Sometimes, Melissa runs her legs. Sometimes, she runs her mouth.

Tag: 2009 (Page 2 of 10)

Blogging for Books

Little Rock Tweetup has decided to give back to the community and will be having a Twestival on September 10th at the Clinton Library. This year’s “twetival” will be benefiting Reach Out and Read Arkansas. You can purchase tickets here. It’s 10 dollars and you are to bring a book for a child under the age of 5.

Today Friday September 4, 2009, we were to blog for books. Our assignment was to name a book we liked as a kid. I loved The Monster at the End of This Book . It’s a Sesame Street book and it’s the story of Grover who hears that there is a Monster at the end of this book. He is scared. He tries to get us to stop turning the pages by setting up barriers such as ropes and bricks. He’s all scared and freaked out. In the end . . . . well I won’t tell you the end. read it yourself.

For some reason, I loved this book. It was about fear and overcoming your fear. It is also about how sometimes people worry over nothing and make things scarier than they actually are. It’s a good lesson for everyone, not just kids.

A children’s book that I discovered as an adult is The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts (My Body Science). It’s a Japanese Children’s book about… well you guessed it: Farts. It’s educational and amusing. I mean how can you now laugh at farts. Farts are funny.

Julie and Julia

Julie and Julia is based on two true stories: Julie Powell writing a blog, which later became the book Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
, chronicling her year long quest to cook every single recipe in Child’s The Art of French Cooking and the story of how Julia Child discovered cooking and came to write Mastering The Art of French Cooking
in the book My Life in France This movie is directed by Nora Ephron.

I have to wonder if Ephron either wanted to just do a movie of “My Life in France” or met Julie Powell and hated her because she managed to make New York and Amy Adams ugly and downright boring. Now I know that Amy Adams and New York city aren’t boring and ugly so I have to come to the conclusion that Ms. Ephron did this on purpose.

In contrast, Julia Child’s France is a beautiful adventure land where everything is absolutely beautiful.

This might be used to reflect Julie Powell’s lost attitude but really? did you have to bore us.

Somehow they made Meryl Streep look six foot two. Julia Child was really six foot two. I have no idea. They must have found every petite actor and actress in Hollywood but they did it. Streep herself acted the hell out of this part and managed to pull of the very public and well known Child in a way that was realistic and not ridiculing. Given Child’s high pitched voice and mannerisms, she would be very easy to caricature. Instead, she turned out to be charming and fun. I had to find the book to discover that the postcards made in the film were actual postcards made by Julia and Paul (Sorry you have to see the film).

The food itself was featured but not in a food porn way such as Big Night or Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. I did, however, become fascinated with the first fish dish in the film and will eventually find the recipe and make it myself. Foodies will like that the author (via an actress playing her) of Joy of Cooking makes an appearance and makes a references to the changes made to the book over time.

aww

Molly Ringwald wrote this editorial in the New York Times about John Hughes. The most poignant paragraph about his later films.

None of the films that he made subsequently had the same kind of personal feeling to me. They were funny, yes, wildly successful, to be sure, but I recognized very little of the John I knew in them, of his youthful, urgent, unmistakable vulnerability. It was like his heart had closed, or at least was no longer open for public view. A darker spin can be gleaned from the words John put into the mouth of Allison in “The Breakfast Club”: “When you grow up … your heart dies.”

BBC book list.

This is a cheesy meme from facebook but I love books so much I thought I would put it here.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible (not the whole thing, so a little x)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

Total: 4 1/2

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (this is on the list of books to read before I die. hrmmm I think I have 5 plays down.)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife X
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

Total: 3

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

Total: 4

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X

Total: 4

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

Total: 3

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel X
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total: 3

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Total: 4

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt

Total: 0

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

Total: 4

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Total: 3

32 1/2

So… slightly less than 1/3

Running log

2 miles. 25 minutes 28 seconds. That’s a 12’42” mile.

Pocketful of Sunshine by Natasha Bedingfield is a favorite on my iPod now.

Alice in Wonderland

Look it’s the trailer for the new live action Alice in Wonderland movie directed by Tim Burton. I am excited about this movie. The art direction looks amazing. Johnny Depp is the Had Hatter. Anne Hathaway is the White Queen. Helena Bonham Carter is the Red Queen. Here are some stills from the movie.

TWEET!

WORK WORK WORK WORK

So much work I missed out on the french movie I wanted to see. Now I get to wait for it to be released on Netflix

AND

I attended the LR Tweet up. I didn’t take pictures. I was too busy mingling. Other people took pictures and a good bunch are over on Lance Turner’s Blog..

Over 70 people RSVPed and there were quite a few there. The room that was originally reserved for the event was too small and the people managed to take over the entire bar area.

I’d give more details but I don’t want to end up in the trunk of a car. You’ll just have to come to the next one.

Thoughts of the day at the end of the day.

This was in Conway today. Conway is town where my alma mater is located. On more than one occasion, I remember sitting in the hallway of the first floor in the dorm waiting for a tornado watch/warning to let up. It’s an awesome video. The conversation between the two people who are watching this while one is filming is pretty classic.

I took one of those cheesy “which Greek Goddess are you?” quizzes and got Hecate. I’ve never heard of her. Obviously, my education on the Greek Gods and Goddess is sorely lacking. Fascinating though.

For all your personal injury attorneys, the ambulance chaser t-shirt.

This is the video of Arkansas Lottery Director Ernie Passailaigue after his speech to the Arkansas Political Animals Club. He gave a lot of football metaphors and called the Hogs. I love the attempt to ingratiate himself with the locals by calling the Hogs. I can understand the theory on why you pay the lottery people so much; (It’s a specialized set of information and to set up one from scratch requires a level of expertise that should be compensated) BUT WHY!!!! is the security detail (a former Arkansas sheriff) getting paid six figures? Is he supposed to follow the director around 24/7?

The best part about Tolbert’s video is the female reporter making faces. She obviously forgot that people could see her. OH MY!

early morning Tuesday

It’s 1:08 on Tuesday morning. So yeah I’m up late. I have some low level allergies that messes with my head which messes with my sleep schedule. I’ve also been busy at work and life.

  1. I won something that I thought I’d lose. It’s always a pleasant surprise when you find out that you have underestimated your abilities. Or heck, pleasant surprise when you have just lucked out!
  2. I finally replaced my Nike + iPod. This made me happier than being the next contestant on the Price is Right.
  3. I am excited about seeing this movie: Summer House. Both Blake Rutherford and Jennybee liked it. Both of them like fancy pants movies. They saw it on the same day at the same theater. They may have even seen it at the same time. NO, as far as I know, they don’t know each other.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

yes America, I went and saw Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

I read the book back in the day but I haven’t reread it since. I do, however, remember quite a bit of the plot. Let’s say that I remember enough to know what was going to happen but not enough to get pissy about the things left out.

This is the movie that starts right after the confrontation between Harry and he who must not be named himself Voldemort in the Goblet of Fire. Harry hangs out at the Weasleys. They start school and Malfoy looks like he’s up to no good. This time, it looks like he’s really really up to no good. What is he doing? Also, the whole gang has discovered the opposite sex and crushes abound. This is Harry Potter: teen angst version.

This movie is darker than the previous Potter films, as it should be. Dumbledore asks Harry to get close to the new potions teacher to find out some dirt on a former student. Dumbledore is away on his own doings trying to take down the death eaters. There are mysterious conversations regarding Snape.

So. The movie is quite a fun ride. Some of the plot lines in the book were more subtle than the movie version especially the romantic plot lines of Ron, Hermoine, and Harry.

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