Monthly Archives: April 2007

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Across the universe

B sent me this link today. I don’t really know anything about it other than what’s here, but OH MY GOODNESS I HAVE TO SEE THIS MOVIE! This, if you were wondering, is a total Maryanne trailer. If you ever want to make a trailer for which I would be the target market, use this, the Moulin Rouge, and the Kill Bill trailer as templates, and I’ll watch anything you make.

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Geekitude

Today I witnessed one of the geekiest things I’ve ever seen. And don’t say that lightly; I’ve witnessed levels of geekiness that top out the scales. I’ve seen grown men dressed as female anime characters, in public. I’ve seen someone accost Darick Robertson at a signing and not just explain, but act out the opening sequence of their proposed version of the Transmetropolitan movie, complete with singing the theme song. So I’ve seen my share of geek.

But what I saw today? It was beautiful. I was walking through the parking garage when I heard something that sounded familiar. As the car it was coming from came closer, I recognized it. There was no way to not recognize it. And then I saw the car. It was a gorgeous silver convertible Astin Martin with the top down, out of which was blasting the James Bond theme. Not one of the individual theme songs, like Duran Duran’s View to a Kill or something, but the duh-duh-duh duh duh-duh-duuuh, duhduhduhduh duhduh duh one.

Now, if I had a gorgeous silver Astin Martin I might drive around pretending to be a spy, and that might include playing the James Bond theme, but the sound would be contained to the car. I just have to wonder, did I catch this guy in his one moment of geeking out, or does he have the theme on a loop and just drives around announcing to the world that, in case they missed it, he is in fact driving the James Bond car?

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Yay me!

I successfully completed my goal of not taking in any celebrity gossip for a whole month! (No help from Debbie Gibson, I tell you!) So I did it, and I feel like a better person for it. Of course I celebrated by checking out what exactly it was that Alec Baldwin left in the message on his daughter’s cell phone, but it was killing me and it was the only piece of gossip I looked at. I’m going to continue to cut back on the gossip; if I feel like I’m investigating it out of spite or malice then I won’t look. Even morbid curiosity is out. Well, kind of, because that’s pretty much what made me check out the Baldwin message. But anyway. I’m trying to use this as a jumping off point to do better.

My new goal? To work out consistently. I got a great set of work out dvds that are a great mix of hippy yoga, fun dance moves, and totally kick-your-butt ab work that are the perfect fit for my workout personality. There are five different workouts, and I’m rotating through them, which keeps things new and fun. I’ve now successfully worked out for 7 days and I feel really good.

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A new game

Stolen from someone else:

“Head to IMDB.com and look up ten of your favorite movies. List three plot keywords for each movie, and then see which of your friends can guess what movie you’re talkin’ bout. NO cheating, now…”

Here’s mine, post your guesses in the comments. I tried to pick the keywords I thought best expressed the movie, without being too obvious and giving it away.

1. One Day, Music Store, Head Shaving

2. Championship, plagiarism, Title spoken by character

3. Blackmail, Dandy, Upper Class

4. Upstairs Downstairs, Murder, Maid

5. Taxicab, Egyptology, Double Cross

6. 1930′s, Actress, Revenge

7. Dysfunctional Family, Child Prodigy,

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A challenge

This is stolen from a LiveJournal, but it sounded fun.

Assemble a super team from your favorite films, TV shows, books etc. All your superteam members must be from DIFFERENT sources.

Your team must consist of the following:

- Team Leader
- Warrior
- Smartypants
- Hottie
- Comic Relief

We’ve been having a great time coming up with different possibilities for teams. Mine at the moment:

Team Leader: Mal from Firefly

Warrior: The Bride from Kill Bill

Smartypants: Dr. Who (The Christopher Eccelston version)

Hottie: Mr. Smith from Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Comic Relief: Jack Sparrow from Pirates

I would have had Batman be the smarty pants, but he doesn’t really work well on a team. Kabuki was my other choice for warrior, but she doesn’t work well on a team either.

So who would be on your super team? Remember, they each have to be from different sources, which does NOT preclude them from all being the same person, as you can see in my truly inspired list below:

Team Leader: Jack Sparrow from Pirates

Warrior: Sands from Once Upon A Time In Mexico

Smarty pants: Ichabod Crane from Sleepy Hollow

Hottie: Officer Tom Hanson from 21 Jump St.

Comic Relief: Wade Walker from Cry Baby

That’s right, a whole super team of Johnny Depp. Can you beat it? :)

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The Top Ten

The Top Ten: Writers Pick their Favorite Books, edited by J. Peder Zane is a collection of top ten book lists that 125 authors submitted, with the results correlated in all kinds of interesting ways. (I know that’s not terribly descriptive, but I’ve been struggling with that one sentence for about 2 weeks now, so either take my word for it or go here for a slightly more eloquent description.)

Each book that appears on a list is given points for where on the list it appears (#1 books get 10 points, all the way down to 1 point for books in the #10 position). If a book appear on more than one list all its points get totaled and the books with the most points at the end make up the end-all-be-all top ten list. In total there were 544 books listed. The book also contains paragraph long synopses of each of the books listed.
Of course I had to keep track of my own stats as I went, and this is what I discovered. Out of the end-all-be-all top ten best books I’ve read seven :Anna Karenina (#1), Madame Bovary (#2), Lolita (#4), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (#5), Hamlet (#6), The Great Gatsby (#7), The stories of Anton Chekhov (#9); and haven’t read three: War and Peace (#3), In Search of Lost Time (#8), and Middlemarch (#10).
Out of all of the books I’ve read 87, 5 of which I want to reread. I’ve tried but didn’t finish 15, 9 of which I want to go back and try again, and I haven’t read but want to read 145. The remaining 280 I just have no interest in. (I know those numbers don’t add up to 544, but words, not numbers, are my friends.

I’ve read the most off of the top ten works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mostly because of my good friend Shakespeare, and I’ve read more American authors than British, Russian or French.

Interesting to no one but me? Probably. But here’s a question you may find more interesting, if you’re still with me– what are your top ten books? I’ve been thinking about it, and my tentative list is below. You can take “best” to mean whatever you want: favorite, most influential, most powerful, whatever- but the books should be fiction.

1) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fiztgerald
2) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
3) Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
4) Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
5) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Murial Spark
6) Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
7) The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

8) Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Cholderlos de Laclos

9) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

10) A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Those aren’t in order, it was hard enough to narrow it down without trying to choose which was the best of the best. (The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson are screaming to be on the list, I just can’t pick anything to take off to put them on.) And just so you know, my criteria for best included how much I love it, how much I enjoy reading and rereading it, the quality of the writing, and the contribution I think it makes to the world.

So what are your top ten?