Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety-Jig...
Well, I'm back from Westercon in Seattle. It was much fun, and good contacts and all the rest, part business and part vacation.
The vacation part extended by visiting my friends Craig and Susan the day after, and the day after that, visiting my friend Diane in Eugene.
While so doing, checked out the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
Nutshell review, no spoilers: Fun movie, well worth seeing. There is a crackerjack after the credits, worth waiting for, so stay and see it.
Small rant, with very little spoiler: I enjoyed the period details. I enjoyed the use of a bedwarmer in one scene. However, this is the tropics. While there was ample reason to use a bedwarmer in the scene, my only rational explanation for its presence was that this was a transplanted British household who thought they might be needing a bedwarmer in the tropics (you really wouldn't) and were so overjoyed to actually have an excuse to use the thing, they forgot how to use one properly. For those who haven't seen one, a bedwarmer is a covered pan on a long handle that's used basically as a large iron to warm up the sheets in places like, say, England or New England, where you commonly need such things. You slide it under the sheets to warm them up, moving it around like an iron,
but you do not leave it under the sheets!
Thankfully, the maid's brainfart about the proper operation of bedwarmers and the incipient mattress fire and flaming sheets was prevented by the fortuitous invasion of undead pirates. Allowing the bedwarmer full of coals to be upended over the head of the most enertaining of the character actor pirates--I suspect the real reason for the bedwarmer's inclusion.
There were many entertaining special effects and much swashbuckling. My only complaint--aside from the misuse of the non-tropical bedwarmer--was that no one did the old pirate movie standard of rapelling down a full blown sail by land in on it and sticking a dagger in the canvas. Of course, since one of the ships had the tattered sails of a ghost ship, this would have been followed by an ignominious fall to the decks, so I suppose it's a reasonable thing to avoid.
Always room for one in the sequel, however.
The preview for The Haunted Mansion left me shuddering in horror, and not in a good way. Why? Because it's an extended version of Eddie Murphy's monologue about what black people would do if they were in the Amityville Horror house. The mansion is a Victorian mansion filled with white ghosts who will of course be completely politically correct as they chase the black family around, I suppose being the ghosts of friendly abolitionists or something. I'm expecting some infernal mating of The Haunting and Wild Wild West.
