in britannia

Check this out: Accessorizing the Scoops of Summer from the New York Times. You may have to register to read it. Sorry. Not since I read a food column in a humor magazine (the food column was from the New York Times and was in to contrast with a humorous column from the same newspaper the next day) have I read such prose! This is truly horrifying and outstanding, all at the same time.

I saw the Harry Potter movie today. Yes, yes, it's been out for a while and yes, this was my first time seeing it. I could totally tell that it was a new director; the drop in faithfulness to the books as well as a very different editing style were apparent. Overall, not a bad movie, but it still lacks the magic and bright-eyed wonder of the first.

I also saw the lab where my best friend works. Having worked in the humanities since, well, forever, it's interesting for me to visit laboratories, in that I will probably never work in one. Among the bewilderingly complex things she does is to squeeze frogs. She would often tell of this squeezing when we chatted on the phone, but only today did I fully understand what she meant. It appeared to be akin to squeezing toothpaste out of a stubborn tube, or icing out of a pastry cone, except that it was a female frog, and eggs were coming out of her backside. She assures me that she's not actually hurting the frog (she uses the eggs to collect DNA for something or other), but I'm pretty sure that I'd react poorly to being squeezed so hard that what was supposed to stay inside me came out.