Downton Abbey Rap

I couldn't think of a clever post title, and really, what it is says it all. I never thought I'd be linking a rap song here!



From the artist's website:

'Downton Abbey is the kind of thing that you hear about, and you’re all like, “That sounds terrible.” And then even one of your best friends won’t shut up about it, and then you have to fly to Seattle and see that the first season is only $9.99 on iTunes (God bless you PBS), and you watch it on the plane, and get completely obsessed with it. And then you’re calling your friend and saying things like “I’m at the part where Matthew Crawley is investigating the entail for Lord Grantham, and the Dowager Countess finds out about it,” and you realize you’re whispering because honestly, what the HELL are you even saying? Anyway, enjoy it.'


Good times.

Christmas Present (For Me)

Here's Your Sign

I documented my 14-hour drive today with lots of photos from my phone. Hey - at least I wasn't texting, right? Hopefully tomorrow I'll get them down/uploaded... believe me, the Green Goblin is worth waiting for!

On the drive I also saw some pretty... interesting... signs, and I'd like to recreate them for you here:

Burns, OR - a store that advertised "Antiques, Furniture, Appliances, Junque". Someday, I will own a store called "The Junque Shoppe."
- a billboard that read "Big Tobacco is full of spit. Don't take their spit. Quit." I'm not kidding. And I applaud their marketing person.

Sisters, OR - the road sign that said "Deer - Next 1 Mile". I have to wonder, how do they enforce that? Is there Deer Police or something? "Look, punk, you can graze between mile marker 738 and 737. DON'T PUSH ME."
- "Scenic Byway Interpretive Area" - I was looking for emo musicians and performance arts dancers along the road for MILES. Nothing.

Pictures tomorrow!

FAIL

Not one person mentioned (good, bad, or other) my haircut today. That would normally inspire me to start hacking away with the nail scissors, or adding blue streaks and a perma-updo. Apparently, I crave attention. Who knew?

Also, it's September. I'm a little shocked we allowed that to happen already. In protest, I need to go dye something.

You can color too, while you wait.

Soul Sister

Tonight while I was driving home with the windows down, I was singing (nearly) at the top of my lungs - since that's what you do on a summer night, you drive around with the windows down whether or not you have air-conditioning and play rock star in your car. The thing you may not realize is that there are times when it's not just you and the radio. At a stop light I had just hit a chorus when I heard a voice from over my left shoulder hollering, "you've got a beautiful voice!" I turned to see a scruffy man in a John Deere cap in the next car over, both his windows down, grinning at me. I sized up the situation, took stock of the song, and sang louder.

Lesson one: Take your entertainment where you can find it, with the corollary: It's OK sometimes to participate in other people's fun, particularly if you are safely separated by two full cars (hey, he had no idea if I had mace or was a serial killer - gotta take a risk now and then!). Lesson two: SING. Sing loudly, enthusiastically, with style and attitude and only a passing consideration of accuracy as long as it's fun (which will pretty much be always). Lesson three: Make sure to show your fans a little love.


Watch out for falling turtles (especially if they look like Cher or a pop-y emo band),

Cyd



P.S. How much do you want to bet John Deere Cap is intimately acquainted with all the lyrics to the entire Charlie Daniels' Band catalog? You KNOW he's a superstar in his Subaru!

Distraction!

Now, this? Is Funny.



I would really like to find some random guy in a park somewhere and have this conversation with him. Just for FUN. Heh.

Randomosity

Today at work I made a prototype Tear-Away Teepee. (Not kidding.) There's a porno joke in there somewhere, but I wouldn't have the slightest idea where to even begin looking.

... [And] I'm sticking to it.

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Pop Culture Relevance Counter: 1

- Last night I was watching a recent episode of NCIS, and one of the characters referenced the story of Aeschylus (he pronounced it "Ay-skee-lus") with the bird (in this telling a vulture) dropping a rock on the unsuspecting man's head... followed immediately by another character finishing up with, "The Father of Greek Tragedy". I felt so hip.

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The good news is: I'm not the only international post-grad student still looking for someplace to live for the upcoming school year. I feel less stupid, more validated as a person and part of a larger group.

The bad news is: I'm not the only international post-grad student still looking for someplace to live for the upcoming school year. Options are getting reeeeally slim, and I sorta wish I were there already to claw the others out of the way. Every student for himself/herself!

In two weeks I will have been in England for a few hours, and hopefully will be unpacking a few things someplace cozy and liveable. (Let us pray.)

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I found another North and South fan today. They're everywhere. (Also, it's entirely possible that, thanks to yet another member of the N&S rabid fan base, I might have found a version of the completely unavailable soundtrack. *whistles nonchalantly*)

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There will be no political commentary in today's post. Unless you add it in the comments, of course - but that's up to you. No pressure.

Sarcasm Font Needed

These are both random AND completely awesome.

Thank you, Facebook friends, for giving me something to link from my blog once more!

80's By Way of A'Cappella Slovenia (Jazz)

Another fabulous video... Thanks, Annette!

Catch and Release (But Watch the Instant Replay)

I really don't have anything to blog about today. I hope y'all are not too disappointed. I was thinking of pictures, or a video link, or a Dr. Seuss poem... and decided they were all too much trouble (sorry).

Instead, a mini-movie review - I watched Catch and Release last night. I had heard it was a pretty mediocre movie, so I never bothered to watch it until I saw it on the shelf at the library... and it really is a pretty mediocre movie. The performances are all right - although I couldn't remember Jennifer Garner's last name until I saw it in the credits, which bugged - and overall the plot really doesn't make much sense. Not a lot in the way of character motivation, either. What it does have, though, is some seriously hot kissing and make-out scenes. It's implied that the two main characters have sex - none of that is shown though. Really no need, since the first kiss and then later making out when they almost get caught and have to stop more than covers whatever titillation the non-super-spicy crowd would be looking for (i.e., no clothes come off). On that note - I was going to put up a Youtube video or two here with clips, but I decided you can go find it yourself if you're interested... just in case my mom reads this entry.

Turn up the air-conditioning before you watch it - trust me.

Out the Door

My schedule:

- Lagoon-A-Beach (water park)
- Lagoon (amusement park)
- Harry Potter 6 Midnight(ish) showing
- Family Birthday "Beach"-themed party
- Girl's Night with party-animal ladies from the ward
- Work
- Work
- Girl's Hallmark Hall of Fame Cheesy Movie Fest

It looks like I won't really be sleeping until sometime this weekend. I may get a nap on Thursday, though! I'm off to go sunscreen up. Later!

Just for Fun

This made me very happy.



Also, one of my (former) students caught a fish and named it after me. Apparently we have a lot in common... we're both "green". Go figure.

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This morning (6:00 AM) I had a phone interview with one of the graduate schools I applied to in England - it was going really well, and then I realized I had applied to the wrong program. The one I applied to sounds fascinating, though, so... who knows?

Video Mash Ups

Heh.

Got any fans of Buffy out there? Ever wish she'd give Edward the ol' what for? Check it out.

http://blip.tv/file/2261825/


And this is fun - a Fred Astaire video, set to Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal". Pretty cool, actually.

Double Feature

In which we shall see: Well, not much of anything, frankly, because at my age sitting through two movies in a row leaves you a bit fuzzy (*gets cane to hobble to front door and yell at neighbor kids to get off the lawn*). You all get two movie reviews, plus bonus-type stuff! Lucky you.

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Right next door to the theatre where I'm currently working (how sad is it that I am super excited to be upholstering a prop carriage tomorrow? It's been too long, staple gun! If only there were a dead body in the carriage, life would be complete) is a movie theater, and I decided to catch a matinee show right after work. Big feature, just opened, lots of hype - and I always love getting in to see a film right as it opens. Halfway through the movie I caught myself thinking, "Huh. I wish I'd gone to see The Proposal instead."

So - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. *sigh* I wanted to like it, I really did. I'm as big a fan of the summer "popcorn" movie as the next person, and I have no beef with action/adventure. (Except for that Indiana Jones Goes Geriatric and His Son Gets Weepy Because of the Stupid Props fiasco, but we're not talking about that.) I was even OK with the first Transformers film, having been a big fan of the cartoon (see the original disclaimer about my age, all right?). This one, though - well, pardon my language, but it sucked. Yes, I know it's Michael Bay and one should expect only big explosions and long action sequences with very little plot or character development. Got it. Unfortunately, he also got fairly decent actors who were doing their best with the material they were given, and every time there was a slower scene involving dialogue or an attempt to develop relationships they made glaring and joltingly obvious shifts in the pace of the movie, and actually demonstrated the deficiencies in the plot rather than moving it forward. MB's editor should probably be fired, and his scriptwriters sent back to third grade (with an apology to all you third-graders out there). Yes, lots of things went BOOM - the problem with this franchise, though, is that the robots are so complex that it's actually difficult to tell if anything's happened to them in the course of a fight. Plus the whole "shaky cam for reality" thing definitely did NOT help clear any of that up. I remember when my parents went to see The Bourne Ultimatum and they ended up on the front row and Mom came home with motion sickness - that's how I felt with T:RotF, and I was back in the middle of the theater. It was a relief to watch the driving scenes, because when I was looking at the various vehicles I could tell what they were and had some idea which side they were working for. This movie was too long, the CGI was too complex and not clean enough, and it was just uninvolving - much of it was in freaking EGYPT, for pity's sake, and I couldn't even enjoy the visuals. I'm all about the travelogue! (Shia LaBeouf was cute and fine, and Megan Fox did a good job - she's a little, oh, "much", just being herself - and the costumer definitely played that up - but I have a suspicion that there is a decent actress lurking inside that disgustingly gorgeous exterior. The only time you got to like Josh Duhamel was when he was throwing a governmental advisor out of a plane - and again, the humor was off-putting because it was so forced. Funny, but ill-fitting.)

Naturally, when someone leaves one movie slightly queasy, the remedy is to immediately move on to the next! If I hadn't been queasy I might have just checked the times for the next movie I wanted to see at the theater where I was already parked, but no, I got in my car and drove to another one that was a little closer to home. Bonus: I got my ticket about 10 minutes after movie #2 started, and it was awesome - I only had to sit through about 8 more minutes of previews before the actual show started! Score!) Movie #2 was, in fact, The Proposal. And let me just say - I liked it! I have also been known to enjoy a chick flick or twenty, but I do not immediately give a movie a "+" just because it has shopping and sappyness. (I'm a little nervous, actually - we're having a Girl's Day on Friday and watching Confessions of a Shopaholic. I'm considering bringing chicken fingers, (root) beer, and doses of testosterone to combat all the rumored estrogen in that one.) I enjoyed Sandra Bullock, and while Ryan Reynolds hasn't been given much to do besides play a Ken doll, he's been growing on me and I thought he did some good stuff in this show. They played off each other well, and had a terrific supporting cast - and Alaska! It's beautiful! The movie settled my queasy stomach and left me with a much better taste in my mouth. And yes, I'm perfectly OK with a movie that has an older woman (though age is not mentioned) get together with a very cute younger man. So sue me.

I won't be recommending Transformers to anyone, and won't be bothered to see it again, even on DVD. I don't think I'll see The Proposal again in the theater, but will be happy to talk about it with friends and will have no issue with seeing it sometime in the comfort of my own home.

Mini-Reviews: In contrast, I saw Star Trek twice in the theater, and am starting to feel like I may want to catch it again while it's still on the big screen. FANTASTIC show, for many reasons, and definitely destined for my home library.

I also very much enjoyed Up, which made me cry, and laugh, and cry, and laugh again - not bad for an animated flick. The gal at the counter was probably right, though - this was one where the 3-D probably didn't make much difference, and it would have been fine to see in the regular format (and a couple of dollars cheaper). I'll certainly look for this on DVD as well.

And... I'm now officially tapped out. Happy movie-going, people!

Watch out for falling robots (literally) and murky plotting that may or may not involve turtles,

Cyd

P.S. I DO have a couple of tickets for the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and it is entirely possible I will dress up in full costume. I am frantically re-reading the HP books 1-6, just to be ready for the film. I am a nerd. I am also a nerd with an extra ticket.

ETA: So, The Proposal wasn't actually shot in Alaska - it was Massachusetts ACTING like Alaska. 1) Way to go, MA - that was a better performance than many so-called "professionals" I could name, and 2) I still want to visit Alaska thanks to this movie. Works for me.

Oh, wow. WOWOWOWOWOW.

Thank you, Matt. From the bottom of my heart.

Everything's Coming Up Zombies

I have no idea why, but lately I'm obsessed with all things zombie. It's bizarre. In many ways, I blame Jane Austen. Seriously, I found this book recently :

(you can read more about it here and here)

It's gruesomely hilarious, and a few of my students even managed to work the title into a one-act play they were doing for our class SLAM project. They were a little further ahead of themselves than they realized - they used the title as a movie title rather than the book, and apparently in "real life" the movie version is already in the works. Awesome.

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Runway models as zombies. Totally makes sense. Also, it's a reality series just WAITING to happen.

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An appropriate quote from a friend's blog:

"It's good to be open-minded,but not so open-minded that your brains fall out."

~Dr. Richard Sloan, Professor of Behavioral Medicineat Columbia University Medical Center

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And, in all reality, you've never seen more lifelike zombies until you try to get through a class on the last Friday before the last week of school. I swear, it really is contagious - I felt just as sluggish and brain dead as the students!

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One more book (again, found recently and picked up just for the title):

I'm just waiting for them to pick up the movie rights on this one, too.

The GAME

In which we shall see: Drama-related non-drama FUN.

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I know I haven't been around for a while - I've been so busy trying to figure out how to teach high school AND have some kind of life outside the "job" AND clean and pack my house (hint: only the first of those three things is something I've made any headway with) that I haven't thought really at all about blogging. If you live for my blog posts, sorry... no, really, I'm sorry - that's just pathetic. (Ironic future blog post: List of Current and Exciting Hobbies That Do Not Involve Keyboards.) But I still love you.

Last weekend I spent all day Saturday (unpaid) at the State Drama Competition; quite frankly, it was oodles of fun. No, I'm not being sarcastic. (Seriously.) I was hoping to sit in on a few of my students' competition rounds to watch their final performances, but instead I was corralled in the library with the other teachers for the day tabulating all the scores as they came in from the judges. Instead of being cranky and surreptitiously ticking off the half-hours in mechanical pencil on the wall, I found myself at a table with the teachers from West Jordan, Jordan, and Skyline High Schools. It was FANTASTIC. First off, to combat his ADD, WJ started a "State Competition Bingo Sheet" complete with odd gestures, swear words, and bodily functions relating to another teacher's newborn baby. Listening to him trying to get random people to say some of the things on his sheet was hilarious. Watching the other people at the table try to keep straight faces as he did so was just about as good. (Next year, J plans to bring official Bingo cards for the entire room.) It took me back to "Fred Bingo" from college (also referenced by a teacher that I went to school with) and that's just good times for everybody.

Second, S taught us an absolutely BRILLIANT game - once we learned how to play, it was nearly impossible to focus on anything else. Evidently, back in college S and one of his roommates realized that every person resembles one of four animals. The full extent of the game is looking around, identifying an animal, and sharing your results with another player. That's it. We pegged our table (we had one of each), all the remaining occupants of the room (under our breaths), and then on the lunch break wandered the halls of the school and zeroed in on students. You don't even know. I got a better workout from laughing that day than I had doing anything else in months. YOU HAVE GOT TO TRY THIS.

The animals:

RAT: It's all in the teeth. Pointy chin, slightly (or not-so-slightly) bulbous eyes. Females are rarer than males in this group, making for much more exciting finds. WJ.

MONKEY: Round face-shape. This has to do more with cheeks, forehead, and ears - it's hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. Me.

PIG: Nose, of course. Otherwise monkey-ish faces will slide over the line if the schnooz has a tip-tilt. Big eyes, small eyes, ears, cheeks - it all comes down to the nose. J.

BIRD: In a way, this one is about the "direction" of the face. The long, straight nose, the delicate bones, the lines that move the eye in a smooth swoop down and out, with the chin and mouth pulling into a ski-jump. They're also just "bird-like". One woman who was sure she'd be pegged as a pig turned out to be a bird because of the actual shape of her facial features. S.

Once you start noticing, and passing on your observations to someone else, it's really hard to stop. My students have no idea why I was stepping into their conversation groups, "listening" intently (I haven't a clue what any of them said), and then ducking out just as I was about to burst into laughter. We four teachers would wander around the commons area where our kids were gathered, make a few mental notes, and then re-group to giggle and nosh on fruit salsa and cinnamon tortilla chips WJ had liberated from one of his crew. It was a very good day.

Honestly, a day like that (even unpaid) would nearly be enough to make me reconsider becoming a real live high school teacher. (And apparently the school's administration is interested in keeping me on as a real teacher, too - but that's another story.)

Family Home Evening, Date Night, Shopping at the Mall - you haven't lived until you've tried The GAME.

(Oh, and apparently an excellent way to combat boredom in church is to set up your own "Testimony Meeting Bingo". Why didn't I think of that?!?)

Watch for falling rats, monkeys, pigs, birds, AND turtles -

Cyd

Some Days...

Easter Vampire

Step off, Bella - THIS is MY brand of heroin!

My one true love. (One-sided, sure, but it does tend to stick around, even after the holiday...)

Bonus Content #8 - Sunday Comic

Stupid is as stupid does.


I heart Frazz.