Happy... whatever

Here’s to all of you out there…

A very merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah or whatever-you-celebrate. Have good time, don’t eat to much cookies or fat roast meat... :-)
Enjoy!

((This is the Christmas card I sent out to some people. Satin tree on printed cotton, with bouillion wire and beads, sewn onto cardboard.))

Kong

Just saw Peter Jackson’s „King Kong“ today.

What can I say? Tremendous pictures kind of like Lord of the Rings (although I liked the trilogy better, but that’s due to the fact that I’m a LOTR fan). “Kong” was full to the brim with effects, creatures of any kind, lots of possible and impossible creatures and environments. Great pictures. Good actors, too. 3 hours of great cinema. A classic retold with modern means. Fast-paced tracking shots, stunts, SFX, and the creatures looked so real, at least in, say, 98 % of the scenes. Kongs facial expression is simply superb. I love the dinos. And the wonderful landscapes (yeah I know that they’ve done a lot of painting. Who cares!).

Don’t give a hoot for the incredible story (which doesn’t deviate much from the original), just relax, lean back and enjoy an adventure, and let this movie surprise you.
But, hey, many scenes from the trailer seem to miss. Do we have to wait for the Extended Edition on DVD to see those?

And: the production diary can still be viewed at www.kongisking.net. Just in case you don’t want to spend the 15 € for the DVD; saw that one in a story for this price the other day.

The time before Christmas

When Barb of Woof Nanny posted something about gnomes, I remembered the last day in Iceland.
We had booked a bus tour to Vik, and, after having had all kinds of weather until then (except for sunshine), we arrived in knee-deep snow in a snow storm, with waves so high that we didn’t want to go to the shore anyway.
On the way back to Reykjavik, Addy, the chaperone, told us about pre-Christmas customs in Iceland, and of the 13 Christmas Lads that visit the Icelandic children from December 6th until Christmas Eve. Of course, they have all different names, which all tell something about their attributes, or their behaviour, e. g. one of them is said to raise the women’s skirts...

Children in Iceland put a shoe in their window on the eve of December 6th, and when they’ve been nice, they’ll find a little present in there in the morning, but if they’ve been naughty, only a potato.
The Christmas Lads come from the mountains; they’re all siblings, children of an ugly ogre and his wicked ogre wife. The father is mere ugly, but in a way that children cry for fear when they see him. But the mother will come out of the mountain to catch the children that have been naughty and boil them in her big pot to eat them. And even their big black Christmas Cat eats children who don’t get new things to wear for Christmas. Addy said that that (of course) wouldn’t have happened to anyone she knew as they always had new things to wear for Christmas ;-)

In this regard, our (German) pre-Christmas Nikolaus (Saint Nicholas) and “Knecht Ruprecht” (his helper), who thrashes naughty children with a rod (or simply lets them jump over the rod nowadays), are quite harmless!

Wanna know more about the Christmas Lads? This way, please.