Stirring the Fires of Imagination

I love Young Adult fiction! I don't know why, but some of these books just come up with the craziest concepts, or put a totally new spin on them. I just finished reading Cinder by Melissa Meyer and I am still buzzing with adrenaline. I love it. I'll post a formal review of it later but I think I finished in, like, a day? After work tomorrow I am planning on stopping by Walmart and oh so casually being like, "Oh, yeah, Dad, I need to run into Stuff-Mart real quick and pick up something... No just something. Do we need lemons while we're here?" I will probably have to pick up the next two books if they all end the same way Cinder did... not that that's a bad thing. ;-)
My brain feels on fire now. If I didn't have to get up early I would totally right into the wee hours of the night. How far away is the weekend? Curses. I guess I will just have to go without TV for a while. Hahaha.
But, seriously.
Going back to my opening statement, I do love Young Adult fiction, although some of it I'll relent can get tedious and predictable. But then there are those times when you pick up a book, read the book jacket, glance at a few pages... and abracadabra, you've got yourself a new summer obsession. I think I gravitate toward the YA genre because it offers a really colorful perspective for me. Hmm... let me see if I can word that better. When you pick up a book that you know has been written for adults, your brain enters into this mindset. You become really serious and any humor is dry, forced, or inappropriate. But with YA, I feel like there're no limits, no constraints. I've found myself trying to incorporate more and more of the real world and just logistics and things like that into my fantasy stories, and I truly believe they have suffered for it. Then I look at something like Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid and... have you ever read the original Little Mermaid? Yeah, it's ending is not Disney-approved, but the way he writes about the under-sea kingdom is magnetic. That's the word I would use. Magnetic. And mesmerizing. And beautiful. I love that YA novels have the capacity to be beautiful, funny, imaginative, captivating and new. Although certain criteria are usually met, I find the stories themselves wonderfully engrossing. And when they are spins on classis, like Cinder, it piques my interest even more. Yeah, I'm a sucker for the classics, and even more so for Disney, and this book just hit all the right markers.

-Grace

Celebrity Look-Alikes: Kimberley Nixon VS Ariel Winter

This is what I do at night between dinner and shlumping up to bed. I go on YouTube or Pinterest and find whatever it is I've been thinking about that day, and occasionally I will come across a face of someone who looks like someone else. A look-alike. My last post was also about celebrity look-alikes (Benedict Cumberbatch and Colin Morgan) and last night I came across another pair that I felt like sharing. I wonder if this is going to become a thing now. Me posting celebrity look-alikes. Sounds kind of creepy if you think about it.... Anyway, our contestants for today are...

Kimberley Nixon


And...

Ariel Winter




Last night I found a list of actors who consistently die in their movies. Catchy, right? Totally alluring. Among the list of actors was Sean Bean. He dies in so many movies he ought to be called the Jet Li of Scotland, minus the martial arts as far as I'm aware, and of course with ginger hair. Anyway, the reel they showed in the video was of a movie called Black Death. Miss Kimberely Nixon starred in it alongside Mr. Bean and Eddie Redmayne. When her picture came up I literally did a double-take. Can you see why?

-Grace

Celebrity Almost-Look-Alikes: Colin Morgan VS Benedict Cumberbatch

This is totally random, but I feel like doing it anyway.
During one of my YouTube binges, I stumbled across the BBC's Merlin clips... and I could help noticing... Merlin (played by Colin Morgan) looks a bit like Benedict Cumberbatch.
 
(Colin Morgan on set of Merlin)


(Benedict Cumberbatch)

Well, maybe it's harder to tell between these pictures, but what about these ones?


[Colin Morgan on set of Merlin (picture enlarged because when it was resized, it looked all stretched-out)]


(Benedict Cumberbatch at the 2014 Oscars)

...Well, I think they could play relatives or something. Watch a few Merlin clips and you will see. You will be like, "Hey, he kind of does look like Benedict Cumberbatch in that scene."

Photos courtesy of www.fanpop.com (top photo, Morgan), insidemovies.ew.com (top photo, Cumberbatch), www.scifi.about.com (bottom photo, Morgan), and www.popsugar.com (bottom photo, Cumberbatch).

-Grace

Postscript: Mr. Cumberbatch's top photo was taken I believe by Jason Merritt of Getty Images.