I just love a happy ending

... even when the protagonist is a lowly varmint, literally.

As you may know, when Hamfist moved in he brought two ball pythons with him. I am delighted to have them; they're beautiful and I love to watch them. I was surprised to find that I even enjoy watching them go after the live rats we feed them (although not as much as the cats enjoy it). Must have been all that "Wild Kingdom" I watched as a kid.

However, we've all been denied that pleasure for the last 3 months or so. We believe the snakes have been in hibernation mode - at least that's the only reason we could come up with that they refused to eat every time a rat was presented to them. To complicate matters, right before the beginning of that period Hamfist decided to change from small rats to medium ones. That went okay for a couple rounds of feeding, but the last one was too big: The male snake was able to kill his with no trouble, but couldn't swallow it. The female, on the other hand, didn't even strike at her rat. What to do??

We decided to just let them wait a couple weeks, then try again to see whether they wanted to eat. So we put the remaining rat in the cat carrier in the shed, with some cedar chips to nest in, and dishes of food and water. And there he remained for the next 3 months. Except for the torture sessions every two weeks or so, when we'd bring him in, put him in one snake's tank for an hour or two, then move him to the other's for a while. The snakes never showed one bit of interest, so back he'd go to his improvised cage for another fortnight.

Now, Hamfist and I are both confirmed animal lovers. While we have no qualms about providing live food for our pet snakes - after all, if they were to meet up in the wild on their own, we all know how that would go - both our consciences were increasingly troubled about the poor rattus. A quick, merciful death as part of the food chain is one thing, but this was starting to feel a little concentration-campy, and neither of us was comfortable with being responsible for that. We talked a lot about the possibility of just making him a permanent member of the household. I'd wanted a pet rat since I was a teenager, when my mother would have none of that idea, but I wanted a rat I could really treat as a pet, let it out of its cage to play with and cuddle. Now that the household is run by three cats, though, it would have to be caged almost all the time, and I 1) just plain don't want to keep a caged pet, and 2) didn't think that a life of constant fear in a cage, surrounded by vigilant, lip-smacking predators sounded like much of a deal for the poor guy either... nor even much of an improvement.

So, Hamfist finally got around to putting an ad on Craigslist to find him a proper home. As I expected, it only took a couple of days; there were quite a few people interested in saving the poor guy once they heard his story! In making the arrangements for transfer, we found out that his new person already had him named before she even got him: "Monty", for Monty Python, in honor of all he'd been through. Hamfist reports that she already has two other rats, and that she picked him up in a Mercedes(!), so we feel confident that he's going to have a much better life than we could have given him. Further, he intends to keep in touch with her. I'm hoping we'll at least get to see a picture of him in his new home, clean and well-fed. The poor little bugger deserves at least that! His life expectancy is only 2-3 years, for pete's sake, and we robbed him of 3 months of it. I hope the rest of his time on earth makes up for his time as a POW, and that the other rats revere him for the survivor he is.

After watching "The Ten Commandments" for the bazillionth time

I know, I know, it's cheesy as hell, but for some reason it's the only one of the movies that get shown at the same time every year that I still watch every time. Not that I bust out the popcorn and park on the couch for the full 5-hour experience, but definitely leave it on and listen with half an ear while I do other things, so I can be sure to catch my favorite scenes.

This being the first time this has happened since Hamfist moved in, he had some questions - can you imagine, he'd never seen the whole thing! You should have seen his face when I told him how long it is. Mostly, he wondered why this is the one I watch every time. Why not, say, "The Sound of Music"? Of course I'd never given that any conscious though before...

"Sound of Music" I'll still watch in its entirety IF the night it's showing happens to coincide with a night I'm wrapping Christmas gifts; those two things go together like chocolate and peppermint for some reason. Otherwise, meh; we had the record of the soundtrack when I was a kid, and between that and the frequent viewings I pretty much have the thing memorized, so there's not all that much point. "Wizard of Oz", similarly, I can pretty much recite verbatim, but I still might leave it on if I chance across it, depending on mood. "It's a Wonderful Life" - Jimmy Stewart is always adorable, but it doesn't hold my attention. So why this one?

Well, for starters, Yul Brynner was a stone fox in those days. And that resonant bass voice intoning "So let it be written, so let it be done" - not quite often enough to make for a really good drinking game, although maybe that's for the best considering the film's duration - woof. For another thing, Anne Baxter's Nefertiri is everything anyone ever needs to know about high camp. Every gesture, every word, just that leeetle bit exaggerated - I checked, sure enough she had an extensive stage background - delicious.

But mostly I think it's the sheer scale of the thing. I remember the first time I saw it; my parents found its broadcast important enough that we spent the evening with our friends who had a big color TV (yeah, we didn't get one ourselves until the late 70s. LAME). I was no more than 8, already going through my first obsession with ancient Egypt, and easily seduced by pageantry and tinsel, but too young to be hypercritical about the already-dated special effects. To this day, I see something new every time in the big exodus scene with everyone leaving Egypt, and I imagine how cool it must have been to be one of the extras. They'll never film another scene like that again, mark my words; too easy to make it look cool with 30 actors and some CGI, but I'm sorry, that does NOT pack the same punch.

Now that I'm really thinking about the thing, I had to sniff around a little, and learned something I hadn't known before: Yvonne deCarlo, who played Moses' wife Sephora, and the character with whom I've always most identified, also played Lilly in "The Munsters", which was a huge childhood fave of mine! Now THAT is range, people. It gives me an entirely new appreciation for her.

I've realized another thing I always loved about Sephora, and her sisters: Their hair. With my renewed dedication to "setting my hair free" as the Russians say, these days I see long hair everywhere, and now I know why the scene where all the sisters (except modest Sephora, who got the guy in the end - hah!) dance before Moses so he'll choose one of them to marry is my other favorite. All those waist-and-longer heads swirling around - glorious! And you know those were real, not extensions. It was the mid-50s after all, and the girls were rocking those long beatnik ponytails. Sometimes I wonder whether those parts were cast on the basis of hair length. I bet it was at least a consideration.

I've been saving the embarrassing admission for last: I was in my mid-30s before I put it together that this movie is not shown at Eastertime every year. Yes, it usually happens to fall around Easter, but that is not the holiday it commemorates, now is it?? I didn't have to admit that, you know.

I swear I'm not always this serious

But damn it, when serious things happen, I can't help but notice. And when they happen in my house, I take it personally.

I'm referring to Monday's bombings in Moscow's metro. One of the stations involved, Park Kultury, was my home station when I lived in Moscow, during the '95-'96 academic year. To this day I could find my way around that building blindfolded. Hearing that that was where it happened was like hearing that a friend was on one of those trains, and learning that the building itself (as well as the other station involved, Lubyanka) wasn't damaged was almost as great a relief as if my friend had escaped unharmed.

I still can't make myself watch much of the first-on-the-scene videos. The second one I saw showed blood spattered on the tiles of the platform, and I completely lost my shit. It was so much more personal than the shown-ad-nauseam footage of the World Trade Center in 2001 - I've never even been in New York, and it was harder to wrap my head around a catastrophe of that scale, somehow. This was like... seeing the apartment where I spent my teenage years on the news as the scene of a horrific mass murder, with blood splashed across the walls of my old bedroom. That kind of fondness, that kind of familiarity, that kind of NOOOOOOOO.

So, after one day of uncontrollable weeping and a couple more days of thinking about it constantly I'm calmer, at least.

I'm no fan of the Russian Federation's policies in the Caucasus region, don't get me wrong; I'll show you the pictures of me at a 1996 Moscow rally against the war in Chechnya, including the barely-got-it snapshot of Gorbachev, who was a surprise speaker! But, as usual, it's not the governments and their policies that occupy my thoughts, it's the individuals. I think I can understand objectively what it might be like, to have so little hope that blowing yourself up in a crowded metro car - just to make a point?! - seemed like the thing to do. Can't picture doing it myself, but you know, I've read the interviews... I certainly have no solutions to offer in that situation. I have only heartsickness at how people seem to believe they are entitled to impose their ideas on anyone else. I don't care what religion or nationality or ideology or profit you may be using as your justification; I care about innocent blood being spilled.

One thing that has helped me is hearing from everyone who came to visit me in Moscow. They'd all heard about it on the news, and every one of them went "Hey, I was in that station!", and understood why I was so upset. It occurs to me that I actually contributed to making the world a little bit smaller, by being there. People who would never otherwise have been there came because I was, and felt themselves connected to that place in a way they wouldn't have without that experience. Hot damn, all that high-mined stuff on the application essay for the scholarship that got me there, about fostering understanding between formerly adversarial peoples, coming to know each other as individuals and speaking each other's languages? Turns out I accomplished that in a small way after all, even if I didn't end up using the education I gained there in quite the way I intended at the time.