31 Days of Delight

Preamble:

As longtime members of my vast reading audience (all three of you) will recall, September First will be my 38th birthday. Should you want to get me a little something, have no fear that I'm too proud: I direct you to the Wishlist to your right (just reorganized, BTW).

This upcoming observation of my birth is also from whence the future purchase of an MP3 player is coming, if you hadn't guessed. So I moved a lot of the CDs way down my preferences on Amazon, and even deleted a couple (do I really need a whole CD's worth of Robbie Williams?)

Maybe with an MP3 player I can finally put together, track-by-track, that Heaven 17 compilation I've been looking for a very long time...

Anyway, you may also remember that for the past couple of years or so I've liked to do a little "countdown" on my blog or blogs, a daily series, as'twere. Last year it was things that make me happy, the year before, "Women My Own Age."

(Not that women my own age don't make me happy, of course)

This year I've decided to go after a variant of last year's "happiness" theme. For each day in August, I will name, and try to illustrate, a person, place, or thing that I find to be delightful.

Just to make it interesting (for me if no one else), I'm also going to try to keep these relatively fresh, meaning no naming favorite images from Star Wars, Beatles or Kirsty MacColl songs, or Amber Benson.

Still, today I think I'll start with something simple, and that is Coraline on DVD. I saw the movie in the theater and thought it was awesome. Having recently re-viewed it on DVD, I can say that it definitely stands up, and the special features are some of the best I've ever seen.

My mind boggles at the scale of the work involved. I've said this before: Even thought I understand how animators "do" it--the series of sequential pictures "flipped" together to create the illusion of life--I still don't really understand how they do it...




Also worth noting in the behind-the-scenes interviews, just as being evidence of how quickly people change at some ages, is Dakota Fanning, who of course voiced Coraline.

In footage shot for Coraline publicity no more than a year or two ago, she was still a girl. We see pictures of her now and she's clearly growing up into a charming young lady.

(To be perfectly fair, in this particular picture she's in character for Runaways...but I think my point still holds).