Bits and bobbles of spare time entertainment

I can't think what to write about. My life is very dull at the moment. Also I played basketball last night after work and I sprained my thumb (of course) so I can't type very well.

We have finished watching Rome in the evenings now. It took us a while to find a tv series that would match up to the excitement of getting the next Rome dvd in the series, but we did eventually.

And the winner is..... Weeds. I had never heard of it. But one of my colleagues recommended it and when I rented it the woman in Blockbusters raved about it.

Damn right too - great show. Mary Louise Parker plays a suburban soccer mom whose husband has dropped dead and left her in a financial mess. So she sells weed to her neighbours to pay her bills.

Geddit... weeds/ weed... hur hur...

Her suppliers are African American and the scenes between her and them are a little laboured, but the scenes between her and her neighbour, who is a DH-type beyotch, and between herself and her competition, a local teenager, are very well drawn. Parker is her usual dead pan self.

Gilmore Girls meets Desperate Housewives with a Boys in the Hood twist that doesn't really work.

Well worth a watch.

I also watched Alpha Dog at the weekend. Good movie, although it took me ages to figure out what was going on because all the dawgs looked the same. Am I getting old? I watch new, fresh, exciting movies and sit there going 'oh, he's playing Ed Norton in American Hero X', or 'he's playing a Tarantino gang leader type', or 'all those girls look like they're from the OC'.

Maybe I'm right. Maybe I'm just over-exposed to the US body of film. Maybe I need to join the arty dvd store and bring home Brazilian street movies. There are people in my house who find it difficult to read sub-titles though, not being used to it.

I also just finished reading Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood. Great, great novel. If I were to write a novel about a young girl growing up I would say exactly the same things. That's what so great about Atwood. Her description of personal experiences is so universal that she pulls everyone in at some point.

So talented. There was a great story in the paper yesterday when she talked about promising a young British publisher to do a reworking of a myth - Penelopeiad - to help him with his struggling business. He worked on her guilt complex - he must really understand Canadians, she said. Then she found it too difficult, so she called her agent and asked whether it would be okay to pull out.

There was a long pause and then the agent said, well I'm sure the editor would have something to say about it. Then she said, I'm going to climb Mt Kilimanjaro and when I get back we'll have a nice chat. Apparently this frightened Atwood so much she got started on the Penelopeiad and had it well underway by the time her agent got back.

I love her self-deprecating humour - it's so Canadian, but she's one of the few Canucks that is proud of it and talks about it.

The idea of being able to scare Margaret Atwood!!!

Really!!!