Mechanical engineer, master of materials science and engineering, professional dabbler. I sometimes fold DNA into shapes for a living. Ask me about cyanobacteria.
Fourish days ago, His Lordship slurped down one of his string toys like a noodle. I don’t know what brain cells collided in his little baby head to make him try this out - he had shown zero interest in ingesting toys before (just about everything else is fair game). The vet told me to just wait and see.
So of course I have been stressy about his intessys ever since. But he woke me up at 7:03 this morning by loudly ralphing it up. Yayyyy! He went straight to his time out spot when I let him out of his crate, but once he realized I wasn’t mad he came and while I was cleaning up tried to supportively lick my hair with his gross puke tongue. Thanks, buddy. Then he went straight back into his crate without me telling him to, and we mutually agreed to go back to sleep…until he puked a bit more at 8:30.
So then I got ready to take him outside, but he decided I was taking too long and leapt the two foot barrier into his thunderdome to pee on the puppy pad there, which. Good boy? Better than the carpet but c'mon, bro. Give me ten seconds to put a coat on, not all of us have fur.
Then he refused to eat his breakfast until 9am on the dot, when it was time to go back in his crate.
“Frodo was a very, very important character in the movies. But he’s also a very difficult character to play and to cast. […] We were convinced that Frodo is gonna be an English actor, ’cause we wanted the Hobbits to basically be English as Tolkien really wrote them. So, we went to London and we started auditioning.
We couldn’t think of any actor to play Frodo. We had nobody in mind. We thought it would be unknown English actor, a young kid. We were in London auditioning for about a month and we’ve probably seen three hundred Frodos. There were two or three that were okay, but nothing magical, you know. ’Cause Frodo had to be magical. Every time the casting room door opened and some nervous young actor would come in, we were saying, ‘is this gonna be Frodo?’ And you sort of know within ten seconds that it wasn’t really Frodo. It was a worry, but we were plugging on.
And then our casting director said to us one day, ‘A package’s just come in the mail. It’s from Elijah Wood’. It was a video tape, a VHS tape. I had heard Elijah’s name, but I’ve never seen a film he’d done. I actually had no face for Elijah, I didn’t know how he looked like.
So, we put the video tape in. Elijah was in LA and heard that we were in London and we’re not gonna come to LA. He really wanted to get this role. So, he hired a dialect coach to teach him accent, he’d gone to the local costume-hire, got some cheesy kind of Hobbit costume on. He’d gone into the trees somewhere behind his house with a friend, and he just videotaped his own audition. He didn’t have our script, so he was reading from the book, he was doing Frodo parts from the book.
I just put this video tape in, and literally, not having known who Elijah Wood was really, I just thought, ‘he’s wonderful, he’s absolutely great’. And so, Elijah cast himself”.
There was one of those hyperspecific polls that had an option like “your grandfather told you war stories that he never told anyone else” and now I feel like I have to tell the story about how a spider saved my grandpa’s life in WWII and how my family doesn’t kill spiders because we owe our existence to that One Single Spider
So to set the scene, it’s the height of WWII in France and my grandpa—a 6'3" 20 year old upper Michigan farm boy—has been separated from his company after their temporary camp was shelled. My grandpa (who, I have to add, was nicknamed ‘the Suicide Kid’ at this point because he worked in demolitions and bomb interception and kept taking the jobs no one wanted with the expectation that he was never going home anyway) is scared out of his wits, wandering around the French countryside alone. He has to move at night and sleep in barns and sheds during the day to hide from people who most definitely want him dead.
On one of these days, he finds a farmhouse of a very jittery couple who agree to let him sleep in the barn, with the conditions that he sleeps in the barn loft and if he’s found, they disavow all knowledge that he was there. He agrees, because he’s exhausted and will sleep in a hay pile if he has to. My grandpa manages to fit all six foot three inches of himself into a feed trough stored upstairs and tries to get some sleep.
However, right when he’s half-snoozing, he hears motors outside and sure enough, here are some very angry officers of mixed Nazi and Vichy make confronting the couple saying someone up the road spotted an American soldier walking this way. They wouldn’t know anything about that, would they? No, of course not.
All the while, my grandpa—now trying to figure out how to either escape the barn unseen or how to fight off six? seven? eight? people at once—freezes up and waits for the inevitable. While he does, a HUGE spider crawls next to his head and onto the loft railing. For one second, he thinks about swatting it away, but that would risk him being seen and killed.
So, instead, he lays there and waits to either fight to the death or get executed in a feed trough. And while he lays there, the spider starts making a huge web on the railing. My grandpa’s transfixed by this thing. He watches her go around and around, building a solid web before plopping herself off to one side and waiting for breakfast. At the same time, the officers finally go into the barn.
My grandpa can hear them searching around, turning over crates and checking animal pens. Then, he hears one say to check the loft.
And then another say, “Don’t bother. Look at the spiderwebs up there. No one’s been there in a while.”
And they leave.
Because my grandpa didn’t swat the spider away and let her build her web, the officers thought no one was there and left him alone. They drive off and my grandpa immediately thanks the farmer couple and hauls ass out of there as soon as he can.
After this, my grandpa refused to kill any spider, and his kids did the same. Because if it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t have lived and would never have had kids or grandkids. So we owe her one.
no idea if it’s my hormones, what I’ve seen in the news lately, the weight of living the past few years, or just because it’s Judi Dench…but this impromptu performance really made me cry for a good ten minutes, no kidding.
