memes
- Look at the list and bold those you have read. 2) Italicize those you intend to read. 3) Mark in red the books you LOVE. - I’m skipping this step. 4) Reprint this list in your blog
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The Princess Bride An oldie but goodie. Yes, I can quote far too much of it. But to leave it off the list would be, well, inconceivable. And how can you dislike a movie with Andre the Giant?
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Lost in Translation Bill Murray. So good. Scarlett Johannson. Amazing. Slow, light on plot, heavy on atmosphere. I loved it.
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That Thing You Do So I’m a sucker for a movie about musicians who briefly make the bigtime. Tom Hanks is such a fantastic character in this movie, and yeah, if I’m one of the guys in the film, hands down, I’m the drummer.
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Fiddler on the Roof I really need to include a musical on here somewhere, and Fiddler is a great musical. It’s been far too long since I’ve watched this one. But Topol captures Tevye so well, and the songs are classics.
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Once OK, so I’m gonna include a second musical on here, and it’s gonna be a film that I’ve only seen, well, once. Low-budget, first-time actors, but the story feels real in a way that very few films seem to manage. I need to buy this one.
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Apollo 13 Jeff mentioned this one in his list, but I’m gonna include it here, too. Sure, Tom Hanks is great in the starring role, but Ed Harris is the guy that makes the movie for me. And how can I not love a movie where the true heroes are nerdy engineers? Can you build a CO2 scrubber from this random assortment of parts?
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Heat Michael Mann at his best, and Pacino and DeNiro to boot. A big crime drama, spread across Southern California, with the atmosphere and expanse that Mann seems to do so well. Oh, and did I mention Pacino and DeNiro?
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The Matrix Can we just forget that this is supposedly the beginning of a movie trilogy? This movie works so well by itself - the cyberpunk genre, the stop-action camera work, the ridiculous action scenes… so much fun.
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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Too many of the old song-and-dance movies were very weakly plotted, with just enough plot to string things together between musical numbers. Mitty isn’t one of those. Yes, it provides ample opportunity for Danny Kaye to mug for the camera, do some hilarious song-and-dance routines (how can you not love Anatole of Paris?), and generally cut up, but they actually belong as part of the plot. Lots of fun.
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L.A. Confidential It was harder than I thought coming up with a tenth film, but this one deserves a spot here. A gritty film noir filled with all the elements you could want - dirty cops, femme fatales, Hollywoord in its heyday. Add in Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, and James Cromwell, and you’ve got a great film.
- Crown him with many crowns, the Lamb upon the throne
- It’s all right, it’s all right, carrier, carrier…
- Well I can always tell a liar, and I always know a thief
- She turns like the ocean, she tells no emotion
- From glass alabaster she poured out the depths of her soul
- Part of me, you are part of me I never want to lose
- Save yourself, cause the only thing that matters that you get away from the pain and the thought of losing your mind
- All your ways and all your thunder got me in a haste running for cover
- I started asking some questions about your walk with the Lord
- Feel the weight of this passing time all those crazy faces run through my mind
- I was thinking the other day, what if cartoons got saved
- Another day that I’m runnin' and I hear somebody pounding on my door
- Hard times have fallen on you even when you smile I see the hurt come through
- I mount up with waxen wings, high to reach the sun
- Once upon a time you dressed so fine
- Every tree is green again in the wood out of my back door
- You dwell in glory, the heavens are your home
- There’s a man goin' round taking names
- In your hands I know he could be a man of peace
- I stood on that Cherokee plain and the Cimarron broke free and jumped its banks
- It’s a muggy night in Houston
- Barbara Manatee, you are the one for me
- Hard time here and everywhere you go, times is harder than ever been before
- No one serves both God and money
- I thought we would always be together, never be apart
- roofer during a hot Texas summer
- Waiter at “Hennington’s” in Granbury, TX
- fixer-upper of messed-up data for the BNSF railroad
- resident computer geek for JW Operating of Longview TX
- Lost in Translation
- The Princess Bride
- Fiddler on the Roof
- The Thomas Crowne Affair
- The Lord of the Rings
- The Chronicles of Narnia
- Orthodoxy (Chesterton)
- the Manifold series (Stephen Baxter)
- Fremont, NE
- Granbury, TX
- Longview, TX
- Hiawatha, IA
- House
- MI-5 (Spooks for you British types)
- Hustle (a new show on AMC, also by the BBC)
- pretty much any sports
- Destin, FL
- Estes Park, CO
- Chicago, IL
- Los Angeles, CA
- Enchiladas
- Sesame Chicken
- Pizza
- a good steak
- not at work
- at home with Becky and Laura
- at my favorite coffeehouse with a good book and my laptop
- on vacation someplace warm and slow-paced
- First Song: ” ‘Round Midnight”, Miles Davis, Best of Miles Davis
- Last Song: “Zoo Station”, U2, Achtung Baby
- Shortest Song: “One Last ‘Woo-Hoo!’ for the Pullman”, 0:06, Sufjan Stevens, Illinois
- Longest Song: “Hansel And Gretel And Ted And Alice/An opera in one unnatural act”, 24:40, P.D.Q. Bach, The Intimate P.D.Q. Bach
- First Song: “Concerto in D-Minor for Two Violins: 1 - Vivace”, Itzhak Perlman & Isaac Stern, “Double” Concerto for Two Violins
- Last Song: “Happiness”, 1999 Broadway Revival Recording, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown
- “The Far Country”, 20 plays, Andrew Peterson, The Far Country
- “The Havens Grey”, 18 plays, ibid. T3. “Canaan Bound”, 17 plays, Andrew Peterson, Love and Thunder T3. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, 17 plays, Bob Dylan, The Essential Bob Dylan T3. “Say”, 17 plays, Sleeping At Last, Ghosts
- “Lay Me Down”, 16 plays, Andrew Peterson, The Far Country
- “The Queen of Iowa”, 14 plays, ibid. T8. “Fields Of Gold”, 13 plays, Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley T8. “I Get a Kick out of You”, 13 plays, Jamie Cullum, Twentysomething. T8. “Lonely People”, 13 plays, Jars Of Clay, Who We Are Instead.
100 Books
Being the voracious reader that I am, I was happy to steal this from Kari and Roger. The story is that apparently the National Endowment for the Arts estimates that the average adult has only read six of these books. Here are the markup guidelines:
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - This sure seems like a duplicate to me!
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - I’ve started this one three times and can never seem to finish it.
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - Started it, but just can’t get in to Rushdie’s writing style.
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
So, looks like I’ve read 28 off the list, which barely puts me ahead of Roger, but finds me far, far, behind librarian Kari’s 50. I do enjoy this, though, because it gives me a list to work from. Now if our library could ever get their online catalog back online after the flood, I could start reserving some of these. :-)
Top Ten Movies
Well, I haven’t done a meme in a while, and Jeff tagged me for this one, so I’ll give it a go.
The rules of the “game” are simple: 1. list your top ten favorite films (in no particular order). 2. if you’re tagged, you’ve got to post and tag 3-5 other people. 3. give a tag back (some link love) to the one who tagged you in your post 4. give a hat tip (HT) to Dan (I have no idea who Dan is, but hey, there ya go).
This is gonna be a challenge for me, because I haven’t watched that many movies lately, and really, how do you go about choosing favorites? Simply by number of times watched? At least you’ll get 10 from me here that I really like. Maybe not the 10 greatest movies I’ve ever seen, but 10 that I’d be happy to sit down and watch again semi-regularly or would recommend to a friend. Oh, and off the top, I’m not gonna say Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, because they’re almost prerequisites for this kind of list, and it seems boring. So, in no particular order…
I'm it.
Having been tagged by Jeff for the latest interweb meme to filter around to these parts, I suppose I should play along.
The Rules: (1) Link to the person that tagged you. (2) Post the rules on your blog. (3) Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself. (4) Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs. (5) Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.
So, the six non-important things/habits/quirks about me:
1) The Soundtrack in my Head Other people talk about having an internal dialog going all the time - I have an internal soundtrack. If I hear some word or phrase or phrasing that trips a memory in my brain, I’m likely to start singing the line from the song. (This drives my wife nuts.)
2) I have a propensity for spoofing song lyrics. Think Weird Al, just less talented, and without the accordion. The fun part is to try to do it on the fly in real time. Sometimes it works. Most of the time I just end up breaking out in hysterical laughter after about five lines.
3) I hate hate HATE asking people for things. Don’t know how this one got started, but I would rather put myself out than ask someone for something, even something that I know they’d gladly be willing to do/give. This maybe doesn’t belong on this list because it verges toward the important - this can be a real flaw at times that I need to work to correct.
4) I see chord structures. I don’t know of a better way to describe it. If I hear a song, I’m working through parsing the chord structure in my head. Usually I assume what key the song is in, and then work it out from there, but if I find out it’s actually in a different key, I can easily make the switch. I feel it in some combination of what the chord feels like when played on the piano and when played on the guitar. I will drive myself nuts sometimes if I don’t get a song figured out right away. I remember sitting in the parking lot at a Subway waiting for Becky to get a sandwich and trying to work out Simon & Garfunkel’s Mrs. Robinson. I was so proud when I finally got it.
5) I go to the same restaurants and order the same things every single time. I hate trying new places. Once I find a place and a dish that I like, I will order the same thing every time. This goes so far as to extend to business trips; last fall I traveled to Oklahoma City for two days and once I found a movie theater and restaurant nearby that I liked, I hit them both two nights in a row…. it’s just easier than having to try something new.
6) I have a huge memory for music and lyrics… but my repertoire is limited. Yeah, if I were on that Don’t Forget The Lyrics show I would fail miserably… unless they limited themselves to CCM from the 1990’s and indie-Christian-folk-rock from the 2000’s. I somehow missed all of the other stuff growing up and have been trying to fill in holes as I go along. You know, in some areas I didn’t miss much at all, but I wish I would’ve found U2 a lot earlier on. :-)
Now, then… who to tag?
Rae Whitlock Daniel D Bridget Roger TK Nate
Fun, fun.
Name That Tune
[Meme fearlessly stolen from CJ].
Step 1: Put your ipod on random. Step 2: Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarassing. Step 3: Strike out the songs when someone guesses correctly.
Now, y’all got lucky here and got some easy ones. Bonus points to the person who guesses the artist for #1.
Have fun!
An evil brain teaser
Geof posted this over on the Rumor Forum and it’s been so much fun I thought I’d share it with everybody. (Geof promises his solution tomorrow.)
Question:
An aircraft is on a runway. This runway is outfitted with a conveyor belt that has the capability to exactly match the speed of the aircraft landing gear’s wheels. Can the plane take off? Why or why not?
and it comes around to me... "4 things"
I’ve kinda been waiting for this one… Thanks Stephanie for tagging me!
Four jobs I’ve had
Four movies I could watch over and over
Four books I could read over and over
Four places I have lived
Four TV shows I watch
Four places I have been on vacation (ok, so I haven’t traveled much)
Four websites I visit daily other than email
Four favorite foods
Four places I’d like to be right now
Four bloggers I’m tagging
iTunes meme
Geof did this, and it looked like fun.
Open iTunes to answer the following:
Total number of tracks: 4,336.
Sort by song title:
scary note: these are the same two songs (save for the artist on ‘Round Midnight) as Geof had…
Sort by time:
Sort by album:
Top 10 Most Played Songs:
First five songs that come up on Party Shuffle:
This doesn’t really work since Party Shuffle doesn’t pick up the stuff on my iPod, and I don’t have much of anything left stored in my library.
Search for: “sex”, how many songs come up?: zero. “love”, how many songs come up?: 336. “you”, how many songs come up?: 564. “death”, how many songs come up?: Six. “hate”, how many songs come up?: Two. “wish” how many songs come up?: Eleven.