Oh, Nicholas Cage.

I had a dream last night where I was walking on the streets of New York City with my mom, and we passed a candy and ice cream shop. I did a double take as we went by because there was a dude looking in the window, and I realized on my second look that it was Nicholas Cage. I ran back and started to chat him up. Reality-me thinks Nicholas Cage movies are so bad they're fantastic, but Dream-me was a fan. Dream-me kept telling him how it was the greatest disappointment of the last few months to me that I missed getting to see Drive Angry in theaters (but that Dream-me would rectify that ASAP when the DVD came out) and that I had dragged out my entire family to see Season of the Witch, which wasn't that good, but goddamn but The Rock is, like, my favorite action movie ever.

I think I started to realize I had, inadvertently, insulted him about the Season of the Witch thing because he started to look uninterested and eventually said, "Yeah, that's great. Did you want me to sign that?" And he took a white paper bucket that I was carrying--we use them at work to bring mice down from our barrier facility--and signed it and walked two steps away to stare at the ice cream shop window intently. My mother asked me if that was as thrilling as I hoped it would be. I said not really, that he signed this bucket and now I had to keep it. What a useless thing.

Then I woke up and thought about posting to LJ about how I broke my Do Not Engage policy, vis a vis celebrities because I woke up still thinking it was something that had happened. It's only just now that I am more awake that I realize it didn't. I know exactly from whence all this has come, by the by--I was looking over my posts for the 30 Day Movie Meme, and there are not one but three entries with Nicholas Cage featured heavily--and, yes, The Rock is one of my favorite action movies of all time. Crazy brain. Do we secretly love Nicholas Cage? I don't know, but I am so looking forward to Drive Angry on DVD...

So...close...

I went to drop off laundry this morning that probably should have been done a lot earlier. (It was exercise stuff, mostly, that had been soaked through when I rode home from work last Friday, and it smelled...unpleasant.) As I was waiting to get my receipt, another customer in the store saw that I was reading A Game of Thrones and started freaking out about how great the TV show was, and was I watching it? I told him, no, I wanted to read the book first. He thought that sounded like a great idea until I told him was 800 pages.

I'm now 700+ pages in, and I've just hit the scene that was the spoiler heard around the world. MY GOD IT TOOK 700 PAGES TO GET TO THIS, NO WONDER EVERYONE IS JUST WATCHING THE SHOW. I just want to be done. Of course, they start filming the next season in a month, and it'll be on before I've got time to read the second book if I don't push on. HELP ME.

On the spoiler issue: I talked about with my roommates about it last night. It's really not something I could help coming across. It was a spoiler so large the internet exploded. It wasn't careless people on Twitter (which I mostly ignore anyway) or reviews of the show itself on geek websites that got me. It was things like Entertainment Weekly not caring for anyone so lazy and poor as not to have both HBO and a TiVo that they could catch up on the show within a week that spoiled me. I'm not even a huge spoiler-hater person. I mentioned to my roommates how little I care to read reviews for anything I'm excited about because I tend to like some seriously crap stuff. And it has been my experience that the less a given film/show/book is esteemed, the less reviewers give a shit about spoiling important things. I agree with moonlightalice that basic plot outlines are not especially spoiler-y, but when you're talking about the difference between The King's Speech and something like Priest, a reviewer will, despite the formulaic and historical nature of the former, spare it and spoil the latter in a review. I do not care that I called the "surprise reveal" in Priest two seconds in--even if it's obvious, don't give it away, okay?

But, yes, I'm about to finish A Game of Thrones, and I've quite enjoyed it. I hope it manages, in the next 70 pages or so, to resolve enough that I don't have to tax my already exhausted reserves to finish the book after in order to feel any sense of closure. (This is where you don't tell me whether I do or not, okay? Save it for when I do a full review.)