hill of oblivion

gosh, it's so warm in portland right now. even in buffalo it was warm and rainy. global warming blah blah, but you've had some weather over there, huh? anyway, i've got some sleepy tea and herbal cigarettes so i'm ready to talk about what i've seen over the past few days, as i descend into herbal overload.

so, on xmas morning, my father, brother and I went to see avatar in 3d. you know, everyone's talking about avatar cos it's so expensive and amazing or whatever but i might not have gone had my dad not been so gung ho. he's a very, very mellow person, so for him to be gung ho about something is a big deal. so we went. it was nearly three hours long and totally beautiful. the fakeness of it was really smooth and i do love odd plantlife and make believe animals and matriarchal, peaceful societies, so even though the story was pretty lame, i really enjoyed it. i don't think my dad hits the movies that often, and he's either going deaf or losing all tendency to give a crap when in public, but he kept leaning over to me and loudly verbalizing his plot predictions which were almost always wrong (he got the end right) but actually way more interesting than what actually happened.

then for xmas my brother pulled a total miracle. when we were little we were obsessed with this movie that played on the disney channel but as far as finding it as adults, we didn't have a title or really more to go on except some vague images like block people and an evil magician that may or may not have been a ball of angry light. these are some images i've been asking people about every few years with no results. anyway, he somehow figured it out and bought me the dvd for xmas. it's called unico and it's an adorable japanese thing from the 70s about a baby unicorn thing whose superpower is to make everyone he comes in contact with happy which pisses off the gods (and now i'm just plagiarizing the youtube description) so they banish him to the hill of oblivion (so great!) until the west wind lady decides that's too cruel a fate and whisks him off to different places where he gets into different adventures. here's a taste:


so it's totally exciting and mindblowing to watch this! it's been 22 years! it looks like you can watch the whole thing on youtube. it's pretty sweet.

lastly, my mom is obsessed with bored to death and was extremely disappointed that it was no longer available on hbo ondemand so she couldn't play me her favorite episode. but she kind of described it to me and that was good too.