Just Sayin'

I come from a long line of ketchup enthusiasts. That's why it distresses me that ketchup does not get the respect it deserves as a condiment. In my opinion, ketchup outranks every other condiment (unless you count guacamole as a condiment - avocado beats tomatoes any day). So, it distresses me that I take a lot of flak from my friends for putting ketchup on, well, pretty much everything. (Also, let me just note that when I say ketchup, I mean Heinz ketchup because nothing else is even vaguely worthy of consumption (side note, did you know that the Heinz company also makes peanut butter,  strangely, that gives me a craving for a peanut butter ketchup sandwich)) I mean, everyone's always telling me how important eating vegetables is - doesn't ketchup count as a vegetable? I know that the tomato is a fruit, but, nutritionally it seems like more of a vegetable. So, if ketchup is a vegetable, I should be consuming like three to four servings a day, right? Which is actually, fo...

So, a few days ago I was over at a friends house and we were watching Captain America (for the win); they had a really high definition television and the picture was so real. Of course, this is coming from a person who watches all her videos from a laptop screen or the sort of TV's that still have glass on the front and wouldn't know a flat screen if it bit them, but it was just a really weird experience. I mean, it was so high def, that it almost looked realer than real life. Like, it was so real, that one of my friends thought the video was animated . Animated. I just couldn't get over it. It looked like it was in four dimensions or something, either that or the real world is actually two-dimensions and the HD  world is three-dimensions and no one told me . It reminds me of when I got new glasses a few months ago and suddenly, colors were brighter and everything had depth. It really helped with my tendency to walk into door frames. Well, that's what it was like to...

So, a few days ago, when Prince George was born, I heard that the Canadians had dyed Niagara Falls blue in his honor. On the surface, that's a nice thing to do; it's a lovely gesture. Of course, everyone was so excited about the royal baby that it seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. But, think about it, what if that baby had been a girl? I mean, the gender of the baby was not announced before it's birth, so it could have easily been a girl and they would have had to dye the falls pink. That is disturbing because I'm pretty sure the Canadian government didn't just dash over to Wal-Mart for those little bottles of food dye with the pointy caps. If you want to be able to find enough dye to change the color of Niagara Falls, you have to buy it ahead of time. Which, would be fine, except that no one knew it was going to be a boy. So, the way I see it, they would have had to buy enough blue dye and pink dye, just in case. What a waste of Canadian taxpayer money...

So, recently I was catching up on the new season of True Blood (season 6) and, I have to say, it's actually not horrible. Weird, right? After the disaster that was season 5, I was expecting season 6 to be as much fun as a barrel full of monkeys on crack, but it's actually much better than the last two seasons. And the previews for the new episodes look really promising. I think what happened to make season 5 so unpopular was that the creator's of the show got too bogged down in the whole 'Authority' plot, which no one liked. I mean, people don't watch True Blood to see how vampires interact with each other, they watch True Blood to see how vampires interact with humans. That's the point of the show. Season 4 wasn't as bad as season 5, but a lot of people disliked it because of the weird, witch plot that seemed kind of weird and forced and because, after Eric got his memories back, he turned into Mr. Sensitive. No one wants a sensitive Eric; the publi...

Okay, so all you future people who are reading this blog and already know what Kate Middleton's baby's name is, don't ruin the moment for me, guys. So, like the rest of the world, I am super-duper excited about Kate and William's new baby! Anyway, my friends and I are having an ongoing discussion about what the baby's name is going to be, because, when your kid is the future king of England, you can't name him just anything. Like, no one is going to bow down to the king if his name is North . No, there has to be some precedent for the baby's name. I am almost 100% certain that they are going to name him something super traditional that other kings have been called before. That's a pretty limited list. The way I figure it, Will and Kate's options are: William (so, the baby would be King Jr.)  Charles ( King Charles I lost his head to Cromwell, so that's bad karma) George (a good, solid Hanoverian name that is also the name of one of the pa...

I'm not sure if I've blogged about this before but, if I have, I'm going to blog about it again because it annoys me. Why is there so much prejudice against Slytherins? Like, I get that a lot of them went Death Eater and started chilling with Voldemort, but not all of them. Like Professor Slughorn, he's a Slytherin, but when we first meet him, he's disguised as an arm chair. How can you hate an arm chair? There's nothing threatening about that. Don't be a Death Eater Besides, all of that Voldemort stuff was over in the 90s. A lot of weird stuff happened in the 90s - overalls, neon, spandex, boy bands - I think it's time we moved past it. Let me just do a quick review for those of you who aren't up on your world events from the past twenty years. Voldemort was defeated for the first time on Halloween, 1981 (Muggle years). Let's call this the Interim Period (IP). In 1995, or 15 IP, let's call this the beginning of the Second Voldemortia...

So, as sort of a continuation of my last A Song of Ice and Fire blog about Jon Snow's parentage, I've decided to go a little further in depth on this topic and tell you about my predictions for the three heads of the dragon. In case you're unfamiliar with this concept, the three heads of the dragon are a reference to the three headed dragon on the sigil of house Targaryen. This symbol dates back to the days when the Targaryens first arrived in Westeros; the three heads of the dragon represent Aegon the Conqueror (the first Targaryen king) and his two sisters and the three dragons they rode. Now, as you know if you've read A Song of Ice and Fire or seen the TV show, Daenerys Targaryen has managed to hatch three dragons. So, what is pretty obvious is that there is going to be a resurrection of the three headed dragon. It is well established in dragon lore that a dragon can have only one rider. Obviously, Dany, who is, after all, the mother of dragons, is one of the hea...

So, the other day I started rereading The Great Gatsby . It's a great book and all and I am enjoying it as much as I did the first time, but I noticed something that I didn't notice the first time. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes really complicated sentences. Point out the obvious much? I mean, Fitzgerald doesn't just write a sentence; he writes a little adjective filled, adverb flavored pie with a thin, flaky verb crust on top. He writes a sentence like he's riding a stampeding wildebeest in the Lion King: very carefully. Because writing a sentence can be a dangerous thing. I mean, you don't know how dangerous a semi-colon can be until you misuse one and suddenly it's punching you in the stomach while a pair of quotation marks hold you down. However, reading a sentence can be just as hazardous. As an English major, I'm used to complicated sentences, but that doesn't change the fact that every time you read a sentence, you are diving into that sentence...

I have been the proud owner of a Christmas Cactus for almost a year and a half and let me tell you something, it's very rewarding. As you may or may not know, I have never really had a lot of luck with pets (my hermit crabs once tried to eat each other); although, I haven't completely failed at keeping fish alive. However, I've been very successful at keeping my cactus alive (I call him Cacti). Because, when you forget to water/feed a cactus for a few days, nothing too bad happens. When fish miss a day of feeding, they start to eat their young. The noble cactus, on the other hand, is a dignified creature that does not stoop to cannibalism. Breathing pets, I find, are mostly over rated, but it's not all fun and games owning a Christmas Cactus. It's a lot of hard work. To get it to flower, you have to make sure that it gets a long period of uninterrupted darkness. In winter, that means you have to turn off the lights when it starts to get dark outside. So ba...

So, I stumbled upon this picture the other day. As a Slytherin, I was kind of disturbed to have Roose Bolton on my house's quidditch team (but I like Margaery and Oberyn, so that's okay). Also, it's kind of weird to see Lannisters wearing green. It kind of makes me uncomfortable (not because they don't behave like Slytherins, but because their colors are red and gold which, ironically, are Gryffindor colors - the Lannisters are so not Gryffindors). But, anyway, the point is, I had no idea of the wild, weird world of Fandom Cross-Overs that was brewing right underneath the surface of my Tumblr account, and, actually, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I mean, I'm okay when they're making fun of Twilight , but sometimes, like, I just get confused.    Like, for example, you have no idea how long it took me to figure these out. Like, not that it's not cool that Tonks is on Game of Thrones; it's just one of those moments where your...

An open letter to Facebook, So, the other day I was talking to one of my friends on Facebook chat and I was telling her that I had just aquired a bag of Werther's Caramels and I thought, wouldn't it be great if Facebook had a vampire emote. Because, when you're sitting in your office with a big bag of candy, the only way to really express how you feel is with a smiling, vampire emoticon. I think it's shameful that there isn't a vampire emote. If there's a shark emote, penguin emote, robot emote, devil emote, a whole new page of cat emotes, and a Christopher Putnam emote, there should be a vampire emote. I think it would serve a desperate need. I mean, as a person who lives in Pennsylvania where the sun only shines in brief intervals between rain storms, a vampire emote is the perfect way to express how sunshine makes me feel. The sun, it burns . And I don't want to even go in to how many times a day garlic and silver come up in Facebook conversations! ...

So, since I wrote about Jurassic Park last week, I thought I'd talk about one of my other favorite movies, Independence Day . Now a lot of people think that Independence Day is just an action, patriotism movie about the power of the human spirit and what you can accomplish if you set your mind to it, but it's about so much more than that. It's about Will Smith killing aliens. Sure, it's a great 'Murica moment when the president rallies the fighter pilots and they go in guns a-blazing to shot down the alien's space ship, but when Will Smith's plane gets shot down over the desert and he just pops out of the smoking wreckage and starts beating on that alien, that's what makes the movie. I mean, there are a lot of great characters in Independence Day, but Will Smith's character, Steve, is definitely the clincher. Like, he gets shot out of the sky, beats up an alien, then drags it for miles across the desert, and then goes on to learn to fly a UFO, who...

So, the other day I saw Jurassic Park (for the millionth time). Let me tell you something, I frickin' love Jurassic Park . It's right up there on my list of my favorite movies along with The Amazing Spider-Man ,   Dr. Strangelove ,  Independence Day , and Mean Girls  (gotta love the classics). I know everyone is always all like "oh Spielberg, he made E.T. !". Not me, I don't really care about E.T. (although I did like the whole glowing finger thing and the scene where he's following the Reese's Pieces); when I hear anything about Spielberg, I'm like "oh, he made Jurassic Park ". In my opinion, Jurassic Park is a massively underrated movie and I will tell you why. Nowadays, when you see a dinosaur on TV, it's Dr. Curt Connors as The Lizard and the citizens of Tokyo are running for the hills. And it's not like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park just dropped out of the sky either. There is a very plausible explanation for the crea...

So, if you're A Song of Ice and Fire fan, you know that one of the big questions of the series is Jon Snow's parentage. I'm not going to propose any crazy, new theories here like, what if Jon's mother was actually Catelyn but she got amnesia and Ned made everyone pretend that she wasn't his mother so she wouldn't realize she'd forgotten. Though, if that turns out to be true, it would create a lot of interesting and unresolvable issues. I am pretty much firmly in the 'Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen are Jon Snow's parents' camp. And, following in my new tradition in which, apparently, I weigh in on controversial A Song of Ice and Fire issues, I am going to tell you why I think Jon's is Lyanna and Rhaegar's son. I think that this theory makes logical sense on a number of different levels: 1) It would tie everything up very nicely. Lyanna is such a pivotal character in the pre-history of the series and yet all the information we ha...