Period Costume Dude at Basildon Park

actually uses the phrase "lust tiger"

Speaking of Dad...

He would have been wild about where I went today with Julie, Zoe and Nicole...to Basildon Park...where they filmed a lot of the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice (not my fave version btw, am I really supposed to buy Keira Knightley as a woman a guy would find unattractive at first? puhlease.) anyways...

Father's Day Shout Out

I love him and miss him and believe in him. And he has a heart the size of Jupiter. Happy Father's Day, Pops.

Riddle me this.

I'm having a hard time remembering when exactly we started caring about who was giving voice to animated features. It seems like every time a animated film is released these days we have to know up front which celebrities are lending their voices to the characters. Now, my problem with this is two-fold:

1. I've a great respect for voiceover artists and I bet a good number of them are getting screwed out of a job just so a movie can amp up the fact that some celeb is behind the talking frog or penguin or whatever. (I'm not talking about roles where versatility is needed like Robin Williams as the genie in Aladdin, etc. I'm talking about characters that just require a nice, pleasant voice, which brings me to part 2 of the two-fold problem...)

2. Part of the point of animation is that, well, it's animated; it's illusory. We are supposed to believe in the character and not be able to picture the person behind what's been fashioned so carefully on screen. It's actually distracting.

So there ya go.



(Truth be told, I have no idea who played Ariel and I don't really need to know, but whoever she is, I hope she hasn't lost her job to Cameron Diaz.)

20 days and counting....

20 more days until cigarette smoking is banned in UK establishments and forced out into the fresh open air where it belongs.

Texas accent, revisited.

Well, after years of trying to shed my Texas accent, I'm afraid that after seeing Vernon God Little at the Young Vic last night, it's rearing it's Southern head. Apologies all 'round, y'all.

Fwwwwt! Fwwwwwt! Swooosh.

(that would be the sound of me wiping dust off my blog.)