die, she got rescued by the man she hates that turns out to be the love of her life as well as very very rich. YAWN.

Related Quote of the Day: "8oxc 3" - Kuleana, trotting across my keyboard. She IS big...