Culture
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Jon Hamm as….SERGIO!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MADdGkWtbCw[/youtube] If you thought you loved him as Don Draper in Mad Men, wait until you see him as Sergio the Sexy Sax Player! Wait…I love Don more. Wait…Don’s an ass. I forgot.
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(Not) Lost Generation
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA[/youtube] I got this in the email the other day. I liked it. See if you do, too.
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Friday Randomness
Thanks everyone for your kind birthday wishes. I had a lovely birthday, and a lovely time off from work. One of Maya’s Christmas gifts was tickets to go see Wicked, which was a lot of fun. I’m not a huge fan of the musical as a play, but this one was really fun and interesting and kept your attention the whole way through. Excellent gift, Ted! Btw, Ted wrote a great review of the show for Popdose, and he included a couple of YouTube clips that are pretty great. Along the theme of gifts that are not things, we also received tickets for dinner on the Napa Valley Wine Train,…
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On the First Day of Christmas…
(image found here) A Facebook friend posted this morning, “Happy First Day of Christmas”, which confused me, because I thought Christmas Day was the first day of Christmas, with Epiphany being the 12th day, and the day that the magi came bringing gifts to the baby Jesus. But what do I know, I’m an atheist. Thanks to the internet, all I had to do was search for ‘1st day of Christmas’, and I found this very informative page, which both agreed with what my Facebook friend said, and what I had said as well. In other words, different traditions and churches celebrate it on different dates. I don’t know about…
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Friday Randomness, Now on Tuesday!
(photo found at SF Gate, here) Does anyone else still get a newspaper delivered to your house, as opposed to looking for your news online? We are suckers and pay quite a bit to support this dying industry. Sometimes I wonder why, and other times, I’m glad. Today I was glad, as I saw the picture above, which I might have missed if I had been looking online. The story is that the San Francisco Ice Co. donated 10 tons of ice to the San Francisco Zoo, which the zoo had blown into snow for the Polar Bears, who look like they’re LOVING it, don’t they? Doesn’t the bear in…
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Teaching Your Children to Read
When Maya was 3 or 4, LeapFrog came out with their LeapPad line of products, and I really wanted one for Maya. I remember thinking that the kids that had this toy might have some advantage, might learn to read more quickly than she would, might learn to love reading more than she did. But they were expensive. So I was hoping one of her grandparents might get her one. At that time, my mom used to come down for a month in November. She would spend a week with me, a week with her friend Kate, and two weeks with my Grandma and Great Aunt. During her week with…
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Don’t Analyze, Act!
I’ve heard a few things about Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, “Bright Sided“, though I haven’t read it. But the idea has intrigued me, because it’s the idea that our world of positive thinking is too much, and it’s somewhat dangerous. She says that when someone gets cancer, and is told that positive thinking can heal them, they’re lying in a very cruel and dangerous way to those people. And really, they’re blaming that person for not being positive enough. If they don’t get better, it’s then their fault, for not keeping up that sunny disposition all of the time. This reminds me of those who say some variation of, “God never…
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Boomtown Rats ~ I Don’t Like Mondays
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA-2oXzk10[/youtube] For those of us old enough (or young enough) to remember Live Aid, it was indeed an amazing phenomenon. We missed a lot of it in California, being 8 hours behind England, and 3 hours behind Philadelphia, and it being announced not too long before the concerts were held. But wow, the work that went into that…without email, without cell phones, all of that. And a lot of it didn’t make it to MTV at the time. Originally, Geldof didn’t want the concert to be re-broadcast, saying that it would have more power in our memories than in being replayed over and over again. Not like today, where it…
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Health Care food for thought…
I have a Facebook friend who I sort of knew via High School. He was a really great guy, and we had several friends in common, but he was a few years ahead of me, and he graduated before I started HS. Anyway, through common friends, we became Facebook buddies. He’s been talking once in awhile about the Health Care issue, one that he clearly feels passionately about, as do many people on both sides of the argument. I’ve made my admittedly emotional points already, but since A doesn’t have a blog, I thought I’d let him guest post here. He sent me several emails full of his thoughts on…
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40 Years Ago Today
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B882w2gC22s[/youtube] My mom wrote about the moon landing a couple of years ago, on another moon landing anniversary. I love her story about my Grandpa and his calling it “Wizard of Oz” to believe that man would ever go to the moon. And his graceful recovery for his pig-headedness, 40 years ago today. Click the link and enjoy.
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Love is the Answer
(graphic found here) Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald Ted and I watched a very interesting episode of Bill Moyers Journal (you can watch the entire episode by following the link…it’s about an hour) the other day, one which dealt with Faith and Social Justice. The panelists were Cornel West, Serene Jones, and Gary Dorrien, three heavy hitting scholars and members of the social gospel movement. They were discussing what our ethics and values say about our society, most specifically how our system encourages greed and immoral conduct, and the culture of indifference in which we find ourselves. They argued…
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The Cola Wars Continue
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgq4knffRKc[/youtube] We’ve been hearing a lot about High Fructose Corn Syrup vs. Sugar lately, and we decided to do a very low-tech cola taste test on Saturday. I went to my local grocery store, where I procured one Pepsi, one Coke, one Mexican Coke (aka, Coke with sugar), and one Pepsi Natural (aka, Pepsi with sugar). Ted wanted to try some other cola brands as well, but at $7.80 for four sodas, we decided that four were enough. We decided that a blind taste test was best, so I marked the bottoms of some paper cups with the four varieties, and we each had a sample of all four. We…
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Great American Food & Music Debacle
One advantage of Ted’s job is that we sometimes get free tickets to local events. One such event was yesterday’s Great American Food & Music Festival, held in Mountain View. This was the first (perhaps last) year for this event. The idea was to take iconic dishes from around the country and bring them all to one venue, bring in some big names from the Food Network, and pair it up with some good music and make a day of it. Sounds good on paper, right? Unfortunately, something fell apart in the execution. I’d be interested to read a newspaper account of what all actually went wrong, but one major…
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What’s Wrong in this Marriage?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9bsu5CqMBY[/youtube] I saw this video the other day, and I was horrified. Here’s the story: A family with a husband, wife, and daughter. The husband was laid off, and hasn’t been able to find work. His wife increased her hours at work to compensate for their lost income. So he’s staying home and caring for the home and their child, and she’s working. Guess what? They both resent the hell out of each other. She has lost respect for him, because he’s not working, and because she doesn’t feel like a woman in this roll. He doesn’t feel like she respects what he does around the house, and wants to…
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Farewell, Natasha
I was saddend to hear of the skiing accident of Natasha Richardson. It reminded me of when Princess Diana was killed in that car accident. The first reports that were reported to the press said, “She has been in a car accident, and has been injured”, which is right and correct and as is should be, to protect the privacy of the family. This was what we learned before I went to bed that night, and in the morning, I learned that she was dead. Horrible. So Natasha, who I remember first and foremost as Offred from “The Handmaid’s Tale“, was skiing, and fell on a beginners slope, with a…