auspicious beginnings

Things I did today:

1. Fell on the stairs on my way into work and whacked my knee hard, right across the kneecap. (Incidentally: I'm now pretty sure that it's possible literally to swear a blue streak.) I tried to take a picture of the resulting knee-goiter with my cell phone so that I could share the joy with you, my wonderful friends, but it didn't turn out very well. Maybe I'll get y'all one later, when the whole shebang turns purple.
2. Opened a Cafe Press shop. I'm only telling you this so that you can make fun of me for being a crazy egotistical freak, and this is certainly not a request for any of you to buy anything. I'm not entirely sure why I did this, except that I love my bunny collage so, so much and it's not legal for me to marry it yet.
3. Got a spam email with the subject line "groundhog cinematographer". It may not be the best spam I've ever gotten, but it says so much in such a little space, don't you think?
   
4. Watched Rowing With the Wind. In this film, Byron (Scooby Doo) shaves his chest, shoots a bunch of stuff, and keeps a giraffe in his parlor. Or in his echoing marble foyer, rather. Also, Frankenstein's monster comes to life and (a) makes Polidori hang himself during the summer of 1816 [!] by beating him at pool, or something; (b) drowns the Shelleys' son William (their only child in this movie [!!]); (c) somehow manages to give Byron and Claire Clairmont's daughter Allegra the fever that kills her (perhaps he exudes a miasma?); (d) drowns Mr. Peanut Butter Shelley and his friend Edward Williams; and, finally, (e) hunts down Byron in Greece and whacks him too (not pictured; the miasma again, one assumes). The only thing I found even moderately believable about this film was Shelley's sheer insufferableness. But hey, we got to see him naked! Twice!
   

i love this picture

That's all, go about your business.

technically it's homework, hush

We've been given the option of writing a review of one of three movies about the Shelley/Shelley/Byron/Byron's chippie ghost-story challenge. Well, I left John Polidori out of that list, but so apparently does this movie, the only one of the three available from Netflix. That's really fine by me, I've read his thing and I'm okay with it not being talked about. I do, however, have an objection to the last sentence of the plot summary: "...Byron makes his historical proposition that Mary and her cousin Claire each concoct a horror story."

Ahem. So... wait, the proposition didn't include Byron himself, or Percy Shelley, or Dr. Polidori, just Mary... and her cousin... who is played by Elizabeth Hurley. What kind of a horror story do you think this movie is going to have Byron propositioning Mary and Claire with? I'm taking bets.

Byron, incidentally, is played by Hugh Grant.