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Wishing everyone who's more in the path of Irene than we turned out to be dry basements, unbroken windows and uninterrupted electricity!

I woke up this morning to find the storm had more or less passed us by (4 hours inland from Cape Lookout, so no big surprise). It's windy out there, but not enough to knock down a small boy on a scooter. A branch falling on a wire could knock out the power, but that true pretty much every day.

The threat of Irene, however, was enough to have them cancel the outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream we were supposed to see last night (my ten-year-old's first Shakespeare play). I thought it would have been cool to see the play amid the flying pine needles, but I suppose the actors thought otherwise.

Anyway, have two entirely dissimilar youtube videos:

1. Thanks for lilithlessfair I have been watching The Hour with Romola Garai, Dominic West and the wonderful Ben Wishaw. It is highly entertaining, and reminding me how much I loved Wishaw as Keats. So, in honor of the summer being almost over, here he is reading one of my favorite poems:



2. And because every day is crazy bird day:



Okay, must go check and see if I'm right about the winds not being strong enough to take the boys to Oz--stay safe everyone!

So there was some talk of the boys and I going to see Thor on Sunday, but in the end we went to see the G-rated Rio, which is about a blue macaw boy chick stolen from the Brazilian rainforest, and reared by a bookstore owner in Minnesota, who is then brought back to Brazil to mate with a girl macaw (to preserve the species, you know!). Adventures ensue, and Blu, the boy macaw, who never learned to fly in Minnesota, eventually finds his wings through love. As one does.

It wasn't the best plotted animated movie I've ever seen, though pretty to look at, what with the tropical birds and all. Still, we found it endearing because it reminded us of our pet Cockatiel, Gerry, who also had a hard time learning to fly (and still doesn't do it right)--though he was hand-raised in North Raleigh, rather than being snatched up by the illegal bird trade.

The funniest thing about the movie is that Blu, the boy macaw, is voiced by Jesse Eisenberg, so I kept imagining a different movie in which Jewel, the girl macaw dumps him, and he goes off in a huff to invent "BeakBook" in revenge. But birds apparently don't get hung up on those sorts of things, so Blu and Jewel flew off into the Brazilian nature reserve to make babies instead.

It also reminded me of this awesome Sherlock bird!fic I read recently. I am not much for pet stories, but, obviously, I have a big soft spot for birds, and this story works like a charm. Even if birds aren't your thing, it's still a wonderful John-Sherlock-Lestrade friendship fic.

The Case of the Unexpected Guest by thirdbird_fic

Also, let me draw your attention to the fantastic Five Acts fill brighteyed_jill wrote for me--the acts are fever, touch and dancing, and it's John/Sherlock (gen)--do I really need to say anything more?