I think it is entirely possible that I will not write 50,000 words this month. Probable, even. But I do intend to keep both of my blogs happily updated and to learn to categorize my own epic creations. I can think of no better challenge to better myself and my own organizational skills than to do this, and it will certainly be interesting to see how many words I actually produce, even if it’s not within the perimeters of NaNoWiMo’s rules and regs.

Along with over two thousand Singaporeans and 612 Argentinians, I’m logging in and checking it out. Who knows, maybe one year I will write that novel. Just not this year.

I love getting into the holiday spirit by “watching” movies in a hidden window while I’m working. This Halloween, I happened across a bunch of great links to watch feature length movies, old television shows and cartoons online for free, so I thought I’d share it with all (2? 3?) of my readers…Enjoy! And feel free to add to my list using the Comments below.

Child-Friendly and Nightmare-free Halloween Flicks:

• Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas – Netflix users can watch this on Watch Instantly, or on YouTube here, divided into 8 parts.
• The Halloween Tree – Too cool, somebody made a compilation of all 8 parts from YouTube and put it on one page. The author just asks that you click on an ad or two.
• It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown - Halloween just wouldn’t be a holiday worth looking forward to if it wasn’t for Charlie Brown.

Halloween For the 80′s Kid In All Of Us:

• The Pit and the Pendulum – The face of Vincent Price etched itself into my nightmares for years following this 1961 classic. Why is it in this category, you ask? Well, I first watched it in the 80′s, that’s why. Here’s your Trivia of the Day to make up for this categorization: You now know that Vincent Price and Christopher Lee were born on the same day (27th May) and Peter Cushing was born on the 26th. *Twilight theme song, please*
• Teen Witch – This one is broken into 9 parts, but you may be thankful for the breaks. Alternatively, check out the classic clips from one of the corniest movies of all time here!
• Teen Wolf - OK, not strictly Halloween-y enough, but after Teen Witch you’re going to need a really good movie! Fluffy Michael J. Fox is just the ticket. Teen Wolf Too is available to ‘Watch Instantly’ on Netflix, for those of you who need more. And if that’s not enough, YouTube offers clips from the popular cartoon series.

Timeless Halloween Loveliness:

• Bewitched TV Series – Nose-twitching witchiness from TV’s best newlywed couple to date.
• The Addams Family – Full episodes from the television serious, plus the cartoons are available on tons of sites, but YouTube has a good selection here.
• The Munsters – Begin at the beginning again with the bright and chirpy Munsters family. Very tough to find the old episodes in their entirety online – all I kept finding was The Munsters Today, which was a bit rubbish, IMHO. If you get tired of the canned laughter, head on back to The Addams Family and prepare yourself for Christmas.

Halloween Horrors that Have Horrid Storylines:

• The Island of Dr. Moreau – not much like the book at all, and makes half as much sense. When you get bored, turn it off and read H.G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ instead. Or read about how when the story was broadcast on the radio in 1938, listeners actually believed Wells’ fantasy was fact. Yes, H.G., you did much better things than The Island of Dr. Moreau, but this movie at least has an attractive cast (including Fairuza Balk of Return To Oz fame…too scary to add to this list, but yes, Youtube has it, here).
• Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers – Odd Nordic vampires who are distant descendants of cats. Warning, pet lovers, there are some pretty creepy scenes with cats in here.
• Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy – Shortly after renting this one year, my parents actually cut up my Blockbuster renters card as though it was a credit card and I was forthwith banned from choosing movies for family movie nights. You’ll need a Hulu account (but it’s ok, it’s free) because of the “mature” content.

But it would seem out here in the US, we’re are only interested in donating or buying charitable gifts when it suits our taxes. I could only find Christmas cards, and expensive ones at that.  What I didn’t expect to find was an endless array of beautiful handcrafted goods. I do mean beau-ti-ful crafts that you would consider placing right in the center of a mantelpiece (or, at least, I would if I had a mantelpiece).

I’m used to finding gorgeous handcrafted goods on Etsy, and they do have their very kind Pay It Forward scheme, although as I understand it, it benefits sellers more than impoverished children in the Sudan. If you love Etsy half as much as I do, you’ll understand why I felt the need to list some of the beautiful handicrafts I found on my mission to buy charitable Thank You cards. Obviously, I am not looking in the right place for these cards, and when the wedding is all over and done with I’ll return to my sightseeing adventures to museums and the like, find the cards, and kick myself for not looking there earlier.

So, meanwhile, here are some beautiful and unusual products that can benefit your greedy lust for stylish things and at the same time, help the needy:

Phone Wire Basket

Handwoven by Zulu women in South Africa, these bowls are pretty gosh-darn stunning.

The proceeds from each telephone wire basket purchased through Bridge for Africa go to the weaver and his/her family, and to improve working conditions and further job creation in the region.

Bodhi Leaf Thank You Cards

Re-useable gift cards, you ask? Why yes — come on, what’s really wrong with that? Given that the Bodhi leaf is supposed to be a present in and of itself, these cards actually have replaceable inserts, so the card can just keep on carding (like the gifts that keep on gifting). Bodhi leaves are intended to provide peace to the recipient. Go on, give peace.

Grey Wool Purse from India

Bright Hope International

Handmade in the Godavari River Delta in India by women who live in a town that only gets running water three times a week. Imagine that.

This purse is so cute and woolly, and in these city-slicker colours, it will match just about any winter coat.  So cute. Did I say that? Did I mention it’s only $24.99? On the same page, you’ll find a selection of intricate lace shawls and table runners, too.

Greeting Cards from El Salvador

These cards immediately make me think of something you might find in a magazine during Fashion Week. They come in a variety of styles with pressed flowers integrated into their hairstyles. Truly beautiful gift cards, blank inside for your own message.

Handmade by women whose homes in El Salvador’s highland cloud forest were destroyed by a devastating earthquake and mudslides.

Mulberry Paper Journals from Thailand

Handmade in Northern Thailand, these black and white journals are simply beautiful. Choose the ‘Funky Zebra’, ‘Koi Fish’ with a splash of red or ‘Modern Paisley’ pattern, or do more good and order all three — at $7.95 you’re hardly doing your wallet any harm.

You see, sometimes it’s just good to go shopping.

For a great list of Fair Trade online shops, visit:
http://www.globalstewards.org/fairtradeshops.htm

Or you can donate your own time & craft making skills:
http://www.craftbits.com/crafts/charity

iGoogle wants you to be paranoid.

My iGoogle page today held this gem for me under my Daily Shakespeare Quote. I don’t recall ever seeing ads on this app before, but if this is new is someone having a laugh?

As a PPC specialist, I’d like to know what keywords triggered the appearance of this ad. Was it the “loving friends” or the more complicated notion of our friends being representative of ourselves? Either way, I think Google AdWords/AdSense is getting a bit too clever for comfort here.

Although the Harry Potter saga is something of an epic in the most classical sense for modern audiences, the movies are starting to fail me a little by giving peripheral plot aspects undue screentime. I’m kind of short on patience for the magical delight both we and Harry are supposed to get from watching Dumbledore restore a ransacked room to it’s original state, a la Disney’s ‘Fantasia’. You’d think after six years of living in a magical school, training to be a wizard, and fighting mano a mano with Voldemort would jade him a bit. (It’s jaded me!) And what’s more, after fixing the room and establishing no one would stay in it for longer than a week, they leave a minute later. Instead of spending time cramming the six memories of Tom Riddle that Harry explores in the book, only two are shown. And while this is the book where hormones start really raging for the teenagers, in this movie it overshadows and diminishes the dark and disruptive forces of the Death Eaters, who are threatening wizards and muggles now, indiscriminately. We never even find out why Ollivander’s Wand Shop is destroyed.

Overall, the Harry Potter movies are turning out to be the Cliff Notes of the real thing, or the Ladybird versions of a classic. As with Hermione’s Time Turner in ‘The Prisoner of Azkaban’, the curiosity towards the “Who is the Half-Blood Prince?” mystery itself was not fully captured the way it drove our attention in the book, and that leaves me with a slightly unfulfilled feeling about this movie. The next and final installment(s) of the series will be sure to provide some much needed catharsis for viewers simply by including the final chapter of the book and bringing peace to our hero, Harry. But I can’t help but hope that once this business is all over and done with, they’ll start making a movie series of the book, for real this time.

As a side note, I’m intrigued that they showed the exact location of Diagon Alley for once! I wonder if the City of Westminster will add a commemorative English Heritage blue plaque?

To see the original publication of this article on Associated Content, please click here.

I’m feeling genuinely torn about this. I’ve thrown softer objects at the television or radio whenever I heard ol’ Dubya open his mouth. He was a terrible embarrassment to all Americans on a global scale. He made it significantly harder for any American to be respected overseas and repeatedly answered pressing interview questions with an “i don’t care” shrug, as though he’d simply inherited a bad world and didn’t care to change it much.

I realize that what I’m saying is controversial. I’m generally a proponent of As-Long-As-You’re-Not-Hurting-Anyone… I know, for example, that my brother deeply respects Georgie Porgie. I’ve listened to his side, and maybe for a while Americans needed a down to earth, “regular kinda guy” whom Americans could relate to. They just ended up with someone a little too basic. He regularly came across as a horrid public speaker who lacked intelligence and willingness to remove himself from his natural golf course habitat. Throwing things at his head was just a fantasy I had because of this, but I doubt I could actually, physically do it myself.

All that time on the golf course obviously paid off for Bush when it happened. Look at him dodge that first shoe! It’s so oddly familiar to him, isn’t it? He’s so wily and so unfazed afterwards, I’m willing to bet he gets things thrown at his head a lot. I also learned in this article that shoe-hurling is a grave insult in Arab culture. I thought he just picked an opportune moment to practice his wellie wanging.

In truth, I wanted to post the transcript of President Obama’s speech yesterday. This man knows how to work a room. I love his powerful, hope and awe-inspiring rhetoric. Big pat on the back for his speech writer. Now, let’s just hope he’s sincere.

I have high hopes for this guy. I like what he’s saying so far, and I especially like the way he’s saying it. Can he keep this country from an economic disaster of astronomical proportions?

It’s a square straight out of a Star Wars city: clouds, large marble pillars, expansive and sweeping staircases, and lots and lots of sunlight.

This Korean woman wearing an enourmous serving tray over he shoulders carrying every kind of hanging antique in the universe waddled up to me. She was something out of Howl’s Moving Castle or the Fifth Element. And she was trying to pawn off a tea set on me. Thing about the teapot she was shaking at me was that it’s the one I’ve been looking for forever…It’s a Japanese design that features a dragon on a black background. The special thing about these tea sets is that back in the day, they used to create these designs on the base of the cups that could only be seen if you held them up to the light. (Weird, but true, so no extra points.)

There was a door to one of the buildings: Big glass doors with metal handles and signs on either side that read “Push” or “Pull” in clean Helvetica. The door which was a Time Door. Everyone walking in and out of it was a mirage-like hologram of people in the past. Like a sci-fi echo of time, the door was capturing echoes of people walking through doors through the ages. Some were hurrying and then would fade into a mist 3 feet from the exit. Others would keep walking, talking to their invisible friends who were not echoing in this place.They’d be doing the normal act of walking through a glass door, only they couldn’t see anyone around them from any other time period than their own. For example, one of the many people I saw walk right past me was my father. It must have been the 70s for him because he had a funky handlebar moustache and he looked like he’d been out all night partying with friends. Of course, he didn’t see me, and if he had, he wouldn’t have know who I was because I knew that he hadn’t even met my mother yet.

The worst (and best) part about the dream, was that my friend Stephanie came to see me there. She was there with her husband in some Quantum Leap kind of world where they had come to see me and to attend some sort of reunion on this temporal plane, but having attended, they had to go back to their own time (the present, which unfortunately meant they had to zap back over to Texas). She ran up to me and gave me a quick hug and then ran into a building, where her husband was waiting in a room where there were like 5 or 6 men in uniform and a mattress on the floor. They both lay on a mattress and these “Time Assistants” lifted the mattress up to a wall. I thought they were going to get hurt so i pulled the mattress away from the wall again, but they had disappeared. Almost. I could still see the indent in the mattress where they were lying and watching as the last traces of their outlines disappeared, until there was nothing left but the mattress itself. (Multiple points for Weirdness.)

Then my alarm went off.

And that is why I should never eat Indian food before bedtime.

Visit my site to keep in touch with my whereabouts, find recent postings, and all the “fun stuff”. For the more serious side, stay here. (Just so you know, I’m the one who wears glasses.)