A Magical Evening with Glenn Gary

Over the weekend, I surprised Uncle & Auntie, Arul and Janeni to a magic show in celebration of their 21^st wedding anniversary.

We went to The Parlor Magic Show by the famous magician Glenn Gary at the Westin City Center Hotel in Washington, DC. The unique part of the whole show, it is limited to per reservation basis, hence, you can expect a smaller crowd, more of a personalized attention and audience participation.

A quick bio about the magician (extracted from his webpage): Glenn is a masterful magician who performs sophisticated, classical, state-of-the-art sleight of hand conjuring and mind boggling feats of magic. Glenn has been a student of magic since the 10th grade, when he discovered magic while working at a theatre. One week’s salary was spent to place his first order for magic tricks. His mother was furious with him for spending all his money on what she called junk. Within a year, Glenn was performing his first amateur show and his magic career took off. He was awarded twice as the “Best Manipulation Act” and “Best Act of Competition” by his peers, fellow magicians themselves.

And I truly agree to that! He was simply magnificent; he made sure each and every audience member had their equal share of participation in his tricks. As part of the anniversary gift, he asked Auntie to tear a huge paper into pieces and he magically turned it into a cute little hat for her.

Each of his act just mesmerized us, being the act of disappearing egg in a bag, the never ending handkerchief joke, the bunny family (although it was a little sad that there were no real bunny used), the ripped...or maybe not newspaper trick, the disappearing $100 bill act or even the linked chains trick. Even his white pigeon Toby (or shall I say pigeons) was very well trained to participate in Glenn’s tricks.

I must say I was stunned with his grand finale act of the "floating deck card box”or the show-stopping act as his critics call it, an original masterpiece originated by Glenn himself. According to Glenn the pixie dusts made the box to fly. I would never know what is the logic or magic behind it, but it was truly Magical!

Glenn Gary’s website : http://www.glenngary.com/index.htm

Glenn's Blog: http://glenngary.blog.com/

R.I.P Brownie! The greatest bunny ever!

I totally agree to the fact that sometimes you never realize how precious your loved ones are till they are gone. We recently lost one of our “siblings, nephew, grandson”, our pet rabbit.

Brownie Palaniandy aka Chipo-Chan aka Mrs.Moi aka Bunny (I always thought he was suffering from multiple personality syndrome), passed away peacefully on Saturday March 13^th, 2010 at about 12:20 pm. He belonged to Rana and Kanna Palaniandy.

He was infact the greatest bunny ever lived! He exceeded 3 years from th regular bunny’s life span of just 5-6 years. According to the our Vet, Brownie must have been at least 70 years old in human life. We got him about 8 years ago an elderly woman as she was no longer able to take care of him.

The final rites were performed according to the Hindu rituals, he was wrapped in a silk cloth, placed in a small box and buried in about 3-4 feet hole. It was the cutest little funeral service that I have ever seen!

Even though it has been almost 2 days now, we still talk about him and feel an empty presence at home. Brownie,we will definitely remember the times where Rana was chewed up for not letting you to watch TV with her, the times where you pooped all around the house that too on the new carpet!, the time where you freaked us out by shivering in the cold, your “play dead” drama with Kanna, the times where you will be sliding around the house, the time where Arul almost grilled you, the times where instead of exploring the outdoors you will just sleep lazily under the tree, and many more moments.

Brownie you will be truly missed! You will always be in our hearts. R.I.P.

Feel the Rain

Reminds me of the song by Natasha Bedingfield “Feel the rain on your skin as no one else can feel it for you”.

For some reason watching the weather changes is really interesting, from 3-4 months pure bitter cold months with monstrous piles of snow, we finally saw some sunshine and the weather was in 60s last weekend. Then came another change in the weather pattern, rain just rain almost 2-4 inches. As much as I have missed the sun, I did miss the rain too! (The strange part is we do have month longs of monsoon season in Malaysia but it never really bumped into me the beauty of rain till recently)

I am kind of lost of words to describe the experience of rain, it really has a very different feeling (some might say it feels like falling in love again), a little cold and each rain drop not only gives you the chill but also the tickles sometime!

You might have go out and feel the rain on your own skin to comprehend what I’m saying, till then I'm going to look a big puddle of water to jump in!

Alice in Wonderland in 3D

I had the privilege of going for the preview of the much anticipated Disney movie, Alice in Wonderland in 3D by Tim Burton. Wow! A tale that I loved reading in my childhood and it really does make a distinction when you add life to the characters, that also in 3D. (Sometimes I do feel that I look like blind mice with those big 3D glasses, but hey I’m not alone)

This story revolves around a now-grown Alice, who has forgotten all about the Wonderland and the characters takes her through a series of event that links her dreams and her childhood memories being the young Alice. She was fated to come to the Wonderland as she is the only champion that could slay Jabberwocky on Frabjous Day. The dragon belongs to the Queen of Spades, who destroyed the White Queens kingdom in order to take over the throne.

My favorite character from this film would be The Mad Hatter, not only because he was played by Johnny Depp, but purely because his wacky personality shed some hilarity to the story. I had the opportunity to take a picture with an artist portraying as the Mad Hatter at the theater. The always mischievous Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) didn’t had much of a role to play on the reel life, however the award should go to the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) for the Best Villain. She is a hilarious yet an evil villain with a big blown-up head and hated her sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway). The main lead, Alice (Mia Wasikowska), should have been given a little more weight , as she is always either nervous or crying and her pale complexion didn’t help much either in bringing out the adorable yet adventurous Alice that we all have read about.

Thumbs up to the production team for the outstanding work on the liveliness of the animations, the animated characters looked just like the real-life ones without a blemish. The blue caterpillar Twedelum, the time keeper White Rabbit and Bayard the dog, looked just like any real animals and these added the excitement to the movie besides it being projected in 3D.

One small thing to note, they had used the British English instead of the American English. These not only made it difficult to hear the dialogues as the sounds kind of echoed but it also reminded me of movies such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.

Overall Alice in Wonderland sure did bring back my childhood bedtime stories, but only this time in 3D and I was able to avoid the teacup thrown by the March Hare.

Official website: http://adisney.go.com/disneypictures/aliceinwonderland/

Poster source : http://schofizzymoviereview.blogspot.com/2009/11/poster-3-alice-in-wonderland.html