What a night last night! My whole family spent from about 6:30 to 10:15 watching the Superbowl from beginning to end (National Anthem to Post-Game show), PLUS all the commercials! There were snacks and munchies, most were crunchy. Potato chips, vegetables and dips. (Hey, I made a mini-poem ^_^ )
As to which team I was rooting for (Pitsburgh Steelers VS. Green Bay Packers), I'll have to say that I was rooting for both at the same time. I cheered whenever one team made a touchdown, and I groaned whenever somebody missed a catch. I'm happy that the Packers won, but I'm also a little sympathetic for the Steelers. Still, the best team really did win, Packers-Steelers, 31-25.
The commercials during the Superbowl were fun to watch. Some were clever, some were waaay over-the-top, some were cute, and some were just plain weird. My favorite ads were the ones with cars, because they're the coolest in my opinion. Remember the talking cars chatting about the review site Cars.com? Recall the Volkswagen spot with an actual beetle racing past CGI insects? Does Chrysler's "Imported from Detroit" commercial ring a bell?
Anyway, I think that's quite enough about football and commercials for one post.
The other thing I wanted to write about in this post is the fact that earlier today I finished a really great book!
It is the timeless classic, "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson. One day a week or so ago I saw it on the fiction-shelf of our local library and I thought to myself, "Wow, I know this story, but I've never actually read it before." Much like Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde" is simply one of those widely known stories that most people can summarize for you without having read the book itself. There have been quite a few movie adaptations of this story (one of the more famous versions being "The Nutty Professor"), and just the names Jekyll and Hyde evoke familiar mental images of mad science and split-personality disorders.
Reading the actual book was an interesting experience for me. At first the story starts off from the point of view of Dr. Jekyll's lawyer and good friend, Mr. Utterson. In this way the reader observes whatever Mr. Utterson is observing, and starts out just as curious as he is about the strange and frequent disappearances of Henry Jekyll, and the sudden appearance of the unsavory character Edward Hyde. As the story progresses, Mr. Utterson gathers information from Dr. Jekyll's colleagues and servants, and also receives strange letters from Jekyll himself. In the end, he catches Mr. Hyde in Dr. Jekyll's laboratory just as Hyde commits suicide, and he reads a full confession from Jekyll about what he's been up to. The confession is then written from Jekyll's point of view, and in my opinion it's the best part of the whole story.
Robert Louis Stevenson's writing style is so unique in that he knows how to paint compelling images in the reader's mind of the setting (foggy 19th century London), the characters, and what happens to them. He seems to use just the right words for just the right situations, and the beginning and middle build up the suspense pretty well. The language is a bit old-fashioned and formal for some folk, but if you're patient for the first couple chapters, I think you're in for a good literary treat. "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde": a classic novel that I recommend for those who know the story but never read the book.
This month, my goals are all about blogging. I think that if I can write online more often about the things I'm interested in and what I'm doing during this period in time, the better I'll be for it. At the very least I want to break my blogging record for last year (in Feb. 2010, only 1 post did I write).