Baby needs a blog name

I was doing so well with my plan to post on a regular basis, and then life intervened. My excuse for last week: Had to study for a professional test at work (pretty good, huh?). My excuse for every day after last Friday? Life really did intervene, new life that is. My first niece was born on Friday, and well, she's cuter than you are. We can already tell she's gonna be a heart-breaker. She will be affectionately known as niece57 in these parts, and she started owning that name when she was born at 8:57 a.m. I am looking forward to my new role as 'the cool aunt' and the ability/excuse to buy children's toys , clothing, and books. (Look, a whole outfit for just 9.95!) I can now buy this for my own fridge...I'll just tell everyone my niece was over.

Hey, wasn't I just there...?

I saw The Bourne Ultimatum tonight, which was a great, great end(?) to the trilogy. I saw the second installment in the trilogy (The Bourne Supremacy) in the week between my summer living in Germany and returning to graduate school. As you may recall, much of the film took place in Berlin. I had spent several days in Berlin while in Germany and it was pretty awesome to recognize so many of the locations on the big screen. A true 'Hey, wasn't I just there' moment. The same held true for parts of the third film tonight. Without giving away any major plot points, parts of the film take place in Tangier, Morocco and on a ferry going over from Spain. Once again I thought, 'Hey, wasn't I just there'?

This is one of the few action series where I hope they make another one, but only if they can get Matt Damon to play the lead. People probably felt the same way when Bond switched from Connery to Lazenby (I blame the ruffled shirts for the how bad the film is) and then from Connery to Moore, but Bond seems to me to be more about the position than the person (007 number, high-tech gadgets, and hot women). Bourne rarely uses technology outside of what he comes across, gets by on hand to hand contact and evasive speed, and doesn't have a woman in every...location. So I'm not sure that the series can work if the actor is changed. We'll see what I happens I guess.

Your first concert in years and you wear odd shoes. -Shine(1996)

1. Who did a 14-year-old Andy Williams dub [parts of] the singing for in To Have And To Have Not?

2. What 1934 Dashiell Hammett inspired film was shot in 16 days by director W.S. Van Dyke, known as One-Take Woody?

3. Who played Rufus T. Firefly in Duck Soup?

4. What was the baby in Bringing up Baby?

5. What was the last line of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers?

ETA: Answers in the comments.

Turn! Turn! Turn!

Fall has arrived, inside my mailbox at least. Catalogues filled with fall clothing have started to pour in, just in time for August's humid ninety degree days. I understand of course, it's back-to-school shopping season. After 20 years of conditioning, I'm hard-wired to expect summer to end the third week in August, or Labor day at the very latest. Two years off isn't enough time to be reconditioned. I figure I'll be over it by the time my hypothetical future children are ready for school, thus ensuring that I won't fully recover until I'm well into my AARP years. I am ready for fall though- I want to wear sweaters again dammit! Also, I miss college football and scripted prime time television. But that is still weeks away, which means that the 'Fall Story' JCrew catalogue that came last week only made my summer ennui worse last weekend. This of course is a mood that makes me want to watch Pride and Prejudice (the 5 hour BBC miniseries no less!) and knit. Both of which I did; it helped enormously. Topping things off, the JCrew catalogue was insidiously full of sweaters that had been photographed in an historic Boston library. Nothing sells sweaters like books. Seriously. That's just mean. I love sweaters almost as much as I like books and libraries. So, inevitably, I had to order a sweater because by the time it is sweater weather they will be selling swimming suits and shorts again. To everything there is a season.


If you like looking at other people's libraries as much as I do:
The Your Home Library Project
Celebrities' bookshelves
Flickr Bookshelf Pool pictures

I just want to move ahead, I just want to free myself - but it's a struggle

Recently, like others around this part of the internet (Built On A Dare & Mommy Tracks) I started running again on a semi-frequent basis. I was a long-distance runner in highschool and continued to run on and off throughout college. The last two years...nada. This, however, is the first time I've consistently run since I've owned an ipod. I have 3 requirements for a song to make the running playlist:

1: tempo, the most important thing, nothing slow or erratic.
2: no long intros.
3: it's gotta have lyrics.

Here's the playlist I've been using thus far:

Unwritten, Natasha Bedingfield
Tears Of Pearls, Savage Garden
Suzie, Boy Kill Boy
One girl revolution, Superchic[k]
Sunshine Superman, Donovan
Sunshine Lollipops & Rainbows, Lesley Gore
Summer Of '69, Bryan Adams
Struggle, Ringside
Sinner Man, Nina Simone
Seventh Son, Johnny Rivers
Secret Agent Man, Johnny Rivers
Runnin' Down a Dream, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
Red Staggerwing, Mark Knopfler/Emmylou Harris
Rebel Rebel, David Bowie
Out of Control, She Wants Revenge
Need You Tonight, INXS
Naturally, Middle Distance Runner
Mrs. Potter's Lullaby, Counting Crows
Midnight Special, Johnny Rivers
Memphis, Johnny Rivers
Mellow Yellow, Donovan
Le Disko, Shiny Toy Guns
Just Like Heaven, The Cure
Jet Airliner, Steve Miller Band
Jerk It Out, Caesars
I Want You, Savage Garden
I Can't Get Next to You, The Temptations
Holiday, Green Day
Perfect Day, Hoku
Here It Goes Again, OK Go
Happy Jack, The Who
Hammer To Fall, Queen
Go Tell The World, Joy Zipper
Friday I'm in Love, The Cure
Fortunate Son, Creedence Clearwater Revival
Cobrastyle (featuring Mad Cobra), Teddybears
Clocks, Coldplay
Charlotte, Air Traffic
The Boy from New York City, The Ad Libs
Born to Be Wild, Steppenwolf
Blankest Year, Nada Surf
Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, KT Tunstall
Beautiful Life, Ace of Base
Bang a Gong (Get It On), T. Rex
A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You, The Monkees

I don't, apparently, require motivational lyrics as some of these choices make evident.

Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't. -The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Trivia questions are back...in case you were waiting.

1. What 1974 film was set in part before the Kefauver Committee in the Senate caucus room?

2. Whose poem inspired production of 1939's Gunga Din?

3. What Walt Disney film was originally titled The Sorceror's Apprentice, then renamed Concert Feature?

4. Who directed Red River?

5. Who played the nasty Noah Cross in Chinatown?

ETA: Answers in the comments.

Oh, simple thing, where have you gone?

To explain my blog silence, I suppose I should tell you what I've been doing. It's summertime and my brain just doesn't seem to want to be serious or focus, a symptom of having spent more years in school than out I suppose. But, I did go on vacation for a week, co-host a baby shower for my brother and his wife, and read the latest and last installment of the Harry Potter series. I finished Sunday evening. I kept meaning to post something, but things kept coming up and the summertime lazies infected me. I'm back though, and better than ever. I'll try to get the movie trivia started again tomorrow, and update my book progress, and format those pesky travel photos...sometime this week*. I promise.

*this week may be interpreted as any time in the next seven days...

Day #185

The year is slightly more than halfway over now, so it seems like a good time to do a progress report. In the 50 books project I am currently reading number 23, Jeeves In The Offing. My 1001 movies number stands at 226, which means I've seen 59 since I started blogging about it back in March. I feel pretty confident that I'll be able to finish my 50 books for the year, and I'm sure I'll pass 250 movies, if not closer to 300. Happy 4th of July!

Once I get inside and hit these air conditioners I get a little dizzy. -Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)

The quote I really wanted to use, but is too long for a blogger title:
-First of all, don't make fun of the weather here, and don't say the weather is the same all the time here. Because it's not. In fact, it's two degrees colder today than yesterday.
-Two degrees colder, me without my muff.


1. What film did Alfred Hitchcock make twice?

2. What actor's arms did Frank Sinatra die in, in From Here To Eternity?

3. What 1970 war epic ended with the line: "All glory is fleeting"?

4. Who sang Put the Blame on Mame in Gilda?

5. What film concerned the first murder in the annals of Sparta, Mississippi?

ETA: Answers, finally, in the comments.

# 18: Out of Africa

Out Of Africa by Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen) is a memoir of a time and a place that don't exist anymore: European colonial Africa. This is one instance though where I was glad that I saw the movie movie before reading the book, in order to have a visual sense of the scenery. The movie is vastly different than the book because it is based on the life of Karen Blixen as opposed to what is in the memoir, which has sketches of life in Africa, no mention of her husband, and stories about her 'friend' Denys Finch-Hatton. What makes this book worth reading is Karen Blixen's ability to describe what it is to be a stranger in a strange land who suddenly feels at home there. When forced to leave Kenya at the end of the book she writes about how it feels to leave a place you have been of, rather than just in:

I was the last person to realize that I was going. When I look back upon my last months in Africa, it seems to me that the lifeless things were aware of my departure a long time before I was so myself. The hills, the forests, plains and rivers, the wind, all knew that we were to part. When I first began to make terms with fate, and the negotiations about the farm were taken up, the attitude of the landscape towards me changed. Till then I had been part of it, and the drought had been to me like a fever, and the flowering of the plain like a new frock. Now the country disengaged itself from me, and stood back a little, in order that I should see clearly and as a whole.

I've experienced a similar feeling when leaving a place that had become home without realizing it, and never would have expressed the feeling this elegantly or perfectly. These places, my college town and the cities of my internships, I don't think I truly saw until I was leaving them.

The other nice thing about seeing the movie first: its nice to have Robert Redford as the idea of what Denys looks like when reading about a character for whom little physical description is given. Substitute a young Meryl Streep for the narrator if that is your persuasion.