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Really?  This ad is going to sell you a cold medicine?  Take Halls – you’ll still look like crap, but you’ll be able to muddle through!  Take Halls – you not only will look like crap, but you will scare small children on the train! 

And not only is there one snot nosed lady attempting to sell Halls, there’s another one on the opposite wall, who’s nose is even redder – Take Halls – we know Rudolph was your favorite reindeer!

Seriously – is this really selling Halls to anyone? 

Not the work of Don Draper.

Remember a few posts ago, I mentioned ridiculous wedding favors?

I figured I’d show them to you, just in case anyone’s looking for a little (and I mean little) inspiration.

Favors should be easy – its easy to say thank you when you really are thankful.    Thank you for coming to our wedding, to show our appreciation we got you -

a mini buri fan?

a tacky lantern?

Or, perhaps, a pair of cheesy crystal swans?

Thank you for attending our wedding – here’s some crap to take home with you.

A nice trendy thing to do is to make a donation to a charity in your wedding guests’ names.  That’s fine for many families, but for my politically polarized family, that just wouldn’t be a good idea. Even a donation to feeding the homeless might raise an eyebrow — why are they homeless? my Republican brother might ask.  Anyway, I didn’t feel comfortable making a donation in someone else’s name – there are many charities that I wouldn’t want my name associated with – and I wasn’t going to do it to someone else.

The only wedding favors that I haven’t “accidentally” left on the table were edibles.  My sister-in-law is a bit Hershey bar happy – every family event has a corresponding Hershey bar – so I decided to go with Hershey’s kisses.  I surfed the internet looking for wedding favor folks who applied stickers to the bottoms of Hershey’s kisses. And you know what, the price of a kiss went up astronomically once it was transformed into a wedding favor.  

Huh, I thought.  I could do that – why should I pay someone.  And, huh, I could do it better – why just have it say, Joe & Wendy – why couldn’t it be a picture.  And really, why should it be just one picture – it could be many pictures!  In fact, each box could have all unique pictures.  Why not?

I’ll tell you why not – it was was a total pain in the ass.

But, I had a vision in my head.  I saw a clear box, tied up with a fall colored ribbon.  And through the clear panels of the box, you would be able to see the pictures — pictures of us, our family, our friends.  My ideas got grandiose – I could even make personalized boxes – yes! that’s it!  Each box will contain pictures of us and the pertinent guest.  It’ll be fantastic.

So, we went to A.C. Moore, and investigated the clear boxes.  The boxes came in 2 sizes – a 2 x 2 x 2, and a 3 x 3 x 3 — Joe, the candy man, poo pooed the smalelr box – that’ll only hold five candies, he proclaimed.  So, I went home with the 3 x 3′s, and started to load up the 600 kisses that I had already stamped.   

Well, it turned out a 3 x 3 x 3 box holds 25 Hershey’s kisses.  I needed to make 60 or so boxes.  So that’s 25 different pictures, on 60 different labels – and then they had to be individually sorted, box by box.  Have you done the math yet?  Yes, that’s right – I had to hand apply 1500 stickers to 1500 Hershey’s kisses.  So much for my 600 labels I had already printed – I wasn’t even half there!

And, of course, I had bought the last 2 label packs at the Michael’s in the Northeast.  I called the Willow Grove store, and had them put aside four more packages of labels, and we trekked out to the ‘burbs so that I would be able to finish the project.  While we were there, we also picked up fall colored ribbon to finish the box with a flourish – voila, a bow!

So, I printed out a gazillion labels, through the personalized box idea out the window, and sorted – I had a bag of 60 kisses with photo A, a bag of kisses with photo b, etc.  And, after all of the boxes were filled, I began the bowing.

I had tied up 4 boxes, and ran out of ribbon. 

Huh.

Back to the drawing board.  So, we went back to Michael’s, and bought bows that were affixed to elastic – like a hair doo dah – and thank you tags.  Perfect, I thought.

Hmmm – the elastic wasn’t wide enough to get around the box.

No problem.  We cut the elastic off, and super glued each bow with tag on top of the box.

See, ridiculous wedding favors – what was I thinking!  But, here is the finished product:

The sky is falling! Oh, that was Meteor.  It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s – aliens?  Independence Day.  No, in 2012 there’s no meteor shower, space ships, or drilling on the moon.  This time, there are tsunami’s, earthquakes, and planet alignment.  In 2012, this year’s The World is Ending movie, the Earth’s core is heating up, baking the earth from the inside out like a microwave, causing the Earth’s crust to shift (I guess I shouldn’t be complaining so much about cinema verite in law films – scientists definitely have a bone to pick with this movie), the Washington Monument to crumble, and Yellowstone National Park to turn into a bubbling, exploding volcano.  Scrambling car escape? Check.   Nearly missed by a flying train while escaping in a biplane?  Check.  National monument wreckage – of course.  All of the classic disaster elements are there – sigh, the Earth is ending again.

The only reason this movie worked at all for me is John Cusack, playing a science fiction writer who “gets it.”  I liked him, I liked his family, and I wanted them to live.  Of course, since he’s a writer who “gets it,” he wasn’t “there” for his family, who leave him, and move in with mom’s new boyfriend, the likable, but not cool Gordon, a doctor who happens to be taking flying lessons.  At the end of the movie, you know that both John and Gordon can’t both survive, because the family could not be reunited with likable guy Gordon in the way.  I also liked the dog, a pretty ugly dog, but a dog nonetheless, and I was happy that the dog managed to live as well. 

The movie has a lot impassioned speeches from the President, and his scientific advisor – the moral centers of the film.  They talk like we would want politicians to talk – admitting wrong, taking the blame, “owning it,” and in the end, doing the right thing – more of  a fantasy than the earth ending I suppose.  Civilization be damned – we are going to do the right thing!  And of course, it all comes down to John Cusack saving the day – but first, he has to reunite with his estranged wife – and there’s a long kissy cooey scene where the seconds are ticking away, and he’s supposed to be saving the world. 

The movie is long – really really long – and editing out the romance would have been a nice way to speed things up a bit.  I guess the producers thought that the marriage between Indpendence Day and Titanic would sell more tickets to women – I don’t know why movie folks think that to get women to go to the movies there had better be a romance with a satisfying ending.  I don’t know – maybe they’re right – but this woman just wants to go to a good movie.

Yes, the blog has been having a bit of split personality disorder lately.  Or maybe it’s not the blog, maybe it’s me.  Hmm, I’ll have to think on that one. 

After Joe picked Law Abiding Citizen, it was my turn to roll the cinematic dice – we’re diplomatic that way – if you blow it, you lose picking privileges until forgiven.  So, I picked Amelia, which I thought would be a fascinating story of how a woman of her era became such a feminist, a pioneer for women in the field of aviation at a time when women driving cars was frowned upon.  No such luck.  The film opens with Ms. Earhart’s first trip to New York to essentially auditition for  George Putnam,  he would later become her husband, for the prize spot of becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic – as part of the crew, but really as a celebrated passenger.  Where’d she come from?  Unclear.  Why does she fly?  Who knows.  Family?  General information about her father having problems with alcohol.  Instead of getting to the heart of Earhart, the movie chooses to center around the relationship between her and George, with a side trip to Vidal land – which because we know nothing about her other than she is a freewheeling free thinker not to be tied down, or earthbound, but artificial constructs such as marriage, makes very little sense.

So, what should be an enlightening biopic turns into essentially Titanic in the air – a rather boring, trite romance, with Richard Gere looking all misty eyed – and you know behind his glazed over eyes, he’s just counting the money that he’ll make from this movie, and how much he’ll be able to give to the Dalai Lama, laughing at everyone who bought a ticket to this Oscar contender in sheeps clothing – ha ha, fooled ya!  And, I guess in order to perpetuate the fraud that this is actually a good biography and a serious film, it is critical of Earhart – how many times can it tell us that in actuality, she wasn’t a very good pilot, had little training, and probably shouldn’t have been soloing across the globe in the first place?  And, because we have no back story, no insight into Amelia aside from her relationship with George, it’s hard to come away from the movie without thinking – silly woman, what was she thinking? 

And, Hilary Swank really doesn’t help matters.  Sure, she could be Amelia’s twin, yeah, she’s got that strange androgyny thing going – but all of this really serves as a distraction.  Like her teeth – I find it hard to watch Swank because of her teeth – just a little aside.  Here, Swank affects what I suppose is a Kansas accent – puts on masculine, boyish clothes, and has her eyes permanently affixed straight ahead, in a wide eyed stare, I guess signifying honesty, and a rose colored glasses way of looking at the world.  Just doesn’t work for me.  And, I don’t believe it – I look at pictures of Amelia Earhart, and the one thing you know from those pictures is that she was a player – and everything she did, she did full throttle – those pictures show hard living – and you get none of that from Swank.  The accent, the strange speech patterns, the clothes - she wears them like a Halloween costume – it all seemed very unnatural – she didn’t become the character, she just wore her.

So, will the Academy be fooled – accents are biggies at award time, along with gaining weight, and playing Nazis.  Heck, Richard Gere could be nominated for best support actor his ”subtle” (he mailed it in) performance, could be a nice enough performance for the Academy to throw him a body of work bone.  And her – if she gets nominated, it’s definitely what I’ve called in the past, the Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome - this wasn’t a great performance, but she has all the trappings to fool a fool – accent, teeth, clothes.  We’ll have to see.