10.25.2005

Hollywood bust
I told you Mr. Incredible and Elmo are buds. Apparently they're partners in crime, too.

Animated Characters Switch From Snapshots to Mugshots.
LA Times (Thanks to J-Dub for the link)

10.17.2005

Back so soon
More Baby Viviane pictures
Visiting LA pictures
Bandit pictures
...It smells like an airport runway*
La-la-la L.A. Why was I in LA, you ask? Why not? I didn't have anything else going on for the weekend, I found a cheap flight, and I had a floor on which I could crash (thank you, JDub). Observations from the City of Angels (or demons?)*:
• The Hollywood(land) sign would be a much better site were there a trail on which you could hike to the top. It's somewhat anticlimactic to drive up a hill, take a picture, and drive back down.
• Tourists are star-struck idiots who will pay any amount just to say they've tread in the tracks of George Clooney/Cameron Diaz/other star-struck tourists who have been inside the Chinese and Kodak theaters.
• In that same vein, my flip flops totally stepped where the heels of many an Oscar de la Renta-wearing, Oscar de l'Academy-toting actress has tread...well, minus the red carpet. But JDub and I remained outside, $15 richer than the tourists.
• Mr. Incredible and Elmo are buds. Or at least they hang around the walk of fame together.
• There are some real freaks out there.
• People in Hollywood/Burbank (I think it was Burbank, that's the town where all the studios actually are, right?) act at all times, as if they're expecting someone to discover them at any moment.
• We totally had lunch with people from the WB at the oldest remaining Big Boy in LA/Burbank/wherever...well, we at least saw an SUV with the license plate THE WB pulling into the parking lot, and they wouldn't give that plate away to just anybody, right? So someone from the WB had to have been in the diner somewhere, right?

JDub got the honor of meeting a contingent of the Brooks clan. We stopped by my cousin Damon's college soccer game, then went out to dinner with the rest of the fam. I think I take for granted how much fun my family is.

We celebrated Mizzou's Homecoming by going to an Oktoberfest party at Jayna and Heather's, where we met several more Mizzou grads and even a couple of other girls who were in LA from Phoenix for the weekend. I swear, Phoenix is LA's little sister, considering how many people come and go between the two (and Vegas is the slutty step-sister).

Total rock-my-world coincidence
It turned out that my cousin Kelsey was on my flight from LAX to PHX. She and the rest of the UofA club soccer team had flown to LA for a soccer tournament in Santa Barbara, and they were headed back to Tucson via Phoenix. We had one of those squealing, hugging, "Oh my God! This is so unreal!" moments when we ran into each other in the terminal waiting area. Oh my God. It was so unreal.

Who let the dog in? Woof woof woof
Let it be known that we now have a puppy in the Brooks house. Meet Bandit ("because he steals your hearts," says Mama Brooks). He is a 6 month-old Cavalier King Charles/Cocker Spaniel mix, he's absolutely adorable, and he doesn't do any of that barking stuff.

Pictures of all that and more TK.

*Name that song

10.16.2005

i'm in los angeles today
LOS ANGELES -- Greetings from sunny California and J-Dub's bachelor pad. Just blogging for the dateline, you know how it is. More later.

Goodbye now.

10.13.2005

posting just to post
I got a new belt yesterday that makes me look like Xena Warrior Princess, but it keeps falling off. I bet Xena never had a problem with her belt.

It's been fanfrickintastic outside recently. Know what this means? Picnics in the park during my lunch break!

Phoenix Film Festival judging has begun. This means watching a whole bunch of crappy movies while hoping I stumble upon the hidden indie film gem of the year. Actually, most of the films in this first box of entries are pretty good. Watched the short The Fix last night. Remember the name Travis Aaron Wade; I think we'll be seeing more of him.

10.09.2005

go CoMo, go CoMo, go!
An excerpt from "Making the Band" by Erin Byers in this month's issue of Boston.

There's a particular smell that comes from a rock band at 4 in the morning--the semll of too many guys crowded into a small space littered with too many pizza boxes, too many cigarttes, and too many empty beer bottles. This is the smell wafting through a room at the Regency Hotel downtown in Columbia, Missouri, where the Boston band Apollo Sunshine is crashing for the night.
For the past five days, all that the band members had talked about was the marathon party they were going to have after they played a gig at Columbia's Blue Note club. It would be an all-nighter for the record books, the Perfect Hangover. Yet there we all were, slumped in a stinky haze--them, dazed; me, confused.
[...]
Groupies today are not the sex-crazed females portrayed in so many movies. Forget Kate Hudson in
Almost Famous;* think John Cusak in High Fidelity.
[...]
We finally arrive in Columbia. The band has visited nearly every city between Boston and San Diego, but to the guys this college town is Vegas and Gomorrah combined. "Last time I was in [Missouri] I slept with two women," Gallagher boasts...


I wonder if I know either of those two women...

Also, Columbia was mentioned on NPR last week in a story about a guy (in CoMo) who started a Save Fiona Apple club and helped to convince her lable to go through with producing her latest record. I gave a little, "Woot woot!" in my car when I heard them mention Columbia.

X degrees from Nelson Mandela?
My dad is having dinner with the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Monday night. Sweet.

*Penny Lane was not a "groupie." She was a Band-Aid! Get it straight!

10.07.2005

I've never promised that this blog would contain original content
In the vein of Pat, Megan and Sarah, I give you my political views, OKCupid-style:



You are a

Social Liberal
(73% permissive)

and an...

Economic Liberal
(10% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Socialist




Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating
Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test


I took the same test a few years ago, and I must say, I don't think much has changed. I must agree, Megan, I would much rather be in a cluster with Hillary, Ghandi and Bono than anywhere near Darth Vader, Osama bin Laden, Stalin or the Unabomber. Who's the man to the left of my dot, though? Anyone know? And who's the crazy, wide-eyed fella at the top of the square? On the same page as my results, they list the edicts that fellow test-takers would make. My favorite was this one from AMS in South Milwaukee, Wisc.:

Everyone must use full, LITERATE language when talking in e-mails, instant messages, notes in school, and cell phone texts. Anyone making a word other than "a" or "I" with one letter or number is shot immediately.

li ho
(I think that means Hello in Taiwanese.) Someone recently stumbled onto my blog through Yahoo! Taiwan's translation search. Ever wonder what A Leaky Cauldron, of Sorts looked like in Taiwanese? (Click the pic to enlarge.)

10.06.2005

hehehe
Had to post today's Pickles strip because of the Moon River reference.

10.02.2005

instant gratification
There are moments while I am enjoying a book, movie or song when it strikes me, this one sentence/scene/line is worth the entire book/movie/album. This author would deserve my $14 if the entire book had been one page with this scene printed on it. Or, that musician could forever be listed in my hall of fame because of those notes alone. Nearly every one of my favorite books/movies/songs has a moment like that. Here are a few that earned the distinction of Favorite in the past year or so.

books
• "I was born twice; first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." Opening sentence of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• "Mr. Jeavons said that I liked maths because it was safe. He said I liked maths because it meant solving problems and these problems were difficult and interesting but there was always a straightforward answer at the end [...] maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers at the end." Plus the rest of chapter 101 of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
• "'Well,' [Hassan] said, 'if I may ask, why did the man kill his wife? In fact, why did he ever have to feel sad to shed tears? Couldn't he have just smelled an onion?' ¶ [...] Taught by Hassan of all people. Hassan who couldn't read and had never written a single word in his entire life. A voice, cold and dark, suddenly whispered in my ear, What does he know, that illiterate Hazara? He'll never be anything but a cook. How dare he criticize you?" The end of chapter 4 of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
• "'You see, the prophecy does not mean you have to do anything! But the prophecy caused Lord Voldemort to mark you as his equal. ... In other words, you are free to choose your way, quite free to turn your back on the prophecy! But Voldemort continues to set store by the prophecy. He will continue to hunt you ... which makes it certain, really, that --' ¶'That one of us is going to end up killing the other,' said Harry." The end of chapter 23 of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling.
• "CREAM RINSE Cream rinse always gets stuck in the upper rim of my right ear. [...] i will be driving and glance at myself in the rearview mirror and spot white goo hanging out in there. I'm always like, Again! The cream rinse! What's up with this?! as I wipe it off." Page 81 of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal.

movie scenes
Before Sunrise When Celine and Jesse are in the listening booth at a record store and try to avoid making eye-contact with each other. It's all done in one shot and I don't know how they did it without cracking up.
Saved! When Mary confronts a cross at a church right after she's found out she's pregnant; she curses God and you know that that moment is the first time she's ever said a swear word in her life. It is the moment she begins to really examine her faith for the first time, too.
Après Vous The entire job interview scene, especially the part where Antoine tries to mime "lobster" for Louis to guess.
Garden State The scene in Sam's bedroom where she tells Largeman to create a unique moment, which will be unique because no one in all of history will have ever done that precise thing in that precise place and no one ever will.
Be Cool Toward the end of the movie, the moment where Andre 3000 sips tea out of a dainty teacup, raising it to his mouth with the aide of his handgun.

music
• "I was waiting for a cross-town train on the London Underground when it struck me
I've been waiting since birth to find a love that would look and sound like a movie"
Clark Gable by The Postal Service
• "I'll tap the break while you crack the window
The smell of smoke is making my lungs explode
The 51 is backed up and too slow
Let's tune out by turning on the radio"
Tune Out by The Format
• The two chords after "I thought you could read my mind"
Trusted by Ben Folds
• The way Jen Wood says "lure" in "You've got a lure I can't deny"
Nothing Better by The Postal Service (OK, so The Postal Service makes the list twice...gotta problem with that?)
• "When I awoke I was on the highway
Highway
Highway
Highway"
A Movie Script Ending by Death Cab for Cutie

--

Will someone please call the surgeon
Who can crack my ribs and repair this broken heart

I recently found out a crush from my past is getting married soon. This affects me more than you know and more than I would have ever expected.