I don’t do bad reviews. There is SO MUCH cool stuff in the world to talk about that I think it’s a waste of time to complain about the stupid stuff.

That’s why when I Am Legend came out and I saw it, I never mentioned it here. I LOVED most of the movie, but the ending was so insipidly stupid that I hated the entire movie.

SPOILER WARNING!!

The horrible messiah thing at the end and his “sacrifice” to save the serum, the world and the beautiful girl was just the kind of ending that makes me throw things. Luckily, the only thing around for me to throw was the remote control and the DVD box.

Come to find out, that wasn’t the original ending. That was the ending that the studio forced. The real alternate ending is here:

That five second scene where Will Smith says, “I’m sorry,” the bad guy screams at him and in the background you can see the Polaroids of all the subjects that he had been experimenting on this whole time is just heart breaking. THAT is the ending to this film. Will Smith became a monster just as much as the others. After seeing the humanity in the victims of the plague, suddenly Will’s methodical experimenting makes him seem more like a monster than the monsters. AND HE KNOWS IT.

What the HECK were the studio heads thinking changing that ending?!!

Where can I get a version of I Am Legend on DVD with THAT ending? It looks like the second disc of this set has the movie with the alternate ending. Good… I need that.

• I Am Legend at Amazon.com

Via: Movie Detritus: 10 Worst Science Fiction Remakes

• Beat the blues: http://tinyurl.com/5b5q5b #

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• Crochet this baby penguin for Michael: http://tinyurl.com/2a2cbu #

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Every night when I go to bed, Maggie will climb on my shoulder and lie there, purring. It’s the BEST way to go to sleep and I have become so accustomed to it that I really miss her when we go out of town. Sometimes, it’s really difficult to go to sleep without her there.

The other night, I recorded her purring with Mike’s Edirol. I pulled it into GarageBand and made an mp3 that works pretty well. It’s only 2:43 minutes, but I put it in a playlist and have the playlist repeat.

Here is the MP3 if you would like to fall asleep to the sound of my precious Maggie purring. It’s a quiet file, so make sure you turn up the volume so you can hear it.

Download MP3 here: Maggie Purring Right click and choose Save As…

I have gotten so much solace from this cat. When we lost Linda last year, both Maggie and I were so heartbroken that we bonded together. She was with me all the time. Since we’ve gotten Elvis, however, she spends a lot of time playing, growling at and sleeping with him, so she needs me less. I’m happy that she’s more content, but I feel like I’ve lost her a little.

• Most adorable melted snowman cupcakes: http://tinyurl.com/5tzbb5 #
• @nakedjen Missing you too. Apparently I have no motivation to exercise on my own. I’ve been forcing myself. #

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After The Young Ones, MTV showed The Comic Strip Presents… It was a silly little show with many of the same actors as The Young Ones. It’s still not available on DVD, but you can see almost all the episodes on YouTube.

Stacey’s favorite episode was The Slags. I felt like a hero the other day when I found it on YouTube:

I love how Adrian Edmondson plays a cool Rutger Hauer in this episode. The whole thing reminds me of a cheap rip-off of Bladerunner. This episode was just as bad as I remember it, but I it makes me happy to watch it.

By the way, is that Emma Thompson having her baby stolen (Part 1 at 7:12) and then finally exploded with a grenade in her shopping cart (Part 2 at 8:18)? I’ve watched that scene about ten times now and I can’t tell if it’s her or not?!

Should have just checked IMDB in the first place:

• “The Comic Strip Presents…” Slags (1984)

She’s there, playing the part of “Young Woman.” That’s freaking AWESOME!

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Remember this when it comes time to create my Steampunk Costume next year…

• Etsy :: birdzNbeez :: Book Of Spells

This is a clip from the BBC show called The Young Ones. MTV used to play episodes of The Young Ones and I used to watch them religiously. This clip is called Doctor Martin’s Boots. It was the first time I had ever heard of Doc Martins. I scoured the shoe stores of Salt Lake City fruitlessly looking for the elusive Doctor Martin’s Boots.

In 1987, I finally found them in one of Mike Pinkston’s skateboard magazines. I could mail order them for $75. I had never mail ordered footwear before and I was not about to pay seventy-five bucks for shoes, no matter how cool they were. Instead, I just bought myself a pair of steel-toed work boots on clearance at K-Mart and pretended that they were Doc Martins.

When they finally showed up in Salt Lake City, they were STILL too expensive for me to afford on my college budget, plus my old boots had always been good enough to fool the dorks in Salt Lake City. Weren’t REAL steel-toed boots more punk than Doc Martins, anyway?

It wasn’t until years later when I was married to Mike that I found my first pair of REAL Doc Martins at a price I could afford. TJ Maxx had them on sale for $45. It was a lot of money at the time, but I was willing to pay it to finally have a pair of “Doctor Martin’s Boots.” Of course, by then I was nearly graduated from college, married two years and well on my way to losing all the punk that was in me. All that’s left now is these boots, dusty from disuse.

It finally snowed here. Maybe I’ll wear my Doc Martin’s to shovel the walk…

In the early days of Swatch, they created these watches for a special event that never took place. Instead, they gave these rare watches to Swatch employees. There were only 500 in existence, so collectors are willing to pay upwards of $3500 for one.

• Swatch Velvet Underground – Special – GZ999W | Squiggly Swatch Watches and Straps

Swatch eventually came out with a consolation prize for those of us who didn’t get one of these rare watches. It was also called Velvet Underground. I have one here:

Still, I can’t help but want that exotic original piece of history, but there is NO WAY I’m paying nearly four thousand bucks for a twenty year old watch, so I decided to create my own.

Firstly, I started with Big Eclipse. Instead of its typical black band, I put on a white band. The face isn’t neon pink, but I’m not trying to defraud anyone. I’m just trying to make a Swatch that’s cool and that I love. A black face with white hands is good enough for me.

The parts I needed was some lace, needle, thread and some quilt pins.

Next, I removed the buckle and strap holder. This is easier for some brands of bands than others. I used the Swatch tool to pop the middle pin out.

I cut the lace to be slightly longer than the watch. Honestly, I should have given it a tad more length than this, so if you do this, make sure you cut a little more than I did.

The original Velvet Underground had a seam along the back, so I did the same with mine. I pinned the lace together along the back with quilt pins.

Once it was pinned securely, I trimmed the excess lace, leaving a quarter inch seam allowance on the back.

With a needle and thread, I sewed up the lace along the back of the watch. I kept the pins in until I was sewing right next to them. Don’t take them all out before you start sewing. It will make your job harder.

The completed seam looks like this. I didn’t have quite enough to go over the buckle area of the watch like I wanted. There is just barely enough to get there. That’s why you should cut more lace when you do it. Notice that there isn’t a hole for the battery case. I installed a fresh battery, so in five years, when this one runs out, I’ll have to carefully cut a hole in the lace, just like the current collectors have done to theirs.

The final step is to reattach the buckle and strap holder. The strap holder needs to go OVER the lace and then the buckle is attached. It’s nice finishing touch, I think.

You can see the final product here:

• Faux Velvet Underground – a set on Flickr

It looks great on my wrist, which is something I would NEVER do if this were a REAL Velvet Underground.

This project took me less time than it took me to wait in line at Joann’s to have the lace cut and sold (about thirty minutes). Have FUN!!

• Note to self: Review this list of Fallacies: http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/fallacy.htm #
• Aurora Borealis, from space. COOL! http://tinyurl.com/6bc2c8 #
• Popup Reindeer pattern for homemade Xmas cards. http://tinyurl.com/5c4xld #
• FINALLY! Some snow!! Please let it be enough to cover the ground… #
• @libel_vox The correct spelling is Oquirrh. http://tinyurl.com/2h55tk #

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Before Andy Warhol was a famous Pop Artist, he was just an ordinary graphic artist. It looks like the Andy Warhol Foundation is milking his early work for all they can get by releasing those sketches on watches.

• 15minutesof.com – Watches

It’s really a shame that Andy Warhol was too greedy to do a few watches for Swatch. Their watches are of such great quality that they’ll last far longer than these cheap Swatch knock-offs.

• This mouse is smarter than your border collie: http://tinyurl.com/43kcw9 #
• Monsters Vs. Aliens Gotta see it in March: http://tinyurl.com/68e52k #

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• Dr. Horrible’s henchman, Moist, gets his own origin story here! http://tinyurl.com/5kwws2 #

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• Next cube demo. Watch this when I have more time: http://tinyurl.com/59hkmu #
• Walking with Buddha and Stella in the dark. We need these: http://tinyurl.com/56fe96 #
• The English Beat at The Depot 12-09: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1408232/ #
• Cute Purple People Eater Gloves: http://tinyurl.com/5n3hda #
• Levitating Water: http://tinyurl.com/5nkyuo #

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• @wilw You’ve made a heroic appearance on Something Positive! No one else is dying on your watch! http://70.38.78.174/sp11242008.shtml #
• Make your own iPhone dock: http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/?p=7020 #

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I just learned how to edit photographs to make them look like models using Tilt Shift Photography. There are ways to do it with a really cool camera, but if you have taken an aerial photo with a normal camera, you can use Photoshop techniques to make it look like a Tilt Shift photo. There is a tutorial here:

• Tilt-Shift Photography Photoshop Tutorial | Miniature Faking | TiltShiftPhotography.net

The basic steps are:

• Choose Quick Mask mode.
• Using the Gradient Tool in Reflection mode, draw a vertical line from the center of the in-focus area to the point where the transition from in-focus to out-of-focus is completed.
• Return to Standard Mode
• Choose the Open Lens Blur Filter option.
• Deselect
• Open Hue/Saturation in the Adjustments menu and increase Saturation (+40).
• Open Curves in the Adjustments menue and create an S shaped curve.

This is my first try. It looks better if you click on it to look at it full size:

The original is here:

Here is another one I did:

It has been a while since I’ve found anything fun to do with my photos like this. It makes me want to hike the Wasatch Mountains so I can tilt shift my town.

This morning, NakedJen and I went on a walk with her dogs. Since she moved in across the street, I have been lucky enough to go with her on her morning walks. It has really helped me stop being so crazy. This morning I found this card on the ground:

It’s a 20% off coupon for The Gap. I don’t really care about that. I just like the photo of Rainn Wilson on the other side. Rainn Wilson plays Dwight on The Office. By NO stretch could he ever be called cute, but this photo of him all bundled up on sweaters and gloves makes him look really cute.

Not sexy, mind you, CUTE. Cute like kittens and puppies, not cute like Brad Pitt.

I first saw this photo on a full page ad on the back of Entertainment Weekly. I pulled it out and I have been thinking about it ever since. What makes him cute? Is it the mitten/glove conversion? Is it the varied styles of knitwear? Is it the two day stubble on his face? What?

It can’t be any of those things because this photo of him with Selma Blair isn’t nearly as cute.

It’s all there: the knitwear, the scarf, the stubble. He doesn’t look quite as cute in this photo as he does in the previous one. Is it the hat? The glasses? I’m really at a loss on this one.

I can’t figure it out.

Holy cow, the video is cute, too!

• @ashbuckles RU complaining about LOW gas prices? #

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My friend has gotten a job at Macy’s to tide him over until his teaching position starts in the Spring. He logged his experiences working Black Friday.

• Blind Prophecy » Tales of Black Friday

I started writing a comment, but it got so long that I thought it might be more polite to post it here:

I worked Black Friday for seven years in a row when I put myself through college. I was at K-Mart. It’s nice to know that the rich people who shop at Macy’s are just as rude as the plebs that shop at K-Mart.

BTW, the reason they don’t pick up the upper sweaters to get theirs is because their HANDS ARE FULL. That sort of display is ALWAYS going to be messy, but if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t need to pay you to keep it neat.

Oh, those six days you have scheduled off? They’re going to call you in at least once. After today, some of the Christmas help will not come back. They just won’t show up when they were supposed to. If you’re reliable, they’ll give you more hours than you could possibly work and you’ll dread the phone. Luckily, there’s call waiting.

It has been 15 years since I worked Black Friday and I still have scars from it. I NEVER shop the door busters. I find them the embarrassment of humanity. I wish I could forget the year that a riot broke out with fighting for seven dollar blankets. Women pushing and grabbing. The pallet was empty within seconds.

Honestly, sometimes I miss it. Working 80 hour weeks with crabby Christmas shoppers sounds like hell, but part of it was fun. I never fully get into the Christmas mood as I did those years that I worked retail. As difficult as it was, having Christmas thrown in my face every day really made me appreciate those few hours of the day when the store was closed and I could be with my family.

• I have TWO Thanksgiving meals today: Lunch at the Moncurs and dinner at the Reeds. I’m doubly blessed! #

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• @ashbuckles Don’t waste your money. It’s not real HD and lens is TINY. Get the Sanyo Xacti and get a REAL camera. http://tinyurl.com/56mmaq #
• Retweet @Craigboy: Squid!: http://tinyurl.com/5jpntm I guess off-shore drilling isn’t ALL bad… #

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• Birth School Work Death by the Godfathers: http://tinyurl.com/6htybh #

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• @tomjohnson Thanks for the http://twitthat.com link. It looks like making notes to myself using Twitter just got easier. #
• Retweet @feliciaday Check out the trailer and a teaser for Season 2 streaming on http://www.watchtheguild.com Season 2 Launches tomorrow! #
• OMG! Police dashcam of meteor in Canada: http://tinyurl.com/5npt2n #
• Crochet sculptural primer: http://tinyurl.com/6bz37e #
• Mike? Can we get this couch? http://tinyurl.com/6x9dq5 #

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• @bradbaldwin I’ve got to get me some of that Kiwi Express Shoe Polish. I have some shoes that need it BAD! Where’d ya git it? #
• Best Yahoo comment I’ve read since Jerry Yang left! http://tinyurl.com/634umq #
• Sexy Sugababes video: http://tinyurl.com/67dkve #

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• Adorable Bowling Bunny Game: http://tinyurl.com/5sn64p #
• Brilliant crocheted performance art: http://www.aestheticdialectic.com/archives/283 #
• Xmas star ornaments made out of water bottles: http://tinyurl.com/6zxnee #
• Birdseed Skull: http://tinyurl.com/5dnjfw Where do I get one or how do I make one?! #
• The cutest video of a little girl telling a story: http://vimeo.com/2113477 #
• How to cut curves with a rotary cutter VIDEO: http://www.flickr.com/photos/craftapple/3046556933/ #
• @libel_vox You were expecting hardball? DUDE, you’re in ZION! They don’t think they have an image problem. They’re PROUD of what they did :( #
• This photo makes me want to put my cat on my scanner: http://tinyurl.com/5b3wgo #

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I absolutely LOVE this photo!

Mrs. H.P. Whitney from The Library of Congress from Flickr

At first glance, it looks like yet another Library of Congress photo from the Bain Collection, but this one is SO much more than that. Who is this Mrs. H.P. Whitney? Look at the photo closely. I’m certain she just said something incredibly witty.

Look at them laughing. It just makes me want to be friends with that group. I especially like how disapproving these two are.

She must have said something TERRIBLY scandalous!

Her full name is Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney and she showed some dahlias at a flower show once in 1918:

• DAHLIA SHOW IS OPENED.; Judge Marean, Mrs. H.P. Whitney, and Others Am… – Article Preview – The New York Times

She established a field hospital in Paris during World War I:

• MRS. H. P. WHITNEY BACK.; Called from War Zone by Illness of Her Daugh… – Article Preview – The New York Times

She even founded the Whitney Museum of American Art:

• Whitney Museum of American Art

All this insistence on calling her by her husband’s name, however, hides who she is. Her given name was Gertrude Vanderbilt. She was involved in a famous case when she sued to get custody of her granddaughter, Gloria Vanderbilt. She was even portrayed in a television mini-series by Angela Lansbury. Here’s the trailer for it:

I didn’t know ANY of this when I first saw that photo. I just saw the laughing eyes and the disapproving looks and I wanted to know more about her. So much more than the allotted thousand.

If you ever wanted to design your own Swatch, here is a template to do it:

• Blank Swatch Template: Right click and choose Save As…

When I was in high school, I never considered designing my own Swatch, but now that I have been scanning eBay for Swatches for the last two months, I wish that Swatch would allow me to design my own Swatch and enter an contest or something. They allow “real” artists to do it all the time. Why don’t they open up the creation process to their customers all over the world? It would be a great advertisement and they could have a huge selection of new Swatch designs to choose from. Sure, most of them would be CRAP, but every once and a while, a REALLY good one would come along.

Swatch REALLY doesn’t understand the new marketing, new media and crowd sourcing. It makes me kind of sad when I think about it…

• Oh, Twitter, you have failed me again. Why do you have so little to say to me when I need it most? #

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• I am increasingly unimpressed by Twitter. I wish it felt like it did last year. I just can’t care anymore. #

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Back in September, we adopted Elvis. I find it strange that I haven’t talked about him here yet, but two months of my life kind of flew by while we enjoyed our new kitten.

It all started when Stacey and Dan got a puppy. Mini was the tiniest Chihuahua puppy you’ve ever seen and she fit in Mike’s hand. Seeing her made me want a kitten. It had been almost a year since Linda had died. Maggie was lonely and clung to me like a needy baby and I thought having a kitten would be nice for her AND us.

I talked to Mike about looking at kittens, but Mike said, “Cats tend to show up in our lives. Let’s not look for a kitten. Let’s just wait for the next one to show up.”

Within two weeks, I got a phone call from my mom. “There is a 70 year old lady in Reed’s apartment building that is going to abandon a kitten outside. Do you want to adopt him?” Apparently the woman had adopted the kitten, given him ONE day to get used to her current cat and couldn’t stand the fighting anymore. She was just going to let him free outside, near a BUSY road.

Within the hour, we had the kitten at our vets office. He was free of parasites and nasty diseases, so we took him home.

It took Maggie two days to stop hiding under the bed.

It took us two weeks to name him. Mike just gave up and let me name him Elvis. The “official” story is that he’s named after Elvis Costello, but really, I named him after Elvis in Animal Crossing. Everybody just thinks we named him after Elvis Presley.

After two months, he and Maggie play and fight and I’ve even caught her cleaning his ears like she used to do with Linda before she died.

Here’s a video of them playing with their new cat toy. Mike had sprinkled some catnip on it. They both wanted it, but Maggie unilaterally informs Elvis that he needs to wait his turn.

Adding Elvis to our household has been a joy. I’m so glad he showed up in our lives.

• my Twitterank is 100.77! http://twitterank.com/?u=lauramoncur #
• My Twitterank is 100.7. Is #1 good or is a higher number good? #

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I can’t say it any better…

Via: BIBLE VERSUS: THE BOOK OF LOVE

The LDS church is in the news again this week:

• Holocaust survivors to Mormons: Stop baptisms of dead Jews – CNN.com

Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, saying the church has repeatedly violated a 13-year-old agreement barring the practice.

The question that I have is: why do they care? If you believe Judaism, then what the Mormons do in their little databases and in their temples is none of your concern. In fact, if I’m to remember my theology correctly, we are worm food after death according to the Jewish teachings. There is no afterlife in Judaic teaching, right? Am I wrong?

Why should they care whether people who are Jews are baptized in proxy in LDS temples? I don’t even know why the LDS church agreed to bar the practice. What right do Holocaust survivors (or anyone for that matter) have to tell the LDS church what they can and cannot do in their little imaginary world? They aren’t hurting anyone by dunking teenagers in water and checking names off lists, so this seems like a pretty clear cut case to me.

The LDS church’s involvement in Prop 8, on the other hand, is pretty damn infuriating…

• Catholics, Mormons defend backing same-sex marriage ban – CNN.com

I wish I had known about the protest here in Salt Lake. I would have been at the front of the lines.

It looks like Dolce and Gabana had a little fun with the glue gun over the weekend…

I guess I’m going to be crafting up my sunglasses for the winter season. If Dolce and Gabana can do it, so can I.

Dear Lancome,

Does anyone really NEED vibrating mascara? I have a hard enough time not getting mascara all over myself without a wiggly applicator brush.

Game over, man… try again.

Laura Moncur

Ever since I got this Swatch, Jade:

I’ve been racking my brain how to do the same thing for my beloved Lazuli Swatch:

The only suitable band I could find was for Poolhof, but the band has silver highlights instead of gold, which wouldn’t match with the gold flecks and hands of Lazuli.

So, I decided to buy a Jade band AND a Poolhof band and switch the metal highlights on the ends of the flex bands. Here is how I did it. (Continue Reading…)

In addition to finding Swatch advertisements while I was looking through those old Seventeen magazines, I found a lot of companies who stole Swatch’s style.

Awatch was another brand of watches that stole the Swatch style in the mid-Eighties. Unlike the others, they were smart enough to name their watches, just like Swatch did. Instead of Tennis Grid, they had Fashion Grids.

Even Timex jumped on the bandwagon. They released an entire line of watches macking on the Swatch line.

Back in 1986, I worked in the jewelry department at K-Mart. We carried these Timex watches. I was so tempted to buy the one with the sunglasses on the bottom row. Kind of wish I did, now…

No Excuses was another brand that released watches that were suspiciously similar to Swatch.

Armitron has built an empire making watches that look like the watch du juour. In 1986, their watches all looked like Swatches.

These type of watches aren’t technically counterfeits, but they are still slimy. My “real” counterfeit Swatch is FAR more valuable than any of these watches would be now, but all of them are garbage compared to legitimate Swatches.

I took a trip to the Salt Lake City Library. They have all the Seventeen magazines on file, bound in large, blue books. I snapped a few photos of some Swatch ads from the Eighties.

I love how those old school Swatch Guards look. Why did they stop making them?

Swatches featured: Yamaha Racer, Calypso Diver, Dotted Swiss, and Tri-Color Racer

This is the first Swatch ad I remember ever seeing. By then, Swatch had won hearts with their fruity smelling Swatches.

When am I going to find that sweatshirt on eBay?

Swatches featured: Sheherazade, Mc Swatch

I don’t remember seeing this advertisement when I was a kid, but it was right there in the old Seventeen magazines that I read every month.

Swatches featured: Sir Limelight and Lady Limelight.

Another advertisement I never remember seeing, but I KNOW I read that magazine, so I must have seen it. It didn’t make an impression on me, however.

Swatch featured: Sir Limelight

This advertisement is the reason why I bought Sir Swatch back in 1986.

Swatches featured: Lancelot, Sir Swatch, Valkyrie, Lionheart

I wish I could have had a chance to buy some of those Swatch clothes…

Going through those old Seventeen magazines was a fun walk down memory lane. I was so surprised how much of my choices in clothing were from the advertisements in that magazine. The day I discovered Seventeen magazine, I went from being a dork in high school to having a fighting chance. I am grateful to them to this day.