Molly Ringle's Blog, page 28

Hey Pixar, where your women at?

I was going to write a post criticizing Pixar for having practically zero central female characters in any of their movies, then discovered someone already wrote that post years ago. And they're not the only one: just Google "Pixar female characters" for a sampling of similar critiques.

I actually like Pixar's movies quite a lot. So much that I didn't even notice the gender issue until this year, when I watched the trailer for Brave and realized it was remarkable that the main character was a girl.

But of course, guess what kind of girl she is? A princess. (*sigh*)

Pixar, I admire and enjoy you, so I'm going to keep giving you more chances. But really, take a page from Joss Whedon and Hayao Miyazaki, who, despite both being men, know how to give girls and women the center stage--and look! It hasn't scared away any of their male fans! Amazing! I assume that's what Pixar is afraid of: alienating the dads and sons of the world. Or are they just unaware of the pattern in the choices they've made so far? Is that possible, in this world of advanced market research?

What is up with this, Pixar? I want to know.

Perfume giveaway: five in one! Tea theme.

I've been accumulating cute little perfume samples at a zealous rate this past year. Knows Perfume has been holding these once-a-month classes on a given fragrance note, where as part of the experience you get a bag of samples containing that note, and, well, I can't resist that. But naturally only *some* of the fragrances work well enough on my skin that I want to hoard them. The rest I feel inclined to share with the world, so as to let them find a perfect home and spread the gospel of scent, etc. etc. Why am I still talking? Without further yapping, here are the five, yes, FIVE scents I am giving away this time:

The Dormouse, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab: four teas, light herbs, peony.

Scent, Costume National: amber, jasmine tea, mother of pearl hibiscus, woods.

Sandalo e The, Bois 1920: jasmine, Bulgarian rose, sandalwood, tea leaves.

Malabah, Penhaligon's: lemon, Earl Grey tea, cilantro, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, rose, orris, sweet amber, sandalwood, musk.

Fire and Cream, Strange Invisible Perfumes: orange, orange blossom (neroli), tuberose, frankincense, white lavender, vetiver, sandalwood, patchouli. (Not a tea scent, but tossed in for variety.)


All are in the usual 1 ml sample vials, though concentration varies. (I believe BPAL and Strange Invisible are oils, or at least higher concentration, while the others are EDTs or perhaps EDPs.) Comment on this post to enter the drawing. Winner gets all five vials, naturally. I'll pick a winner by random number generator in one week. I'm dreadfully sorry, but I'm restricting it again to US entrants. Going to the post office and dealing with customs forms took more time than I can usually spare, whereas I can weigh and stamp US mail from home.

Thanks and good luck!

Keemun Hao Ya A, or Keemun "Hell Yeah!" A, as I call it.

I'm starting to think I need a spreadsheet of all the teas I've sampled, since the number is growing and may someday match the number of perfumes I've tried on. The subject deserves equal written records of my reviews. In any case, here's today's:

I'm trying a new tea I ordered from Seattle's Perennial Tea Room, a China black called Keemun Hao Ya A. It's quite good, and has the unique and fascinating feature of smelling (and thus tasting, in a way) like the inside of Westminster Abbey. Or so my scent memory keeps insisting. You might not think a flavor of old, damp, historic stone, with a hint of candle smoke and beeswax sweetness, is something one would enjoy drinking, but then you'd be forgetting what an Anglophile I am. I tell you, I sip it, and I'm standing in a dim, high-arched forest of stone, gazing at the tomb of Queen Elizabeth I.

It's possible it also smells exactly like some ancient buildings in China, but having never been there, I can't answer to that. Or, it could be that all structures in the British Isles have been steeped in the scent of tea by now, given the importance and ubiquity of tea in British history. Still, this one does have a quality I haven't encountered before, wherein the warm, wet leaves enter the scent territory shared by warm, wet stone or even wet hair or fur (someone who didn't like this might find notes of "wet dog" in it)--yet, really, I swear, it's good! It's such an interesting flavor that I've even foregone the splash of milk I usually add to hot black tea, because I didn't want to dilute my Drinkable Westminster Abbey experience.

Open letter to the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winners

Dear winners of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:

Congratulations! By joining the ranks of those who have placed in this contest, you have officially become some of the funniest people in the entire world. That is, funniest by the standards of those of us with hobbies like submitting sentences to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

Today I happily pass the crown on to this year's grand prize winner. (The crown is handcrafted from multicolored foil peeled from hundreds of different-flavored yogurt cups. It goes with any outfit.) Her tasteless and shudderingly evocative sentence will bring her global acclaim, and she has earned the right to bask in it. Well done!

All of you will likely hear from the media--journalists are writers too, so they love this contest. Also, you will quickly learn that the world is made up of two kinds of people: those who get the Bulwer-Lytton contest, and those who do not. The former will think you are freaking awesome. The latter will not understand why you're happy the world is picking on your writing, and they'll probably also think you actually wrote and published a novel that begins with your winning sentence. These people often have blogs or are authorized to write articles, in which they will grimly express loathing at the state of modern prose.

Yes, it's sad, and we've set up a charity, hoping to raise money so that with one simple operation, their damaged senses of humor can be fully restored. In the meantime, I recommend you put together a small army who can comment on such posts and defend your name so you don't have to do it all yourself.

Speaking of doing it all yourself, let's wrap this up by raising our glasses to Professor Scott Rice, who has graciously invited humankind to mail him terrible sentences, and has read through them pretty much every day for almost thirty years now. Through his efforts, a whole subset of literary humor has been born, and has made untold millions of people laugh. Thanks, Professor!

Today, winners, your sentences will make the world laugh too. I loved reading your creations--thanks for sending them in!

Molly Ringle
2010 grand prize winner (you know, with Ricardo and Felicity and the gerbil/water bottle analogy)
Yes, I got "award-winning author" put on the cover of an ebook lately because of the BLFC. You can henceforth do the same. All's fair in love and marketing.
No, none of my novels start with the gerbil sentence.

Calling all book review bloggers

My publishers and I do contact book blogs personally in search of getting reviews, but just to cover more territory, I'll put this call out there today.

Does your blog review books as one of its main functions? Are you willing to take ebooks? Are you interested in reading and reviewing any of mine? If so, please do email me!

I can be reached at writerofirony at earthlink dot net. And I'll have two new ebooks coming out by the end of the year (hurray!), so more review opportunities are on the way. (See my site for the covers and descriptions of the two new ones. The cover art is super cool.)

A few notes on Deathly Hallows part 1

Finally got around to seeing this on DVD. I thought it quite good, one of the best so far, though my heart may always give the true "favorite" label to Goblet of Fire with its bubbly rom-com feel. Anyway, notes follow, with spoilers for part 1 if you care.

Yes, that was a totally random Ginny/Harry make-out scene (the "zip me up" bit). But it was worth it for George sneaking around the kitchen in the background in order to position himself at the sink, leering, sipping from his mug, and drawling, "Morning."

Harry/Hermione awkward dancing in the tent was awkward. Subtext conversation as they stared at each other afterward:
Harry: So, you know, do you wanna...(eyebrow lift of innuendo)
Hermione: Eh...maybe?
Harry: Just to pass the time, as it were? You think? No?
Hermione: Nah. Headache. Plus you're scruffy-looking lately.
Harry: 'Kay. Go mope about Ron some more.
Hermione: 'Kay.

Never expected to say, "That guy in the bit part as the snatcher Scabior was strangely hot," but he was. In a 1980s-Adam-Ant kind of way.

I never liked Dobby much until he was within minutes of getting killed. Only intending "to maim or seriously injure"--hee! So after that, his death scene was quite sad.

I still wish Rowling had done more with Draco rather than reducing him to quivering uncertainty for the entire 7th (and much of the 6th) installment. Oh well. Nothing to be done about it now.

Mysteries of olfactory science

Last month we spent some vacation time at my in-laws' house, which is a new, clean, dry, prefab dwelling in central California. When we got back, our 1940s Seattle house smelled old and musty in a striking way that I usually don't notice. It wasn't an altogether bad smell--it mostly reminded me of secondhand record stores and vintage movie theaters. Still, I had to wonder, is that the smell that hits everyone in the nose when they enter our house?

However, yesterday we returned from a weekend at my parents' vacation house across Puget Sound, a 1960s kit house (cabin, even) coated inside and out with smoke, sand, marine air, fir needles, dog hair, and probably 324 kinds of mildew or mold. (Really, it's charming, and the location is possibly my favorite on Earth, but such is the state of the interior air quality there.) When we came home after that, my nose found with pleasant surprise that our house smelled crisp and clean and fresh.

The difference is possibly due in part to the length of time our house was unoccupied--ten days in the first case, only a day and a half in the second. Being unlived-in and having the thermostat turned down and the windows shut probably contributes to a disused smell of its own. But I can't help thinking the main part of the difference lies in the air we got acclimated to in each case while we were away--arid and new on the one hand, damp and quaintly crumbling on the other. I guess our house's smell lies somewhere in between, and it's likely that whoever enters it will smell mainly the difference between our house and what they personally are used to.

This just goes to show that those designing perfumes, or studying olfactory science, have a heck of a lot of subjectivity to factor into their calculations. I wish them the best of luck.

Phantom phone buzz

Does anyone else experience phantom phone buzz?

I tend to leave my cell phone on vibrate, so as to avoid having a call wake up a sleeping toddler, or chirp loudly in the public library. But that means I've become susceptible to thinking the phone is vibrating when it actually isn't. The car rumbles over a rough patch of pavement, someone scoots a piece of furniture, two pieces of fabric rub against each other--each time, I snap to attention and check the phone, thinking maybe someone called. Ugh. Nope, generally not.

Phantom phone buzz, I tell you. It's a real thing.

I've seen WALL-E too many times.

Our sons have lately been watching two Pixar movies obsessively and repeatedly: Cars and WALL-E. And though my husband and I keep reminding each other *not* to analyze and nitpick the plots of these movies, which aren't really supposed to make huge amounts of sense, we keep finding ourselves doing it and making observations to one another anyway. We can't help it.

WALL-E in particular brings out the pointless musings in us--maybe because Cars makes no sense in its initial concept (cars are the only living things on Earth? And they're...living?), so you kind of forgive the rest of its oddities as minor points in comparison. But WALL-E seems like honest-to-gosh science fiction, so you try to take it seriously; but as such, it has big silly plot holes. Examples:

If humans have managed to keep themselves alive and well on a spaceship for 700 years, including somehow creating food out of who knows what, surely they have the technology to go back to Earth and clean it up?

What is the Axiom doing out there in space, anyway? They appear to be just floating around aimlessly. Aren't they at least conducting some astronomical research? Looking for another habitable planet? It would seem not, which is really odd.

Of all the robots, why did they give the vegetation probe (EVE) the most lethal firepower? Wouldn't the power-hungry robots on the Axiom find a way to program in some similar firepower for themselves?

If said power-hungry robots (Auto and his cronies) didn't want the captain ever to return to Earth, why did they let him see the plant and the "time to return to Earth" message in the first place? Why didn't they steal the plant off EVE the second she arrived, and incinerate it, and never tell him?

By the way, the first plant that grows again on a barren Earth, what's that really going to be? Kudzu? Dandelion? Knotweed? I suppose it's still potentially edible, but quite unlikely to be the tidy little bean sprout they illustrate.

Also there are a couple of common sci-fi errors. For example, there shouldn't be any sounds in space (like the fire extinguisher's whoosh when WALL-E is using it to jet around). And the Axiom's gravity field would surely orient gravity toward the floor of the ship, no matter which way the ship was pointing, so spinning the steering wheel shouldn't make all the passengers go sliding to one end of the room as if they were on a boat in the ocean.

But, honestly, despite all those points, I think it's a delightful, clever movie. We still grin and giggle at certain lines and scenes. (The first time through, I couldn't stop laughing at WALL-E getting attacked by shopping carts.) The animation and artwork is astonishingly cool, the sound effects fun and creative. (I heard in a radio interview that for MO, the frenetic clean-up robot, they recorded the buzz of an electric razor.) I sympathize fully with EVE's fiery temper, as it's quite a lot like mine. (As my family acknowledges. Good thing no one equipped me with a laser arm.)

And I may never want to eat a Twinkie again after watching that cockroach burrow into it twenty or thirty times now. So that's probably just as well, as far as my health is concerned.

Aokigahara - Suicide forest

It isn't like me to post something creepy and sad with pretty much no hint of "cool" or "funny." But this is bizarrely riveting, and, initially, scary enough to make "The Blair Witch Project" look like the silly little joke that it is. As the clip's info explains: "The Aokigahara Forest is the most popular site for suicides in Japan. After the novel Kuroi Jukai was published, in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest, people started taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year."

Yikes.

So. These are two segments of a short Japanese TV documentary, each about 10 minutes. (Warning: not highly graphic, but certainly disturbing content.)

When I watched the first section -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CK1KdAha78
- I was mostly just creeped out.

But after moving on and watching the second section -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1eXOXYI3bc
- I settled down to a general sadness, and a great fondness for the kindly geologist with this strange and vital job of sweeping the forest to prevent suicides when he can, and find the ones he couldn't prevent.

Since we're on the subject, I'd like to share the wise words of Ed Chigliak from "Northern Exposure":
"Suicide's not the Indian way. Don't go where you're not invited. Know what I mean?"
A good rule. Make it yours too, my friends.