Pajiba

well i will be watching New moon. and eclispe and breaking dawn.

I remain blissfully ignorant of any and all things Twilight. In a few years I'll be like that one friend of mine who's never read a Harry Potter book, only more smug.

That is seriously Dakota Fanning in that picture? Huh.

Also, is that Cameron Bright? Huh, again. When the hell did he get so ... pretty?

Can any of the PajiBrits explain cricket to me? Just a quick explanation, as you would a child. I'm strangely intrigued by it.

I just moved from my beloved Seattle, and I got so very tired of certain "friends" talking about how beautiful the Pacific Northwest is because of this series. Yes, beautiful, fantastic, amazing, but if you are comparing it to scenes from Twilight you just spiraled from "decent human" to "die by grizzly ingestion" on my kill meter.

God, she could have just written "I heart Joseph Smith Edward Cullen" 1200 times in her trapper keeper and then drawn an explicit possible rape scene with the resulting baby being eaten of a womb and gotten it out of her system, next to her "he does it because he loves me" and her "I didn't vote" stickers.

Like Genny, I exist in a Twilightless vaccuum. It's not a conscious choice. I simply have male sex organs and use them in conjunction with female sex organs. This activity chemically altered my brain to the point that I couldn't pay attention to it even if I wanted to. Which I don't.

I took my cousin to the bookstore the other day and, at some point while I was searching for Y: The Last Man, she managed to find a copy of Twilight and expressed interest in "seeing what all the fuss was about". Fun fact: When you slap a book out of a customer's hand, stomp on it as if it were on fire, and hurl it down an escalator, Barnes and Noble's management and security views it as "damaging store property" and not "saving a life". Potato, potato.

Wait--Is that Paul Dano on the right? Somebody assure me it's not. Please.

It's not, Jerce, it's Cameron Bright. Who suddenly grew up and got really pretty. Except he didn't really so much group, as he's only 16. Which means I am now having sexual thoughts about a 16-year-old boy. Thanks, Pajiba. You took my latent pedophiliac tendencies and made them... well, not latent. I'll be blaming you for my jail time and expecting bail.

*grow up*, not *group*. I'm all distracted my my criminality.

Of course, we can't forget that he's going to be playing Blofeld in the new Bond movie!

there are several states in the US where 16 is the age of consent. So while you may feel pervy in a moral sense, you're in the clear legally.

Posted by: Genny (actually Rusty now) at July 30, 2009 12:09 PM
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Queue uncomfortable Selena Gomez comments in 3...2...1...

Holy shit, I totally missed the fact that someone has The Kilted Yaksman as their handle. Does your yak smell like a rotting beef carcass? Does searing sand blow up your skirt? INQUIRING MINDS NEED TO KNOW!

The trouble with soccer is that while it's excrutiating to watch, it's got seriously some of the best looking athletes I've ever seen. When I was in high school my friends and I would go to this local Irish pub down the road from Gillette stadium to watch the Revs relax after their games. Seriously, we would just order a fry basket for the table and bask in the glory of Taylor Twellman. It's embarassing, now that I think of it.

I found out that my favorite work-friend (for the sake of anonymity let's just call her REBECCA HIX) was shitballs crazy when she suggested that the best way for me to relieve the stress of working for that annoying British prick and my upcoming heart catheterizaton was to read "Twitlight". She sought to pique my interest by regaling me with tidbits from the book -- like how the vampires sparkle.

Who the fuck ever heard of sparkly vampires?!?! Frankly, I'd rather let the British prick annoy me into a premature heart attack than read about vampires who don't drink human blood.

Kballs and Genny (actually Rusty now) let's make a pact to live the rest of our lives without ever reading these books or seeing these movies. And may we have our eyeballs pecked out if we do.

I think I just vomited in my mouth.

Colm Meaney as Don Revie?! I'm in, and I HATE Leeds United.

Cricket is like baseball except:
-Everyone gets to bat so there's two long innings
-You stay at bat until you're tagged or caught out or the ball hits the wicket behind your leg. If you swing and miss nothing happens. People stay at bat for hours or days.
-You bat underhanded.
-There are only two bases (wickets) so you run back and forth (one point) and can stay at one end and bat from there. If you hit it out of the park it's automatically 4 or 6 points (can't remember).
-The pitcher (bowler) gets a hard start and can RUN at you and has to bounce the ball before it goes over the strike area.
-The field is oval
-The uniforms are poncey white slacks and sweater vests so you can pretend the British Empire still exists.

I'm sorry, but Baseball is the world's dullest sport. Unless you're into a dozen guys standing around doing nothing.

Which one is Dakota Fanning? I am so confused, and yet I'm not sure I don't want to be, when it comes to Twilight.

He was also the kid that made out with Nicole Kidman in Birth, so, there's that.
Um, what?

I'm sorry, but Baseball is the world's dullest sport.
Wait, WHAT?!?

Yous Guys is cuh-razy today!

Never read Twilight or Harry Potter and I firmly intend to keep it that way. I enjoy lording my smugness of this over the unwashed masses.

Posted by: Melody at July 30, 2009 11:44 AM

Hey, that's not fair. Harry Potter has a lot of batshit insane fans, but at least it's an actual book. Twilight isn't fit to be written on toilet paper, and used to wipe J.K. Rowling's ass.

I would watch Michael Sheen eat a ham sandwich, no joke. He is the only reason I'll be watching that stupid Twilight movie.

jM,
Good for you! I have to sell those things, and I find it very tiring to keep the disdain/disgust off my face. Worse still was the copy of Wuthering Heights that had the blurb "Ella and Edward's favorite book" round stamped on it. Ick

...well, on the bright side, Michael Sheen looks like he could be cast as "Grave Robber" should Repo ever hit Broadway.

cricket is a wonderful game, but there's absolutely no question that it can be extremely taxing on the watcher's patience. but then, it really depends on what you consider to be boring...

in test cricket - the longest and best form of the game, where matches can last for 5 days - the essence of the contest is the sustained application of pressure. the team that bats has 2 men 'in' at a time, defending a wicket at either end of a long, thin pitch. his opponent is the bowler, again one at each end, who has 6 balls to try to get the batsman out. to score the batsmen run between the wickets, so the bowler could end up bowling each ball of his over to alternate batsmen, or to the same guy for six balls. once he's bowled six balls, the other bowler gets a go from his end.

this is the game broken down to it's most basic level - all very well and good, but where's the interest, you ask... to simplify it horribly - to get a score of 30, at a point every time he hits the ball, the batsman has to stand and face the bowler 30 times. the ball is bounced, and the bowler can impart spin on it so it moves in the air and again off the playing surface. sometimes it travels quite slowly, but other times it can be bowled at around 90 miles an hour and, crucially,the batsman can be hit anywhere on his body, from his hands to his ribs to his head, and if he's not too badly injured he has to face the next ball. and not only does he have the bowler to deal with, but 10 other members of the opposing team stand around him, sometimes only a couple of feet away, waiting for him to make a mistake.

it seems to me that this type of psychological confrontation is the fundamental thing that makes sport compelling. sometimes the batsman dominates, and it looks like the poor bowlers are just chucking the ball down for the batsman to smash it away and score at will; sometimes the bowler dominates, and the batsman stands there like a rabbit in the headlights for 20 minutes, not scoring (the main reason most people find cricket so boring) before being put out of his misery. and what do you think the next batsman, coming in after watching his colleague being humiliated and physically intimidated, will be thinking?

so why is it so laughable that these guys get a break for drinks every 3 hours or so? when it comes to sport, appreciation and understanding go hand in hand. when i watch top level cricket, or soccer, i see a rhythm that changes as the game goes on, an ebb and flow of superiority expressed in constant movement, testing of weakness, feints and withdrawals, chances taken or wasted, luck ridden and made, and individual skill shining while at the same time being made to serve a greater purpose. all of this is drama. when i watch american football or baseball, which i do rarely i will admit, through lack of enjoyment, i see no drama in frantic bursts of action punctuated by long pauses where everyone gets together to decide what they're going to do next. in baseball there seems to be none of the physical intimidation of batsmen that you get in cricket, so he doesn't have to battle to triumph. and in american football i see an almost mindless charge up and down the field, a kind of sporting trench warfare, whereas the world's football is more like a dance, a pitchwide ripple of little advances, retreats, re-alignments and adaptations.

of course, this is all relative, and to watch any sport played badly is to have your soul die by a thousand cuts. but i would argue that, once you learn a little about it, cricket is the least boring and one of the most sophisticated team sports out there, and makes baseball and american football seem very shallow indeed. i am prepared, and willing, to be schooled otherwise...

and now i'll shut up