I watched The Artist with some friends last night and it's totally awesome. And I'm not just saying that because I love silent movies anyway. It doesn't have the most authentic look (by which I mean you can tell it's a modern movie) but I guess you do have to consider the general audience and what they are used to and this movie is far from conventional already. So I guess the authentic look wasn't a big priority but I did missed the guyliner a bit.

Also, is Uggy nominated for something? His part qualifies as supporting role for sure, non?

how can I be expected to stick to my six books rule when you donate books with hilarious titles like this one to the public bookshelves?



This sounds like really cracky fanfiction, doesn't it? :D
Can't wait ...

In case you're owning a cinema in Germany and wonder why no one is showing up ... here's one of many reasons why:

I was just ordering Sherlock on play.com and came across an ad for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. This will be out on the 30th, which is BEFORE German cinemas even bother showing it. Now ... I want to see it, Marco wants to see it, my mum wants to see it, my grandparents want to see it ... doing the maths, I get a pretty steelbook edition plus popcorn and drinks for the money we would otherwise spend on tickets and we won't have trouble finding a showing of an undubbed version either.

Now I'm off to the public bookshelves. I have packed six books I want to donate, so the plan is to not return with more than six books, excluding books I already own (if I find a pretty edition of a book I already own in a less pretty edition I exchange them and take the less pretty edition back ... so this doesn't really count as a new book). It probably won't work, because it never works and because I can't resist the lure of a free book, but I'll try ;-)

Someone in my grandma's neighbourhood is trying to call Batman!!!!
(excuse the classic UFO picture quality, I'm without a tripod and 16 seconds can be an eternity, if you have to hold a camera steady for that long)

Watching Matt Smith in bed with men (in Christopher and his kind) is strangely unerotic and it's not because of bad acting or anything ... odd. I don't usually have that "but ... it's the Doctor!" problem with other actors. The film itself is a bit boring to be honest, but if you are into bad German accents and cliché Nazis this might totally be your film. To be fair, Matt plays an English character, so his bad accent might be intentional.

Word of the day is Eid-Otter (oath otter), which is how a voice software chose to pronounce Ei-Dotter (egg yolk). Of course, the problem is, that the proper German spelling of that word is Eidotter and the software doesn't know where to put a break in the word, since all four words exist and since software is basically stupid. But it still kept me amused for quite a while (yes, I AM easily amused).

I watched an episode of American Horror Story ... does this get any better? It's like they are ticking off all the boxes on the list of horror clichés. Family has issues, moves in a haunted house, enter some creepy neighbours and some carefully dropped hints of impending doom. I got bored with the horror genre for exactly that.

Talking TV ... I was just wondering what the big twist in the story of the next Sherlock episode might be and my money is on "Moriarty is dead, or is he?" I'm just writing this down to come back here next week and laugh at how wrong I was.

There is hope for the good old Christmas tradition after all! I'm getting ready to travel home and storm "Andrea" is expected to cause trouble, which might lead to delayed or even cancelled flights.

Also, Noel Clarke and Benedict Cumberbatch cast in Star Trek?! Do you hear that loud noise? That's the sound of a whole bunch of fandoms colliding in this movie.

Happy New Year, everyone!

When exactly is the world supposed to end this year, btw? I want to plan ahead a bit, because the last end of the world was quite nice ... we had fresh strawberries and drinks and Doctor Who was on and then we watched some Star Trek ... and then they rescheduled the end of the world of course.

So, new Sherlock. Brilliant! Yes? YES!
I don't get the wank about the ending (remember this is Moffat ... what did you expect?) but the most important question - is Moriarty still pretending that he has pretended to be gay? After THAT ringtone? I mean ... raise your hand if you are a straight man who would consider a 70s disco song for your ringtone ...no one? Thought so.

Dear Dad. Last time I checked, we did not have house elves and the self untangling strings of Christmas lights hadn't been invented yet. If you put them in the box in something resembling the Gordian knot after Christmas, they will come out of that box in something resembling the Gordian knot when you need them for next Christmas. Also, I don't think using a sword would be a good way to deal with the problem either ... although I'm very tempted right now. I've been trying to untangle the lights since breakfast with not much success :-/

PS: No problems with travelling at all. And I was picked up by my dad, which was a nice surprise. This Christmas is strange indeed.


*I managed to almost avoid this song this Christmas season. I heard it for the first time yesterday in a shop.

I'm on my way to visit my family for Christmas and the calm irritates me to no end. It's not snowing. It's not cold enough to make possible rain freeze when it hits the ground or other objects, like planes. There's no fog. Nothing out of the ordinary seems to happen on the streets. The airport website shows no delay for my flight. My mum checked my luggage in without problems ... Something is very wrong here. What happened to good old Christmas traditions?!

Of course, my bag might still end up in Russia or something or my flight might get redirected to some middle of nowhere airport with no public transport available ... in case this should happen - Happy Holidays! In case this shouldn't happen - see you later!

I'm back from some highly scientific research. I was researching silly headgear in relation to the blood alcohol level and the best place to go for that is of course a German Christmas market. The results are this:

If you are a kid, there seems to be no connection at all. However, if you are a very small kid or a dog the blood alcohol level of the parent or owner is important. Apparently it leads them to notice, that their baby or pet is suffering from a serious lack of antlers and the desire to fix the problem.

If you are an adult it's relatively easy - the higher the alcohol level, the higher the probability of being caught wearing silly headgear while visiting a Christmas market. However, you have to consider the headgear losing factor, which also increases with the blood alcohol level.


PS: Me: Eggnog, Apple Punch and Hot Chocolate with peppermint snaps, no silly headgear.

Here's something weird ... I got the "Girl with the dragon tattoo" soundtrack (because! Trent Reznor!) and before that I had no intentions to watch the movie ... I read the book, I saw the Swedish movie, I don't like to support Hollywood's lack or original ideas ...

But now I'm wondering how the music will work in the movie and I might end up watching it after all. There aren't a lot of movies I'm looking forward to anyway (see comment above, the one about the lack of original ideas ...). We're going to watch the new Sherlock Holmes movie on Saturday though. I can't quite take it seriously (as a Sherlock Holmes adaptation, that is) but it will be fun. Talking about fun .. fun fact - whoever translated the movie title to German turned "A game of shadows" into "Game in the shadows" ... apparently, language skills are not required for the job.

Also, I have yet another YA literature burnout. I started quite a few books and then decided that none of them is worth my time. With authors trying to rewrite Twilight for the xth time this can hardly be blamed on me though, can it? I need to rearrange my "to read" pile and put everything with a female main character, supernatural elements and relationships in geometrical shapes to the very bottom.

Ha! Warehouse 13 has Ianto ... or Warehouse 12 had Ianto, to be precise. I knew I was getting a Torchwoody vibe from this show. I've reached the end season 3, btw ... probably a bit more Game of Thrones will be next or maybe a complete Fringe rewatch. I always liked this show but saw a lot of episodes out of order or with random breaks in between, so while I found the individual cases interesting enough I never quite got into the story ark. There are also a couple of movies I haven't watched yet and that should be out on DVD now.

Also, happy Nikolaus day (other official and unofficial holidays are available, I know there are a few more today ...). We made rum truffles for my mum and grandparents and for Marco's parents last night and quite a bit of rum went into these. We should have packed them with warnings about not eating them if you want to be fit to drive ... but they are yummy and were well received. I got a bunch of green chocolate Santas (After Eight), tea, socks, roasted almonds ... I love how everyone remembered my fav type of chocolate Santa this year :D

I know, technically, there is no such thing as a healthy cookie, but these contain brown sugar, oat flakes and almonds ... that sounds healthy, right? Plus, I didn't put chocolate at the bottom because by the time I noticed the missing chocolate half of the cookies were gone already. I'm actually proud I managed to take a picture.

The temperature is like +15°C here, so, not really the best conditions for baking Christmas cookies but they would go well with iced coffee or gingerbread milk shakes too ... if they were still around, which they are not. The last ones fell victim to the Warehouse 13 season 2 watching session.

I don't know why, but buying craft supplies always seems to lead to weird reactions ...

There's a flea market here that has a guy selling all kinds of medical instruments and he's there every week and everyone seems to think it's all perfectly normal ... then, I walk up to this guy and say something like "I'm looking for a solid scalpel with a sharp, pointy blade" and everyone around me looks at me as if I'm Hannibal Lecter on a shopping tour. Very odd.
I need the scalpel to cut patterns in leather, btw. and the craft scalpels that are sold look all totally rubbish and I don't think they would handle thicker leather very well, at least not for long.

On the plus side, buying nail polish remover in the drug store for brush cleaning went smoothly. The girl didn't look at me as if I'm secretly painting my toe nails in a glittery pink but asked me if it's better for the brushes than using pure acetone (which indeed it is, if your brushes are made of real hair).

Did I complain about the weather recently?! It's boring! We are having the driest November in I don't know how many years, but that doesn't mean it's nice and sunny. It's grey and foggy or foggy and grey. If you want to see the sun you have to climb on a mountain and there are none of these readily available around here. Last year, we had snow by the end of November but I'm not greedy ... I would welcome rain and storm too, every change would be welcome actually.

Also, the latest Amazon fail just arrived. I added a shower gel for 65 Cents to my order to qualify for free shipping and they put that shower gel in an extra parcel! They probably get special discounts and all that, but if I would send a parcel like the one with the 65 Cents shower gel it would cost me 1,65 Euros! And there was loads of space left in the other parcel too ...

So, Warehouse 13. It's like X-files meets Torchwood (before it became all serious), gets rid of the aliens and adds a bit of Ghostbusters (Who you gonna call?) and then has a run in with someone who builds awesome steampunk gadgets.

Since I've been a bit ill (the usual cold that everyone seems to have these days ...) I watched the first season. Not bad. Bit very cheesy at times and a bit of a blah arch villain ... but, enjoyable enough. And nice gadgets! I even started to care about some of the characters, although I found them all a bit dull and cliché at the beginning. So, season 2 awaits.

Forget what else I wanted to say ... I'll be back.

... yes, in life too, but let's be less dramatic and talk about photography for a minute.



This is a picture I took recently, which looks nice and idyllic and all that, only, if you zoom out ...

( ... this is what you get )

On other news - my breakfast week is over and I just had pizza and salad. Hurray! I didn't try out a weird diet, I just had a weird schedule. So my last meal of the day was breakfast, then I got some sleep and when I got up I had breakfast, because that's what I do after I got up, even if it's actually dinner time. And then later on I usually had something like a sandwich, pastry and tea or coffee, so, more breakfast food.

For some odd reason I am not tired of my LJ header yet, but I did get an autumn themed one for my DW.

I ordered a book like 3 weeks ago from buecher.de and despite having like 100 unread books I'm still annoyed that it hasn't been delivered yet. Guess there is a reason why I usually order from Amazon after all. I didn't this time because I had a voucher and I can't resist a free book calling my name ...

I finished True Blood after all and it wasn't that bad ... I painted bottles and branches for Halloween though, while I was watching. Maybe that helped. But I have to say, Jessica has almost reached a Sophie-Anne hotness level in that Red Riding Hood costume. Yummy!

Also, I watched Fright Night. 2D. Ha! Pretty old school let's-kill-a-vampire movie, but it has David Tennant in tight leather. Also very yummy!

Now, on to watching Warehouse 13.

Despite the chaos caused by the pope (the show they are putting on for one delusional old man is incredible) I did manage to get to the furniture stores and shop for new blinds for the kitchen.

In one of the store there was a kid reading a book from the shelf decoration. I remember when I was little we were looking for new furniture for me and there was this shelf in one store that had loads of books and I was all happy and grabbed one and then noticed it was just a painted box. So it's really nice to see that some stores got over the painted boxes and are using real books now. It saved at least one kid from a big disappointment.

Back to the pope for a second - I find it incredibly funny how he seems to always mention how important his religion is and how important his church is. If this isn't a sign of insignificance I don't know what is. I mean, have you ever heard a truly important person going on and on about their importance?


Also, it's apparently Bilbo Baggins' birthday today. Hurray!!!! I'm going to watch some LOTR in his honour later on.

It's that time of the year again ... Halloween approaching. Again. And we're in need of a theme for a party. Again.

In previous years it was usually something we (meaning the people involved in the planning) liked at the moment. So, mostly a theme based on a book, movie or series but this year we're a bit lost. Themes based on contemporary stuff are boring when it comes to party decoration and costumes, themes based on very CGIed stuff like X-men are boring too, since CGI doesn't translate to reality (although I wouldn't mind the girls dressed in blue paint ...).

We agreed to do nothing vampire this year, since we had Vampire Slayers last year and before that Bella was a fangbanger and Undead Baroque. Not all in a row of course, but still, enough with the vamps for a bit.


Any thoughts on Warehouse 13? I saw a pretty awesome looking trailer, but a lot of trailers have looked awesome and then the real thing was pretty bad. So yeah, anyone watching this? Worth my time?