happy day

This is a post of such inconsequentiality, mostly about NCIS and The Princess and the Frog, and a little about food, that I shall put it behind a cut tag.

It’s been a nice weekend. We made some small effort at cleaning the house yesterday and made enough difference to be satisfying (though we need someone to mop for us. we both hate mopping…), and had a nice quiet evening of watching the two JAG episodes which introduced the NCIS team. Ted’s conclusion was that they never, ever intended to keep “Agent Blackadder” because nobody in their right mind could possibly take a character with that name seriously. I think he’s right. :) Also, Tony wore glasses (very Eyes Only), and Abby’s voice was deeper and she spoke a lot more slowly (which were both true of her in the first episodes of the actual show, too) and she was a bit more traditional goth than perky goth. We love our Abby *more*. And I thought it was pretty funny that the suit she’s made to buy for the JAG courtroom scene is the same one seen at least once in future NCIS episodes…and it didn’t fit her well in the JAG episode either! :)

This morning I made an applesauce cake (with homemade applesauce, no less), which smells utterly delicious. This afternoon I made a macaroni salad. Between these two culinary events, we went to see The Princess & the Frog, which may be the least memorable Disney film in history. Certainly the music was bland enough that not one single song stuck in my mind on the way out of the theatre, which for a Disney animated feature is something of a let-down.

There were some nice aspects. It’s set mostly in the 20s, and there was some effort to have appropriate costuming, and the two main female characters were not va-va-va-voom builds, but rather more toward the idealized slim 20s body form, which I saw as a distinct change from most of the Disney heroines of the past, oh, twenty years, anyway. They were *impossibly* slim, of course, but at least it was a different sort of impossible build from, say, Jasmine or Ariel. And there were a couple of nice touches in that our heroine Tiana and her mother got in the back of the trolley car when they got in it in the rich white part of town, and they did a credible job of showing the segregated society throughout both the diner restaurant Tiana worked at and her dreams of a high-end restaurant of her own: blacks were the clientele at both establishments, and were only very slightly invaded by white people, both of whom were Tiana’s friends/employers and who therefore had at least some tenuous connection/reason to be in the black part of town. Something that I expected was a complete falling out between Tiana and Charlotte, Tiana’s rich white childhood friend–I expected racial strain there when they grew up, and actually was rather pleased (if perhaps slightly disbelieving) that it didn’t come to pass–but neither was there any implication that the two characters were equal in social status or expectations. Tiana was much smarter and more sympathetic than Charlotte, who, while a spoiled idiot, wasn’t Evil or even Horrible in terms of their relationship, which I’d basically expected her to be. And to my surprise, she rather redeemed herself at the end, while remaining quite in character, so I thought that was well done.

We thought the shadowy bad guy things were pretty scary for little people, although to be fair, none of the little people at the movie seemed unduly alarmed. :)

And now, having nattered about things of no consequence, I’m going to go make some cream cheese frosting for the cake. :)