The Blog of Wistar Watts Murray

Therefore I can admit that I am psyched about seeing 10,000 BC tonight at the cinemaplex near Taco Bell. From the moment I glimpsed a preview for this film about prehistoric mammoth hunters, I knew I had to see it in the theater. I feel like all the decades of improvements in film technology, CGI, and digital post-production have been building up to tonight’s realistic depiction of a saber-toothed tiger eating somebody in a loincloth. I also spent many hours reading the Clan of the Cave Bear series when I was a kid, particularly the sex scenes. I just have a thing for prehistory and I am too lazy to be an archaeologist. I like movies and books to do the work of my imagination. Full review to come!

I don’t hate baking cookies as much as I say I do. I just like the idea of pouting and complaining while wearing a reindeer apron.

the

(I’ve always wanted to say that.)

On Friday night Darren and I chose to see The Mist without reading a single review of the movie. I thought the preview looked scary and I have liked Stephen King since I was a fifth grader trading his horror novels with my teacher Mrs. Connor. Years later I expanded my literary canon from Stephen King to Jim Morrison’s bad poetry (and for some reason Mrs. Connor then deemed me mature enough to babysit her child), but I still have a soft spot for the creepy books that used to keep me up at night. So imagine my surprise when I walked into the downtown movie theater with my hands full of expensive popcorn and saw octopus tentacles slithering into a grocery store and devouring a teenage stock boy. That sounds kind of cool when it’s written out, but believe me, it wasn’t.

I forget about Stephen King books for long periods of time and then all of a sudden he’s there on my radar writing about evil talking cars or giant carnivorous insects coming out of the mist and I’m like, “Stephen? What happened to the good old days? Have you run out of ideas? Are you just messing with us at this point? Why can’t you smack my primal emotions around like you used to?” King seems like a smart, self-reflecting guy, judging from his Entertainment Weekly Pop of King column, so there must be a reason for these nefarious tentacles that are vaguely linked to some secret military industrial complex in a small town in Maine. Maybe King is working on a much larger, meta horror story, where unsuspecting King readers and movie-goers are sucked into a nightmare of bad dialogue and outlandish visions. We pay $9 for a movie ticket and $14 for snacks and then we are haunted for the rest of our lives by the one time we failed to skim the New York Times movie reviews before date night. At the same time, I know that the director of The Mist probably butchered King’s story. And I know what it’s like to be out of ideas. And one time I was shopping for groceries and a sparrow whizzed right by my head and almost ate me.

1. Showering

2. Cooking dinner

3. Combing my hair

4. Cleaning the toilet

5. Putting gas in my car

6. Folding clean laundry

7. Fast-forwarding through the previews on a DVD

8. Brushing my teeth

I would make a really good medieval queen.

Today I give you: evil fairies

This is the best one.

And reminds me of my little sister somehow. Is that you Margaret?

More pictures.

I haven’t been up to much these days. Dorking out, mostly. Staying in. Chronic fatigue syndrome. Hot chocolate. My grandmother is still ailing. She has renamed my family’s cat “Percocet.” Last night Darren and I watched the first episode of The Wire, which I couldn’t help but compare to Monk, a USA show we watched last week, also for the first time. The Wire is a “gritty” HBO drama about multi-ethnic, hard-boiled homicide and narcotics detectives in Baltimore, Maryland, where it seems that everyone either smokes crack or owns a loaded gun. The second is a cute show about a lily white obsessive compulsive detective who solves murders by being a charming idiot-savant. I want something in between these two shows. For instance, a jaded Mexican cop has to break up a heroin ring at the high rise Lifesaver Towers in Candy Land. Or a child detective who can’t stop wetting his pants has to kill a couple guys in Queens.

Poor Tanya Tucker. She has to sing to the Republican Party for her supper, and now she has to battle the fire that is menacing her stage costumes:

About 1,400 firefighters battled the Malibu fire that started Sunday morning and had spread more than 2,200 acres, destroying 25 structures — including five homes, a glass company and Malibu Presbyterian Church. Officials ordered the evacuation of several hundred homes — including those of James Cameron, director of the movie “Titanic,” and singers Olivia Newton-John and Tanya Tucker.

“All my stage clothing, boots, belts and wardrobe is in that house,” Tucker said. “I have so much memorabilia since I just moved from Nashville to Malibu.”

Why do I get the feeling that famous peoples’ homes are like museums to themselves? The only thing that relates in my life is my fridge, which is like a Wistar’s Half-Eaten Sandwich Hall of Fame.

Dumbledore is gay. Leno is going to have a field day with that one.