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grrgoylParvo is a horrible, horrible, potentially lethal, and 100% preventable disease. Parvo causes an animal (primarily dogs, although can be caught by ferrets) to slough off its intestinal lining quite painfully -- in my experience, anything that involves the word "slough" is rarely good. Parvo is caused by stupid, lazy puppy owners who put off getting their vaccinations, and moreso by stupider, lazier puppy owners who don't pick up their dog's poo. The virus grows in the poo, and moves into the ground where it can live happily for up to 20 years, infecting unsuspecting puppies owned by stupid, lazy people. About the only good thing to be said about Parvo is that it's like chickenpox; if your dog gets it, it will be immune for the rest of its life. Assuming it survives the infection.
I mention this only because we've been having a rash of Parvo puppies all month. This past weekend I had two, one of which was "Lucky" -- I don't know if plans are in the works for a name change. Lucky is an adorable little poodle/American Eskimo mix who was actually doing pretty well Friday night. Saturday was a different story, however, with hourly bouts of bloody diarrhea and much whimpering, the poor little thing.
*WARNING: FAIRLY GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION TO FOLLOW. PROBABLY NOT FOR THE WEAK OF HEART OR STOMACH*
I was supposed to temp Lucky at 11, but found I couldn't because he had some sort of solid, bloody material hanging out of his bum. Attempts to remove it were so painful for the dog that he actually vomited and practically jumped out of the cage, so I was afraid it might be still-attached intestine for all I knew. I called the doctor (again Dr. E, whose lethargic instructions may or may not have cost little Sally her life) and told her what was happening. Her thoroughly unhelpful response was, "Well, I don't understand. He was fine all day." As if I was just making it up to get out of temping the dog. When I insisted that no, the material was not my imagination, she said, "Well, just pull it out. It will be fine." I repeated the part about him vomiting, but she assured me it would be fine. Well, I tried again with similar results, and made a command decision that this really should be handled by a doctor personally, in the morning. I felt ineffectual, but I'm not at all comfortable with ripping out things that might still be attached based on the best guess of a doctor who sounded 3/4 asleep anyway.
By morning the diarrhea seemed to have slowed somewhat and Lucky was resting easier. I really hope the little guy pulls through.
~*~
Directly across the street from the hospital is a HUGE fast food Mexican restaurant named (again ironically) Taco Junior. It's neon green, stretches half a city block, and when the bars close at 2 a.m. is a mob scene, but the way sound carries it sounds like people are right outside my window. Saturday night (Sunday morning) it sounded especially rowdy, so I went upstairs to have a look. I wish I had taken a picture -- there had to be 50 freakin' people in that place. Bathed in that eerie green light, it looked like a taco joint from the afterlife in Beetlejuice.
About 10 of the patrons were a group of Mexicans that were currently shouting at each other angrily by the front door. It seemed to be escalating rapidly from my vantage point, and I was seconds from calling the police when a little senorita broke them up and they went their separate ways. Fortunate, because of all the things I don't enjoy hearing outside my window in the middle of the night, angry yelling people is probably in my Top Ten -- aww, hell, I'll put them in my Top Three, right behind 1) angry yelling people with guns and 2) angry Sasquatches. Thank god Sasquatch season is almost over. I'm sure no one is more relieved than me.
Saturday night was also especially windy. Fall is my favorite season, but standing out in that exercise yard, with the trees whipped into a frenzy and dry leaves skittering noisily, the night seems exceptionally sinister to me. I much prefer spending such a night at home.
Before we leave the kennels, here's my favorite dog from this weekend:
This is Patches. Normally I prefer large dogs, but lacking any of those I chose this little girl. This I think is what the phrase "So ugly she's cute" means. Awwwwwwww : )
~*~
Speaking of sinister, against the advice of movie reviewers and MyFriendGerry alike, I accompanied![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dopshoppe to see the vampire flick 30 Days of Night.
The movie takes place in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in America, which experiences the titular month of darkness. Much is made of this at the beginning, in the form of 3/4 of the population making a mad rush to the tiny airport to catch the last plane out before the sun sets for the last time -- evidently Alaska is sorely lacking in pilots who are qualified to fly at night.
Meanwhile sherriff Eben (Josh Hartnett) is investigating some peculiar disturbances: a grave of melted cell phones, a kennel full of slaughtered sled dogs, and the town's lone helicopter fed into the "Muffin Monster," a huge machine with chomping, pulverizing gears that's given enough screen time initially that you'd have to be a complete idiot to miss the foreshadowing to someone's gruesome demise inside it later.
Accompanying all of these events is the arrival of a Stranger (Ben Foster, completely unrecognizable. I thought it was David Arquette). That's his name in the credits, so we'll just call him Renfield. He gets himself tossed in the pokey for unruly behavior, giving us a chance to meet Eben's younger brother and grandmother who hang out at the station. Renfield gets handcuffed to the bars before he can start eating bugs, but he's still able to spout portentious, cryptic warnings about those who are coming. Oooooh, scary.
Oh yeah, and somewhere in here is a subplot about Eben's recently estranged wife, Stella, whichdopshoppe rightly guessed would become significant later in the worst possible clichéd fashion.
A bit more time is spent on meeting the remaining relevant players, then the vampires start appearing. At first we see very little, just townsfolk being snatched suddenly and dragged under buildings. The first real appearance is, in my opinion, the scariest and coolest image in the film. Eben and Stella are driving an SUV at top speed when the vampire running behind them catches up, leaps onto the roof and starts pounding viciously, still with the vehicle going full tilt. It's all shown in shadowy silhouette, VERY scary I thought.
Not that the vamps are any less terrifying once they're revealed fully. They're brutal, feral pack hunters whose faces resemble a cross between an extraterrestrial and Marilyn Manson, and who speak a gutteral mix of Ukrainian and Xhosa, when they aren't signaling to each other in an unearthly scream that was last heard in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They're inhumanly fast, strong and ravenous. They're not all-powerful however -- they obliterate most of the humans initially with the advantage of surprise, but then when Eben and his small band of survivors go into hiding, the vamps need to use captured townspeople as bait to lure them out. Which is grotesque and cunning, but I thought vampires had preternatural senses? They can't smell or hear a band of humans clustered together in the same place, who occasionally break into none-too-quiet arguments and pace pretty noisily for people supposedly terrified for their lives?
Evidently not, because, although they're certainly whittled down, about half survive to day 27. Consequently the vampires increase their resolve; as their leader says, "We've survived this long because they don't believe in us. We can't give them cause to suspect." Suspect. I think they have a titch more than a suspicion now that most of their friends and family have been reduced to a bloody smear on the road.
Speaking of bloody smears, there's blood in this movie. Lots of blood. Lots of close-ups of throats being torn out, heads being lopped off, evisceration, dismemberment...in the dark the gore is subdued, but it's there. Yet the only moment that madedopshoppe recoil in horror was when a vampire snapped someone's neck with his foot. Peculiar chick.
The movie builds to an inevitable showdown between Eben and the leader, the details of which I won't reveal, but the outcome seems a tiny bit unbelievable. SPOILER!!!!!!! LOOK AWAY!!!! DANGER!!!! Eben defeats the leader and the rest of the vampires flee? Vanish? What's to stop them from returning or attacking another town? All these questions are ignored, quite conveniently.
The ending is grim, logical and poetically beautiful. If I wanted to delve deeper, I could tell you how Eben did what he did because the previous month of carnage and having to make some morally objectionable decisions had chipped away at his humanity, and he couldn't live with what he became. But that might unfairly raise your expectations of the movie.
The good: The music was atmospheric, creepy, suspense building. The setting was effectively bleak -- 10 minutes in, I literally had to snuggle under my coat because the cold was palpably radiating off the screen. The vampires, despite their flaws, were pretty scary. Most of what happens is generally believable.
The bad: Not as much as the critics would have you believe. My biggest complaint is the use of that awful, half-frame per second or whatever technique during action scenes that I first saw in Gladiator, you know the one that looks very, very exciting but impossible to see anything at all that's going on? Directors, have more faith in your stuntmen please. Also it makes no sense at all for an Alaskan town, which experiences regular and no doubt destructive blizzards, to have their power lines above ground. Unless the ground never thaws enough to bury them? I honestly don't know, can someone tell me?
And speaking of "Good to Know" information, there's no explanation given as to why vampires haven't taken advantage of Alaska's sunless season sooner (just a comment "We should have come here ages ago." Yes, you should have. Try reading a damn geography book once in awhile).
The best vampire movie ever made? Don't know about that. One of the goriest? Most certainly. 3 out of 5 for effort. If you want a movie that's really taut and guaranteed to make you squirm and leave you feeling morally ambiguous, rent instead this director's other movie, Hard Candy, about one teen girl's solution to pedophilia.
I might be jaded, but not a single moment of 30 Days matched the spike of fear that slid down my spine at the hospital Saturday night when I was certain, I mean absolutely sure, someone was crunching around in the leaves just on the other side of the fence, watching me. Guess I can save my movie ticket money and just go to work for a thrill, eh?
Today I plan to watch a movie of far more dubious quality, Sometimes they come back...for more!!
I mention this only because we've been having a rash of Parvo puppies all month. This past weekend I had two, one of which was "Lucky" -- I don't know if plans are in the works for a name change. Lucky is an adorable little poodle/American Eskimo mix who was actually doing pretty well Friday night. Saturday was a different story, however, with hourly bouts of bloody diarrhea and much whimpering, the poor little thing.
*WARNING: FAIRLY GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION TO FOLLOW. PROBABLY NOT FOR THE WEAK OF HEART OR STOMACH*
I was supposed to temp Lucky at 11, but found I couldn't because he had some sort of solid, bloody material hanging out of his bum. Attempts to remove it were so painful for the dog that he actually vomited and practically jumped out of the cage, so I was afraid it might be still-attached intestine for all I knew. I called the doctor (again Dr. E, whose lethargic instructions may or may not have cost little Sally her life) and told her what was happening. Her thoroughly unhelpful response was, "Well, I don't understand. He was fine all day." As if I was just making it up to get out of temping the dog. When I insisted that no, the material was not my imagination, she said, "Well, just pull it out. It will be fine." I repeated the part about him vomiting, but she assured me it would be fine. Well, I tried again with similar results, and made a command decision that this really should be handled by a doctor personally, in the morning. I felt ineffectual, but I'm not at all comfortable with ripping out things that might still be attached based on the best guess of a doctor who sounded 3/4 asleep anyway.
By morning the diarrhea seemed to have slowed somewhat and Lucky was resting easier. I really hope the little guy pulls through.
~*~
Directly across the street from the hospital is a HUGE fast food Mexican restaurant named (again ironically) Taco Junior. It's neon green, stretches half a city block, and when the bars close at 2 a.m. is a mob scene, but the way sound carries it sounds like people are right outside my window. Saturday night (Sunday morning) it sounded especially rowdy, so I went upstairs to have a look. I wish I had taken a picture -- there had to be 50 freakin' people in that place. Bathed in that eerie green light, it looked like a taco joint from the afterlife in Beetlejuice.
About 10 of the patrons were a group of Mexicans that were currently shouting at each other angrily by the front door. It seemed to be escalating rapidly from my vantage point, and I was seconds from calling the police when a little senorita broke them up and they went their separate ways. Fortunate, because of all the things I don't enjoy hearing outside my window in the middle of the night, angry yelling people is probably in my Top Ten -- aww, hell, I'll put them in my Top Three, right behind 1) angry yelling people with guns and 2) angry Sasquatches. Thank god Sasquatch season is almost over. I'm sure no one is more relieved than me.
Saturday night was also especially windy. Fall is my favorite season, but standing out in that exercise yard, with the trees whipped into a frenzy and dry leaves skittering noisily, the night seems exceptionally sinister to me. I much prefer spending such a night at home.
Before we leave the kennels, here's my favorite dog from this weekend:
This is Patches. Normally I prefer large dogs, but lacking any of those I chose this little girl. This I think is what the phrase "So ugly she's cute" means. Awwwwwwww : )
~*~
Speaking of sinister, against the advice of movie reviewers and MyFriendGerry alike, I accompanied
dopshoppe to see the vampire flick 30 Days of Night. The movie takes place in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in America, which experiences the titular month of darkness. Much is made of this at the beginning, in the form of 3/4 of the population making a mad rush to the tiny airport to catch the last plane out before the sun sets for the last time -- evidently Alaska is sorely lacking in pilots who are qualified to fly at night.
Meanwhile sherriff Eben (Josh Hartnett) is investigating some peculiar disturbances: a grave of melted cell phones, a kennel full of slaughtered sled dogs, and the town's lone helicopter fed into the "Muffin Monster," a huge machine with chomping, pulverizing gears that's given enough screen time initially that you'd have to be a complete idiot to miss the foreshadowing to someone's gruesome demise inside it later.
Accompanying all of these events is the arrival of a Stranger (Ben Foster, completely unrecognizable. I thought it was David Arquette). That's his name in the credits, so we'll just call him Renfield. He gets himself tossed in the pokey for unruly behavior, giving us a chance to meet Eben's younger brother and grandmother who hang out at the station. Renfield gets handcuffed to the bars before he can start eating bugs, but he's still able to spout portentious, cryptic warnings about those who are coming. Oooooh, scary.
Oh yeah, and somewhere in here is a subplot about Eben's recently estranged wife, Stella, which
dopshoppe rightly guessed would become significant later in the worst possible clichéd fashion.A bit more time is spent on meeting the remaining relevant players, then the vampires start appearing. At first we see very little, just townsfolk being snatched suddenly and dragged under buildings. The first real appearance is, in my opinion, the scariest and coolest image in the film. Eben and Stella are driving an SUV at top speed when the vampire running behind them catches up, leaps onto the roof and starts pounding viciously, still with the vehicle going full tilt. It's all shown in shadowy silhouette, VERY scary I thought.
Not that the vamps are any less terrifying once they're revealed fully. They're brutal, feral pack hunters whose faces resemble a cross between an extraterrestrial and Marilyn Manson, and who speak a gutteral mix of Ukrainian and Xhosa, when they aren't signaling to each other in an unearthly scream that was last heard in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They're inhumanly fast, strong and ravenous. They're not all-powerful however -- they obliterate most of the humans initially with the advantage of surprise, but then when Eben and his small band of survivors go into hiding, the vamps need to use captured townspeople as bait to lure them out. Which is grotesque and cunning, but I thought vampires had preternatural senses? They can't smell or hear a band of humans clustered together in the same place, who occasionally break into none-too-quiet arguments and pace pretty noisily for people supposedly terrified for their lives?
Evidently not, because, although they're certainly whittled down, about half survive to day 27. Consequently the vampires increase their resolve; as their leader says, "We've survived this long because they don't believe in us. We can't give them cause to suspect." Suspect. I think they have a titch more than a suspicion now that most of their friends and family have been reduced to a bloody smear on the road.
Speaking of bloody smears, there's blood in this movie. Lots of blood. Lots of close-ups of throats being torn out, heads being lopped off, evisceration, dismemberment...in the dark the gore is subdued, but it's there. Yet the only moment that made
dopshoppe recoil in horror was when a vampire snapped someone's neck with his foot. Peculiar chick. The movie builds to an inevitable showdown between Eben and the leader, the details of which I won't reveal, but the outcome seems a tiny bit unbelievable. SPOILER!!!!!!! LOOK AWAY!!!! DANGER!!!! Eben defeats the leader and the rest of the vampires flee? Vanish? What's to stop them from returning or attacking another town? All these questions are ignored, quite conveniently.
The ending is grim, logical and poetically beautiful. If I wanted to delve deeper, I could tell you how Eben did what he did because the previous month of carnage and having to make some morally objectionable decisions had chipped away at his humanity, and he couldn't live with what he became. But that might unfairly raise your expectations of the movie.
The good: The music was atmospheric, creepy, suspense building. The setting was effectively bleak -- 10 minutes in, I literally had to snuggle under my coat because the cold was palpably radiating off the screen. The vampires, despite their flaws, were pretty scary. Most of what happens is generally believable.
The bad: Not as much as the critics would have you believe. My biggest complaint is the use of that awful, half-frame per second or whatever technique during action scenes that I first saw in Gladiator, you know the one that looks very, very exciting but impossible to see anything at all that's going on? Directors, have more faith in your stuntmen please. Also it makes no sense at all for an Alaskan town, which experiences regular and no doubt destructive blizzards, to have their power lines above ground. Unless the ground never thaws enough to bury them? I honestly don't know, can someone tell me?
And speaking of "Good to Know" information, there's no explanation given as to why vampires haven't taken advantage of Alaska's sunless season sooner (just a comment "We should have come here ages ago." Yes, you should have. Try reading a damn geography book once in awhile).
The best vampire movie ever made? Don't know about that. One of the goriest? Most certainly. 3 out of 5 for effort. If you want a movie that's really taut and guaranteed to make you squirm and leave you feeling morally ambiguous, rent instead this director's other movie, Hard Candy, about one teen girl's solution to pedophilia.
I might be jaded, but not a single moment of 30 Days matched the spike of fear that slid down my spine at the hospital Saturday night when I was certain, I mean absolutely sure, someone was crunching around in the leaves just on the other side of the fence, watching me. Guess I can save my movie ticket money and just go to work for a thrill, eh?
Today I plan to watch a movie of far more dubious quality, Sometimes they come back...for more!!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 04:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 02:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 08:12 am (UTC)And the story about the dog intestine was no less sad/horrifying the second time. What did you end up doing about that, anyway? Did you pull? Oh, Lainey, please tell me you didn't pull.
You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to set a notification for when you update your journal so that I'll be sure to read it (really, I'm going to make use of it, too, not just say I will. Boy, I've stuck my foot in it now).
no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 03:08 pm (UTC)No I didn't pull. Nor did I push (lol).
Yeah, yeah, sure sure. ; ) You don't owe me anything, honey.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-25 09:18 am (UTC)I'm quite arrogant when I manage to write more than one journal entry in one month.
Date: 2007-10-25 03:14 am (UTC)I can't remember the last time I managed that.
Date: 2007-10-25 09:23 am (UTC)I want to write a blog about Matt and how weird everything is (because it isn't weird), but my problem, besides pure laziness, is that I don't know how interesting it'll be to read. Nothing like yours, which I haven't even come up with a proper comment for yet. Not that you'd get it if I did.
Guns 'N Roses updates more often than you.
Date: 2007-10-26 03:09 am (UTC)Oh SNAP.
Date: 2007-10-27 10:41 pm (UTC)INORITE? It just came to me.;
Date: 2007-10-29 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-24 09:40 am (UTC)Oh, Elaine's-friend-Steve-who-I-guess-is-some-super-fantastic-guy-I've-never-met.
Date: 2007-10-24 09:25 pm (UTC)Anyway, didn't everyone already know he was gay? I usually assume every character with a meaningful same-sex friendship is secretly canonically gay.
He IS super fantastic. Get to know him!
Date: 2007-10-25 12:24 am (UTC)I went to read that reportedly amazing blog of his, but it is dead. It is an ex-blog.
Date: 2007-10-25 02:09 am (UTC)Still, there's always the off chance that she really didn't plan it to shock people, and she just assumed people would know already. You can understand that as a writer you sometimes don't know whether you're communicating everything you have in your head.
Remember the part where I said he's left and returned several times?
Date: 2007-10-25 05:19 pm (UTC)And Steve's a great guy, but he thinks JKR is a talentless hack and completely undeserving of her fame. He also doesn't care for the Snarry, but I try not to hold either against him.
I suppose I agree with what you said. Although if she were truly interested in tolerance, Dumbledore's orientation would have actually been in the books and not posted as a footnote in the media where kids might or might not read it.
Yeah, but he had at least one entry before, I'm sure of it.
Date: 2007-10-26 03:33 am (UTC)I agree with most of that. Why do kids need to know about an adult's sexuality, either way? Saying kids need to be made especially aware of the gay people around them so they can learn to be tolerant is so...reverse homophobic. Heterophobic?
Re: Yeah, but he had at least one entry before, I'm sure of it.
Date: 2007-10-29 04:51 am (UTC)I like what he said about only keeping things relevant to the story in the story, certainly. But I also like what was said in a recent EW editorial arguing that gay presence in the entertainment medium is down (a mere 1.1% of characters in network TV), and that's a drastic underrepresentation.
I personally don't think making kids aware of gays is a bad thing. I'm not asking for JKR to throw in a blowjob scene, for heaven's sake. And I read so much slash nowadays that the lines are blurry, but wasn't Harry's intense admiration of the Half-Blood Prince given mildly homosexual overtones in the book (or at the very least gentle ribbing from his friends), or is that just fanfic?
Re: Yeah, but he had at least one entry before, I'm sure of it.
Date: 2007-10-29 05:30 pm (UTC)There were MHO, to be sure (or maybe I just have slash on the brain too) but I don't remember his friends mentioning it. Then again, I skimmed through that book. I think it was my least favorite of all of them.
Re: Yeah, but he had at least one entry before, I'm sure of it.
Date: 2007-10-30 03:45 pm (UTC)Re: He IS super fantastic. Get to know him!
Date: 2007-10-25 08:06 am (UTC)Re: He IS super fantastic. Get to know him!
Date: 2007-10-25 05:25 pm (UTC)Why does that vet even have a job?
Date: 2007-10-25 02:50 am (UTC)Because she's a manager now and makes the company lots of money by nickel and diming clients
Date: 2007-10-25 05:49 pm (UTC)Looking back, I see I didn't actually review "Hard Candy." Suffice to say that it's unsettling in the extreme, and actually leaves you rooting for the pedophile. Far more difficult to watch than "30 Days" in the stomach-turning department.
I'll start retagging my entries this weekend just for you. : )
No, seriously, that vet is evil or something
Date: 2007-10-26 01:23 am (UTC)I agree with kavieshana. You need to retag all your movie reviews ASAP. Shit, Bear, you're the Ebert. Get in the game!
Re: No, seriously, that vet is evil or something
Date: 2007-10-26 05:38 pm (UTC)What's so confusing about Dumbledore and JKR?
You and kavieshana (and anyone else) can easily see all my reviews in my "Memories" section on my profile page. Just clicky my little LJ guy next to my name.
So the company, whose mission is to care for animals, doesn't care about poor suffering animals?
Date: 2007-10-26 03:17 am (UTC)Wait, is "Hard Candy" the one where she kills him in his car?
Oh, yay! Old Friend Bear and I thank you.
Re: So the company, whose mission is to care for animals, doesn't care about poor suffering animals?
Date: 2007-10-26 05:40 pm (UTC)I don't remember how Hard Candy ended, but I don't remember a car killing either.
Re: So the company, whose mission is to care for animals, doesn't care about poor suffering animals?
Date: 2007-10-26 09:37 pm (UTC)Oh, damn. I guess I haven't seen it after all.
Re: So the company, whose mission is to care for animals, doesn't care about poor suffering animals?
Date: 2007-10-29 05:00 am (UTC)Hmmmm. She didn't say as much to me. Guess we haven't reached that level of honesty yet in our friendship. You know, not worrying about the other person's feelings (as if I directed the movie or something!)
Re: So the company, whose mission is to care for animals, doesn't care about poor suffering animals?
Date: 2007-10-29 05:38 pm (UTC)Re: So the company, whose mission is to care for animals, doesn't care about poor suffering animals?
Date: 2007-10-30 05:34 am (UTC)Re: So the company, whose mission is to care for animals, doesn't care about poor suffering animals?
Date: 2007-11-06 04:03 am (UTC)Re: So the company, whose mission is to care for animals, doesn't care about poor suffering animals?
Date: 2007-11-06 04:31 am (UTC)