Neville Longbottom Is Completely Hot (In Case That Has Escaped Your Notice)

It is time for us to delve into my most recent obsession, which is: Neville Longbottom.

Actually Neville Longbottom, the book Neville Longbottom, has been on my top ten list of fictional characters ever since the seventh book came out (if you haven’t read the seventh book, that’s fine, but we can never be friends and also if I see you in the street I may kick you in the shins). That is because Neville Longbottom is an unarguable Guy Full of Awesome who openly defies Voldemort and is completely humble at the same time. He’s kind of like Harry Potter, but with a lot less angst.

So I have had Neville Longbottom love for a long time. The recent part of this obsession started when I first saw Neville Longbottom as he looks now. Technically, in real life, his name is Matthew Lewis and he is the guy who plays Neville Longbottom, but obviously I will always call him Neville Longbottom because that’s just how I roll. Have you seen him recently? If you haven’t, here you go. 

(source: Tumbler, originally from foxeailes)

 You're welcome. And also, do you see what I mean? Do you understand why I could be staying up at night thinking of ways I could marry him? Not that I am doing that. But do you understand what would drive me to such behavior? If you don't you are probably male. If you don't understand and you are aren't male I don't think that we would get along very well, probably because I would greet you with "What the heck is wrong with you?" and that tends to put a damper on any relationship. Here is a relatively hot male actor who has played one of my all time favorite fictional characters, ever, and he is British. I would explain why that is important but if you don't already understand then you're probably not from this planet and maybe you are lost? Can we help you get back? Yes? 

I can't. I'm too busy looking at Neville Longbottom. Maybe you can get Daniel Radcliffe's female fans to help you out, assuming there are any left (sorry, Daniel).

K Talks About Attractiveness, Round Two

Can I marry Jim Halpert? Or maybe not? 

These are the questions that plague me most of the time, because, as far as I am concerned, Jim Halpert is The Awesome. But since he is already married, I am thinking that I had better settle for John Krasinski. 

Or at least, I HAD been thinking that I had better just settle for John Krasinski, because he is hilarious even when he is NOT Jim Halpert, and so he is practically the next best thing, but then I found out that John Krasinski is married. 

I found this out from my brother, who informed me that Emily Blunt, henceforth known as “John Krasinski’s stupid wife,” is hot (I’m sure she is a lovely person in real life). I don’t know why he would think that I would care about this, but apparently it is vitally important to him. I am not allowed to say that I find John Krasinski attractive, though, because the last time that I did, I got very strange looks from the male members of my family. My mother, however, completely understands this point of view. 

Actually, this is apparently a widespread phenomenon, because every boy I’ve talked to has been extremely weirded out by the fact that I, and several of my close friends, find John Krasinski attractive. “Why?” they ask, looking at a picture of John Krasinksi, possibly upside down, in an attempt to understand on what universe and, apparently, at what angle he would be considered more than Not Hideous. 

“Because,” the girls explain, taking the picture away from the boys because they are getting their fingerprints all over John Krasinski’s face, and that is a crime, “he’s adorable. Also funny.” 

Actually, it is mainly the funny part. Don’t get me wrong: John Krasinski is not hideous. But he is also not the type of man that women would stop in the street and say, “Excuse me, but you are hot.” 

“But,” you might be saying, “nobody does that to anybody. It is creepy.” To which I say: shut up. That is not the point. The point is, he is not ridiculously attractive. But he is hilarious, which takes his slightly dorky boy-next-door looks up about sixteen gajillion levels to Movie Star Hot. It’s sort of like a math problem, except I actually understand it.  

Anyway, humor is definitely a strong point in the attractiveness of any given member of the male species. This does not seem to work in reverse, however. For instance, I have never once seen a boy drooling over a picture of, say, Tina Fey, and, when questioned, have them cite her wittiness and hilarity as a reason for her attractiveness. It doesn’t seem to work that way. 

Rather, the boys that I know have a tendency to drool over, say, Hayden Panettiere. Which is nice, but she is not funny. In fact, after watching her in every Neutrogena commercial on the face of the planet, I kind of think that she is the opposite of funny and a soul killer and the very sound of her voice saying “gorgeous, flawless makeup” makes me want to karate chop my television. 

Anyway. 

The point is, John Krasinski is taken, and so is Jim Halpert. So I am just going to have to find somebody else who is witty and funny to date and possibly at an undetermined point in the future get married to. 

Or maybe I will just become a nun. That seems like the easier option, even if I am not, strictly speaking, Catholic.

Me and the Old Spice Guy

So I have a new hero, and he is the Old Spice Guy. 

I know that this is nothing new because, presumably, the Old Spice Guy is everybody’s hero. How could he not be? He sits on a horse! Looking awesome! Smelling awesome! Telling other people how to smell awesome! He has bulging muscles! What’s not to like?

I am going to start emulating him any day now. I can just imagine coming up to people and demanding that they look at me. Now look at themselves. Now look at me. Sadly, they are not me. But they can look like me if they buy a Superman t-shirt, or baggy sweats, or whatever fetching outfit I’ve put on that day.

Or I might go a different route and tell them that they can smell like me, but that seems like it might bring about copyright issues. No, I think looking like me is the way to go.

Of course, nobody is going to want to look like me, and telling them how they can, in the weirdest way possible, might isolate people and make it difficult to make new friends. But that is the price I am willing to pay to be like the Old Spice Guy.

Obviously, he will always be cooler than me, but there is nothing I can do about that. For one thing, I do not have a horse. So I will just have to settle for semi-cool.

Oh, well.  

In Which My Hobo Dreams Are Shattered

It is official. Law and Order has made it impossible for me to leave my house, ever.

Specifically it is Law and Order: Criminal Intent, but let’s not point fingers here. The point is that I will have to live as a hermit for the rest of my life, and also, it has made my dream of being a hobo impossible because hoboes live on street corners and on Law and Order, if you live on a street corner, you are almost guaranteed to die.

In fact, on Law and Order, if you live anywhere in the New York vicinity, and are: pretty, ugly, young, old, rich, poor, a drug-dealer, an anti-drug crusader, a prostitute, a CEO, black, white, Asian, a nun, a heretic, a billionaire’s wife, child, nephew, uncle, or second cousin sixteen times removed, or, as far as I can tell, breathing, you are, at some point, probably going to be murdered.

It’s basic mathematics. There are something like ten thousand episodes of Law and Order, because it has been on television for approximately a hundred years. In each of these episodes, at least one person dies. Sometimes two or three or twenty people die. If you average that all and multiply the number of episodes by the number of victims on each episode, you get….

Um….sixteen trillion dead people.

My math might be a little off on this one, but the point remains. There are only slightly more than sixteen trillion people in New York, which means that, theoretically, according to Law and Order, everybody in New York City should be dead by now. And yet, they persist in being in New York City and living in New York City and telling the rest of America how much better New York City is and how much more urbane and cool. This just feeds my theory that New Yorkers are probably zombies, but I digress.

The point is, with that many dead people in every episode, and with such a wide variety of victims, it’s starting to make me nervous to leave my house. In about half of the episodes, leaving their house is exactly what got the victim killed in the first place. If they had just stayed in, maybe ordered in some pizza and watched a nice crime show, it never would have happened. They would still be alive and kicking and telling the rest of the world how much better New York City is than them.

On the other hand, I am also nervous to stay inside my house. The other half of the victims on Law and Order are killed inside their homes. If they had just gone out, maybe gone out for dinner and seen a nice movie, they would still be alive and kicking etc. etc.

You can see my problem. If I stay in, I am in danger. If I go out, I am in danger. I have no sanctuary. I am slowly but surely becoming a nervous wreck. Since I started watching the show, I have begun the process of creating defenses for myself to make my house marginally safer, which include checking every door sixteen times a night to make sure that they’re all locked, pulling down the shades, considering maybe buying sixteen security systems, considering buying a very large, very loyal German Shepherd, possibly named Garbanzo, to sleep next to my bed, and also keeping my cell phone close by me while I sleep so that I can call the police if anything bad happens, or if I suspect that anything bad might be happening, which may or may not include my sprinklers going off. 

Actually, I don’t think that the last precaution actually does all that much. From everything I know about police officers, they never show up to the scene of the crime until after the victim is dead.

Of course, all my knowledge of police officers is gleaned off of Law and Order. So possibly my sample is a little skewed.

What I really need is to actually marry a detective. As far as I can tell, detectives never have their homes broken into, and they are never killed, unless their contracts are up and the TV producers need a way to get rid of the character. But we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

When It Comes To Dealing With Dead Mice, I Am Basically Batman

Do you know why high school sucks? It is because teenagers think it is funny to make their peers look at dead mice.

Some of you are probably thinking, “That has never happened to me in my entire life. Is it possible that it happened to you and you are bitter about it?” To which I answer: be quiet. I hate your face. Also, you are not a psychologist and it is probably illegal to try to act like one when you aren’t. Sort of like pretending that you are a doctor. Do you know what happens to people who go around pretending that they are qualified to delve into people’s psyches, or administer brain surgery? Bad things, that’s what.

Now that we have dealt with those jerk-heads, I’ll move on to the real story here, which is: that I hate mice.

I don’t like them. At all. Ever. I don’t even really like Mickey Mouse, because he is bossy and a goody two shoes and everybody knows that Donald Duck is better. In real life, when I see them, I have been known to have what is medically referred to as a meltdown. This is probably partly because when I was younger, my family dogs liked to make a habit of killing mice or rats and laying them out where we (translation: I) could find them, as though they expected some sort of reward for scaring the living crap out of me. The only time when I have ever liked rodents was on Ratatouille, and that’s because they could talk and they weren’t all pompous and uppity and Pixar is magic and can make even the most horrifying things, like monsters or talking toys, endearing and cute.

You get the picture. Mice and I are not friends. In fact we are enemies. Even if, say, Stuart Little, who is arguably the most likeable of all the mice in the world, came up to me and said, “Hey, you want to be friends?” I would say, “NO!” and then maybe hit him with a frying pan.

Of course I don’t demonstrate this aversion to rodents in public because people (by which I mean: teenage boys) like to make other people freak out by subjecting them to the object of their fears. High school (I don’t know if you have noticed this) is full of teenage boys. So of course I didn’t bring it up. It is like bringing up the fact that you are ticklish. Anybody with siblings knows that this is practically like giving people permission to tickle you. I was not going to give people permission to shove rodents in my face. It was just not going to happen.

Now, in high school, I was on the yearbook staff, and at the beginning of my senior year we were having an issue with mice in the building, mainly: they were trying to infiltrate it and make all of us their slaves (nobody ever came out and said that, blatantly, but I knew that this was the mice’s plan). Along those same lines, we had little electrical outlets in certain rooms in the school that I can best describe as small boxes that were installed in the floor. They had little covers over the top of them and space inside. The mice liked to crawl in here.

One day, during yearbook, we were sitting around, doing the things that yearbook staffers generally do—harass people for interviews, complain about picture quality, eat pancakes—when it came to my attention that something, I believe maybe the phone, needed to be plugged in. As I went around looking for a place to do that, one of our yearbook editors directed me to a specific electric box and told me to plug the phone in there. Unbeknownst to me, he and another editor had found a dead mouse in one of the boxes the day before and had already agreed that, when some poor sucker came along and the opportunity was appropriate, they would trick the poor sucker into finding the dead mouse and maybe they could make them have a heart attack.

I am sure that they thought this would be hilarious, because they apparently had no souls.

So when I opened the electrical box I was greeted by a dead mouse. Because I was practically an adult and fully in charge of my emotions, I descended rapidly into what is referred to in the medical community as freaking out.

Actually, in retrospect, I did better than I thought I would do in that kind of situation, mainly because I didn’t start screaming. Instead my heart stopped and I sat, very quietly, for a minute or two, waiting for it to restart, before it registered that I had been set up and, as such, I had the chase the person who had, to all appearances, set me up, down the hall and maybe possibly catch him and kill him.

I didn’t catch him, mainly because I am slow and out of shape, but also because my heart had only just recently restarted and when your heart restarts, it does not expect you to immediately start running and making it work hard. In fact it hates it when you do that. I was lucky it didn’t stop again, just to teach me a lesson.

Anyway, by the time I got back to the room, and forced the door open because they locked me out, probably to prevent me from strangling him, the story had spread around and there were about forty people in there snickering at my expense. My options at this point included:

1. Crying.

2. Kicking them.

3. Yelling, “HAHA! YOU FELL FOR IT!” and running off like a maniac, potentially leaving them all confused and sort of kind of saving my reputation.

I chose option 4, which was: be an idiot. In an effort to convince them that I was not afraid of mice but was actually merely surprised by finding a dead animal where I did not expect there to be one, I put on a pair of plastic gloves and pulled the dead mouse out of the box to throw it away.

I don’t want to act like a hero or anything, but I totally succeeded in throwing the mouse away. Because I am brave. And that is what brave people do.

And guess what? It only took me about three months to stop being afraid of plugging anything into those electrical outlets. That makes me basically like Batman as far as handling fear and stuff go. Everybody knows that Batman is fearless.

Also, if you see Mickey Mouse, could you not tell him that I was badmouthing him? The last thing I need is a giant rodent coming after me.

Thanks.

Draco Malfoy Is A Bad Boy, Minus The Leather Jacket

I don’t understand the appeal behind Draco Malfoy.

The theory, I think, is that he has undeniable BAD BOY status. For reasons unbeknownst to the rest of the rational world, adolescent girls, particularly of the eleven-to-thirteen-year-old variety, love BAD BOYS. They think that BAD BOYS represent rebellion and awesomeness and sheer and utter coolness. It is even better if these BAD BOYS are portrayed as having a secret soft side that, preferably, only comes out when they are with the woman that they love. Even if this woman is technically not a woman but really just a whiny sixteen-year-old girl who can’t walk three steps without tripping over her own feet.

For some reason, BAD BOYS really go for that kind of thing.

Most people would think that BAD BOYS would date BAD GIRLS so that they could do things like ride motorcycles and get tattooed and pierce random body parts together, in a weird attempt at bonding. But pre-teen girls know better. BAD BOYS do not actually want a girl who acts like them and shares their same interest and superficial stuff like that. BAD BOYS want a girl who will understand them and does not mind their stalker-ish ways. BAD BOYS are really just soft and gooey on the inside and need their one true love to come and puncture them so all that soft and gooey filling can be exposed to the rest of the world. BAD BOYS just want understanding and real, meaningful relationships. They also like to talk by candlelight and will make romantic dinners if requested. Nobody else realizes this but pre-teen girls, but they know BAD BOYS better than anybody else, and they know that if they just love their BAD BOY long enough, he will come around and become a GOOD BOY. Except with a leather jacket and maybe a snottier attitude.

Which brings us back to Draco Malfoy. Admittedly he does not have a leather jacket, but he does try to kill people on a regular basis, which is considered an acceptable substitute. Girls who like BAD BOYS love Draco Malfoy. They are convinced that if only they can find some bumbling girl to fall in love with him, he will become squishy and moldable and will stop calling people insulting names and maybe not be a slimy spineless coward. Since there are very few bumbling girls in the Harry Potter universe, they settle for either Hermione Granger or Ginny Weasley as Malfoy’s intended love interest and work feverishly to convince the people around them that they are right and that Malfoy needs to marry one of them. Then they begin to resent Harry and Ron for winning the girls’ affections and taking them away from Malfoy and his BAD BOY ways. Soon they are arguing that Harry and Ron are probably evil and have maybe started a cult and are out to destroy Malfoy. It is in this way that they convince themselves that a villain is a good guy, and the good guys are the villains.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Malfoy’s admirers are busy teaching themselves how to trip over their own feet and maybe if they’re really talented down a flight of stairs. It is, they know, their only hope for finding their own BAD BOY.

If they are lucky, he might even have a leather jacket.

Nicholas Cage Should Learn Knock-Knock Jokes

Nicholas Cage is not an attractive man.

Any woman who is not blind could tell you that. The men would tell you, also, but men are very weird about talking about the attractiveness, or, conversely, non-attractiveness, of their fellow males, i.e., they refuse to discuss it and will begin a conversation regarding anything else to avoid discussing it, including the weather, what you had for dinner, and weird medical conditions of various family members.

The point is, nearly everybody knows that Nicholas Cage is not attractive. And yet, in the bizarre mindset that Hollywood has, the producers of every Nicholas Cage movie ever have convinced themselves that he is, attractive-wise, on the same level as Jessica Alba or Diane Kruger and it is perfectly legitimate and not at all fishy to have him date these women on movies.

I realize that I sound highly shallow about this, and for the most part I am not a shallow person in real life, but when it comes to actors that I am expected to watch on a screen the size of Donald Trump’s ego, my standards are slightly higher. I demand someone more attractive than Nicholas Cage, and if the women of the world are going to be forced to endure him for two hours at a time, then the men of the world should be forced to endure a woman who is, relatively speaking, on the same level of attractiveness as he is. Which Jessica Alba and Diane Kruger are not.

And it is not just Nicholas Cage. There are hundreds upon hundreds of movies in which relatively unattractive men are paired with beautiful women, and probably about five where the unattractive women are paired with the hot men. This is ridiculous. If women have to suffer through Nicholas Cage movies, then the men should have to suffer through movies in which Ryan Reynolds falls in love with a woman on the same attractiveness level of Nicholas Cage. Possibly Nicholas Cage’s sister. I think that this would level the playing field a bit.

The only situation in which I accept the premise that a not highly-attractive man could date a very attractive woman is if the man is funny. So non attractive actors everywhere should begin brushing up on their witty comebacks and possibly also their knock-knock jokes. It is their only hope.

Sherlock Holmes and Career Choices

Briefly, like for five minutes or so, I hosted the fantasy of one day being Sherlock Holmes.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kndynt2099/5739971866/

Like this. Only with more makeup. 

It was going to be great. I was going to tick people off and run around solving crimes and being more brilliant than everybody else. I thought that this was a good career plan because, generally speaking, when you are more brilliant than everybody else you can usually shame them into doing whatever you want them to do, like bring you pie. So I would never have to drive all the way to the store and buy pie for myself ever again. People would just bring it to my front door, possibly in trucks, and I would never have to leave the house at all. I could sit inside and do more important things, like argue with people over the Internet and watch television. 

Then I realized that being more brilliant than everybody else also meant that people might resent me for it. 

This was when the fantasy started to crumble. 

I realized that I would have to start fearing for my life, which would be a bad thing because I am neurotic enough as it is. This would probably reduce me to hiding out underneath my bed, eating my hair with my comforter pulled over my head muttering reassuring things to myself. Then I would realize that I am claustrophobic and relocate to my closet, which would not make me feel as safe. 

Also, I would have to start doing drugs and alienate everybody and never have any friends. I wasn't too worried about the last two because that is basically how I live right now, but the doing drugs part was slightly concerning, mainly because I am demonic when I drink too much Coca Cola, and I can only imagine what would happen if I put stronger substances into my body. 

Mayhem. Chaos. The end of the universe as we know it. 

That kind of thing. 

So I gave up the idea of being Sherlock Holmes. Forever. 

Now I just want to be Dr. Watson. 

But with better hair.