The Squeee

Today is Richard Armitage's 40th birthday! Congratulations, Richard, wherever you are! :) I'm currently busy with my parents over from Sweden, so have a few posts lined up beforehand for this week. (This is one of them.) Richard Armitage wallpaper by BccMee (she does some beautiful ones, you should go check out her blog!) To celebrate the man's birthday, I share with you the message I wrote for Calexora 's birthday book. See if you can crack the cypher and spot the hidden message! :)

James Stewart 's uniform On the way back from the airport, where we picked up my parents, we stopped by at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford. Lots of hangers with planes of all kinds. There's also an exhibition of an operations room from the 1940s, and you can walk through a Concorde and everything. A Concorde is smaller than I thought it was going to be and very claustrophobic! All in all, a good day out. Saw a piece of the Tirpitz warship, a midget submarine and lots and lots of airplanes. Oh, and actor James Stewart's uniform, because he used to be in the US Air Force! :)

A Swedish friend shared this with me on Facebook, saying she had a sudden urge to come visit me in the UK next spring. This is why:

There are fans of someone, and then there are the so-called "Beliebers" (*gag*), who are so obnoxious on there that Twitter seems to have banned "Justin Bieber" from trending. Ways around it? Certainly. Weapon of choice at the moment is "Derek Bieber". Guessing Derek is the poor lad's middle name or something, but to be honest, I don't care. Aww, he wuvs his fans! ...I think I need to puke.

Hollywood, PLEASE will you STOP FIXING WHAT ISN'T BROKEN?! Latest in line with the ever-present threat of being re-made, Entertainment Weekly report that Kenny Ortega has signed on to direct a re-make of Dirty Dancing . In a statement, Ortega - who was the choreographer of the original film - said: The opportunity to direct Dirty Dancing is like returning home for me…. Patrick Swayze set the bar for men dancing in the movies as Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire did before him. I believe everywhere you look there is evidence that the talent is out there and I can’t wait to begin the process of discovering the next breakout triple-threats.

This post would not have been made if it wasn't for BrontëBlog who alerted me to their existance, and hacsince1991 on YouTube for uploading them! It's SOME deleted scenes (NOT all of them!) from Jane Eyre (2011), which comes out on Region 1 DVD (North America) on 16 August. Us Brits still have to wait for the cinema release, which is one month today! The wait is almost over ...

The Horrible Histories crew have been busy rehearsing for BBC Proms recently. Here's a first look at the show, which is set to air some time later this month! :D Many thanks to Montague Fuzzlepeck on Facebook for the tip!

Lammas , or Lughnasadh (Celtic), is celebrated either on 1 August or 2 August, and celebrates the first harvest. Personally, I celebrate it on 2 August and find Lammas a lot easier to spell. ;) Summer is still in full force, and will be for a while longer, but fruits are starting to ripen, fields are turning yellow and our kitchen gardens are bountiful with the treasures of Mother Nature. My favourite Pagan festivals are the harvest festivals, but that's because I like autumn. Around Mabon (the next holiday in the Wheel of the Year, i.e. the Autumn Equinox in September), we have the holiday as a pivot point between summer and autumn, but I've noticed the change more dramatically in Sweden. Before Mabon, it's basically summer. Then Mabon comes, and the trees quickly start turning yellow. For a harvest festival, I like to bake, even if it's just a little cake or something, as grains are one of the important things currently being harvested. Haven't made one today

Remember back in June, when the news about Pottermore broke? Well, yesterday, 31 July 2011, the site opened for beta testing. Or maybe I should say beta registration? Everyone wanted in on the action, so the site promptly went down - actually, it went down before midnight the day before! And when the site was back up again ... every available account had been snatched. Moo. :( Every day for a week, there will be a chance to get a login, though! You need to keep your eyes peeled on the Pottermore website , because once the clue of the day is up, you're competing against a hoard of others who are trying to do the same and there is only a set number of accounts they have available each day, and once that quota is filled up, you're on your own. Even if you've managed to get the clue.

It's been AGES since I last did one of this - in fact, just under two years. Time do do it again, I reckon. Could do posts about everyone in Harry Potter, but I'm going to start with someone who really has changed a LOT: Matthew Lewis, who played Neville Longbottom in the films. Cast your mind back to 2001 ... *wibbly wobbly effect and harp music* Awwwww! Neville's a clumsy little loser, basically, who can't even keep track of a pet toad. He's bad at everything except Herbology, but he still manages to stand up to his friends and say enough is enough. A true Gryffindor, and we love him.

Before I completely forget, I have to quick recall what little I remember of a dream I had last night: Richard Armitage had got married. ♫ "IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME!" ♫ His new missus was an author and scriptwriter, but not well-known at all. Not heard of full stop, I should say. They had met on set of ... Captain America or something?

SingStar is pretty much the only game I play on the Playstation 3. Have got a bunch of the discs, and today I played around with the 90s one (PS2) I got most recently but hadn't tried yet. Being Swedish does not guarantee a love of ABBA. I, on the other hand, let out a squee when finding out SingStar were bringing out an ABBA special. Why SingStar rocks: It's all the fun of karaoke! But with ... scores! highscores! the original song (and video!) playing in the background, not some cheap and nasty instrumental cover version! bars to show how the melody goes up or down a nice, uncheesy interface the ability to turn the microphone sound up or down as you choose (down to 0 in my case - I love to sing, not to HEAR myself sing) no echo-y reverb effect thingy (seriously, how cheesy is that?)

This really has to be seen to be believed. Battleship the bloody movie. I kid you not. That's right, they've turned THIS: into a film. And not just ANY film! No, it has a plot and everything (kind of). Thus spake Yahoo! Movies : Taylor Kitsch and Alexander Skarsgard play brothers and naval officers facing off against an alien invasion. I really don't remember there being any aliens whenever I played Battleship. Do you? Anyway, here it is, in all it's ... err ... traileryness. (Yes, I really can't think of a more descriptive word.)

James Howson as Heathcliff in the upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation: With thanks to @Film4 for sharing this on Twitter. :) Doesn't look too menacing here, does he?

According to the show I just caught the second half of on ITV1 (sources say it's being re-run on Saturday - HELL-O DVR!), the greatest moment from the Harry Potter films is ... none other than the first glimpse of Hogwarts. (Second and third being character deaths, #3 from HP7:1, and #2 from HP6 - you know the ones I mean. Of the two, I preferred #3, because of the words that are spoken just before, because they make what happens next even more sad.) Do you remember the first time you saw Hogwarts on screen? For the first film, I went to see it at the cinema with my mother, who has read and enjoyed the books too. I remember sitting there in the darkness, and then Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry came into view, and I was completely blown away. How magnificent it looked, perched up on that cliffside! It was so incredibly BIG! In fact, my comment at the time was that it was just like I had imagined it, only much bigger and with a vastly better 3D rendering. It was AMA

One of these days, I should make a post with the pictures I took when skulking around Wollaton Hall, but they're not all that interesting. You can't see anything, as there was a wall and a gate and stuff in front and from the angle you could see into the park, you could only see a car park in the distance. So instead, here's the teaser trailer:

You can ignore it. Oh, and while I'm at it: Steps are re-forming , apparently. Was it the last thing on your mind as well? ;) By the way, if you're signed up to getting email notifications of new posts to this blog ... could you let me know in a comment whether or not you've been receiving any email updates recently? Thanks! Just trying to make sure things are working like they should.

Dear Richard, You have delighted us much recently by posing for pictures with a beard and then there were those Captain America shots as well and the film opens tomorrow in the US (next Friday in the UK) and you attended the red carpet premiere in Hollywood and everything. Great to see you looking so well and sounding so well too. I particularly like this one. (Screencap by RichardArmitageNet.com ) However. We need to have a talk about that new beard of yours.

When someone asks me, what is my favorite book, I answer “Wuthering Heights”. In one of the student organization I belong to we have had book-nights a few times. The first time I took this book with me, and someone actually asked, why this book. I just answered, that whenever I move (and as a student, I have moved a lot!), this is the book that always comes with me! My history with “Wuthering Heights” goes back into the year 2002 or 2003, when we had to read it for our English Literature course. It was out from all the libraries so I found one from the antique bookshop, which is great, because now I have my own personal copy =) Since 2004 I have read it every year at least once. Have already done it in 2011 and not long ago in June. I think I still don't know, why exactly I love this book so much! Is it the plot, the characters, the setting, the era or something else. Or perhaps all of these together. I'm not an educated literature aesthete, especially when I'm not read

If Heath Ledger and Martin Freeman had a love child, this is what he'd look like: