On July 15, everyone’s favorite youthful necromancer this side of Mickey’s Apprentice, returns for another enchanting installment. The hilarity begins when a wicked school marm, in league with the mighty Wormawort, who if you believe the bumper stickers is widely supported by Republicans, punishes Harry’s entire class for turning the chalkboard eraser into a toad.

In the previous 13 installments of this series, Harry has had to learn tough lessons on his way to otherworldly wizardry. Now, however, as we begin the next eighteen-part chapter of this long awaited series, Harry emerges as the ensorcelling hocus-poser we’ve all been awaiting. And in one mystic movement, he points to his lightning bolt birthmark, winks at his classmates, and conjures Marm Ugglidty-Bugility into a Blood Prince.

A Blood Prince, for those living in a cave, is much like the Prince of Tides, except of blood. It is an extraordinarily powerful being, with a head, arms, legs, torso, eyes, and teeth all made of blood. Unfortunately for Harry, he forgot to cast the containment spell, so Marm Ugglidty-Bugility quickly starts to drain away.

A little abracadabra later and Harry and friends have half the Blood Prince, formerly Marm Ugglidty-Bugility. At this point, Republicans and the Wiggles are very mad. They begin to protest all the occult and witchcraft. Harry and friends are simultaneously faced with the diabolic armies of Wormawort and the insidious bobos listening to a man named Rush over his spooky black-arts invention: the radiator.

Do Harry and friends find the other half of Marm Ugglidty-Bugility ? Do the legions of Wormawort and Rush join forces? Do the Wiggles put out another album? This review can’t give everything away, but it is fair to say that in time Harry and friends learn some important lessons, spend a lot of time pondering their fate, particularly the question of Harry’s mortality in the 50^th and final part of this movie saga, and make lots of whooshing noises with their magic wands. You’ll be bewitched by this charming and wonderful tale. And you’ll come away with an uncanny prophecy of your own: Harry’s tricks will be back for more next summer!<–>

Patriotic pretzels

This product got me thinking — is it even possible to come up with 5-10 food products less likely to be patriotized than pretzels?

****

This has got to be harder than hitting a 90 MPH fastball: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/22/forward-flip-basketball-s_n_218799.html

****

On more serious Minnesota political notes,

1) When does Al Franken get to be Senator already?

2) Why doesn’t anyone seem to care that Minnesota’s Governor is behaving like a King?

3) At least one piece of good news for Minnesota baseball fans — no increase in garbage burning coming from right field…http://www.startribune.com/local/west/48815442.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUX

It is in the spirit of Kris’s illuminating review of Transformers Deux that I offer my inaugural post on 12apostrophes: my take on the latest Tarantino film I have not seen…

It is with much anticipation that moovygoers await Quentin Terentino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds. In this latest offring from the qwerky cineaste, Braed Pit leads a teem of Jewish-‘merican soldeurs who are sent on a mission into occupyed France to brutalize n kill n scalp Nazis. Inglourious pays frommage to both New Waive cinema and the bahsghetti-western tradition. Indeed, watching Inglourious is like watching a version of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly that is set in WWII and directed by Jean-Luc Godard while the director of Pulp Fiction holds a gun to his head. In short, Inglourious is galore-ious! C it!

I haven’t actually seen Transformers 2 — in fact, no one has, as it’s not out yet. Or maybe it’s out now?

Anyhow, a few missing details is no good reason for failing to write a quality review.

Transformers 2: Rise of the Robots starts out as a small, empty movie, and never quite becomes the whiz-bang giant robot you came to see.

Which brings me to an interesting question: how does a tiny car become a humungoid robot? I mean, how is the mass of a city-crushing machine with its head in the clouds packed into a VW beetle? You know, scientifically? Weird.

In Transformers 2: Machines Unleashed, Earth is a stage for gargantuan robots to bash, shoot, and thunder against each other. The human characters are no more than window dressing, following the thinnest thread of a plot regarding dilithium crystals or kryptonite . . . something the big robot-types need desperately. Right?

The visual effects are stunning only in their decibel level, which is a hallmark of Jerry Bruckheimer or McG or whichever director it is I don’t like that helmed the film.

Not that Transformers the Second: Optimus Prime Strikes Back is wholly without surprises. At the end, just when you think the head Desceptor Khan robot is finally dead, and Shia Le Beuf is finally going to kiss a girl and/or boy, the lead antagonist robot rises back up and/or sets a catastrophic event in motion with his or her dying breath and/or battery.

Spoiler alert! I mean for that last paragraph — forget it if you want not to be spoiled.

When all is said and done, Transformers Part II: Shia’s Choice is pretty much exactly, no more nor less than, that what meets your eyes.

Thanks to Pulao, creator of The Unviewed Review!

Did you guys see Up?

I would say it’s easily one my favorite movies this year, but that’s beside the point. I guess the question I really want to ask is, did you read any of the reviews for Up?

Here’s a few excerpts from Up’s metacritic page. See if you find anything in common in the language, beyond the fact that most critics seem to adore it.

A captivating odd-couple adventure that becomes funnier and more exciting as it flies along.– Variety

A lovely, thoughtful, and yes, uplifting adventure.– Entertainment Weekly

Rousing, exhilarating entertainment.– Miami Herald

Easily the summer’s, and probably the year’s, most enchanting movie, Up is a buoyant delight.– USA Today

A thoroughly uplifting bit of cinema.– New Orleans Times-Picayune

And here’s one that differs in content, but still fits in:

After a strong takeoff, the film lands on dead grounds.– Film Threat

Do you get it? See, the critics (those clever so-and-sos) are making references to the TITLE of the film in their evaluations. Isn’t that something else?

Ok, so it’s true that this irked me for quite a while. It felt like I wouldn’t even have to have seen the films to be able to predict that these lines would show up in its reviews. Which got me thinking– what else can we assume, without watching the movies themselves, that will be in movie reviews? Which got me thinking more– why don’t we figure that out here, at 12apostrophes?

So let’s play a game. It’s not a contest, exactly, but more like a call for reviews. Of movies you haven’t seen. Feel free to choose whatever film you’d like, though here’s a short list, if you’d like, of upcoming films from this summer:

Year One
Transformers II
Julie and Julia
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Maybe you’d like to include an IMDB plot summary if you think you might need it. In either case, remember to strenghthen your reviews with enough references to the title.

Until the other day, I hadn’t been to the dentist in a long time. Like a long long time. Like such a long time I have trouble translating the true length of my dental hiatus into language. When I finally did go the other day, my new dental hygienist asked me how long it had been:

“A long time,” I said.

“How long?” she asked.

“Years, actually.”

“How many years?”

“Oh I don’t remember,” I lied.

“Like five years? Or ten years?”

“Probably between five and ten years,” I lied again.

Like I said, these aren’t words that come easily. Let me put it this way: “between five and ten years” isn’t a lie because it’s been less than five years.

It’s not my fault that I let the moss gather on my teeth. My Dad never goes to the dentist, so I learned from him (I learned it from watching you, Dad!). Of course, he augments his tooth brushing with tooth picking, the real kind, with a snazzy dental-grade steel tooth picker/scraper, which I once, famously in my family, used to clean out my toenails, assuming that’s what it was for (like I said, I don’t go to the dentist much).

Whenever I told people I was considering getting back in the chair, people thought that was a good time to tell the orthodontic horror story they’d been saving up (”Once I didn’t go for three years . . . then they had to sew my gums back on with a railroad spike.”)

When I finally got there, the hygienist poked around in my mouth, scraping here, probing there, frowning all the while.

“Hmm,” she said, frowning.

“Wrghu?” I asked.

“Wow.”

“Ygher?”

“That’s . . . just . . . not . . . coming off . . .”

(This reminded me of a very similar experience I just had with the electrician and the 25-year old wiring in the basement where I live, which included [I swear to God] a fuse box mounted at a 38-degree angle that had been cut in half with a chain saw, and a bare metal fuse that someone had been nice enough to write next to, in pencil, “danger — do not touch!!!!!” The electrician: “This is just . . . I mean . . . I’ve seen a lot of . . . that’s not even grounded, is it?” And maniacal laughter.)

Back at the dentist, turns out they couldn’t clean my teeth. Well, I’ll just go home then, I thought. No harm no foul. What they actually asked me do was come back for two 90-minute special cleaning sessions that would involve something called “root scaling.”

The first of these sessions also involved, at my request, copious amounts of Novocaine, so it felt like my roots were being scaled somewhere far, far away from my mouth. But they cleaned only the right half of my teeth, which is something my tongue cannot wrap its little tongue brain around. I’ll be sitting there, listening to someone talk, and my tongue will wander freely around the back of my teeth. “Hey,” it thinks, sliding along the backside of my teeth, “this feels different. And this doesn’t.” Then it checks again.

Let this serve as a warning to you: not going to the dentist for an unspecified-ly long time is like living in a house with an ungrounded bare metal fuse box with chainsaw scars. Try not to do both at once.

During one of the boring, unintentionally comical conference calls I had to attend last week, as we discussed marketing efforts, a colleague busted out with, “It’s like ’sell the hole, not the nail.’”

I could hear the blank stares buzzing through my phone line.

“You know it’s one of those sayings. Like, ‘you don’t sell the sizzle, you sell the steak,’” she explained.

In a way, “sell the hole, not the nail” is like “you don’t sell the sizzle, you sell the steak.” In that they both don’t make any sense.

But the real saying, as folks pointed out, was: “You don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.” But what the saying should be, I think, is that the sizzle sells the steak. Or else the steak salesman does.

I think the really real saying, getting back to nails and holes, and what my coworker may have picked up somewhere and meant to say, must be: “You don’t sell the shovel, you sell the hole.”

This would mean, you don’t sell the product, you sell what you can do with it. Like, hey aren’t holes great? I mean wouldn’t you like to have a hole? Well, buy my shovel and dig your own hole!

But it doesn’t work with the nail/hole metaphor. Hey, wouldn’t you really like a small hole in your wall? Doesn’t your wall need a series of small, deep holes? Well, poke your own holes with my patented nail!

Isn’t it just like marketing to teach people marketing with semi-catchy phrases that have no real meaning? In that spirit, let’s have a marketing-aphorism contest.

It goes like this: “Sell the _____, not the _____. Because/Unless _____.”

Like, “Sell the steak, not the cow. Unless it’s a farmer buying.”

Like that. But funny. Or else just play Mad Libs with the blanks.

Most of my workday is spent deciphering e-mails from colleagues. I’m the only person who seems to have a problem with the traditional corporate form of communication, which, it seems, is the poorly punctuated, spouted-off e-mail of whatever word salad happened to take residence in your forebrain while your fingers rested on the keys.

When I write an e-mail, it’s treatise on the task at hand, with complete sentences and adjectival clauses separated with real commas. I never use a pronoun or abbreviations. And nobody, of course, ever reads them.

Yesterday, I got this from my boss (who, I must point out, is a cool, un-corporate kind of guy, but must have been in a bit of a hurry):

When the time comes, please deliver these banners and do the i.o. We’ll extend this by one week so we’ll have new creative come June 1. So schedule the banners for ASAP to June 5.

Not so bad. We have a little conflict between “when the time comes” and “ASAP,” but I didn’t puzzle over it too long. There was the question, in my mind, over the new creative, so I asked:

Do you want the banners you sent to run while we wait for the new creative?

To which he replied:

What new creative are we waiting for?

I had thought I was on board and in the know. I was marching ahead, getting it done, and oh by the way small question? But now I realized that I had absolutely no idea what was going on.

What did you mean here? “We’ll extend this by one week so we’ll have new creative come June 1.”

I had dived right into the heart of the matter. No more pussyfooting around. Here’s what you said, sir, now explain that! Which he did, with just three words:

Deadline extension banners.

Although the words appear to be in my native tongue, the combination continues to elude me. Needless to say, whatever the task he wanted from me was, it’s totally been dropped.

About one and a quarter minutes later, on a completely different topic, I got this from a coworker:

Who has the vector file for the event prelim brochure?

Now this should have been cut and dry. We have an event, we have a brochure. I shouldn’t have bitten on this one, but I was discombobulated from other mysterious e-mails, and the “prelim” threw me off. Were we working on a new brochure now? Did she mean the show guide? I found myself compelled to ask: What’s the prelim brochure?

The brochure (preliminary bro) that is on the web

It’s a prelim brochure, or a preliminary bro, but it’s not a preliminary brochure. It’s not a preliminary brochure, probably, because it’s been printed, mailed, and posted on the Web for two months, and the event is two weeks from now. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

I got this in my inbox this morning:

It’s been over a decade since
I subcribed to your magazine,
but you used to publish a yearly edition of the top US industrial areas, by city.

Do you still do that, and if so, when was the last month and when will it appear again? Thank you.

I’m sure he didn’t mean it, but he has a real rhythm here . . . two 8-syllable lines, two lines of 24(ish), with the pause before the final two beats, “areas, by city.” is echoed with “again? Thank you.”

And what subject holds more pathos than a wistful look back at a magazine subscription left to die? This e-mail is about the relentless nature of change, and, although he is trying to hold on to something, the reader knows that, of course, there is no longer a yearly edition of the top US industrial areas, by city. That time is past.

Are people still upset about Rev. Joseph Lowrey’s inaugural prayer ?  Let me explain.

In addition to responding to the lyrics of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” Lowrey was also responding to an old African American folk saying that goes like this [there are many versions of it floating around]:

If you’re white, you’re right.
If you’re yellow, you’re mellow.
If you’re brown, hang around.
But if you’re black, brother, get back!

This version is from Eldridge Cleaver’s essay “As Crinkly As Yours” in Alan Dundes’ Mother Wit From the Laughing Barrel (U Mississippi P, 1965).

As I heard it, Lowrey was expressing his hope that this ancient expression of the racist status quo was finally going to become untrue.  As a middle-aged white woman from Mississippi, I share this hope.  Folks who found his words insulting need to get a life.  Everything is not about somebody trying to diss you.