Tuesday, December 14, 2004

The first snowy post of the winter

Winter has finally arrived in Columbus. Yesterday was a little chilly, but not too cold, at least not until the evening. In the evening it got really very cold, and it started snowing. It's kept snowing, on and off, ever since. Now it's not Minnesota snow or State College snow, but still it's more snow then we get back home in London most years (more on my London love affair later). To conserve money, well actually to conserve body heat (mine) as I'm too tight to turn the heating on, I'm writing this post fully clothed wearing my dressing gown over the top of my clothes and my duvet is wrapped around me. I'm not much of a winter person. On the subject of not being much of a winter person, next week I get to go to lovely warm Minneapolis for a week.

Another thing that came to Columbus this weekend was the film Closer. As has been mentioned more than once in this blog, I will watch pretty much anything with Natalie Portman in it. Once more this proved to be a very reasonable way of a selecting a film. Particularly as she plays a stripper in the film, although, sadly, there were no gratuitous naked shots — we do get to see one side of one breast, sans nipple, which will do. It was a very good film, about four people and their very messed up relationships with each other. My top five reasons for liking this film are: the aforementioned Natalie Portman, who was very good; gratuitous use of the word 'cunt'; gratuitous (my third in this paragraph, is that grat... no I can't be so cheap) use of the word 'fuck'; the excellent Clive Owen (when will Chancer come out on DVD?); the ubiquitous Jude Law (when does he sleep?);

Actually, I think I probably just lied. My favourite thing in the film was probably London. There's one scene early on in the film, in which Jude Law is showing a freshly arrived Natalie Portman a few pieces of his London, that resonated strongly with me. It's always been something of a fantasy of mine to show a pretty girlie around London, and I'm not talking about the standard touristica thingies but those parts of London that I like, and now miss. While we're talking candidly I have a small confession to make, in these fantasies the girl is usually American. I'm not quite sure why but I find some American girls, c.f. Miss Portman and my obsession post, irresistibly something. Maybe it's just that wide eyed amazement that some American girls get when they hear a British accent.

This weekend was something of a shopping spree for me. I tend to spend more money when I'm feeling slightly sorry for myself, which seems faintly ridiculous. Distressingly, most of the spending spree was on comic books, or graphic novels for those tarts in the audience. Now I'm not sure if I'm more distressed at spending so much on (geeky) comic books, or at the fact that I'm distressed about spending money on this legitimate media form. The rest of the spending spree was spent on Chris Rock, which I haven't watched yet so can't comment on, and the multiple Grammy nominated Kanye West, which I have listened to and is excellent (one chorus in which kiddies sing about entrepreneurial drug dealers counting their money, is very good).

In other news, a beggar reprimanded me for having my music on too loud so he had to ask twice for money (he didn't get any either time), and I found out what CBT is in some circles. At this point I'd like to mention that I only found out what CBT stood for and not what it felt like, as it is Cock and Ball Torture.

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