Erin goes and goes

I drove home from Ashland on Friday night and mom kindly helped me re-pack my bag to include all the birthday goodies for Emmet's party and drove me to the airport for my Aer Lingus flight on Saturday afternoon. After a pretty good flight (only on screaming baby and I was able to get some sleep), my met my high school roommate Sarah (and her sister) at the airport in Dublin and we took a bus (and the subway) back to her house for an episode of Father Ted and a short nap before walking around her neighborhood. Then she took me to the bus that would take me to Clonmel (she even packed me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the trip with lots of black currant jam). The bus ride was good (and I got to sleep for a little while). I was worried (only a little) about meeting Bridget in Clonmel but as luck would have it, she and Orrin (and the boys) were only their way back home and were right behind my bus! On Monday, Bridget and I visited Cahair castle and then returned home to decorate for Emmet's birthday party. I think that everyone had a good time (there were about 30+ kids!). So after unwinding a bit on Monday night (and watching a few episodes of The Office). Bridget dropped off Orrin at work and went to the Rock of Cashel (where I saw St. Patrick's Cross) and to Kilkenny castle (which was updated during the Victorian period so it really only looks like a castle from the outside, the only way you can really tell is the thickness of the windows). And today we went to Blarney Castle were Bridget, Silas, Emmet and I climbed the 127 steps to the top and Bridget and I kissed the Blarney stone! We also walked around the gardens of the castle (which were beautiful) and stopped for some gelato (and a patch for my bag) before heading to Cobh on the coast. Cobh was the last stop of the Titanic before it crossed the ocean (and sank) and an emigration point during the Great Famine. There is statue commemorating the first person to immigrate through Ellis Island who left from Cobh. This sounds like a lot, but we don't have too much planned for tomorrow morning, so we will relax a little bit.

And Bridget will be posting pictures soon!!

T- minus 3 days

In three days, I will be on my way to Ireland to visit my roommate from the Academy and Bridget (and family). I am really excited about going. I will be really busy at work for the rest of week so it will be really good to get a break from work (and not think about work or dream about it). I'm mostly packed (most importantly I've picked out the few books that I would bring with me). I even went to the post office to hold my mail while I'll be gone. I totally feel like such an adult now, you know making lots of preparations and making sure that I won't be behind at work when I get back. Add to that the fact that it is time for re-enroll in the benefits program at work and I am definitely not a student anymore.

HANK: I know I'll never love your feet as much as they do, but the way I look at it, you're like a fully loaded truck. The big tires are part of the package. You pay extra to get those really big tires. Now, why are you crying? You know how much I want a new truck.

Baby you can drive my car

This ad from the UK make me want cake and be really impressed at the same time:

Colorization

For the past few days, I have been watching a lot a black and white movies. I saw Harper (with Paul Newman) on Saturday (which is in color) but then I caught the last (really suspenseful) 15 minutes of the black and white thriller "The Spiral Staircase" with Dorthy Maguire and Ethel Barrymore. After that I watched "The Enchanted Cottage" with Dorthy Maguire. I have never heard of this movie prior to seeing it on TCM on Saturday night. It's about a scarred World War II veteran who finds love with a plain house maid. The play the movie was based on was commissioned by the British government after the end of World War I to create compassion for returning soldiers. And then on Sunday, I watched "Mildred Pierce" with Joan Crawford. I mostly just yelled got annoyed at the daughter Veda. And then Tuesday and Wednesday, I watched "Lady Eve" with Barbra Stanwyck and Henry Fonda and "To Have and Have Not" with Lauren Bacall and Humprey Bogart. And for this weekend (while I work on a baby quilt) I have "Dark Victory" (Bette Davis), "Kiss Me Deadly" (Mike Hammer film noir) and "I'll Be Seeing You" (with one my very favorite actors: Joseph Cotten).

HANK: We used to make movies all the time. Dale, you practically slept with that little camcorder.
DALE: "Practically?" I was going to be the next Zapruder. Except nobody shot a president after that. Nobody that knew what he was doing.

Laughter for one

I heard an interview with the guy who created Father Ted and he talked about his new show called the IT Crowd and I've been watching the show for the past week. This episode is my favorite and since the show is about 24 minutes long, I'll just post the funniest part. The show is about a woman (Jen) with no computer experience become the head of the IT department. In this episode, Jen has her period (for which she uses the euphemism Aunt Irma is visiting) which causes the two IT guys (Moss and Roy) to think that they share her symptoms. Moss sends out a email to every IT person he knows to see if someone else has this symptoms. And hilarity ensures.

Kings and Queen

I didn't do a book review last week because I was up in Ann Arbor helping Rachel prepare for her awesome Halloween party. But this week I do have a review of "The New Kings of Nonfiction" which is a collection of essays/articles edited by Ira Glass from "This American Life". I will admit that I skipped over some of the essays (I couldn't get into the essay and skipped the rest). But the articles that I did, I enjoyed a lot. The topics were quite varied from the SEC charged a 13-year old to 6 degrees of separation to an interview with Val Kilmer. I think my favorite essay was one by Susan Orleans about her interview with a 10 year old boy. Although the one about Val Kilmer was pretty good, Val comes off as both completely wacky at times but also totally normal. I really enjoyed Ira Glass' preface on why he chose some of the essays or more specifically the authors of the article. When I was younger, I would also skip the preface to book until I read this incredible preface to "Persuasion" written by Margret Drabble and since then I always read the preface (although sometimes after the book in case part of the plot is discussed in the preface). What I love with a good preface is an insight to the author frame of mind which often makes me enjoy the book more.

You have won a tiny Dundee

I was reading the NPR pop culture blog, Monkey See, about the upcoming Oscar nominations and how there is a possibility that more "popular" (read made a huge amount of money) movies may get nominated this year like "The Dark Knight" and "Wall-E" or as a super long shot "Iron Man". The blog linked to a couple other stories like on a the New York Times that pointed out that ratings for the past few years Oscar shows have been done and the highest ratings were in 1997 when Titanic won. And that the combined box office for the last five Best Picture winners (Babel, Crash, The Departed, No Country for Old Men and Million Dollar Baby) is was less that the last big box office movie to win Best Picture (The Return of the King in 2003). I think I would be more interested in the results of the Oscars if there wasn't so dependent on when the picture is release since a majority of movies hoping to vie for Oscar nominations are released between October to December. And since, apparently, members of the Academy have short term memory, at lot of performances and movies get overlooked that are released earlier in the year. Two examples of this in the past couple of years in Chris Cooper excellent role in "Breach" and David Fincher's "Zodiac", not to mention the great performances of Robert Downey Jr, Mark Ruffalo, Jake Gyllenhaall and Anthony Edwards in that movie. And there have been some movies that I didn't like that were nominated for Best Picture (i.e. Ghost).

"We are going to see 'The Flowers of Time' with Charlton Heston and Ethan Hawke. This is their third movie together. The first two went straight to video." - Peggy Hill

Quality of Life

This week's review (finally) will be about Lush Life by Richard Price (finally). It took me a while to finish the book mostly due to time rather that the quality of the book. It details the aftermath of the shooting of a young man on the East Side in New York City. The book examines the reactions of police, the other victims of the crime, the perpetrator, and the family of murdered man. It also touches on the politics associated with solving the crime (like timing a meeting with the press to get the best reaction). I really liked to book because it looked at the crime from so many different points of view. Richard Price wrote for the show "The Wire", which was written in a similar style. I think that this style of writing really sets him apart from other writers in this genre. I also liked Price's examination of the history of the East Side of New York City. Apparently, a good portion of immigrants lived in that area until recently when a larger majority of upper class people began moving to the East Side. Anyone who enjoys crime novels would enjoy this book (even though you know who did it from the onset).

Free Pass to Kooky town

I recently mentioned to my mom that I'm looking forward to when I can be completely inflexible and then it can be chalked up to : "I'm old to change" or "I'm just eccentric". Which has made me think about quirky famous people who make the weirdest things and no one seems to care. The video below is an example of 3 people who totally have a free pass to kooky town:

If you have seen any Coen brothers film, you know that they can really throw something from left field into a movie. Gwen Stefani is perhaps that best example of a person that is really eccentric (in music, dress, and influences) and people really don't care, probably because she is so confident in herself.

"Which is why so many people are suddenly allergic to peanuts. The peanuts are emitting toxins as an evolutionary defense mechanism. They're tired of being eaten, and now they're fighting back." - Dale

We let down the funky bunch

This guy at work looks a little like Andy Samburg (including the hair), so from now on, I'm going to be reminded of this clip every time I talk to him.




or this (watch Andy Samburg run away, it's hilarious):

I have feelings of ennui

Work has been really hectic (and stressful) for the last week and as a side effect, I have been neglecting my blog a lot. I haven't posted in about two weeks, so I'm going to try and post more often and do a book review this week. I will try to be better about posting. I think that I will let Andy Bernard express my feelings

Mind the Gap

These two topics are completely unrelated but I've thinking about both of them so they are getting squished together.

• I've been watching Mr. Bean on DVD and it is distributed by A&E Video which means there a a short promotional clip prior to menu which show David Suchet from Poirot and scenes from their excellent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth. And I realized that I miss the old A&E. The one that used to show PBS/BBC mysteries and Law and Order (including a "Kids Kill" marathon for one New Year's Eve) and made really good literary adaptions of Jane Eyre, Emma, Tom Jones and Horatio Hornblower. I am not digging the current A&E at all. I will still watch City Confidential or American Justice from time to time, but the rest of the shows are just crap like Criss Angel and Gene Simmons. And the their TV movies are few and far between and terrible. I watched the new Andromeda Strain which was just terrible (and strayed so far from the book that I didn't even watch the 2nd half). So seeing the clips from A&Es glory days (in my opinion) really bummed me out.
  
• The announcements from the Nobel Prize have been made throughout this week and the prize for literature will be made in the next few days. But there is little likelihood that an American writer will receive the prize because the permanent secretary for the association, Horace Engdahl, said that recent American writers are not deserving of the Nobel prize. He claims that ""The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining." This of course has caused a firestorm in the American literary community. Not only are people upset about the insult to some of the great current writers like Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike and Philip Roth (I love his book The Plot Against America), but the Nobel committee has become more political in their choices, especially honoring writers how dislike the US (and I was reading the history of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Wikipedia and that article mentions that the committee strove to be more neutral during and after World War I). Last year's winner Doris Lessing said that the September 11th attacks were "neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as [Americans] think," and said of Americans that "They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be." There is a really great article at Slate.com about this issue (read it here!). I personally hold little stock in the Nobel Prize in any subject because of the lack of acknowledgment for Roslind Franklin's contributions to determining the structure of DNA (she had passed away before Watson and Crick won but she was barely mentioned in their speech) although I did get to hear a lecture from a Nobel Laurete while I was at Iowa.
  

PEGGY: Let's practice. I'll be Kahn. A-hem: You are a dumb redneck!
HANK: That sounds more like Minh.
PEGGY: Leave my wife out of this, hillbilly!

This makes me smile everytime

I love this commercial so much, it makes me giggle every time.

Conflicted

Today, sitting in my mailbox, were information packets about Ohio State University and Indiana University law schools. My older sister Rachel thinks that I would make a good lawyer and know that idea has begun to grown on me, hence the info on law schools. Both that packets were really informative and got me kinda excited about law school. On the other hand, I'm nervous about applying. I'm not saying that getting into grad school was really easy but applying to law school is much more intense and competitive. Not to mention that law school is a lot harder. I'm also nervous that everyone would be much smarter than me. And that the first day of law school is going to be like this:

Monsterous

The book for this week's review is the Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi. The book tells the story of the search for the "Monster of Florence", a serial killer of several couples in Florence over about a 15 year period. Mario Spezi is a crime journalist that covered the Monster killings for the onset and as a result is considered an expert on the crimes. Douglas Preston (an author of thrillers) moves to Florence with his family and learns (from Spezi) that the house that he has rented is near the site of one of the killings perpetrated by the Monster of Florence. Preston and Spezi decide to write a book about the killings and discover that the people of Florence have a short-term memory when is comes to the killings. And that was the most interesting part about the crime because it was never really resolved (not everyone was convinced that the murder was caught). It was interesting to hear about the investigation and how it was so obviously shaped by the people in charge. And how the Italian government (and the police force) can control the press (journalist can be charged for hampering prosecution through the press). But I did learn a cool Italian term. During one (of the many trials about the Monster of Florence), one of the friends of the suspect keeps saying that he doesn't know the suspect very well, they were just "picnicing friends" and to this day, this term is used to described friends that are involved in sordid doings. I enjoyed this book that explored a well know European crime that is not known very well in the US and apparently Thomas Harris borrowed some the details about the Monster of Florence for his Hannibal Lector novels. And this book made the news when Mario Spezi was arrested and jailed for crimes relating to the Monster of Florence (which just shows how sensitive to these crimes).

Wigfield Wigout!

This week's book for review is Wigfield by Amy Sedaris, Paul DiNello and Stephen Colbert. These same three people were involved with the TV show "Strangers with Candy" and if you have ever seen that show, that will prepare you for the type of dysfunctional humor in Wigfield. The story begins with a author (Russell Hoakes) receiving an advance for a book about the disappearing small town in modern America. As he attempts to write a novel containing 50,000 words (and burning through his advance) he stumbles upon a quasi-shanty town of mortuaries and topless bars at the base of a huge dam. The dam is scheduled to be destroyed and the town of Wigfield it so be flooded. So Russell goes around interviewing the people of the town and trying to help save the town. The town is beyond dysfunctional (ignoring the fact that there are 3 mayors for a town that is not actually a town) partially due to the defunct plutonium disposal canal that makes to ground temperature about 120 degrees (therefore pets and children are not recommended). I found the book hilarious but this may partly be due to the fact that I listened to the book on CD (and read by the authors) so part of the hilarity was due to delivery of the lines. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Strangers with Candy or the work of David Sedaris.

Review in two

This is my first blog post on my new fancy laptop that arrived on Friday afternoon (and Lucy and Vaughn arrived about 5 hours later). After finding out that I needed to charge the pump for the airmatress, Lucy and Vaughn stayed in my room and I slept on the couch. On Saturday, we went to Lehmans (in Kidron) and Lucy was impressed /overwhelmed by the size and selection of the store. Afterward, we have lunch a local Amish restaurant and then returned back to my apartment. Lucy worked on setting up the laptop while I worked on dinner (we had naan and chicken with tandoori marinade). She had some problems getting the internet figured out (included a evening trip to Wal-mart to get a wireless router and a call to my internet provider on Sunday morning) but she got it set up and now I can use my laptop any where in my apartment. During the times we could get Vaughn to actully sleep, we talked or watched season 4 of The Office, episodes of Dead Like Me or Portiot mysteries. Vaughn has been pretty good during the weekend although he has been going to bed much later that he should (he finally fell asleep about 10pm tonight) after waking up three times last night. I was able to get him back to sleep for a little while longer so I could make stuffed french toast for Lucy after their morning nap. Hopefully he sleeps better tonight and Lucy is hoping to time her leaving tomorrow so he is at his maximum goodness. Good Luck! I will be posing a book review tomorrow (I took a personal day at work so I could have some extra time with Lucy and Vaguhn in the morning).

PEGGY: Teach me to walk.
COTTON: You ready to hate me more than you ever hated anyone in your life?
PEGGY: I already do.
COTTON: Then we're halfway there.

Cheesetastic

This week's review (only one day late) will be about Blessed Are the Cheesemakers by Sarah-Kate Lynch. The novel is about two elderly cheesemakers (Corrie and Fee) in Ireland (County Cork) looking for two people to take over their business. And two such people arrive in the form of Kit, an American trying to recovery after the death of his wife, and Abby, Corrie's granddaughter returning to Ireland from the south Pacific after leaving her philandering husband. The plot was relatively simple and slightly predictable (and honestly not enough talk about actul cheesemaking). Despite this, these novel was not without its charms mostly due to the Irish characters (and the fact that Father Ted gets mentioned). I enjoyed the book, I didn't love it, but it was interesting.

Dust off your drug nicknames!

I had drug training yesterday at work and at the end of the training we played Jeopardy with the basic premise of how well do you know your drug lingo. One the my favorite running jokes on King of the Hill is Bobby's excessive knowledge of drug information due to drug prevention lectures at school (and sex ed lectures). And apparently, it's been awhile since my last health class because there were some nicknames that I did know (including that I didn't know what black tar heroin looks like which I think is a good thing).

HANK: Hey there, Bobby. I guess they found a cure for the cooties? Heh, heh, heh.
BOBBY: I don't know. What are cooties?
HANK: Well, when I was a boy, that's what they called the germs you got from girls.
BOBBY: Oh, you mean like chlamydia?
HANK: Huh?

BOBBY: I have to do all the work because Dad's new employee is a drug addict.
HANK: Now Bobby, Leon's a little slow on the draw, but that doesn't mean he's on drugs.
BOBBY: You gotta trust me on this. When you've heard as many former athletes lecture at your school as I have, you get to know all the signs.

HANK: Now, I know we've talked a lot about how you should never do drugs, but from now on you'll be taking medication after every meal.
BOBBY: So, do I smoke it or snort it?
HANK: It's a pill, Bobby.
BOBBY: So I guess I'll just pop it.

Serve the People!

The book for this week's review is "Serve the People" by Yan Lianke. The novel is set in China in 1967 after the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The story recounts an affair between the wife of a Division Commander in the Army and a house servant and ramifications of the affair against the backdrop of repressive Communist China. Due to the nature of the story, the novel has banned in China (and considered unpublishable) but found an audience due to excerpts and discussion posted online (and thus found an American publisher). The novel gives a really interesting inside view of Communist China following the Cultural Revolution. One of my favorite time periods to read about is post World War II, mainly the 50s and the 60s, since the end of the war really created a power vacuum in Eastern Europe (it doesn't hurt that I've had two really good teachers for classes about this period that I took at the Academy and Purdue). And I love reading banned books! Besides the sexual nature of the story, the Chinese government says the novel slanders the Army and Mao Zedong. It especially interesting to read a novel about China during the height of the Communism now in the context of China's increasing involvement in the world economy and politics (not to mention becoming a more capitalist society).

I'm hoping to read all of Richard Price's Lush Life this week, but since the novel it pretty long, I may be reviewing a previously read book, I'm thinking maybe Jane Eyre or Villette or possibly one of my favorite books ever Catherine Called Birdy.