Laughing Wild

My List

2008-07-23T20:58:00.004-04:00

Tracy at Bowl of Life tagged me with this kind of fun meme: who are the 5 celebrities you would want your spouse/partner to grant you a Get Out Of Jail Free card for?

In no particular order:

1. Jon Hamm

He's a new addition to my list, I've been mesmerized by his subtle performance as Don Draper on Mad Men since last summer. He is charming and funny in interviews, and he looks like he's a really good kisser.

2. Nathan Fillion

I already loved him from Firefly and Serenity. But did you see Dr. Horrible? He SINGS, too! I admit, I would like to spend some time with the Captain and his Hammer.

3. Daniel Day-Lewis

I have been in love with Daniel Day-Lewis since the 80's, when I saw him in My Beautiful Laundrette. He's tall and thin, with dark hair and light colored eyes, which is a look that hits me right in my sweet spot. And his intelligence and compassion shows in his acting. Love him.

4. Liam Neeson

Love his accent, fantastic speaking voice, dreamy eyes, I even like his nose, which is proportionally large compared to his face. He has such kindness in his expression.

5. Tie between Kate Winslet and Rachel Weisz

I think they are both so beautiful, and so intelligent and interesting.

So that's my list, fow now.

Oh my God. They killed Penny! You Bastards!

2008-07-19T09:58:00.003-04:00

Joss, clearly, you've been away too long. I had forgotten that in your 'verses, actions have consequences. I was thinking I was watching a love story, about a sorta sweet villain and the do-gooding girl he loves. I thought her purity of heart would turn him around, make him into a hero.

Instead, I was watching supervillain origin story. You zagged when I expected you to zig. I kind of hate you right now, but even more than that, I love you. You rotten bastard.

Nathan Fillion can do anything

2008-07-15T00:53:00.003-04:00

Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog, Part I is now available. Please, do yourself a favor and check it out.

I'm not joking around, people. Get your lazy asses out of bed and hit the site!

Where am I?

2008-07-13T23:47:00.002-04:00

I am busy at work, my home computer is still dead, and I've been having lots of excitement.

1. I was on vacation! As I wrote below, I took 5 days off from work and basically just read a lot.

2. My darling husband was in the hospital with a staph infection. You do not want to get a staph infection. He had a temperature of 103.5, and his poor, needlephobic self had to get 3 IVs (pulled the first one out while he was sleeping, the second one didn't work, and so he had to get a 3rd one for his intravenous meds. He is feeling entirely better now.

3. On the plus side, his doctor wouldn't let him go back to work until today, so we've been spending lots of time together.

4. He got 2 pairs of Converse All Star sneakers, and I have to say, seeing him wearing them makes me a little weak in the knees.

5. I'm working on a writing project that I will tell you about later.

6. I've been watching my Mad Men DVDs. Jon Hamm makes me almost as weak in the knees as my husband in his Converse All Stars.

7. Monkey is at camp, so it's just grownups in our house.

8. This is the week we will get our first look at Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog. I am practically palpitating with excitement.

To answer the question that no one is asking....

2008-06-30T10:15:00.002-04:00

...I've been busy.

Plus, my home computer has a virus, and I don't want to pay the Geek Squad's extortionary rate, so I'm looking for something better.

Also, I took a wee vacation so I could spend some time with Monkey and go to the beach. We happened to pick the only cold day in the past week to go to the beach, but eventually it started raining, so we didn't stay at the beach for long.

I've also been reading. I read The First Casualty and Dead Famous by Ben Elton, Twilight and New Moon by Stephenie Meyer; The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett; A Long Way Down by Nick Hornsby; and I just started The Historian by an author whose name I cannot currently remember.

Lastly, I've been going to bed at a reasonable hour - before 11pm most nights. It helps that I put an air conditioner in my room and it's bloody humid right now. I want to sleep more so I can wake up in October, when it's cool again.

Tony Awards

2008-06-16T09:04:00.003-04:00

I used to love all awards shows when I was younger, but I've definitely lost my love. However, I make an exception for the Tony Awards. When I was a child, the Tony Awards was a window into a world that I wanted to belong to. I pictured myself singing and dancing, in fantastic costumes, on stage in front of a live audience.

I liked a lot of things about last night's show. But the highlights for me were Lin Manuel-Miranda's acceptance speech for winning the Best Original Score Tony - which he delivered in freestyle rap - and the presentation from Sunday In The Park With George, which might be my favorite Sondheim musical.

I'm not sure if it's the music or the words or what, but that song gets me every time.

I am so happy

2008-06-09T09:35:00.001-04:00

that Jesse Taylor is back at Pandagon. I didn't realize how much I missed him until I started reading his posts again.

Maureen Watches Too Much TV: The Dance, Dance, Dance edition

2008-06-09T09:13:00.000-04:00

This week, my TV viewing was almost entirely dedicated to dancing, with a small foray into changing partners with the new CBS drama Swingtown.

So You Think You Can Dance: We had one episode dedicated to auditions, which were kind of boring, and then the Thursday night ep was the Vegas episode. This is when the top 200 dancers get put through the ringer. At the end of the episode, they introduced the top 20 dancers, which surprisingly did not include Kelli Baker or Brandon Bryant, both of whom I thought were locks for the show. The show gets much better once the top 20 are chosen, so I'm looking forward to this weeks episodes.

Step It Up And Dance: This week was the finale, and the final 4 dancers were to present their solos. Of course, first they had to participate in a choreography set to a terrible, terrible song by Fergie. As one of the contestants said "we thought we were going to the finale, but instead, we have finale purgatory." But the solos were impressive. Each one of the dancers presented their solo to notable choreographer Jerry Mitchell, who gave really useful critiques to each one of them. Based on what they presented to Mitchell, I was convinced that Mochi would win - her solo was powerful and beautiful. But when they presented their dances on stage, it was clear that the only possible choice to win the competition (and $100,000) was Cody Greene.

America's Best Dance Crew: I will watch anything dance related that doesn't have the word "star" in the title, I guess. This is an MTV show, produced by the mostly incoherent Randy Jackson. I recorded this one, which was a wise call, because in a TWO HOUR program, there was possibly 8 minutes of dancing. Since I don't care about all the chit chat, I fast-forwarded through everything except the routines. None of the finalists in this one grab me as much as the winners of the last season of this show, Jabberwockees. But it's early days yet.

Swingtown: I was as surprised as anyone when I heard CBS was going to do a show about swingers in the 70s. The premiere episode was okay - they opened the episode with a fake-out blow-job, and they had to make the nod to price differences (heavens forfend, ground beef for .88 cents a pound!), but this could be interesting summer viewing. Molly Parker (Susan) is dreamy (although she either got new boobs or the costumer can do miraculous things), Miriam Shor (Janet) is uptight and judgemental, Jack Davenport (Bruce) is so cute but he's too mumbly, and the swinging couple across the street (Grant Show and Lana Perilla as Tom & Trina Decker) are positively predatory. I'll keep watching this one, for the time being.

Sarah Dugas is hot

2008-06-02T23:23:00.000-04:00

Banned Book Meme

2008-06-01T15:38:00.003-04:00

Tagged by Deborah

These are the top 100 banned books. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you've read only in part.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Consider yourself tagged. Also: some of these books are puzzling inclusions. Little House On The Prairie?

It's a Mr. Death? Something about the reaping?

2008-06-01T15:28:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, our lawn mower passed away, and since it was late spring, the grass grew and grew and grew, until it was very long. I was starting to feel anxious about it (since we live in a neighborhood of people who are obsessed with their lawns), thinking everyone was talking behind our backs about how we were letting things slide, so I decided I had to do something about it.

My initial thought was to buy a reel mower, so we could mow our vast .14 of an acre yard using only man/womanpower. But our grass was too long for a reel mower to be effective. So I bought a grass whip.

It took a little while to get the hang of it, but it was pretty darn effective. You basically swing it like a golf club, only less hip action. The best part: the children in the neighborhood gathered around to watch me reap, and they all wanted turns. I was happy to oblige. My shoulders feel well exercised, and Loki went out and evened out my work (and then did some more), so it looks good now. It's also quiet, uses no fuel and will be handy for those times when we let our lawn get a little out of control.

I think I'll still get the reel mower, though. My friend Katrina has one and she says it works great.

Update

2008-05-28T13:22:00.002-04:00

My friend Leslie has created a new blog, and the link has been updated in my blogroll: Leslie's Life.

I can't get enough of this video

2008-05-27T15:41:00.001-04:00

Wade Robson Dance
Uploaded by mickeymcc

Maureen watches too much TV

2008-05-20T23:29:00.003-04:00

ETA: Can you give me feedback on this post? I would like to know if you think I should have included a plot synopsis for the episodes...sometimes I forget that other people read this and that it's not just for my own personal enjoyment. Do you think a brief synopsis of the plots of the shows listed below would have improved this post?

It's only Tuesday, and thanks to the magic of the Tifaux, I've watched the following series finales since yesterday:

The Big Bang Theory: I only started watching this after the writer's strike was over. I was recording another show and I caught a snippet of the end of this one, and it made me laugh, so I started watching. It's kind of spotty, humor-wise, and this episode featured one character, Leonard (who is a nerdy science type, although I'm not sure which field he works in) kissed Penny (dumb blonde who lives across the hall whom Leonard has had a crush on), and the studio audience reached Married With Children levels of whooping it up. That bothers me. I do like some of the characters: Raj, who is a computer guy, is adorable and consistently makes me laugh; Howard, an engineer, is creepy-funny, and physicist Sheldon, Leonard's hyper-rational roommate can be hilarious when used in small doses.

How I Met Your Mother: I had to start watching this show. I was a huge fan of both Freaks & Geeks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and this show has Jason Segel (Nick Andopolis from F&G) and Alyson Hannigan (Willow from Buffy). I like to keep up with the careers of actors from shows I like. This show has moments of absolute brilliance, and I enjoy the out-of-order storytelling. The finale was a little more sentimental than I like, and they may make the character Neil Patrick Harris plays grow and change, which I'm not sure is a good thing, but I trust the writers.

Bones: I watch this one because David Boreanaz was on Buffy and Angel. The finale sucked. It's like the show is being written by fan fic writers. All I can say is that I've guessed who the bad guy is in every single episode I've seen this season. I might have to drop this one.

House: The season finale was the second part of a 2 episode story that started last week. I was a little disappointed last week because I figured out that Amber was the victim the first time House noticed the beautiful woman's necklace, but otherwise, these two episodes featured stellar work from Hugh Laurie, Robert Sean Leonard, and Anne Dudek, who was radiant in the final episode. RIP, Cutthroat Bitch, you were just too awesome for this world.

Music for a melancholy day

2008-05-20T19:46:00.002-04:00

Oblivious

2008-05-18T00:43:00.003-04:00

Did you ever have one of those days where you suddenly found out all kinds of secrets about your family? I never realized how completely oblivious I am to what's going on around me.

Ten things about my mother

2008-05-11T22:19:00.003-04:00

1. She never says goodbye on the phone. When she's done talking, she just hangs up.
2. She will not accept any presents.
3. If you tell her you like something in her house, she will immediately force you to take it.
4. She has never said "I love you" to any of her children.
5. She has the most lovely singing voice, which she will only rarely share.
6. She once stole a cat and returned it when her mother found out. She then collected the reward for the missing cat.
7. She will drive across state lines for a great pizza.
8. She taught the kids in our neighborhood how to jump double dutch.
9. She made up funny nicknames for teachers she didn't like; the principal of my elementary school, Mr. Reardon, is actually called (according to my mother) Mr. Rearend.
10. She taught me the following rhyme to say to kids I didn't like:

Scab sandwich
pus on top
monkey's vomit
camel's snot
eagle's eyeballs dipped in glue
that's a sandwich made for you

My mom's not perfect, and I can trace certain issues I have back to certain behaviors of hers, but I love her so much. If nothing else, she provides me with some of my best stories.

Kittens

2008-05-11T21:35:00.004-04:00

Monkey is a hog in mud right now, because we are foster parenting two adorable little kittens for the next month.

The sprawled out kitty is Fiona; the curled up one is Candy. When they aren't curled up sleeping, they are climbing furniture, crawling underneath things from which it is hard to get them, and engaging in the impossibly cute things that kitties do.

New to blogroll

2008-05-11T19:43:00.002-04:00

Tracy is a bowl of life.

Clinton v. Obama

2008-05-09T09:25:00.002-04:00

My .02 on this volatile subject:

I am loathe to tell other people how they should vote, but if you tell me that you will stay home if your preferred candidate doesn't get the nomination, I reserve the right to think that you're a self-centered idiot.

I don't think Obama is the savior of the Democratic Party, or that Clinton is the only one who can defeat McCain. I don't expect either one of the them to be perfect; if I had my druthers, we would have a truly progressive candidate instead of two mushy centrists to choose between. But if you can't see that either of them is better than the alternative, you need more than the services of a good opthalmologist - you need to ignore the past 8 years, pretend that the 2000 election never happened, and think so highly of your own personal take on the political situation that you can't fathom that maybe you don't have all the answers.

Choir Update

2008-05-09T09:13:00.003-04:00

Way back in November, if you recall, I left the Congregational church where I sang for 7 years, along with the choir director and the accompaniest, and started singing at a Catholic church with them. The new choir was...not good, to put it as succintly as possible, and I wasn't sure I wanted to continue with them.

I just wanted to share that huge leaps and bounds of progress have been made with the choir. I'm really proud of my section in particular, since we have a committed group of altos who are there every week and put in the work to make our part as good as we can.

In addition to vast improvements in our sightreading and musicality, I've grown to love the people in this choir. They are kind, generous, warm...just a lovely group of people. So I think I'll be continuing with them for a while.

I saw it, so I'm tagged

2008-05-08T23:49:00.003-04:00

Meme via Angelos

1) Ten years ago I was...
Working at Cox Communications, at about this time of the year, I was promoted to work in their new telephony department as a Broadband Analyst. I worked kind of insane hours, but I loved the job. Although, if I hadn't gotten the promotion, I would have been laid off in a great economy, with a year's severence. I would have gotten another job and 2 years salary in one year's time. I regret that, sometimes.

2) Five things on today's (tomorrow's) to-do list:
Buy eggs
Do some yoga
walk the dog
finish the book I'm reading
laundry

3) Things I'd do if I were a billionaire:
Pay off all my debts
Set aside money for Monkey and Sio
Give a big chunk of change to my parents, my siblings, my father-in-law, my aunt-in-law and my sister-in-law
Quit my job so I could go to school full-time and get my damn degree already
Travel around the world
Buy a house in Ireland
Find a way to use my money to help create the kind of world I want to live in

4) Three bad habits:
Overeating
laziness
nail-biting

5) Five places I've lived:
Hebron, CT
Meriden, CT
Yalesville, CT
Portland, CT
Glastonbury, CT

6) Six jobs I've had in my life:
Meat wrapper
video store clerk
grocery store cashier
retail wage slave
waitress/sandwich maker
secretary

Exactly how I feel

2008-05-08T09:43:00.002-04:00

D. Aristophanes at Sadly, No! has captured my opinion of the Clinton v. Obama slugfest. Indeed, I could have written the same post, word for word, if A. I wasn't too lazy to write that much at one time and B. excepted the parts about interblog fighting, because I don't really do that.

Invitation to the Dance

2008-05-07T23:59:00.003-04:00

Ferdy on Films is running a blogathon called Invitation to the Dance. The subject is dance in the movies. Check out the site for links. There are some great videos out there, too. And this gives me an opportunity to share, again, one of my favorite dance scenes from the movies: the dance battle between Bob Fosse and Tommy Rall in My Sister Eileen.

I'm a huge fan of dance battles, and I think we should consider resolving all the world problems with dance battles.

While I was looking up this video, I noticed that several people have taken a video of Gwen Verdon and two other women doing what I describe as a K-Tel Records Easy Listening Songs of the 70's dance, choreo'd by Bob Fosse, and set it to some rather more contemporary songs. For example:

Damn, I love the internet.

Birthday and hiccups

2008-05-07T22:44:00.003-04:00

Monkey opened up some cool presents tonight. She got a couple of books (A Wrinkle In Time and Gossamer, the latter of which caused her to jump up and down with happiness); some chocolate, a new bathing suit, some unmentionables* that she refused to open even in front of Loki, and a boombox (and that's what it's called, because it was in the aisle marked "Audio - MP3 - Boombox").

I made a homemade pizza, which is always an adventure because no two doughs ever come out the same. The last one I made didn't want to rise; this one wouldn't stop rising. It was a fluffy crust, which is not my preference, but it did mean that one piece was enough for me. For dessert, we had birthday cake. As per Monkey's request, we had an ice cream cake, and rather than buying a Carvel ice cream cake at the grocery store, I MADE an ice cream cake. I liked a Pyrex bowl with parchment paper, then put a layer of Breyer's Vanilla. I let that freeze up a bit, then I added half a pint of Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie, a layer of cookie crumbles, and then a layer of fudge. I let that all freeze a bit, and then I added a whole pint of Ben & Jerry's Mint Chocolate Cookie, and then the remaider of the Chocolate Fudge Brownie went on the bottom.

It was pretty awesome.

*yes, I am the kind of mother who buys things like underwear and socks for birthdays and Christmas. If I'm buying something, I like buying something that will get used.

Oh, hiccups. I've been getting them a lot over the past couple of days, usually at night before bed and in the morning when I wake up. It's extremely annoying.