Thursday, July 16, 2009

Harry Potter Half Blood Prince Movie Review

This includes spoilers, so if you haven't seen the movie yet, you might want to go elsewhere.

I re-read the Half Blood Prince a few months ago so it's still pretty fresh in my mind. I went to see the movie today with high hopes. The special effects were certainly spectacular. But the telling of the story got lost somewhere along the way. Many parts were rushed through to the point that I'm not sure how someone who hadn't read the books already could have followed the plot at all.

Also, they made Professor Slughorn such a nice guy when in the book he was an arrogant buffoon that Harry Potter tried to avoid.

But perhaps the biggest disappointment was the final battle. In the book the whole school gets involved with the Death Eaters as Tonks and Bill and the rest of the adults on the side of good get into an epic battle inside Hogwarts. I couldn't wait to see how the movie would handle that battle. Well, they handled it by omitting it completely.

They went from Dumbledor falling from the tower, to the Death Eaters escaping from the grounds. I suppose they did that to simplify things and keep the movie the right length. But seriously, if I was the writer, I would have cried. We can only hope that the epic battle is in the director's cut but I'm kind of doubting it.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Complicated Potato Salad

This has been the trickiest potato salad I ever made. One night I boiled the potatoes but before they were done, my bf decided to make something else for dinner. So I cubed the cooked potatoes and put them in the fridge.

The next night we were both too tired to make it, but he wanted eggs in his. To me a potato salad is about the potatoes, and at most I would have put four or five in there. So after I was in bed last night he tells me he boiled some eggs for the salad tomorrow.

So today I go to make this potato salad finally, and he boiled 11 eggs. Eleven! I guess he wants a few potatoes in his egg salad. Now he hates peeling eggs, so I'm more than happy to do it. So I go to peel the eggs. I notice ice in the bottom of the bowl. So I start peeling and in 7 out of 11 eggs, there is a sheet of ice under the shell. I'm guessing you can't use frozen eggs in potato salad. So he's either going to have to live with 4 eggs in his potato salad or I'm going to have to boil more eggs. I've grown weary of the whole potato salad drama.

Monday, July 6, 2009

Blogging is Getting So Complicated

I am missing the days when you could just set up a blog and start posting away.

A few months ago Project Wonderful killed all my ads because they didn't want to be on the blog if I had Kontera, so I removed Kontera and reapplied. Then they turned me down again on my busiest blog. When I got to the nuts and bolts of why, it's because of the disclosure statement at the bottom of my blogs that I added a few days ago because Google Adsense kept asking us (I thought) to add some kind of disclosure statement. The PW people said it looks like I'm accepting paid sponsorship so that's incompatible with their program, but now I'm really confused because Project Wonderful is a form of paid compensation, so wouldn't they want the disclaimer on here? I've written to them for the fourth time this morning trying to clarify. Google said it would affect how my blogs show up in search engines if I don't add a disclaimer. I'm not a lawyer. Are the rest of you as confused as I am?