From the high desert's walls to the seas red and black

[sovay]

I do have the best cousins. Today started off at a high water mark of suck, but improved markedly once I met up with rushthatspeaks and she fed me spice cake with home-candied orange peel and we walked to the Cambridge Library, where I acquired one book I had been looking for and two I hadn't; we talked a lot about movies and the absolute inexplicability of the music video for Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages." I came home and made myself kelp noodles for dinner. I baked apples with honey and cinnamon, which I hadn't done in several months. And TCM was running a marathon of B-movie monster flicks, which is why I finished my night by watching odds and ends of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) and all of The Monster That Challenged the World (1957), which despite the fact that he's the explanatory supporting scientist and they're supposed to be prehistoric sea snails, I shall continue to think of as Hans Conried vs. the Giant Radioactive Sea Monkeys. Tomorrow I have to be organized, but right now I'm going to curl up and read Kristin Cashore's Fire (2009).

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry about the starting suck, but glad for the improvement of the day and your luck in cousins.

Glad for the amusing movies--I didn't know there'd been a film made about prehistoric sea snails attacking the modern world. Enjoy the book--I'm curious to hear what you think of it. I hope tomorrow's being organised goes well.

[sovay]

I didn't know there'd been a film made about prehistoric sea snails attacking the modern world.

Well, there still hasn't, really. Except for one scene underwater where their shells are visible, they look more arthropod than mollusc (say, fifteen-foot, pissed-off pillbugs with mandibles and white benthic eyes), and they don't challenge the world so much as they vampirize some Army personnel around the Salton Sea. The fact that these creatures are radioactive is surprisingly underplayed, although I suppose it's not as though everyone was going to agree that huge carnivorous non-radioactive sea snails were perfectly all right, then; especially after they get into the All-American Canal. All of this admitted, however, I think it was probably not a bad example of the species Cinema beta americana,* with unexpected dashes of character development thrown in around the scare scenes. It was indicated by TCM that Spielberg took it as the template for Jaws (1975), which I can't verify for myself, having never seen the film despite once glimpsing Roy Scheider in the cafeteria of the American Museum of Natural History. The gender politics were still worse than The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, though.

I hope tomorrow's being organised goes well.

Got all my errands run.

* In which I pretend that κίνημα is feminine, okay? According to Lewis and Short, beta is, so I'm running with that.

[gwynnega]

Ah, bless TCM. I wish I'd seen that Hans Conried film, but I did catch part of Them, which has some great shots of 1950s Los Angeles...

[sovay]

but I did catch part of Them, which has some great shots of 1950s Los Angeles...

I didn't stay up for that one! Awesome.

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Hans Conried vs. the Giant Radioactive Sea Monkeys.

I love you.

[sovay]

I love you.

He was levelheaded and sharp-tongued and did not once break into patter song, although he did lecture a lot about snails. I believe that was sort of the point.