Random News: Disney Villains

Hello Lovely Readers,

As I have mentioned several times on the blog, I often have a soft spot in my heart for villains. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with them or even like them, but I think they are interesting! So I was very excited to stumble across several Buzzfeed articles about the Disney Villains, and thought I would share them with you! The first is a wonderfully comprehensive list of 54 Frightening Facts You Didn’t Know About Disney Villains. It covers many of the classics and some of the modern Disney movies. Some of it is about the ideas behind the villains, the voice actors, who the characters could have been, and so much more.
The next fine was a list of the 12 Greatest Villain Songs. I really loved this list as I do not watch many musicals anymore, but I still love the old Disney ones. Also they included my favorite, one of the songs that I listen to still now, Hellfire by the Count Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Although I knew pretty much all the songs on the list (and all the words!).

The third find was a wonderful art collection that looks at Good vs. Evil in the Disney films. The artwork is really amazing and such a unique way to combine the heroines and the villains!

Artwork by J. Scott Campbell can be found http://j-scott-campbell.deviantart.com/

Lastly, there is a fun quiz to find out who your inner Disney Villain is! I was happy to find out apparently I am really Maleficent! While I think the quiz could have been a little bit more veiled about which response went with which villain, it was still a fun 5 min!

So how do you guys feel about villains, especially Disney villains? Who is your favorite?

Until next time,

Random News: Test Your Vocabulary

Hello Lovely Readers,

Just a quick post today as I really should be doing my work. Some of you might have seen this around Tumblr recently, but I thought I would share it in case you haven’t. I love taking random quizzes and test, but more than that I love to see how I compare to other people (I may be a little competitive). So when I saw that with 3 steps I could test my vocabulary as well as see some of the statistics about everyone who has completed the test, I was in. You can go to the test by clicking on the link here. It’s shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes (probably closer to 5).

When you finish it will show you something like the above, with the estimated size of your vocabulary (yes that is my score). According to their previous participants, ” Most native English adult speakers who have taken the test fall in the range 20,000–35,000 words.” And “foreign learners of English, we’ve found that the most common vocabulary size is from 2,500–9,000 words.” So this lets you know where you fall. Then if you are a nerd like me, you can click through on their links to see graphs with percentiles and ages so you can get a better idea of how you compare to others. They do point out that these scores may be inflated, as what sort of people voluntarily take a vocabulary test online? Probably the self-selecting sample is biased towards those with large vocabularies. I will be curious to see if they release anymore statistics about levels of education and amount of book reading, as these are things they ask you about.

So are any of you going to test your vocabulary, if so how did you do? Do you think reading has helped improve your vocabulary? I know it has for me, as there are a lot of words that I know but I have no idea how to pronounce!

Until next time,

Random News: Even More Middle-Earth Celebration

Hello Lovely Readers,

I clearly am on a Middle-Earth kick right now. I just posted my review of The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug yesterday, it is spoiler free but at the end there is a link to some hidden content where I talk about some parts of the movie that are a little bit of spoilers! However, as I am still on a high from seeing the movie, and just obtaining the soundtrack, here are some more Middle-Earth finds!

First, is a fun personality quiz that tells you what type of Middle-Earth character you would be. I was a bit disappointed as I thought it would be specific people, but it is races (as far as I can tell). However, the quiz is fun, and you can take it here. I’m not sure how accurate the answers are, as I am apparently an  Elf. This made me laugh as I am not someone you would call graceful (more likely clumsy or someone with a lower center of gravity). I am probably more of a hobbit or dwarf, but I do like poetry and woods, so maybe it is plausible.

One of my favorite things is someone has created a Smaug twitter account, and it is pretty funny. Several of the best of them have been collected on lists on Tumblr, but you can access the original tweets here. Just as a heads up, there is a little bit of language not appropriate for kids on there, but it is fun to read.

I had to go looking for this one, as it has been one of my favorite things since I first saw it. I tell many people about it, and decided to include the link to the pictures and original story, you can access it here. But you can see a family spends part of their Christmas holiday building edible/candy recreations of famous battles in Middle-Earth. They have done Helms Deep siege, and my favorite the battle of Pelennor Fields at Minas Tirith (the big battle in Return of the King). I have to say I am very tempted to try one of these myself, but have neither the time nor help to pull it off.

I wasn’t sure if I would include this story or not, but I decided to leave it vague enough that if you don’t want to know you can ignore it. According to Yahoo, it appears that when Evangeline Lilly signed on to play Tauriel she had one demand, and then in editing it was decided to go directly against this wish. I really respect her for demanding it, but I would argue that it worked out. However, for everyone, there is a great video at the end where several of the actors have to guess who a picture of feet belongs to among the cast. It was pretty funny, especially the last set of feet! You can access the article here, but if you really want to avoid all spoilers, hold off on this article.

Anyone else dealing with post Hobbit highs? If so how are you guys dealing with it?

Until next time,