Tom And Jerry: The Night Before Christmas

"Tom and Jerry: the Night Before Christmas" is one of my favourite Tom and Jerry episodes of all time. It is, of course, set on Christmas Eve (duh) and it starts with a choir singing snippets of various Christmas carols over the opening titles.

The action starts with Jerry, appearing from his hole in the skirting board, skirting round a mouse trap and running up to the Christmas tree to play with all the presents. This he does, finding interesting Christmas decorations which show him reflected, like funhouse mirrors, candycanes, dolls and a toy lion. This is all well and good, until he accidentally jumps on Tom's stomach, mistaking him for a cuddly toy.

As is to be expected, chaos ensues. Tom, highly annoyed at being woken form dreams of Sugar Plum mice (or whatever it is Christmassy cats dream about), begins to chase Jerry around a (wonderfully decorated) Christmas tree. This is perhaps one of the more elaborate T&J sets, involving jack in the boxes, boxing gloves, a string of Christmas lights, toy soldiers and a remote control train track...

After a final peace offering involving mistletoe, Jerry is forced to escape into the cruel, dark, snowy (why does it always snow at Christmas on TV?) night. Tom, of course, is very happy with this arrangement. He blocks the door (and the letterbox) with an umbrella stand, a piano stool and (just in case) a walking stick, settles himself by the fire and tries to sleep.

Unfortunately, his peace is disturbed by the howling wind and a sense of guilt for what he did to Jerry, which overpowers him. He removes the barricade from the door and props the letterbox open with the walking stick, hoping Jerry will make his own way back inside and all will be forgiven. Sadly this is not the case. As the viewer, we have also been seeing clips of Jerry, slowly freezing to a mousicle outside in the snow, so we know he can't possibly come back in, even if he wanted to.

Realising there's a problem, Tom rushes outside to try and find Jerry who, but his time, is only a tiny bump in the otherwise perfect snow drift which has (miraculously) formed int he last thirty seconds. Tom picks out Jerry but the tail, roughly shakes off the worst of the snow (which had formed around him in a perfect cube) and carries the solid, stiff Jerry inside. There, Tom thaws Jerry out by the fire, casuing him to stop resembling a frozen snack and start resembling a mouse, lays him on his pillow and helps revive him.

Awaking from this sleep, Jerry is terrified and shocked to find Tom standing over him and begins to run away, but Tom stops him and presents him with a candy cane. As this peace offering is accepted, Tom turns away to drink from his saucer of milk when Jerry, suddenly stops him.Jerry then dips the end of his candy cane into the milk, splashing an outraged Tom, and brings out a mousetrap. Tom is both relieved and a little annoyed, but glad Jerry stopped him.

Suddenly, Jerry has a brainwave. He rescues his candy cane from the mousetrap he'd left in Tom's bowl and runs back to the mousetrap left outside his door. He uses the hook on the end of the candy cane to snag the bow on the cheesy bait, rescuing the cheese for himself without gettign caught in the trap. However, as the snap is sprung, it closes very slowly, playing "Jingle Bells" as it does so, which then leads into the choir singing again and the end credits.

This is, as I have said, one of my favourite Tom and Jerry episodes and it is part of Christmas tradition in my house to watch it before bed every Christmas Eve. It's so sweet and whenever I see it, I'm always reminded of my childhood and of the great Christmases we always had.

Coping with Stress

Hey sexy beasts (and Stanley). Today, for obvious reasons, My ponderings (ponderances? Ponders? Ponderations?) have been on stress, anger and how people deal with such things. What do people do to "release" themselves? I have some friends who work best under stress and don't like bing too relaxed around exam time. I have another friend who combats stress by doing more work, to prove she can. I have yet other friends who relieve their anguish by baking which is lovely, but means everyone I know will have diabetes and heart disease by the time they're 20, including me, but I was going that way anyway.

 

Other people do other things, such as trolling, dancing, sex, self-harm, knitting and a myriad of other, more socially acceptable things as stress-busting techniques. I, as always, have my own take on this. Personally, I do five things:

 

• Exercise; walk, cycle or cross train all my anger and stress away whilst listening to some arse-kicking power rock.
• Mind puzzles; solitaire, Majong, crosswords (to which I today answered slut and moist in the same puzzle) and www.memrise.com whilst listening to some arse-kicking power rock.
• Kick-arse power rock; sing, play, listen, annoy family with...
• Cry, shout, scream & get massively angry verbally. Usually at myself.
• Sleep. A lot.

 

These are all, I find, incredibly useful. As is eating, but I'm not allowed to do that any more :(
Another thing I do to stop from stressing/exploding is to change the topic of discussion, or what I'm thinking about. If I'm Stressed about exams, I'll think about saxophone music, or normal music, or about how awesome my life will be when all my exams are finished and I can finally do what I want. If I'm stressed about the future, or relationships (hahahahaha) or whatever, then thinking about work and upcoming projects is incredibly useful, or again thinking about music nc playing the saxophone keeps me from melting or something similar. If the stress is caused by an argument, I sleep.

 

Again, eating is also useful, but bad.

 

Comments?

Odd Requests

Today I have been pondering odd requests, such as the one which was put to me on Thursday.

As a result of this, today several of my friends and I went to meet up with Ross and some of his friends (who we had never met) at the cinema in Enfield. This was both funny and awkward as Ross didn't bother to introduce us to his friends, so we named them Julio. All of them. Well, apart from one, who we named Juan. He was our favourite; there was also one (Julio) who looked like Michael Crout, which was really funny. So, after being asked to see a film  I wasn't particularly interested in seeing, but which was very good, with a bunch of people I didn't know, I didn't even get to know the people I didn't know. But Josh Roper came, and that was nice.

As part of today's outing, I have now purchased a bright turquoise wig and a pair of fetching rose-tinted spectacles. They are both amazing and look rather sexy whether worn together or separately. It really is better looking at the world through rose-tinted spectacles; everything looks very grey when you remove them. I'm currently considering whether or not I could get away with wearing them for exams, as a medical purpose (preventing depression or sleep). I'm also wondering whether the head would allow the wearing of a turquoise wig as part of the uniform; it doesn't say we can't wear wigs.

So yeah, that's all really, I like fun fun fun things.

By the way, I have Twitter. If you want to follow me, or tell me or anything, or just laugh at the two happy whales I have as my picture, then please do. It's probably #EmPernilla I'm not quite sure how this dooby works. I also don't use Twitter much, ever, so I don't even know why I am suggesting this, but it seems like the cool thing to do these days.

Movie Adaptations

Once I again, I have found something to ponder and bore you with my opinion of. Today, after several hours of hard revision, I rewarded myself by watching "Starter for Ten" — a film based on the book by David Nicholls. It's very good. Possibly better than the book, which was annoying.

For those of you who don't know, "Starter for Ten" is about a boy called Brian who's struggling through his first year at a University (which we're assured isn't Oxford or Cambridge). His life's dream is to appear on University Challenge, hence the name of the book / film. It's an interesting story and the characters are so believable you actually don't like them at times. The book was interesting and included such gems as "Enough of this Shelley, I'm off to tarmac something" and "The ironic thing is, I actually AM a vicar", which continue to make me smile. And the film... Well, like I said, in some ways the film was better than the book, but in some ways it was worse, as is always the case with films. Which made me wonder whether we could ever really have a perfect adaptation of a book to film. I understand that they are clearly two different genres of expression (or whatever), but surely there has to be some overlap?

The film, as a piece of cinematography, is very good; there are some good actors and actresses in it, including Catherine Tate, Benedict Cumberbatch, James Corden, that guy from "Mamma Mia!" and (for about five seconds, being shouty at the end) David Tennant, and the camera work and special effects (of which there admittedly weren't many) were clever and believable. And compared to the novel, the script was pretty accurate. Well, accurate apart from the fact that one of the main characters was meant to be Glaswegian and appeared to be from Bedfordshire, and that chunks of the story line were left out of the film which (while most of them weren't integral) were really funny (like the Shelley quote). So maybe this is as good as it gets? A good film which portrays the story in an accurate way (without making you hate the central character) which stars good actor? There should be more to life, surely?

Any better book/film combos? Let me know.