Amazon.com Wishlists

I really love Amazon's wishlist feature, particularly now that it has the "universal wishlist button" that lets you put items from other stores (including local shops and etsy, yay for taking down big business while using big business!) onto your list. Essentially, the wishlist is a registry that you can start without having a reason to have a registry (I know registries are becoming more popular for housewarmings, but most people still only use them for weddings and babyshowers, and damn it, everyone deserves a present now and again, big life event or not).

I'm a big fan of gifts, both giving and receiving them, and having a list of things a person wants comes in handy around the holidays and at birthdays. Particularly if you live far away from someone, the fact that you can ship directly to their house can be helpful. I've also found that I'm a particularly difficult person to buy for, and so having a wishlist is an easy way to let people know exactly what I want without looking like a jerk.

It's particularly easy to set up and use, and I'd definitely recommend starting one of your own. I've been searching for a lot of my friends, and so far, have only found two who have them, and one who actually uses it, so do yourself and your loved ones a favor and start one today!

Carhartt.com

Simply put, this website is poorly designed and difficult to use. There are five options for women's pants, each with at least three sub-options, and one cannot navigate between the pages easily. Obviously it's difficult to remember whether you've just looked at Traditional Fit Boot-Cut Canvas Jean or Modern Fit Straight-Leg Canvas Workpant or Curvy Canvas Jean because the names are similar in their banal un-description and also because the photographs all look exactly the same. Duck canvas workpants, whether Traditional or Modern or Curvy or Boot-Cut, all look exactly the same in a low-resolution photograph. The written description doesn't help much, either; the pants are generally either 8.5 or 12 or 12.5 weight canvas with or without hammer/ruler/scythe accoutrements. They need to have some Lands' End bathing suit full-body 3D CGI SFX TMI ASAP KTM viewer.

Johnnie Walker Keep Walking Commercial

As we all know, I really like commercials that use history to sell me something. (See here. I also really love this one very much.) If it has a good song, even better. Here's a commercial I just saw that I found very effective because of its combination of powerful music and use of historic images.

However, I wonder, did it go too far by bringing up the Civil Rights Movement and the Unification of Berlin? Any opinions would be most appreciated.

Where the Wild Things Aren't

I don't know how else to say this, so I am just going to come out and say it. I did not like Where the Wild Things Are. Whew. That feels like a confession. Now I can get on this this review without pussyfooting around the idea.

WTWTA opens up on a lonely boy named Max whose sister has out grown him, his mother is too busy for him, and his father is MIA. He has no friends, an overactive imagination, and is frustrated with everything in his life. In fact we continue to see how frustrated he is for about 20 minutes. So, he runs of to where the wild things are. For those of you who have read the book, you know what comes next. He becomes king of the wild things, runs around a lot, appreciates his old life, then decides to go home. Right? Wrong. This is a feature length movie, people. We have to have character development and a way to stretch out those CGI skills. So instead of a pack of monters to rule, Max instead gains a pack of insecurities to rule. In fact, the moneters' insecurities and fears seem to match pretty closely to Max's own. Max spends most of his time trying to placate the pack instead of having just a good old-fashioned rumpus before giving up and heading home.

Ok, so maybe he doesn't just give up. But when he realizes that he's messed things up worse than he's made them better, he abandons the pack without trying to rectify it all. We as an audience are left to believe that life for the monsters either goes on as it has before or that they figure things out on their own. If this movie is about growing up, I don't see much of a lesson there.

Plot points aside, the movie was boring. As I mentioned, the sequences when Max was at home ran too long and pretty much all of the character insteractions were damn right depressing. I was never properly pulled into the movie and kept waiting for it to end. This child next to me became fidgity half-way through the movie, and I can't say that I blamed him. I too wish I could have played in the aisles. If you're going to make a movie based on a children's book, make it appeal to children. For every action/fun scene, there were 5 argument/discussion scenes. The book is such a simple story and Jonze and Eggers had to ruin it by complicating it. The "touching" ending even failed to make me cry, and I cry at everything.

Two good things I will say about this movie is that it's beautifully shot and the costumes/CGI were fantastic. Other than that, save yourself the time and money and go rent to book from the library. It will be far more entertaining.

Little Birds by Anaïs Nin

Since we've been a bit slow with posts recently, so I'm going to cross-post a very short review I just wrote on GoodReads of Anaïs Nin's Little Birds.

An interesting collection of very short erotic stories. I don't read very much erotica, so I can't compare this to anything, really, but it did certainly remind me of Memoirs of a Beatnik in many ways. Some of the writing is lovely, some is awful. The characters are mostly caricatures, but overall I liked it alright and was able to read the whole thing in just two hours. I suspect that if the stories individually and the book as a whole weren't so short, I might have grown bored. I'd really like to read Nin's journals now, because I suspect those will be a bit more substantive.

My recommendation to IttyBittyReaders: If you're in the mood for some very quick erotica, this might be a good place to start. If you're in the mood for a brilliant work of epic fiction, don't bother.