Friday, November 2, 2012

The Perfect Christmas Gift For the Women in Your Life


Do you know that there are only 45 days until Christmas Day?

This means the holiday shopping madness is about to begin! I like to avoid the holiday shopping as much as I can due to the crowded department stores by doing most of my gift shopping months before, but there are always a few people that I have trouble finding a gift for, like my mother, grandmother, etc.

I know that I'm not the only male that has trouble finding the perfect gift for the women in his family, as men tend to wait to the last minute to buy a gift and typically the store shelves are empty by then.

I thought it would be nice of me to put together a nifty gift guide to help out other men who are looking for a great gift for their wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, girlfriend, aunt, etc.

DVD Review - Gilmore Girls: The Complete Sixth Season

Gilmore Girls: The Complete Sixth Season
Starring: Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel, Melissa McCarthy, Scott Patterson, Keiko Agena
Studio: Warner Bros. 
ASIN: B000G1R4SY
Release Date: September 19, 2006
Running Time: 945 minutes
Unrated
Buy Link: Mommy Bear Media

Review: 

A while back I entered into a giveaway on a blog and I won one of the prizes which was a $20 gift card from Walmart. I had completely forgotten about it until I received it several months later. I wasn't for sure what I was going to use the card for. Late one night, I surfed Walmart.com and found the sixth season of Gilmore Girls for fewer than twenty dollars. Of course I had to order it. I have been watching Gilmore Girls ever since I stumbled upon it on the late Soap.net channel earlier this year, but I watch it every weekday morning (if there isn't some kind of marathon) on ABC Family, which had just started airing the sixth season. I received the DVD set very quickly and just like season one and two (that I own on DVD); I flew right through each episode, taking in every bit of the Gilmore Wisdom.

The episodes on season six are:

Disc One:

Episode 1: New and Improved Lorelai (9/13/05)
Episode 2: Fight Face (09/20/05)
Episode 3: The UnGraduate (09/27/05)
Episode 4: Always a Godmother, Never a God (10/4/05)

Disc Two:

Episode 5: We've Got Magic to Do (10/11/05)
Episode 6: Welcome to the Dollhouse (10/18/05)
Episode 7: Twenty-One Is the Loneliest Number (10/25/05)
Episode 8: Let Me Hear Your Balalaikas Ringing Out (11/8/05)

The Friday 56 - A Wreath of Snow



Rules:
Grab a book, any book. 
Turn to page 56. 
Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. 
Post it. 
Add your (url) post below in the Linky at http://fredasvoice.blogspot.com/.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Fire: Man's Earliest Friend, Foe, and Eternal Obsession by Jill Archer





When my kids were younger, we used to play the "Gas, Liquid, or Solid?" game. We also used to play "Man-made or God-made?" (which works no matter what your beliefs are because there are lots of things in our world that aren't made by man; those things have to come from somewhere). What I love about "Fire" is that it isn't easily categorized in these games. I suppose fire is mostly a gas, but it's a burning gas (or gasses). It's as much a state of being as it is a thing. And yet you can see it and feel it. Likewise, it's made by man all the time. And yet we speak of its discovery. Man did not initially create fire. It existed prior to us.

 Fire has fascinated us for millennia. Alchemists and astrologists consider it one of the four elements, along with earth, water, and air. Even if you're not into alchemy or astrology, you have to admit that there's something fairly, ahem, well... elemental about those four concepts. It's not difficult to see why people have been categorizing the nature of things based on those elements from time immemorial. And out of those four basic elements, none has a more contradictory, fascinating nature than fire.

Fire helps to feed us, by cooking our food, and it protects us by keeping us warm and keeping predators away. In modern times, some of fire's more basic benefits have become obscured. But we still have bull roasts and bonfires. We still roast marshmallows and put candles inside jack-o-lanterns on All Hallows Eve to scare evil spirits away. So fire helps us survive – but it is also incredibly deadly. Not to put too fine a point on it, but fire can kill. That's why arson is a serious crime, often a felony, in all 50 states.

Review - A Short History of the Short Story

A Short History of the Short Story
by Glunaz Fatma, MA, MBA
Publisher: Modern History Press
ISBN: 978-1615991662
Pub. Date: September 5, 2012
Pages: 46

Review: 

In fewer than fifty pages, author Glunaz Fatma successfully gives us the basic history of short fiction stories from Western and Asian Traditions. Being an author of short stories myself, I was very eager to review this book courtesy of Modern History Press.

Many famous writers, such as H.G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, Alphonse Daudet, Miguel de Cervantes, Shirley Jackson, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rabindranath Tagore, and many others, have written numerous short stories as it gives them more freedom to express their creativeness without being classified by a genre.

Just like a novel, a short story must has a well-written plot that leads to a conclusion. A short story is between 1,000 to 20,000 words. Anything over is either a novella or a novel, and anything under is considered as short stories or flash fiction.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Retrospective - The Midnight Hour


For the past twenty-seven years, one of my annual Halloween watches is the little known horror comedy The Midnight Hour. It first aired on ABC on November 1, 1985 (Yep, one day after Halloween and two days after Garfield's Halloween Adventure aired on CBS) when I was a four-year-old. At the time my parents and I lived in a two-story farmhouse in the country (which was also haunted) and my parents recorded it onto a VHS tape. I would pester my mother into letting me watch The Midnight Hour, even though The Elf would always freak me out.

The Midnight Hour is set on Halloween in the small town of  Pitchford Cove, New England. Five high school seniors, Phil (Lee Montgomery), Mary (Dedee Pfeiffer), Mitch (Peter DeLuise), Vinnie (LeVar Burton), and Melissa (Shari Belafonte), break into the town's museum. They steal (or should I saw "borrow") a few costumes and an old trunk. They open the trunk at the local cemetery, in which they find a mysterious scroll. Melissa reads the scroll aloud, unleashing a horrible curse.

A few minutes after the kids leave the cemetery, the undead rise from their graves. The undead's leader is Melissa's own ancestor, Lucinda Cavender, who was put to death over 300 hundred years ago for being a vampire.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

DVD Review - Trick 'r Treat


Trick 'r Treat
Director: Michael Dougherty
Starring: Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Dylan Baker, Rochelle Aytes, Quinn Lord
Studio: Warner Home Video
ASIN: B002LMSWN2
Release Date: October 6, 2009
Running Time: 82 minutes
Rated R for horror violence, some sexuality/nudity, and language

Annually, my local Walmart sets out a few horror/Halloween themed movies. It's not even October and this year’s Halloween DVDs/Blu-Rays are already out, in which the majority of them are a mixed bag of good and bad treats. I already own all the good ones and a few that I don't are not my style, but I did pick up Trick ‘r Treat only because Anna Paquin was on the back cover.

Trick 'r Treat was released to one theater in December 2007 followed by a handful of screens in 2008 and 2009, mostly at festivals. The movie was finally released to DVD on October 6, 2009 and received mostly good reviews to the small amount of critics who viewed it.

In this anthology in the style of the Creepshow, a short trick-treater, Sam, wearing a worn-out orange pajamas with a burlap sack over his head, keeps popping throughout the movie. Emma (played by Leslie Bibb) and Henry are the couple that opens up the movie. Henry loves the holiday and has over-decorated their yard with ghost-scarecrows. She demands that he cleans up everything on Halloween night, but he says he'll get to it tomorrow, which she knows he is a lying. He goes inside the house while Emma begins to take down the scarecrows and comes face to face with horror.

Charlie a trick-or-treater stops by Principle Wilkins house and steals a few pieces of Halloween candy that was on the front porch, but he is in for a shock when the candy turns out to be poisoned. It seems that Principle Wilkins drags Charlie's lifeless body inside. Later that night, he digs a hole in the backyard and tosses Charlie on top of another corpse. He is in a hurry to get the bodies covered up, help out his son carve a unique jack-o-lantern, and get ready for his date.