I’ve likely watched movies since Sherlock Holmes, but I can’t remember what they were.

Clearly, I did not review them.  My blog is mostly dead, but as Miracle Max made clear “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.”

So I watched Alice in Wonderland this weekend in 3D.  It seemed to use a different kind of 3D than Avatar, and that certainly didn’t play to its advantage.  I’m not sure there was much to be gained by the 3D treatment.

Tim Burton is weird. I know that some of my friends love his work, but I generally leave the theater feeling as if I spent the last two hours of my life fighting off insanity.

Of his many films, there is only one that I really liked and that was Big Fish.  And yes, that includes Batman.  Sure, it was good when it was the only Batman we had, but Christopher Nolan has shown us a great Batman.  Tim Burton’s is a joke.

So it comes as no surprise to myself that I found Alice in Wonderland to be primarily meh.  It wasn’t a waste of my time, but it was also not a great use of my time.  I didn’t laugh, I didn’t cry, and I didn’t marvel.

Instead, I just questioned the sanity of the filmmaker and spent my time trying to figure out if Johnny Depp meant to switch accents in every scene.  Depp is usually a solid performer even in Burton’s messy movies, but here he seemed a little lost.  Then again, he was playing the Mad Hatter so maybe that was the point.

The only bright spot for me was the realization that the White Queen (played by Anne Hathaway) was modeled after the white queen of the chess board.  Having never read the books, I had never realized that both queens were based on separate games.

Sadly, I could have come to that realization via Wikipedia.

The Cheshire Cat was pretty entertaining and his ability to vanish on demand was used to great effect.  He was probably the strongest character, despite a solid cast of actors.

If you like Tim Burton, you’ll probably like Alice in Wonderland.  If you have nothing better to watch, it won’t feel like a total waste of your time because Anne Hathaway is hot (even when painted white) and the Cheshire Cat is slick.

Verdict: C+ Tilt: D

During the lonely summer months when network television has abandoned me, I search for anything to tide me over.

I play video games, watch reruns of What I Like About You, Gilmore Girls and Star Trek: TNG, and I desperately search for something new (some good, and some bad).

This led me to the discovery that my TiVo is quite capable of showing me YouTube videos on my giant television.  Although YouTube is hardly a new invention, I have never really embraced the phenomenon.  I can always find better things to do on my computer than watch videos.

But watching videos on my television?  Well that’s an entirely different beast.  So I embarked and soon found myself subscribed to Marina Orlova, host and proprietor of HotForWords.

The premise of her website and videos are simple — discussion of the origin of certain words, what they mean, and what they used to mean.

Marina is a philologist by trade so she’s not just some fly-by-night internet researcher.  Her love for words makes her ’students’ hot for words, and there is no better motivator for learning.

Sure it doesn’t hurt that she has a sexy Russian accent and looks like a super model, but it’s really the content that got me to to subscribe.  Learning is fun, and learning in bite-sized chunks is even better.

That long introduction of HotForWords was really to get to a discussion about one of Marina’s latest videos:

This video discusses the meaning and origin of the word mondegreen. It is a word I believe I have come across before but I don’t think I could have told you the meaning before watching this video.

For those unwilling to watch the hot Russian girl above (seriously, what is wrong with you!?), a mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a lyric.

I can’t remember all of the mondegreens I have come across in my life, but I know they are plentiful. From my youth, I can particularly remember mishearing a line in “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid.

The real line goes, “Bright young women, sick of swimming, ready to stand!” but I always heard it as “Pregnant women, sick of swimming, ready to stand!”

I always just assumed it was some sort of reference to Ariel’s unspoken desire to be a mother.

From the video, I have definitely been guilty of “Hold me closer Tony Danza.” I think the first time I heard Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”, I had no idea what he was saying.  Given his preferences, I figured it was perfectly plausible that he had written an ode to Tony Danza.

What are some mondegreens that you’ve been guilty of? With all of the singing of pirate songs and rock concerts you people go to, surely you’ve run into a few.

They just never stop with the laughs.  Today I go to CNN.com to find this little nugget:

Haha.  Those are two headlines that should have never ever been put near each other, eh?

Oh CNN.  You should hire someone to pay attention to your site.

Best Super Bowl commercial ever.

I don’t know why I think this will be fun, but I’m going to post a quote.  I’m intentionally not going to source the quote just to see who picks it up.

It may be from a show you don’t watch.  It may be something you recognize readily.  It’s not really a game so much, but just a way to perpetuate inside jokes from pop culture.

I’ll try to do it every week, but who am I kidding?  This will probably be the only one ever.

If I do keep it up, I’ll just pick a quote that made me laugh and post it.  Kudos to you if you can figure out where it came from.

This week’s is:

“I want to go to there.”

See. That wasn’t so bad.  Now we’ll see if I drive people crazy by never sourcing it.