Imagination vs. Provided Imagery

Or, put more simply, book vs. movie. I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to watch the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  I read the bookand really enjoyed it. it's an exciting adventure with a mystery and lots of over the top IT feats and compelling, interesting characters.But there are [SPOILER ALERT] a couple of really brutal rapes in the book that I don't think I want to see on the screen.  It was one thing to read it, but I really don't want to see it depicted on screen. I'm a very visual person and I'm afraid it will get stuck in my head and be icky. 

As I'm saying this, I'm thinking how odd it is.  I mean, isn't the imagination more powerful than a provided image?  Maybe it's that I didn't try to imagine those parts too much when I read them; I just wanted to get past them to the next part of the story.  But in a movie, I can't gloss over it.  I suppose I could fast forward.  I don't know.

The other night I watched an episode of Hawthorne called "Mother's Day," in which a little baby dies, and I cried and cried! It just blindsided me, I couldn't take it.  I don't do that very often, cry from a TV show or even a good movie.  I'm usually too much the analytical writer, noticing how powerful a scene is and why, to get caught up enough to respond so viscerally as to cry.  But that one really got to me.  And that experience reminded how sometimes imagery has a more powerful effect than my imagination.

The interesting thing is, in this TV episode, they really didn't show much of the baby.  You saw a glimpse of her from the side in a car seat, with her little sunhat, and you saw her little naked toes and her hands.  After that, you really only saw the doctors and nurses working on her, but you didn't see the baby.  Just the faces of the doctors and nurses.  So maybe it actually was my imagination that was so powerful, filling in what wasn't shown!  Or maybe it was a combination of both.  Yeah, I think that's it. 

This reminds me of how in monster movies, it's always scarier when you don't actually see the monster, or only get a glimpse of the monster, until really late in the story.  Perfect example:Jaws.  All you see for 90% of the movie (I just made up that percentage; I'm guessing) is a fin.  Just a fin!  What's so scary about a fin?  Well, it's the characters' reaction to that fin, and to what else they can see and feel (the ouch, it's biting me kind of feeling) that you can't.

Anyway, has anyone seen the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Are the icky scenes really icky? Did they bug you afterward?  Are you scarred for life?

all right, blogger is pissing me off with it's extra line breaks after a link to an amazon product. they just had this great hookup with Amazon, so I thought this stoopid problem would be gone. But no. And I don't feel like trying to fix it right now, not after spending too long on it last night with no success.  I thumb my nose at you, computer!!

A Herd of Cats

Thirty of them, to be precise. I started reading another drawing book called Drawing Lab and the first exercise is to draw 30 cats. I numbered them so you can tell my progress. I think I was supposed to do this in about 10 minutes but I took about 40. It was fun. Some of these I actually like. Some of them are embarrassing. Number 15 looks like a pug, #24 looks like a Weeble, and #6 looks like he has a worm problem. Only the Weeble quality was intentional. Which are your favorites?

More Moon Doodles

Ok, so maybe you're getting sick of these. But I'm not. Sometimes I think something turned out really well so I want to do it over and over again different ways. With these I used some new Zentangles I learned from this great book I got called Totally Tangled.

So the moon guy on the bottom got a little squished, but I think he has personality. And I love the new Tangles I tried.

I think I would like making a big one of these with lots more bands of doodles. And I could add some color. Just a little, like one or two colors.

A Fourple

So, I'm crocheting from this pattern, and it tells me to do this stitch that I haven't done before. It's called a double treble crochet stitch. It sounds very complicated, doesn't it? Well, once I read how to do it, and actually tried it, I was rather unimpressed!

If you don't crochet, let me explain it this way: There's these basic stitches that are different sizes and they are the single crochet, double crochet and treble crochet. 1,2, 3. Simple? (Oh, and there's a half double crochet that's in between a single and a double. So it should really be called a one-and-a-half crochet stitch. You start to see the problem...) Makes sense, right? So then here comes some mysterious monster called the double treble. What? Well, I did it, and it turns out it's really a quadruple crochet stitch. Or, as I would like to call it, a fourple crochet stitch.

My point is, who was on drugs when they came up with this system of naming crochet stitches?! I mean, I'm not an expert crocheter, I only started a few months ago, but I can count. A double treble is not two trebles, as I first suspected. And it's not six units long, it's not a sixple (2 x 3). No, it's four. When does six equal four? Only in America, evidently.

See, I heard from my crochet teacher that the British have a much more logical system of naming crochet stitches. But we Americans couldn't be satisfied with the Brit system. Oh, no. As if King George was keeping the colonists under his thumb by forcing them to use British crochet. Maybe there was even some special protest, like the stupid Boston Tea Party. Maybe a bunch of crocheters threw their crochet hooks and yarn into a lake. Only things went horribly awry. Frogs and ducks hobbling around, tangled up in yarn; fish horking up crochet hooks. What a disaster! It was embarrassing. And when the local beat reporter went out to write a story, lifelong crocheters claimed they were ironsmiths and barkeeps. They refused to be interviewed. So the story went unreported. And was lost to time.

Am I obsessing about this? Probably. But I like things to be logical. I'm a logical person, and I love math. And this is just wrong. It should not be! Well, I'm pushing back. All my double trebles shall henceforth be known as fourples. And if I ever get good enough to write a pattern...fourples.