Poem for Saturday

The Great Figure
By William Carlos Williams

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

--------

Younger son got his retainer this morning, much to his chagrin -- a few weeks with no braces and he was really enjoying having his mouth all to himself. Ultimately he will need braces on the lower teeth, too, poor guy. I dragged older son out with us so I could go buy them both new shoes after the orthodontist...younger son now wears a size bigger than I do in Merrells, which we both love, while older son is rapidly catching up to . And their shoes are getting expensive...eep!

In the afternoon my father took the kids to the pool, since my mother is visiting my sister for several days (my sister, having tired of trying to get the family together for my mother's birthday, is taking my mother to Canyon Ranch later in the summer a long with a bunch of her equally wealthy friends and their mothers, so my sister has probably won the Good Daughter award for the year, as I can't hope to compete on that playing field). I am only halfway done with our eight laundries, so that is Saturday morning's project! I did watch the Stargate: Atlantis season finale, but having missed parts of this season and all of the last, I am in no position to say anything intelligent about it, other than I think I like Elizabeth better than anyone else I know.

: The sun goes down alone
1. Have any road trips planned? Now that we're one day back from the Virginia Beach trip, we have vague tentative plans to go to Hanover for July 4th and to Lake George with my whole family in August, but our next serious road trip won't be till next summer, cross-country.
2. What is out of your reach? At the moment, my cat, who is sitting opposite me on the couch and glaring because I'm not petting her.
3. Are you more likely to watch a sunset or the sun rise? Sunset. I can count the number of sunrises I've seen willingly on both hands.
4. What night will you never forget? The night my younger son was born. (I'd like to say the night my older son was born but I'd been in labor for nearly a day and they gave me Demerol without warning me.)
5. What's the last thing that made you scream? My son using his shirt as a napkin.

: Changing Formats
1. If you were going to remake a movie, what would it be and who would you cast in the roles? I usually hate remakes. I'm tempted to say a live action version of The Road To El Dorado with the main voice actors from the animated movie.
2. If you could turn a book into a movie, what would it be and who would you cast in the roles? The Black Chalice, with Sean Bean as Karelian, Viggo Mortensen as Godfroi, Orlando Bloom as Paul and Catherine Zeta Jones as Raven.
3. If you were going to turn a video game into a movie, what would it be? Would it be animated or live-action? I'd have to play a video game to have an answer to this.
4. You're going to turn a book into a TV series. What is it? Why would it make a good TV show?
5. Do you generally prefer the movie versions or the novel versions of works? Depends on how well-written the novel is. Bestsellers generally translate fine to the screen (I thought The Horse Whisperer for instance was a better movie than book). But The Great Gatsby? Despite a perfect cast, it's a damn mediocre movie.

: Name 5 remakes that never should have been made.
1. The Lion In Winter. I love Glenn Close and Patrick Stewart, but the original was absolutely perfect as it was.
2. King Kong. Everything I can excuse in the older one as a product of its era is magnified and made ten times worse in Peter Jackson's version.
3. A Perfect Murder. Dial M For Murder is a nearly perfect movie, one of the best representative films of the genre. It did NOT need remaking. (I didn't see all of the Psycho remake so I cannot really comment, but I suspect I would feel the same way.)
4. War of the Worlds which should have won Spielberg an Oscar for Worst Idea Involving Tom Cruise Since The Arranged Marriage To Nicole Kidman.
5. The Love Boat. It's not that the original was so good, it's that The Next Wave was SO BAD.

: Theories and More
1. What is your favorite Book 7 theory? If you mean "favorite" as in "one I'd most like to see," it's that Tonks is under Imperius and that's why she's been turned into the Second Coming of Merope. If you mean "one I find both entertaining and reasonably plausible," it's Harry the Horcrux. (Oh -- and, of course, Snape Is Good.)
2. Which movie soundtrack do you like best and why? Prisoner of Azkaban, because it's my favorite of the films and the one I've seen the most times.
3. How long do you plan to spend reading DH? As long as it takes to get from the beginning to the end while writing down notes.
4. If you could have any character for a LiveJournal friend, who would it be? Gilderoy Lockhart. He'd be only slightly more of a braggart than a lot of people around here, he'd tell entertaining stories and all the wannabe BNFs would friend me just because I knew him.
5. Have you ever had a teacher/professor that reminded you of a Hogwarts professor? How? I had a college professor who reminds me of Lupin -- gave me special advanced lessons and everything -- except his weakness was alcohol, not lycanthropy. I also had an Umbridge, but that was in elementary school and best forgotten.


A farmer contemplates his crops outside the walls of Fort James at the Jamestown Settlement.


In the Powhatan village, a Native American woman describes how tobacco and corn are cultivated there.


A settler works on weaving a fishing net...


...while the blacksmith discusses his tools...


...and a cook complains that the chickens keep laying eggs in the oven.


One of the English expedition leaders explains how the Virginia Company books are kept.


Not far away, a Powhatan girl works on a carving.

I was distressed to read that according to The New York Daily News, Boston Legal is replacing nearly half its regular cast. Including Mark Valley, Julie Bowen, Constance Zimmer and Rene Auberjonois! I can live without Claire, she was new last season and they seemed to run out of ideas for what to do with her, and I had feared that Denise might not be back after maternity leave when Shirley suggested that Jerry could take over some of her work (Christian Clemenson, who won an Emmy, will be a regular). But Brad has been there since the beginning and I'm going to be very bummed if he isn't at least a recurring character. I hope Paul Lewiston will be, since Auberjonois was supposed to be only part-time in the first place and had said he was semi-retired, but I will miss his scenes with Shirley! Having John Larroquette is not much consolation and I'd think his fans are older than Valley's and Bowen's, when the show is already allegedly skewing older than ABC wants. And I don't know Tara Summers' work as well as I knew Bowen's. Sigh. At least Shatner, Spader and Bergen are staying!