Solfest

I couldn't make it to Solfest yesterday, but today I paid Hopland a visit with my dad and Caleb. It was sweet. In case you aren't familiar with Solfest, it's an annual festival in Hopland that celebrates being "green." The hippie vibe was ever present, even more so than last year, but the merchandise was awesome. There was a guy teaching people how to carve wood using a magnifying glass and the sun. A fresh-squeezed strawbery lemonade place. Organic burritos. Insulated housing. Lots of Prii. Solar Panels. A button and bumper sticker shop. And just about more hemp than any other place in the world. There was even hempmilk. Any of that strike your fancy? If so, you should definitely come to the next Solfest. We'd love to have you.

I got lots of great stuff at Solfest: a "Coexist" bumper sticker, a button incribed with the message "Bullets don't kill people. Gaping wounds in vital organs kill people," a Solfest T-shirt, a magnification-engraved stick, and a Call2Recycle wrist strap and T-shirt. Since my dad forgot to bring the camera, I have no photos of the actual event, but check these out. You can't really see the T-shirt or button, but you gotta love that stick.

The Yogipie Rap

Here is the rap, as promised.

Posting some posts to the great tribune
Having zero readers makes me look like a loon
But I don’t care what bird I look like
I only care what you can cook like
Apparently we’re allowed to rip off Mulan these days
But does it really matter the rhymes I say?
Probably two people have ever read one post
Caleb Foote the 27th has probably read the most
I even got a T-shirt to promote my blog
Why do they avoid it like a flaming log?
Yogipie is certainly potent (like a nog)
If it had potential I would read a flaming log
Pay good money for Entertainment Weekly
But my insights on the media don’t plod along meekly
I may not have a great multitude of minions
But I’m not so frickin’ slow to get you my opinions
Well, sometimes the connection gets a little stuck
And I say “Internet Explorer really sucks!”
Then I might not be able to blog for days
But you can still read Yogipie anyways
‘Cause posts in the Archives might give you a laugh
For that feature I’d like to thank the Blogger staff
But there’s also a dichotomy as well as a chronology
For finding tags like camping, airbrushing, and genealogy
I’d like to know the readers I’ve got besides one
If you caught the Disney reference, good for you, you’re not dumb
Write wghoberg@comcast.net
If you read this rhyme, tell me; I’ll see what I get
As for the 27th, I was kidding the fool
Having an old name is actually pretty cool
Farewell, readers (probably only one)
I might rhyme more later, because this was fun

More Movie Reviews

This is late but it is as promised and it includes a bonus review.

Transformers: Transformers starts out in much the same way as Disturbia does: Hot girl is the object of desire, best friend is a weirdo, and of course, Shia LaBeouf in pretty much the same role as Sam, the perv teenage guy. Fun fun fun. Except there's also the part about the army being attacked by giant robots, a conspiracy about the Arctic mission of Sam's great-great-granddad, and a Camaro. The movie is way too long, and the excess of product placement and its ludicrously ginormous budget make me sick, but the talent and production values are all in place. ***

Speed: It was a great, high-octane (?) ride. I can't say action movies are my cup of tea, but this was a good movie. Wait a sec... I don't like tea. ***

The Matrix Reloaded: Where do I begin? This one had a great sex scene, about seventy awesome songs, at least 4 classic fight scenes, The Architect, lotsandlotsandlotsof Smiths, a pair of sunglasses for everyone, a traitorous kiss, and many doors. Everything a great movie needs and then some. Quite possibly the awesomest film ever made. Needless to say I really enjoyed it, would recommend it to anyone, and really want to get my hands on the 3rd installment. ****

Back-to-School Shopping

I did my back-to-school shopping yesterday. I got 12 pens, 60 pencils, 3 Pink Pearls, 1 sharpener, 1 Spanish dictionary, 5 100-page notebooks, 1 stack of yellow Post-Its (I didn't even know they still made those), 1 pack of flash cards, and Icebreakers Sours, which, by the way, make good fake lip piercings.

Movie Reviews

Wow, tough job: talking about every movie I've seen in the past month.



Weird Science: This movie was... really weird. It is about two teenagers who create their own sexpot using a computer. There are all sorts of cheesy special effects and the oddest things happen. However, there were some good laughs in there and it had a happy ending. ***



Stephen Bizer's Otto: A 15-minute sci-fi romp that sets up its own rules for existence, and it doesn't care what you think! It has a complex plot, but if you can follow along, you'll find it enjoyable. ***



Stephen Bizer's Illegal Aliens: Also a short film, and also lots of fun, but this one is animated, and black-and-white too. The drawings are noirish and humorous and the plot fits the style perfectly. ****

Pretty in Pink: Incredibly '80s, Pretty in Pink is a romance tale that is well told through a great script, a talented cast (especially the otherwise-nobody, the guy who plays Ducky), and solid directing and producing work. The story is a classic, but the '80s were really the worst decade ever (except the 1340s or maybe the 1350s), and the film's pop culture is really dated. ***

Men At Work: A comedy about garbage men. The premise is really funnier than the jokes, which I suppose is a good thing because that makes the jokes all the funnier. Definitely a good choice. ***

The Bourne Ultimatum: Probably my favorite action movie ever. The plot twists are great, Matt Damon is awesome and the action is phenomenal. Loose ends are tied up with a pretty bow. It's a climactic adrenaline rush end to a great action series. It's definitely not a problem that they reworked some of the ideas from the first one. My beef is with the directing that overemploys the "raw" camera style. Almost perfect, but not quite. ****

Fletch: Chevy Chase is great in this comedy about a Los Angeles investigator-reporter who digs just deep enough into a drug-trafficking problem to uncover a gusher of mystery, bigamy, and Utah. He has jokes and quips by the gross. The plot and the direction are enough to make you see it again, just for fun. ****

Transformers and Speed are coming tomorrow when I'm not so tired.

I'm Back from my Poconos trip

Yesterday I returned from Pennsylvania and the annual Hoberg family reunion. First I flew to Philadelphia, then drove to my aunt and uncle's house, where I spent two nights before driving to my great-uncle's lodge in the Poconos, where I stayed for a week with some of my extended family, whom I'm sure you would love to hear about, so I'll give you a quick rundown of the tree. ROSA Present at the Poconos were: Jan and Mark Gingold with identical twin daughters Sara and Beth and son Daniel (Beth brought her boyfriend Jeremy and Dan brought his girlfriend Janelle), Rick and Jeanne Hoberg with son Matthew and daughter Mellissa (Mellissa brought her friend Kim), Peter Hoberg with son William (me) and daughter Becca, Chris and Ron Bizer with sons Stephen and Tim and daughter Kate, my father's parents Shirley and George Hoberg, Shirley's brother, Bill Kieser, his daughter Valerie, and Don and Jane, whom I don't really know. ROSA Not present were: bunches of other Hobergs, Areharts, and Harrisons.

The lodge overlooks Silver Lake, of which a picture can be found in the upper right corner of this post. The lake is great for swimming and for catching fish. This year I landed three rather large fish, of which I am very proud, a pickerel and two bass. It has long been tradition for the entire family to converge on this site and cause havoc from sheer numbers. This year had a relatively small crowd compared to other years, but there was still lots of havoc. What was really awesome was that all week long there was a chance of thunderstorms, but it didn't so much as rain until the one night our cookout was planned.

There was a dilapidated pool table there, and I played just about everyone on it. I'm not very good at pool. I was introduced to a new game called Pictionary-Telephone, which is exceedingly fun. I visited two waterfall parks, which were both fun, and managed to skip a rock 4 times. I found out that the fish in Silver Lake are attracted to sunscreen the hard way (they chased me out of the water). And I joined The Woodbumz, my cousins' white-rap group. Their names? Ginga Snapz, Bredd Loaf, 20-Inch D, Ju-C Juice, and Vanilla Bean Speck (Matthew, Tim, Daniel, Stephen, and me). They featured me on the track "Damn, it Feels Good to Be a Woodbum," which I believe will be on their album of the same name. Stick around for rhymes to be published on this blog.

tired

Way too tired. Will blog lots tomorrow.

My T-shirt

I forgot about the T-shirt I got yesterday. It's awesome! It says Yogipie. It's purple and brown. I would love to have 5,000 of them to give out to random people. Methinks that would increase readership more than one-thousandfold. I think I should update more speedily.

-Yogipie the Readerless

Harmonica

I wish I knew how to play the harmonica. And yet even if I knew how, I don't think I would be very good at it; my lungs are phenomenally weak. I might learn how to play anyway, because the harmonica is such an awesome instrument. Lately I have been really into these songs:"Walk Like an Egyptian" by the Bangles, "She's not There" by Santana, and the Monk theme by Jeff Beal. This post was pretty random. I will be back later with more to talk about... hopefully.

Table of Harry Potter Statistics

I "learned" how to do this with HTML. Oh yeah, and my hardcover HP collection is complete now that Deathly Hallows has been added. Don't ask me why there's a mile of empty space there; just scroll through and examine my handiwork!

Book	# of Pages	# of Chapters	Average # of Pages per Chapter
Sorcerer's Stone	309	17	18
Chamber of Secrets	341	18	19
Prisoner of Azkaban	435	22	20
Goblet of Fire	734	37	20
Order of the Phoenix	870	38	23
Half-Blood Prince	652	30	22
Deathly Hallows	759 (including Epilogue)	36 (excluding Epilogue)	21 (excluding Epilogue)

SPOILER ALERT

I finished Deathly Hallows Sunday night; sorry I'm so late, but as time is no longer my goal I feel free as a... damn, I've got nothing (Don't you hate it when your similes elude you?). ROSA I thought it was an excellent read, certainly epic, and certainly exciting enough to keep slow readers up in the wee hours of the morning. The body count, however, was tragically, unnecessarily, and yet unsurprisingly high. I simply don't think J.K. needed to kill off so many friends to satisfy her readers. I created a neat circuit today, using an electronics kit. It made a whistling or beeping sound when the lights went on. I thought it would be cool to have several different circuits in several different rooms all set at different frequencies, and use the fuse box as a musical keyboard.... Tomorrow I am going to buy myself a customized airbrushed T-shirt bearing the name Yogipie; it's going to be awesome!

Copperfield's

I went on a trip to Copperfield's Books today. I finally pre-ordered Deathly Hallows, which was long overdue. I'm also going to the party. I got a spiffy bookmark of the 4 house logos. I bought hardcovers of Sorcerer's Stone and Prisoner of Azkaban. The only one I still need is #4. This is a little late, but I'm really excited that Monk and Psych have started their new seasons on USA. I love watching those shows every Friday night.

Life Sucks

I've given up on my goal of blogging about Deathly Hallows. After all, the book is released five hours earlier in England... plenty of time to finish it.

Various Topics

1. I started my own "library of favorites" for contemporary literary classics, and thus I have started to pursue new copies of all my favorites so I can keep them forever, but my mom thinks this is a silly practice and that I should, I dunno, hunt down battered old paperbacks at garage sales and read them once and then donate them to charity or something. ROSA Okay, so that might be an exaggeration of sorts, but that's her state of mind. My point of view is that in this ever changing, tragic world of ours, I really take solace in reliability and stability.

2. I've been rereading the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. Excellent fantasy series, and if you haven't read it you have to do so or you're a... how to put this nicely... SATANIC PIG-HATING COMMUNIST!

3. I treated myself to a shiny new hardcover copy of the original Chamber of Secrets for my library. No more of this silly Anti-Illustrationist movement.

4. I got seventy dollars and several euros richer yesterday; it's pretty happy.

5. Due to said new funding, more Harry Potter hardcover purchases may be on the way.

6. The movie adaptation (if you could call it an adaptation) of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is absolutely terrible. You have this overly and overtly opinionated and unheathily adverbial blogger's advice not to go see it, and his word that unless by chance of stupidity and ignorance, you haven't actually read any of the books, all parts of the movie will disappoint except - I almost regret saying this - the brilliant, spot-on portrayals of Luna Lovegood and Dolores Umbridge. ROSA I would almost see it again just to see Luna say her lines again, which, by the way, are almost all intact from the canon... Seriously, weird in exactly the way I imagined her to be in the book. Oh, and in the chance of said stupidity and ignorance, SIRIUS BLACK IS MURDERED BY BELLATRIX LESTRANGE AT THE END.

7. ROSA is a new good friend of mine, a novel sort of punctuation mark if you will, a running joke, but the kind that isn't funny. The first person to email me telling me what the mark does will win a great big sundae on me.

GREEN

With Live Earth having been (admittedly) a while ago, It's the least I can do (or is it?) to tell you that you can make a difference!!! Join the Alliance for Climate Protection. Small things add up, so try your best to uh, be green!

Back to the Blog

I haven't blogged in ages, and not since I went camping at Yosemite with the YMCA and my friend Caleb. I found lookalikes to a friend's mom, Shia LaBeouf, and my sister's friend. I saw a black bear rip open a log. I hiked Vernal Falls and Yosemite Falls. But none of that matters. My life will have neither meaning nor purpose until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is released. My goal is to be among the first to blog about it, but I doubt that's going to happen, and for two good reasons. One, people have probably already blogged about it, and two, some people, like my sister, can read a book like that in something like four hours, a superpower I, sadly, do not have. I'm going to see Order of the Phoenix on the 14th, which sounds exciting if inaccurate and superficial (sorry, I had to vent). Wikipedia's list/ dictionary of Harry Potter spells is horribly full of holes; it does not even come close to sticking with the canon it specifies. On a completely different note, tracing someone's genealogy back thousands of years is not quite as easy as it sounds, even when that person comes from the house of Levi.

A Wrinkle in Time

I took a short (3-day) break from Harry Potter between #5 and #6 to read Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time. Very very good science fiction novel, nice and short compared to Harry Potter books. If you haven't read it, you're really missing out. I found the fantasy and science fiction elements of the story to be very inspiring for a short story I'm writing called "Angels and Men," loosely based on the music of Juno Reactor.

Classical Music

Classical music... what an odd entity! Considering very few classical songs actually have titles, it was obviously not meant for the information age, but who can blame the classic composers? It's not like any of them ever heard of a search engine. Classical classification remains only by division, from a composer to an opus to a suite to a song (brief spark of pop-culture familiarity) to a movement (what?) My favorite composer is... Hiromi Uehara, hands down. She is the piano virtuoso. Who is your favorite composer?

Decline in Harry Potter Books

I think I have found out why the fifth and sixth books of Harry Potter are my least favorite ones. The reason is not that the books have gotten darker and the tone more serious. It's not even that Mary Grandpre's illustrations have become less cartoony. It's because all the character roles in which the readers got so set over the first four books get changed and turned upside down. For example, in The Order of the Phoenix Ginny stops being all crazy about Harry and starts dating, and in The Half-Blood Prince, Harry is "hungry" for Ginny (creepy). Harry becomes a very angry young man, the government are complete morons, and Sirius gets himself killed. Neville becomes less dorky and Ron gets on the Quidditch team.... It all adds up to a seriously confusing Harry Potter world the likes of which we didn't see in the first four parts. And that is why my order of favoritism is 241356. w00t.

Word List

I have been interested in excellent words and phrases to use for quite some time now. I have compiled a running list of my favorite words. It is composed of not only English words, but also phrases and foreign-language words. But all of the contents have one thing in common: a special flow of sound. With the phrases especially, the cadence and rhythm is very important. This is exemplified in the phrases Supreme Mugwump, Richard Nixon, and Ottery St. Catchpole. Four of my words have the "qua" sequence because that is a cool pattern. I look forward to using these oddments on my readers (1 person) soon. This enthralling, alphabetically-sorted list can be found at the bottom of my blog.