Crunchy Thoughts

This weekend Steven and I have finally begun to tackle the landscaping in our front yard after one too many comments of, “Oooh, you’re a landscape designer? I bet your yard must be AWESOME!” Yes, the crabgrass is very healthy.

Yesterday afternoon we began OPERATION: WEED NUKE. It was a lazy, rainy sort of day which made the weeds easier to pull up, but it also meant we became caked with red mud.

Soon, a muddy Steven announced, “I’ve got to pee.” I started to think about all the logistics involved with his having to remove enough mud from his person so he could enter the house when he just walked into our backyard, found himself a tree, and marked it as his.

I laughed and shouted, “Yay, you got to mark your territory!”

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I am really enjoying the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men’s Chest soundtrack. It has just enough of the original movie’s themes but then builds on them to create totally new pieces of music. To me, it’s the way a sequel soundtrack should be done.

I was talking about this with a fellow soundtrackophile who dislikes the soundtrack because something about it bugs him. “The guitars,” he says. “I don’t think they should use instruments or songs in movies where they wouldn’t exist in the movie’s time in history. Take A Knight’s Tale, for example. They start singing, ‘We Will Rock You’! That bugs me.”

Though I saw his point I still disagreed — I just couldn’t exactly think why except that I knew that stuff usually didn’t irritate me. I also couldn’t think of any good movie examples to refute him, so we let the conversation wander on to less debatable things.

I was thinking about the subject again this morning as the Pirates soundtrack was blasting through the house, and an idea struck me: people of our current time and generation relate to different types of music in a much different way than people of previous time periods and generations do. That’s why modern instruments and songs in otherwise period movies don’t grate against me.

For example, take Beethoven. Most of us hear his Fifth Symphony and images of dour old laidies in pearls and men with waistcoats and pipes sitting around a grammarphone dance in front of our eyes. However, that was not how that piece of music was perceived in Beethoven’s time. People were shocked when they heard the crazy things he was doing with musical sounds — much like the way adults were horrified when the Beatles became popular. Beethoven was a rebel — he did things with music that nobody dreamed of. The punk rocker of his day, that one.

Back to A Knight’s Tale and the crowd of common folk sitting in the stands, chanting “We Will Rock You!” Because we know that song and relate it to sports events, competitions, and general one-upmanship, we get a much better idea of what those people back in that era were feeling when they went to jousts. It was a rarin’ good time! Knowing what that chant means to us makes us realize their sporting events meant no less to them than a good Auburn/Alabama rivalry game means to us. We could not have made that connection had there been a four-piece ensemble of fools playing oboes.

And so with Pirates, the guitar kicking in during the exiting, tense bits of music bumps up our knowledge of the struggle and adventure that is going on on the screen. We relate that sound to high-adrenaline rock bands and that’s how the moviemakers want us to feel when watching the action scenes.

So to my fellow soundtrackophile — ’cause I know you’re reading this — I have just two words for you.

Moulin Rouge.

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To the person who hit that poor Canadian goose on 280 this morning:

YOU ASSHOLE.

Neither of our cats really clean their butts much, but Hermione is especially notorious for it. She collects her little butt nuggets like baseball cards then sticks her rear in your face to show them off.

A few days ago she was flashing her new nugget around. I was too tired to clean it off for her so I just dubbed it Gibraltar and left it at that.

Yes — I named a butt nugget. I know.

Since then I’ve asked Hermione how Gibraltar was doing when she would come to cuddle with us on the bed. She’d flash him, mutter at us, then curl up to sleep with Gibraltar in tow. Being a butt nugget must be hard living.

This evening Steven and I were relaxing on the bed — him listening to a novel while I was reading one — and along comes Hermione with her Friend.

Seeing Gibraltar, Steven points out, “You need to get off this one — I got off the last one.”

“But I like Gibraltar,” I whined.

“It’s. A. Piece. Of. Turd. You don’t have emotional connections to shit.”

Then I broke down into snorting laughter, and came into the office to write this story.

I think Gibraltar is about to be chipped off.