Some people like Bellesouth are already thinking about Halloween costumes but I say that no matter what you wear, your Halloween costume will not be as awesome as this man in a chicken suit right here.
Month: August 2009
So I took Sadie for a walk, right past the house where the pit bull lives. What else was I going to do — get her a treadmill? No, she’s a tracker. She lives to walk along sniffing things. And, anyway, you just can’t stay holed up. You’ve only got this one mongrel life, and you don’t want to spend it hiding indoors; pretty soon the menace is everywhere and you’re left worrying about what’s going to rise up out of the basement. You have to wear down the fear. You can’t kite yourself up over the places you wish did not exist. You have to suit up, show up, move on through. The good news is that the joy is on the other side of the dark stretch of sidewalk. Also, you can ask someone to walk along with you, someone or something you trust. So I decided to be that person for Sadie and help her take back her joy in the street. —- Annie Lamont
Like everybody else and their Mama who has any access to the internet whatsoever, I have a facebook account.
It’s here. Melissa Sawyer
Create Your Badge
Anyway, it’s not a big secret and there you go.
It has a hodge podge of lawschool classmates, college classmates, high school classmates, and friends and colleagues I have amassed over the years. And the occasional person who wants to up their Mafia Wars mafia.
So a couple of days ago, this guy named Thomas Reed put in a friend request. He looked familiar to me. I glanced and noticed several Hendrix people as mutual friends, assumed he was a classmate who ran around in different social circles, and accepted him.
Well I get a message from a college classmate.
Who is Thomas Reed? I added him because several other Hendrix friends had him as a friend, but I do not remember him at all. I could not find him in our yearbooks. (Not a perfect search, mind you, but I looked at all four yearbooks). Do you remember him? Can you jog my memory? I’ve forgotten a lot, but I was a little traumatized at having absolutely no recollection of a person . . .
It is at this point that I realize that I can’t definitely point him out anywhere. My undergrad only has about a thousand people on campus at any given time and my graduating class was in the area of 125 people. It’s not a large school by any means. I usually recognize people from college unless they’ve changed a lot in appearance and can usually tell you some random trivia about them like the dorm they lived in or some other such nonsense but this Thomas Reed. I can’t remember anything.
So I send an email to one of the more gregarious social butterfly types that I know. He also worked in the cafeteria which means he pretty much talked to everybody at some point.
I truly don’t! He is not in any of our old yearbooks. His profile says he graduated with us, but I just don’t remember him!
I sent a message to Mr. Reed himself and asked him to jog my memory about how he is, including asking what dorm he lived in. The place requires you live on campus unless you are married or provide some other type of excuse so everybody at some point has a dorm to name.
I send messages to some other people and it’s the same thing: He looked familiar. I noticed he had other people from college on his friends list and assumed I was daft for not remembering him.
Now. That’s strange.
How could someone go to a school so small and manage to fall under the radar?
OR
Why would a person fake being a 1995 graduate of Hendrix College?
OR
Is this some social psychology experiment to see how peer pressures affects facebook friending? The “Oooh everybody else from my school is his friend, I’ll friend him too” phenomenon.
OR is it someone trying to investigate a classmate who doesn’t know that courts don’t necessarily allow the info you obtain under false pretenses into evidence.
Hrmmmm……
“Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God; your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone, and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people premission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Nelson Mandela
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
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
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.”
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
The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic. Anais Nin
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.
Today I jogged (aka running and walking) 5.1K in 43:19.
