The Desert Mermaid

I've seen a few of these around, but this is my favorite version of Waterbender Elsa. Sorry, Admiral Zhao. Your fish-punching antics will not avail you with this Waterbender! She runs on emotions!

Also, she's not just a Waterbender! She's not even just a healer. SHE HAS THE BREATH OF LIFE, DAMMIT. She created Olaf on a whim, and then after realizing it* she conjures a three-story spiked snow golem who likes to feel pretty. Can you imagine what sort of stuff she'll be able to come up with after a bit of PRACTICE? Good luck trying to take over Arendelle once she's got her flight of frost-breathing goddamn ice dragons rising from the fjord!

Anyway. That artist is pretty exellent. Check out the other Disney/Avatar mashups. I mean, how can you argue with Ursula the Bloodbending Sea Witch? THAT'S RIGHT YOU CAN'T.


*I love how this is glossed over in the film. She sees Olaf and is like "You're ALIVE?" and he's like "... yes?" and she looks at her hands like DAMN--and then the plot sweeps her along. And you're like "Dude, hold up a minute."

Okay, everyone! Meme time wrapup. Y’all asked me questions, and now I provide the answers in the Mystery Characters Doing Stuff Meme! The players were:

1. Bilbo Baggins
2. Toph Bei Fong
3. Pilot
4.Pyanfar Chanur
5. Hank McCoy/Beast
6. Granny Weatherwax
7. Donald Duck
8. Digger-Of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels
9. Data
10. Old Spice Guy
11. Daja Kisubo
12. Keladry of Mindelan
13. Lando Calrissian
14. Uncle General Iroh
15. The Joker

Put them all together, and ( hijinks ensue! )

Today’s inexplicable morning epiphany: I have decided that Uncle General Iroh and Fire Lord Ozai must be half-brothers—Fire Lord Azulon’s sons by different mothers.

It’d explain a lot. Most obviously, it’d explain the age difference. But it also would give Ozai some ammunition when he tries to take the throne, because the more the title of “Mrs. Fire Lord Azulon” bounces around amongst the Fire Nation ladies, the more muddy the question of just who counts as the legitimate Crown Prince is.

And anyway, while I know only choice things about his character, I love the idea that Fire Lord Azulon was a Henry VIII-type serial monogamist.*

Sometimes I wish my epiphanies were useful, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.


*I considered that he might be a King of Siam type, but polygamy doesn’t really seem to fit with the Fire Nation.

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice

• Flash photography really does damage exhibits.
• I knew about the state dinosaur, but I had no idea Utah had an official state cookware. Upon learning this, however, I did correctly guess what it was: the Dutch oven.
• The story of Marco Polo bringing noodles to Europe from China is a myth.
• Every year in Teton National Park at least one family assumes that “bear spray” works like bug spray. So before going on a hike they line their kids up, and … well, I hear the park’s clinic is very good.
• Never try to do a road trip after missing a day of Zoloft.
• There are petroglyphs like EIGHT FEET off the road to Moab. Why have I never seen them before?
• Grendel was a velociraptor!
• Okay, maybe not.
• In the study of prehistoric animals and so-called “transitional fossils,”* the question of whether an animal was reptile or mammal is settled by checking the jaw and inner ear apparatus.
• Psittacosaurus was a great dinosaur—basically a badass parrot.
• Those Wheel of Morality bumps at the ends of kids’ TV shows—Knowing Is Half The Battle, And Now A Message From The POWER RANGERS!—have a distant ancestor in medieval theater, when people would perform stupid farces in churches and conclude with a sudden random promo for Christianity. “And so the shepherds found out their friend had stolen the sheep and pretended it was his son, and they all had a good laugh, in conclusion Christ Child.”
• Speaking of Power Rangers and tolerance, David Yost left the show one day when the homophobic taunts of the crew, who apparently never watched those bumps, got to be too much for him. AND UPON LEARNING THIS, ALL THE PIECES OF MY SHATTERED CHILDHOOD SUDDENLY FIT TOGETHER. All I had known of those dark times was that suddenly Billy was no longer on the show, and so I was no longer watching it.
• Ear drops are more trouble than they’re worth.
• Pets don’t always live their full life span.
• Neither do people.
• Even when you know it’s coming, death is a shock.
• Losing a twin is more traumatic than losing a non-twin sibling.
• Dad is a Led Zeppelin fan.
• Magnetic clasps for necklaces are expensive, but totally worth it.
• Ngila Dickson is my new hero: she designed the costumes for Lord of the Rings, and thus had to figure out what each culture would wear. Also, she had to have each costume made around forty times—and in the case of the hobbits, she had to weave the fabrics twice so they’d fit the same on both the actors and their smaller doubles.**
• YES, CORN IS GRASS.
• Quad-ruled notebooks are the best kind for clear thinking.
• The Hawaiian Islands were, in fact, plagued by wild cattle after Captain Cook introduced them as an ill-advised gift to King Kamehameha I.
• Major depressive disorder is insurable, but PCOS isn't.
• Glass stovetops can be hazardous additions to any kitchen.
• Mint is a thug. Never plant it in your container garden. And thanks to the Awesome Power Of The Internet, not to mention kitmf , I didn’t even have to learn this the hard way!
• The Northern and Southern Air Temples were run by monks, while the Eastern and Western Temples were run by nuns. Just as I suspected!

*This phrase always bugs me.  All fossils are transitional fossils, really.  But it does make sense for the transition of our nomenclature.

**She also gets bonus points for something I noticed a while back: she does the same thing to differentiate Rosie Cotton that they do in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast to set Belle apart from the villagers. Notice how both Belle and Rosie are the only ones in their villages to wear blue.

I am exceptionally grumpy today! The reason is long and complicated and you don’t really want to hear the whole thing, but basically I have been kicked off of the Wii because Dad felt a burning need to futz around with his beloved giant Entertainment System Of Doom. I could care less about the Entertainment System Of Doom,* but I’m bitter because back when he was setting the thing up, he installed the Wii permanently in its matrix about two hours after I asked him not to. And this is exactly why I made that request.

So I’m trying to not be grumpy, and rather focus on the fact that some of my Christmas, Round 2 packages—bought with my aunt’s Christmas money, donchaknow—came absurdly quickly, and I now have all three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender, tea, books, and a new dress for Laurel. And I’m also working intermittently on Torn World, and reading a book on the many horrible ways space can kill you. I should be set for activities for quite a while … the reunion between Iroh and Zuko alone should afford me a good hour of rewinding and crying like a girl.

But I still wanna play Mario.

Happy New Year, dudes!


*An attitude that baffles Dad to no end, because he’s one of those people who actually uses features on his sound system. In the Philosophy of Dad, he who does not use every possible permutation of the multisource surround-sound digital enhancement PC-DVD-Blu-ray-TV-Star Wars player**-video game console-two DVR-Picture-Inna-Picture features leads an unsatisfactory, hollow sham of a life. This in turn baffles someone like me, whose philosophy is whatever I’m watching should take less than ten minutes to buffer, and sound should play in both headphones.

**A relic of the mid-’90s, the Star Wars Player is our laser disc player. We have exactly one thing on laser disc, which is the entire Star Wars Trilogy. Don’t even ask about the Betamax.