But, It Goes to Eleven

I am so excited. I just found out that there will be a new Christopher Guest movie next year! If you have not experienced the joy of a Christopher Guest movie, sequester yourself for a weekend with "This is Spinal Tap", "Best in Show", "Waiting for Guffman", and "A Mighty Wind".

All of his movies are absolutely hilarious mockumentaries, and Spinal Tap is probably the most well known. The sentence-long description of the new one, called "For Your Consideration" is already cracking me up: "Three actors learn their respective performances in the film "Home for Purim," a drama set in the mid-1940s American South, are generating award-season buzz."

What I love about these movies is that it has introduced to me the genius of actors I have usually seen in more "character actor" parts over the years. Eugene Levy (the dad in American Pie), Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge (the hairdresser in Legally Blonde). So the first time you watch one them, you're going "that's the guy in...!"

Christopher Guest is amazing because of the range of roles he can play, and really become a different person in each one. I think my favorite is Corky St. Clair in Waiting for Guffman. In this, he is an actor who moves to Blaine, Missouri from NYC to direct community theater and is always seen buying clothes for his wife "Bonnie" who is mysteriously never around.

One Man's Trash

Real estate terminology, Alabama style:

Curb appeal - Any detritus from your house remodeling or any piece of junk whatsoever that you throw out on the curb for the trash guys and 30 minutes later, it's gone.

I'm not kidding, people will take anything.

Last year we ripped a bunch of nasty astroturf off of our front porch and put it on the curb, - this stuff was moldy and had to have been there at least 15 years - anyway, I was talking to my neighbor a couple of days later and she told me her son was looking out the window one day and saw the guy from the across the street come over while we were at work and cart it off.

When we had contractors working this fall to reside and reroof our house, they told us all kinds of people were stopping by to pick up old aluminum siding, moldy awnings, you name it.

The reason I bring up this topic today is because we ripped up a lot of carpet from inside the house today - mulberry colored old lady carpet - and put it outside. Today is Saturday, and the trash pickup is Monday. Wonder how long it will make it. I predict there will be one happy grandma somewhere tomorrow.

Book of the Month

Currently reading Savage Beauty - a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford. I am excited because I think it will be pretty juicy. I love really good biographies, especially about people who wrote great poetry and had lots of love affairs.

You may have read this poem before, called "First Fig"

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light!

On Modern American Poetry, the critic JoEllen Green Kaiser says of this poem:

"Her most famous poem, after all, does not mourn absent love but rejoices in love’s impermanence."

What Would a Megalomanic Read?

Kim Jong-il's favorite book club:

http://www.dearreader.com/

I just can't help myself sometimes.

The Man Who Wanted Sounds

I've decided that I need to write down some of the strange but true experiences that fate kindly bestowed upon me over the past few years, before I start to forget them. Most of them came from, you guessed it, when I was working at the public library. The first tale is set in the summer of 2002, when I was working in the library before library school that fall, to see if it was something I wanted to keep doing. har dee har har.

This particular day I was working in the audiovisual department:

Patron - a black man in his thirties

Me - clueless

Me: Can I help you?

Patron: I'm looking for some sounds.

Me: Well sir, we have all kinds of CDs with sound effects. Train sounds, scary sounds...

Patron: No, no I want sex sounds, like with a woman.

Me: Uhhh....

Me: Umm, we don't have anything like that here....maybe you could try an adult store?

Patron: Well I know that! (turns around and walks off)

Stay tuned for our next story, "The Strong Woman of Queens."

Rocking-horse droppings?

Funniest thing I read today:

"Illegal aliens didn't invade in one day. However, if our nation devoted every available federal, state and local resource to their removal, in 90 days, they would be as rare as rocking-horse droppings."

- From a letter to the editor in the Huntsville Times.

Neigh!!

Annie Gets Introduced to Physics

I was watching NOVA's Elegant Universe on PBS tonight, and the discussion was about uncertainty at the sub-atomic level and quantum mechanics. What I understood was that Einstein was of the idea that there were rules that explained the behavior of the universe in the somewhat rational and expected manner, but then this new wave of scientists said, hang on, these subatomic particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) will actually behave in very bizarre manners that we can only predict. One example they gave was that you could walk into a wall, and of course, not go through it, but there is that CHANCE that you might be able to phase through it at some point. Of course, the probability is practically infinite, but it's there. I found all of this fascinating, even if I don't understand the science behind it, and it made me think of a social quantum theory.

People broken down singularly are bizarre and eccentric creatures, ranging from our little peccadilloes to major perversions and stuff that gets one into the Darwin Awards and News of the Weird. Yet, as a whole, we somehow manage in most parts of the world to come together as functioning societies. I suppose your black holes would be places like Darfur or East Timor, and your dark matter would be uncontacted tribes in the Amazon.

"O.K., that means our whole solar system could be, like... one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being...
This is too much! That means...
-one tiny atom in my fingernail could be--
-Could be one little...tiny universe....Could I buy some pot from you?"

Mud Spelled Backwards is Dum

Yes, you would be spelling it as "dum" too if the simple minds of the Simplifed Spelling Society and American Literacy Council managed to push their agenda through public schools. This CNN article caught my eye today. Interestingly enough, Andrew Carnegie, he of the philanthropic Carnegie libraries and Melvil Dewey, the Father of Librarianship, were both past proponents of simplified spelling. The basic gist of "simplified spelling" is that you spell a word phoenetically, rather than in all of its rich etymological glory. I can see it now. Take the word "pen." You've got some Alabama kid that's going to spell it as "pin" because of course that's how you pronounce it down here, but some other kid in Virginia is going to say "pehn." Or some other person in Michigan who spells roof as "ruf." Total chaos!!! Kind of reminds me of those parents who won't toilet train their kids because they're afraid of giving them a complex about going to the bathroom. I guess they won't be able to figure out the restroom signage either when they finally learn.

Well, I guess that's enough ranting for one night. I'm going to the liberry.

Best Bun

I am excited because I have had my camera since Christmas, but only got around to figuring out how to upload the pictures today. I was getting grumpy because I couldn't figure out how to do it, and then Matthew asked if I had turned the camera on :-)
He is in tech support, so he is used to this.

This is our most adorable rabbit, Georgie Phillips.

Going to the Chapel

We're already married, but this is a picture of Matthew and me before we left for my friend Tamara's wedding on June 24. I was a bridesmaid.