TV Episode Recap/Review – The Walking Dead “Tell it to the Frogs”
by Mokibobolink on Nov.14, 2010, under Drama, Horror, Television
The Walking Dead “Tell it to the Frogs” Season 1 Episode 3 – Life sure is complicated when the world has been overrun by zombies. Not only do you have to hide away in the woods so that you don’t get eaten, you also have some really tough interpersonal relationships, too.
First off, we were all wondering about how Shane and Lori got together and why she thought Rick was dead. Now we know it was because he told her that. We’re still not sure why though and that’s something I’m very curious about. Was it because he always had a thing for Lori and took advantage of Rick getting shot and a zombie apocalypse to seduce her? Or was he told Rick was dead by someone else?
Secondly, things come to a head when Dickson’s brother gets wind of what happened in Atlanta. Not willing to leave a man to die out in the elements from thirst, Rick decides to go back for him but Lori isn’t happy. I can’t blame her but at the same time it made me admire Rick even more. Talk about integrity, this guy is dripping with it.
Meanwhile tensions are high in the camp as there are more than a few unlikeable folks in the group, including a man who abuses his family. People who would never spend more time together than passing each other in a grocery store aisle are now living together in a community and like it or not and they need to start making some rules about what is acceptable behavior. Shane may have been taking his anger out and gone too far by beating up the abusive husband but his point was still valid, in my opinion.
My favorite bits….
Dickson’s slow descent into insanity interrupted by seeing the dead trying to break down the door. Okay I know what I said about this guy last week but no one deserves to die like that.
Glenn passing the truck, still having a great time in his Challenger. LOL, I love him.
I’m with Carl. Frog legs? Ew.
Glenn justifying drawing attention to their position with “I got a cool car…”
Bawling like a baby when Rick was reunited with his family.
Rick telling Lori that he knew they were alive.
Realizing that was Rick’s ring that Lori was wearing around her neck. I don’t know why but I hadn’t figured that out, I thought it was hers and that he still had his.
Glenn’s disappointment as the “vultures” stripped his car. Oh man, that would suck.
Finding it pretty horrible to watch them all kill that one lonely walker, especially when the head kept moving. Wow, I guess they really do have to get the brain or they won’t die.
Shane diving between Rick and Dickson’s brother.
Shane clarifying that he did indeed mean “douchebag” when speaking about Dickson.
Lori and Carl telling Rick they didn’t want him to go.
Realizing that Jim is the same guy who played the “family dog” in Friday’s episode of Supernatural. Huh, small world.
Rick telling Shane his bag was like the bottom of an old lady’s purse. Does that mean he’s got some butterscotch candies in there, too?
Shane telling Rick he didn’t like what he was doing, but giving him bullets to help him out anyway.
Carl telling Lori not to worry because nothing had killed Rick yet. Aw, that was awesome. What a great kid.
The ladies questioning why they’re the ones doing all the day to day work. Yeah, good point.
The ladies discussing what they miss the most and two of them deciding they missed their vibrators the most. LOL!
The sight of that handcuff and the hand next to it and knowing that Dickson decided to take off his own hand. Holy cow.
So what did you think of the episode? Got any favorite bits of your own? I’d love to hear from you!
More The Walking Dead Reviews….
The Walking Dead Season 1 Episode 1 “Days Gone By”
The Walking Dead Season 1 Episode 2 “Guts”
Book Review – “Your Best Birth” by Ricki Lake
by Mokibobolink on Nov.11, 2010, under Non Fiction
Check out this great review of the book “Your Best Birth” by Ricki Lake – a guest post by Joy Paley.
Being only 6 weeks pregnant with my first child (and an admitted overachiever), I picked up Your Best Birth. I was simultaneously excited about my pregnancy and already overwhelmed by the options. My mom, an ex-hippie who used a midwife with all her children, is strongly in favor of an at-home birth. While I’ve got a little of this au natural bent myself, I’m also a realist and scared of anything going wrong for me or my baby. Since the subtitle of this book is “Know All Your Options, Discover the Natural Choices, and Take Back the Birth Experience,” I hoped this book would help me understand my choices as a soon-to-be mom, and it definitely did.
The book is written by Ricki Lake (yep, the former daytime talk show host) and Abby Epstein, the director of the recent film The Business of Being Born. The book is arranged into four sections, titled “Know Your Options,” “Putting Your Dream Team Together,” “Interventions: the Slippery Slope,” and “Take Back Your Birth.” The book’s aim is to show American women how we go about birth here, and that it doesn’t necessarily need to be this way.
What do I mean by “this way”? Well, the book opens by describing a hypothetical birth in your standard American hospital. While I “knew” what birth is like there (I’ve been with my sister during the birth of her children), putting myself in this hypothetical situation really opened my eyes. The hospital setting is so clinical and removed. Duh, you’re saying, of course it is, it’s a hospital. That’s its job! And you’re right, but one of the main questions of the book, “what kind of birth do you want?” made me question how ideal such a situation would be for me.
I was a little on-guard at the beginning of the part about the hospital birth. I was worried that it was a scare tactic to show me how horrendous hospital births are, but it didn’t read like that at all. The narrative voice is very even and didn’t feel preachy. The down to earth, woman-to-woman tone makes the advice accessible and not like orders you have to follow to be a good mom.
I think most women, even those who very seriously doubt that they will have an out-of-hospital birth, can benefit from this approach. Why? At its most basic, the book is a manual for empowering yourself as an expectant mother. The message isn’t that home birth is “right” and hospital is “wrong,” but to determine what you need to have the best labor you possibly can. Their advice for finding the best birth team for you is practical and helpful, and it doesn’t just include doulas and midwives, but also how to also find the type of OB/Gyn and hospital for your specific labor needs.
If you’re expecting, this book has something to offer you, even if you feel sure that you’ll need a C-section or hospital birth. It’s not a 1960s manual on how to have your baby in a field of wildflowers; it’s a well-researched but down-to-earth guide on ensuring that childbirth is how and where you want it to be.
Joy Paley is a guest blogger for An Apple a Day and a writer on the subject of becoming a medical transcriptionist for the Guide to Health Education.
Interested in Writing a guest post for The Positively Positive? Drop us a line on the Contact page!
More Book Reviews….
The Hunt by Muffy Morrigan
Wedding Journals & Keepsake Gifts by Tammy Kushnir
TV Episode Recap/Review – The Walking Dead “Guts”
by Mokibobolink on Nov.07, 2010, under Drama, Horror
The Walking Dead “Guts” Season 1 Episode 2 – What do you do when most of the population is dead or walking dead and there are still jackasses around? That was a question posed in this episode after Rick gets saved from the mess he was in inside the tank and meets up with a group of refugees. One of them (played by Michael Rooker) is the kind of jerk you hope you’ll only ever see on television but unfortunately for Rick (and the rest of the group) the guy is there in living color and so despicable I wanted to put a bullet in his head myself. Rick does the next best thing when he handcuffs the idiot to the roof, but when everyone has to run for their lives and leave him there, I realized that was an awful thing to do, even to a guy like that.
Another interesting question posed in tonight’s episode – how far would you be willing to go to save yourself? If your answer didn’t involve butchering a zombie and plastering their stinking guts all over your body, well then you might not make it in the world of the walking dead. Because that’s just what Rick and another survivor are forced to do in order to escape the stumbling horde outside. And let me tell ya, you know you’re watching some special kind of tv when there’s a scene where people chop up a dead rotting corpse and spread the gore all over themselves.
My favorite bits…
Lori taking off her necklace and wedding band before she and Shane got busy in the woods. Still very curious what made her leave Rick behind. Did she think he was dead already?
The fact that Glenn kept calling Rick a dumbass. LOL.
TV Episode Recap/Review – The Walking Dead “Days Gone By”
by Mokibobolink on Nov.01, 2010, under Drama, Horror
The Walking Dead “Days Gone By” – Season 1 Episode 1 – I was lucky enough to go to The Walking Dead panel at this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego (CLICK HERE to read my coverage of the panel at Daemon’s TV). I had never heard of the comic book series but I was intrigued by the description in the program so I thought I’d check it out. The first thing they did was show us an extended preview of the show and right then and there I knew I was hooked. Just a few minutes of this show and I knew I was going to love it. Heck, I actually sought out the AMC booth on the vendor’s floor specifically so I could watch the preview over and over. Is that weird?
Sometimes a preview doesn’t live up to the hype and I was really, really hoping that wouldn’t be the case with The Walking Dead. But after the first scene, I knew I had nothing to worry about. It was even better than I expected. What I liked when I saw the preview was that I could see how this show was going to be about more than just the horror and gore. It’s taking a very horrific situation, one that’s been done to death (if you’ll pardon the pun) in tons of movies, and is adding a human touch to it by letting us see what this would do to people and how it effects them emotionally.
Rick isn’t a super hero, he is affected by what he sees and I couldn’t help but to put myself in his place. How would I deal with the news that the world had gone to hell while I slept, everyone I knew was gone and there were creatures that ate people running around? I think Rick took it really well. I probably would have been a drooling mess.
People close to the characters turning into zombies is nothing new but while in most movies they make it a joke or just blow them away, in this show we really see what it’s like when a zombie is someone you used to love – a mother, a wife, a friend. I never thought the sight of a zombie could do anything except make me scream, but there were scenes in this episode where I cried for them. That is something I didn’t expect at all.
Another thing I liked about this show was (continue reading…)
Theme Park Review: Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights 2010
by Mokibobolink on Oct.29, 2010, under Halloween/Horror
This year I went to Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights 2010 no less than five times. How, you ask? By taking advantage of their “9 Killer Night Deal Pass” back in September. The pass was for nine different nights – including the first two weekends, some Fridays, Thursdays and Sundays – except Halloween of course). For me it was the best deal ever. One would think that going to the same park over and over like that would get boring but it didn’t, not even in the slightest.
My friend and I discovered that we got burned out pretty early, so we usually never stayed past midnight, sometimes we were gone by eleven. The lines get longer and longer as the night goes on so we would usually run and do as many things as we could while they were lighter, then eat dinner, watch the Bill and Ted show (yes, every time) then maybe one more maze and we were done. So we didn’t get to every attraction until we’d been there a few times and by then we’d picked out our favorites.
The Mazes
By far our favorite was Friday the 13th maze because it’s just a good old fashioned scary maze and classic scares are the best in my opinion. Just give me a big guy in a creepy mask with a machete or a chainsaw and I’m a very happy girl.
Second up was Nightmare on Elm Street. Another classic with tons of Freddy Krueger clones running around to make you scream like a little girl….which we did gleefully.
Third favorite was definitely the Terror Tram. I love this maze because they drive you out to the Universal backlot and drop you off in the middle of a bunch of great sets like the Bates Motel, the Psycho House and the plane crash from War of the Worlds. But it’s not just the background that makes this maze work – it’s the monsters in it. All of them always seem to be having a great time and up there they found ways to not only make us scream but usually laugh, too (like the one who held up a severed foot and said “Smell my feet.”).
My next favorite was (continue reading…)
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