This is an open thread. Post what you will, including self-linking, if that makes you happy.
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Bobby McFerrin plays the audience like an instrument:
I ran across this list of the 17 best romantic comedies of the last decade, and the eight on the list I’ve seen, I either liked (Waitress, About a Boy, Juno, Punch-Drunk Love, Wall-E) or loved (Sideways, Amélie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). I guess I should see the other nine films on this list.
On the other hand, I definitely won’t be seeing The Ugly Truth after reading this reviewer’s very feminist take on it. I particularly liked that the review noted how insulting this movie’s view of men is.
I really enjoy Alyssa Rosenberg’s blog, but Little Wild Bouquet has, imo, entirely won their inter-blog debate about 30 Rock and race. I laugh a lot while watching 30 Rock, but that doesn’t mean its politics aren’t screwed up.
Just being an English professor: It’s pentatonic, not petatonic. :)
[Thanks! I’ve fixed it! — Amp. :-) ]
Snappy Dance Theater’s Vagina (The Dance) is really beautiful!
I love this video, every time I see it it makes me happy.
I just posted Can you sue Wyeth because of clear conflict of interest at the very least and possibly fraud that led to cancer. Share with anyone who may benefit.
i absolutely loved that review of the ugly truth. i particularly enjoyed her final paragraph: “Welcome to romance: one of you, at least, will get a happy ending. And the other one can fake it.”
i posted a picture i took of a bake shop in Florida, which makes me wonder who their target consumer is…well, not really. it’s painfully obvious.
and my No safety for racism post is now a guest post over at Macon D’s stuff white people do.
and i’m back from vacation :(, so comment away.
Sady Doyle (author of the linked review of Ugly Truth) also has a blog where she similarly eviscerates romcom and bromance cliches.
Myself, I’ve been visiting family in Pittsburgh and can’t seem to get away from disturbed conversation about the L.A. Fitness shooting there. Long ruminating post, shorter Aha–moment post.
Loved that clip. That looks like something that a music teacher could use, too.
FilthyGrandeur, I’d guess their target market is people, likely males, who’d like something that tastes like it was baked at home but who don’t bake themselves.
I say this from the perspective of someone who won a cooking contest this week, BTW.
Congrats RonF! I was wondering where you had gone.
RonF–
congrats on the cooking contest. i’m actually not as offended by the name of the store as it seems, but it did give me a brief “WTF” moment, at least to where i was compelled to snap a picture before the light turned green. i wanted to share the “wtf” moment. lol.
Is that an audience of musicians? They’re too in tune to be a group of random people.
Everything I needed to know about The Ugly Truth was in the stick figures on the posters. Men are horndogs, women are emotional, blah frickin’ blah.
The Bobby McFerrin thing was fun, and a reminder of just how deeply ingrained music is in the human psyche.
Here is a link to my husband’s new blog, neurochemically challenged, about his experience with chronic mental illness. In this post he discusses the relationship between his deeply ingrained ideals of masculinity and the stigma of needing to take psychotropic meds.
He’s a really honest and courageous guy and he lives at the intersection between the personal and the political every hour of every day.
And yes, I’m biased.
Dymphna —
Thanks for the link. As a neurochemically challenged adult myself (depression and ADHD — thanks, incompetent designer!), I’m always glad to see more people talking about those issues in an honest way.
The full video of the session of the World Science Festival that that video comes from can be found here. Neat stuff.
I was at Boy Scout summer camp, spending a week in the woods with a group of 11- to 18-year old boys/young men. No internet, no iPods (we ban all personal electronics for the week), and only adults are permitted cell phones and they are encouraged to only use them for necessary purposes. It was a welcome respite. I need my time in the woods to keep sane. I tell people at work that the iron ore in the hills in Michigan and Wisconsin keeps cell phones from working in remote areas – and they buy it! So, no phone calls from work either.
One necessary purpose for my cell phone turned out to be getting me taken to the emergency room. But what I thought was a heart attack turned out to be rather severe acid reflux. My rather delightful doctor (an immigrant from Croatia with Italian ancestry as well, we had a couple of very intersting conversations) told me that esophageal spasms can very closely mimic MIs, even to the involvment of the nerves of one’s left arm. Walk into a hospital emergency room and answer “Can I help you?” with “I’ve got a pain in my chest and down my left arm” and you become the center of attention real fast. An overnight stay for observation, what looked like about 10 yards of EKG printout and a cardiac stress test the next day and I was sent home 18 hours later with a prescription for pantaprazole. Which according to the patient information sheet can make me test false positive for marijuana usage.
“Home” in this case being a wall tent and cot covered with mosquito netting up on a hill. Yep, I went back to camp. I did the Mile Swim the next day so everyone would know I wasn’t an invalid (and it was one of my goals for the week anyway).
Ten different Dutch ovens were entered into the cooking contest – I won the entree division by roasting an 11-pound turkey stuffed with a combination of Stove Top, some rice I par-cooked, diced apple and some sauteed Italian sausage rubbed up with oil and some Lawry’s chicken seasoning. It took about 45 minutes to get ready and 3.5 hours to cook in a 16″ (12 quart) Dutch oven with about 15 charcoal briquets underneath and about 25 – 30 on top. Apparently the judges found it a welcome respite from the chilis they usually see. The real competitors were a lasagna and a chicken breast rolled with swiss cheese and ham preparation. I thought they’d win, but I guess a full-blown roast stuffed turkey was a novelty.
Doug S. writes:
It’s a science festival, so I’d assume that the audience is at least interested in the sciences if not employed in them. And what I have observed as a student at MIT, as an alumni who interviews high school seniors trying to get into MIT and as someone who sings in two choirs and knows people who make a living musically is that there’s seems to be a high correlation between mathematical aptitude and at least a basic musical aptitude. I too noticed that the audience seemed to be well in tune, but I was not surprised.
Need a little help here:
I was reading a comic that had combined a number of fantasy characters from classic children’s works (e.g., Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, et. al.) but with a decided twist. For example, in this case Alice, though looking and dressing like Alice is classically depicted, packs a sword and is both willing and able to use it. She hsa been sent on a quest by the Queen. She and Peter and others have all fallen in together – each with their own separate motivation – on this quest.
There were at least 4 such books that were downloadable (as .pdf’s) from a site that you have to register on. There are many other comics of various kinds on the site. For the life of me I can’t remember the name of the books nor the site. Any ideas?
It was on WOWIO. But now I can’t find it there.
I am curious what folks here think about court-ordered racial desegregation of California’s men’s prisons (CA women’s prisons never seem to have been racially segregated*). When the Supreme Court decision came out, I agreed with the reasoning of the liberal majority that if other states could have racially integrated prisons, CA ought to be able to do the same. But after last weekend’s prison riot at Chino, I am reconsidering whether it makes sense to use the same rules applied to “normal life” in a penal institution.
* While I was checking that assertion, I was reminded of the bizarre sexual orientation segregation recently revealed at a Virginia women’s prison, where women who were thought to be lesbians were segregated from the rest of the population.
@RonF – is it Grimm Fairy Tales? here I thought you might be talking about Fables at first but that seems like a different character set.
My jaw is dropping at how good this column is — not that it’s objectively super-fantastic, but just because it’s a good column from Michael Gerson. Soft bigotry of low expectations, y’know.
Yowtch! No, Simple Truth, that wasn’t it. This was on Wowio, but it was a multi-issue storyline with all the characters from various children’s books mixed together and acting ex-canonically. I can’t find it on Wowio anymore (now that I’ve remembered that’s where it was and have reactivated my ID there).
The NYT tells us that now it is “hip” for men to have a pot belly. The evidence of this hipness? Everyone seems to have one.
Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath for poochy bellies, thighs that touch or back fat to all of a sudden become “hip” on women just because most of us have at least one if not all of those features.
chingona,
Let’s remember that the article is careful to repeat that this is “hip” in a few very specific precincts of Brooklyn (even in a recession, men in Manhattan are hanging onto their gym memberships, though sometimes downgrading to a cheaper one), and theorizes that it might be a reaction against our president’s famous leanness. Going against the Obama image is definitely a minority trend — Burberry was flying off the shelves in most places when it was noted as a brand that Obama favors, but then again solid British menswear is not exactly the look of hipsters.