The Whateverlah Blog

Happy birthday to Stephanie March. May you be showered with plenty of tequila today. Hopefully, literally; and hopefully with photographic proof. One can hope.

And, um, also happy birthday to the Prime Minister.

And, and.. happy 19th birthday to Dan Radcliffe, who gets better looking with every HP movie.

Let’s start off with a quote from instant messaging…

me:
I have a crush on Movie Harry Potter
so cute!

PpFt:
ah, *now* you have a crush on Movie Harry Potter

me:
well yea..
i dont do underage okay

I’m going to preface this little rambling by saying that I need to watch the movie a second time to really see where I stand.

[SPOILER WARNING]

For now, there are hits and misses but overall the movie was enjoyable if rather clunky for whatever reason.

Biggest hits:

- the three main stars are getting so much better in their roles. I genuinely enjoyed the comedy and the interplay this time rather than rolling my eyes at contrived efforts in the other movies before.

- randomly, everything will come together and a scene would be so perfect that I have no words for it. These scenes make me glow with warmth inside. The Quidditch scenes in HBP does this for me.

- Dan Radcliffe in the Felix Felicis scenes – GOLD!

Biggest misses:

- uh.. talk about dialing in your performances. They might as well have CGI’ed Robbie Coltrane into this one for all the acting he did.

- the WTF scene of Bellatrix attacking the burrows. Someone explain the point of this and maybe I won’t be so unhappy about it. And believe me, I am plenty unhappy about this and the camera work is but only one reason.

-my biggest, and i mean HUGEST sore point about this movie is Draco and the vanishing cabinet. I really wish I could find someone who’s never read the book but has only seen the movies and ask them what they thought was the point of him working so hard on the frakkin cupboard for. To smuggle Bellatrix and the two unnamed death eaters in and…. witness his almost-killing of Dumbledore?? WTF? My friend who accompanied me to watch the movie suggested that they cut the entire Hogwarts battle out of the movie because it would be too similar to the one in Book 7. Okay, fair. But in doing so they’ve made Draco’s scenes – being all emo in the Room of Requirement – POINTLESS. And that really chaps my ass. *deep breaths*

- I’m going to say it might be because I’m tired but I felt that visually the movie wasn’t as cohesive. I felt like I was in different worlds even while in Hogwarts the whole time. Even the muggle world was whacked. Loved the opening to Order of the Phoenix way better.

Random appreciation:

- Rupert Grint is just gold throughout.

- PpFt pointed out that the Lav-Won-Won in the movie is not as geli as the book. Agreed.

- McGonagall and the Weasley Twins – always awesome and needed more screen time.

File this one under things that looks interesting but will never attempt at home:

… because it’s much too much effort.

The laksa croquette is a menu item from 7atenine, a fancy pants place at the Ascott in KL. The menu actually doesn’t look half bad.

My foodie friends, when will you all return so I can go feast there with people I enjoy nomming with?

So muck geek love coming out of Twitter today that I’m not going to bother to fit it all under 140 characters.

First of all, Stephen Fry tweeted:

Wheee!My alltime hero Richard Feynman.The legendary BBCCornell Lectures.God bless Bill Gates(never thought I’d say that!) http://is.gd/1zXuv

Note: the link probably doesn’t work too well, or maybe it’s just my crap internet. Basically, it’s a link to the videos of Feynman’s lectures (7 hours worth) done at Cornell is now available thanks to Bill Gates. (Hint: go youtube these videos if the Microsoft link doesn’t work for you)

The point is.. Fry loves Feynman. I Love Fry and Feynman. <3 <3 <3

And then..

Go behind the scenes of TEDTalk with a mini documentary. Squeeeee!!!!

Time for a repost, from last year:

A month to Kuwait. Packing? What’s that?

**for PpFt because I neglected Tweet In BM Day on Twitter.

Semalam semasa makan tengahari terlihat saya seorang lelaki yang amat tampan sekali duduk di meja sebelah. Apalagi, mencuri-curi tengok sajalah. Apa nak buat? Mak ada.

Ketika tengah-tengah berlakon ‘cool’ saya bangun untuk membasuh tangan tapi belum selangkah saja sudah hampir jatuh.. terpeleot. “Oh mak engkau!” aku berteriak di dalam hati. (But more accurately it was more like “FUCK!”)

Jejakaku senyum. No doubt, at my dweebness. Mampussss….

…

There. Had a good laugh yet?

“They can use their gay marriage money to pay for their chicken issues.”

Anderson Cooper makes Sarah Palin’s spokesperson look inept(which arguably isn’t difficult) through a telephone interview:

Can’t wait till Jon Stewart comes back from his short hiatus. This Palin resignation stuff is gold.

Still looking for my blogging mojo.

In the meantime here’s Stephanie March and Mariska Hargitay at the Gracie’s. Crappy interview. But man, Stephanie should get an NRA membership for those guns she’s sporting. Like whoah!

It was past midnight, closer to one in the morning, when the brother and I were driving home from another food mcguyverism adventure to McDonalds (another post for another day).

As we sat at a light I stared at a giant billboard across the street.

“Bungalow,” I said outloud as I read the plain advertisement for real estate. “Bungalow…” I repeated the word to myself over and over again. “You know,” I turned to the brother, “that doesn’t sound like a very English word.”

“It’s definitely not American. It’s British what.”

“That’s what I mean,” I said. “It’s British but the origins sound colonial.”

“They got no bungalows in UK meh?”

“I’m just saying that I don’t remember the word being used in like.. Sherlock Holmes.” Or in any Jane Austen stories that I remember. “I mean, it’s colonial.. you say the word and you picture an English bungalow in some tropical place no?”

“Yea..” the bro said non-committedly.

“Bungalow… bung-guh-loh… sounds Indian, right? Like, Bangla?” I tried to posit.

“Go home and look it up in Wikipedia lah.”

“I will. I will. Just trying to figure it out on my own first mah.” Thinking about how often I use the word I said, “You never hear it in US though hor?”

“Got lah. Very rare but I’ve heard it used,” the brother said.

“Where? In the south?”

“Got lah…”

“Mmm.. I never.”

“Technically, most American houses are bungalows what,” he pointed out.

“Ehh. I never saw it that way. But you’re right.” (dammit, +1 for him in the ‘always right unofficial contest’)

When we got home I was too lazy to mess with the computer. This morning I remembered so I wiki’ed the term bungalow:

A bungalow is a type of single-story house that originated in India. The word derives from the Hindi ba?gl? (or perhaps the Gujarati variant ba?glo), meaning “Bengali”, used elliptically for a “house in the Bengal style”. Such houses were traditionally small, only one story, thatched and had a wide veranda.

Okay. I’m satisfied now.

The point of this story is that my little puzzle would have been solved very instantly and easily if I own an iPhone. But then I wouldn’t have had half the fun working it out and having conversations like that with the brother. I like my little Nokia 1110.

Yasmin Ahmad talking to the media(?) during the filming of The Funeral.

In this other one, Yasmin talks to some bloggers a year ago. There’s some great anecdotes from the Tan Hong Ming ad. She also touched on several things that I really relate to when talking about filmmaking. One is the idea of control, or the lack of it as the director; and secondly – art as collaboration. I really could listen to her talk all day about film making, love, and on being Malaysian.

STEPHANIE MARCH IS GOING TO STAY WITH SVU

Ausiello just broke the news that apparently Miss March has signed on to appear for at least 10 episodes next season! (In the other episodes, she’ll be stuck in traffic)

At least? C’MON. Gimme Cabot 24/7/365. You know we like it!

Yes. Yesyesyesyesyes. YES!

*girlie scream*

*happy snoopy dance*

(This means Operation Keep Alex Cabot has met its objective. I could cry.)

Blablabla.. the teaching of English (not Math and Science in English) is being kicked around in the spotlight again.

Our Education Minister was shocked (shocked! I tell you!) that you don’t need to pass English to get an SPM cert. So what does he do? He says he wants to “gather gather feedback if this situation was good for the country”.

Does he– What is– Can– ARGH…. WHAT THE FUCK?

Does nobody even question this continual lowering of standards and how it means that the SPM certificate is worth about as much as the toilet paper I wipe my ass with these days?

And I’m not saying that we should overnight make English a compulsory pass subject – it should actually be a credit subject but that’s like asking for the sky.

I’m sayin’ that this continual lowering of expectations means the quality of English being taught in schools suffers because if you don’t need to pass it, who gives a damn? 

Ok, so we set aside the whole English thing. Here’s something else I just learned about the SPM exams that made me want to kill little puppies:

“A pass in English has never been compulsory for SPM. Since 2000, a pass in Bahasa Malaysia was sufficient to get the SPM certificate. Previously, a credit was a must.”

So, not only you can fail English spectacularly — because let’s admit it, the SPM English paper is a joke — but now (ok, since 2000) you can also nearly fail our national language and still get your SPM cert. Again, I say, WHAT THE FUCK YO?!

Literacy fail = unity fail = you and me fail.

Stephanie March pic spam! After the jump because I’m considerate like that.

 
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The episode Zebras in a nutshell, on AIM earlier:

Me: I’m going to teach that bitch to ride the subway
she thinks her blue blooded ass is too good for a subway seat

D: lol

Me: i’ll show her
ALEX FUCKING CABOT
YOU RIDE A SUBWAY WHEN THEY NEED YOUR KICK ASS BUTT

D: I think I fell in love with Liz

Me: oh welcome to teh family

D: you didnt hear that

Me: actually, we’re grieving the loss of Ryan

So. Amanda Green? What do I have to do to get you to write most if not all of season 11? Because… I realise the show is unsalvageable but it’d be great if the series didn’t implode in itself. You know I think you rock – I even concurred on Twitter with Mick Betancourt when he said you are the shit! 

I’m sorry you had to write with Dan Truly, but for the most part Zebras was a good story. You (and Truly) even made me feel sorry for Bing Bang Bong Boy. But only juuust a little since he killed Ryan O. Where am I going to get my tech luvin now?

And Alex Cabot was stuck in traffic and couldn’t make it to arraignment court to duke it out with Liz Donnelly? Much sadness there, let me tell you. I’m still waiting on my Liz/Alex showdown.

Next season, people. It’s a small chance… because silly Dick will probably want a new ADA. FAIL. But here’s a scenario that could happen – the DA will promote Cabot to Sex Crimes Bureau Chief and I can enjoy the moments where she schools the new ADA. Yea. I could totally live with that. Leave me to my delusions.

(so what the hell, y’all – go sign the Keep Stephanie March / Alex Cabot on SVU Petition. Sheesh.)