You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2013.
This week was busy in an unexceptional way, as I was working most of my waking moments. My first big editing job is done, however, and this coming week should be a bit more relaxed. Saturday was quite entertaining, since I was able to get together with a lovely mob of people at my parents’ house. My uncle is visiting from the upper peninsula of Michigan, and he tells incredible stories of more wacky hijinks than most people could manage to squeeze into two lifetimes.
Check out The 5 Worst Pieces of Advice You’re Given in Your 20s, written by my friend Jo.
Amazing:
- Seven Brides for Seven brothers was on the other night, and in my efforts to find a clip of one of the dances, I found this barn dance clip from some other movie called The Second Greatest Sex. I’ve never seen it and know nothing about it, but I can conclusively say that it has great dancing.
- 3Doodler. The future is here, guys. Flying cars must be right around the corner.
- Back when men were men and axe salesmen were really, really good salesmen.
- SciFi Spectacular with the NC Symphony and George Takei. Put your shoes on, we’re going.
- Mark Hamill and company in talks about Star Wars Episode VII. Is there a word for feeling hopeful and horrified at the same time? I’m feeling that.
Hilarity:
- Is everyone in Russia just that jaded? Be prepared to laugh.
- Ask her out! This made me laugh really hard too, for some reason.
- Rhett and Link explore what women really think of kissing men with facial hair. Take note, gentlemen.
- Cats: doing the equivalent of walking all over our keyboards for hundreds of years.
- Baby sloth’s kind gesture.
Music:
- “The Woodpile” by Frightened Rabbit, from their new album. Not as dark as you would initially think.
- “Out from the Valley” by The Veils.
- Check out the new album of Atoms for Peace, Thom Yorke’s latest project, on NPR.
Books: I finished Everlasting Man and am working on Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley. I usually enjoy McKinley’s fairy tale retellings, and this one, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, is even better than some of her others. She’s so good at making fairy tales realistic that sometimes the magical parts feel intrusive, but Spindle’s End strikes just the right blend of normality and the fantastic. She shouldn’t be able to make me worry so much about the end to a story I already know by heart, but she does.
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Snow today! Throws a wrench in some of my plans, but it’s beautiful, and I enjoyed a good frolic in it earlier. Now I’m thinking it’s a good afternoon for a cup of hot chocolate and a nap.
Other than philosophy group and a photoshoot session at the arboretum with Sarah, not many interesting happened this week. Oh, except that Gentry was a womanizing jerk and flirted shamelessly with another dog right in front of his girlfriend, Greta. He wouldn’t even look at Greta, who was beside herself with fury. The next day she threw him into the side of a truck twice when they were playing, so he’s paying for his indiscretion.
Writing:
- Sam’s guest post on a movie blog!
- Nine Nights of Narnia blogging event.
- Why no one likes editors.
- Speaking of Kafka.
Unbelievable:
- Coolest news story of the week: meteorite impact in Russia.
- The UK power grid braces itself as everyone gets up to make a cup of tea at the same time. I’m delighted that this is an actual thing that happens.
- Slightly less painful than the actual crucifixion. Who thought this was a good idea?
- I laughed so hard.
Aww:
- Gentry is easily amused.
- Snake protects puppies in India.
- Falling. The real question is what kind of bird sheds a feather that big?
- Fist-bump an Olympian.
- Mr. Rogers, you guys.
Music:
- “Sleep on Needles” by Sondre Lerche.
- My cool blacksmith friend from the UK has an album of folk songs and sea shanties up on bandcamp! Bit of a content warning on the sea shanties for being, well, sea shanties.
- “Remembrance” by Balmorhea.
- “Wind” by Brian Crain.
- Sherlock theme as a ballad.
Books: I recently finished The Kanteletar, which is a collection of Finnish folk songs and poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot, the same fellow who compiled Finland’s epic, The Kalevala. The works vary widely in age, as many of the poems have been passed down in folklore for hundreds of years, but Elias compiled them in the 1800s. I’m a big fan of Finnish poetry and mythology, but I get the feeling not a lot of other folks are these days, outside of Finland; getting my hands on a copy of The Kanteletar took some work. Most Finnish poetry is written in trochaic tetrameter, which is the same foot used in Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” and the effect is hypnotic, especially in longer works like the The Kalevala. Kanteletar means (more or less) “zither-daughter,” a sort of muse. Some of the poems are beautiful, some are just bizarre outside of context, and they’re all intriguing.
Our philosophy group is back in action, and we’re reading The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton. I’ve been meaning to read Chesterton for ages and ages and somehow never quite got around to reading a single word of his until now. Of course, now I’m kicking myself for not getting to him sooner. He’s brilliant, and his work is engendering great discussion. I can see why Lewis found him so compelling; he lays his arguments out in a very Lewisian style, though Chesterton is more prone to making less-substantiated claims than the more cautious Lewis. I would love to get the two of them in a room and just listen to whatever they had to say to each other.
Anne Elisabeth very kindly featured an interview with me on her blog, Tales of Goldstone Wood! Check it out to learn more details about my life than you ever wanted to know. ; )
On Thursday I had a wonderful time with friends at Humble Pie, listening to live jazz by Peter Lamb and the Wolves. Parking misadventures notwithstanding, I enjoyed the outing, which is true of most of my Raleigh excursions. Live jazz is rapidly becoming one of my very favorite things, and this group is particularly talented.
Would anyone be interested in going to hear Caspian on the 16th? I still haven’t found a soul who is free to go with me, and if there’s a way to attend a concert by oneself and not feel awkward and pathetic, I have not yet discovered it. Help a girl out here, people.
Know this:
- Possibly the coolest thing to happen last week was the confirmation of the discovery of Richard III’s bones in a parking lot.
- Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography to be published.
- Largest glacier calving ever filmed. Calling it “calving” instead of just “splitting” or whatever gives the impression that it’s a living thing, which was exactly the feeling I had watching it.
- Check out the exquisite art of Samantha Keely Smith.
- How people on the East Coast prepare for a blizzard.
- Father of the year.
Music:
- Richard Armitage singing the first part of the Misty Mountains song in an interview, proving that the amazing voice in The Hobbit really was his.
- “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons.
- Quite the lip-syncing performance. Those eyebrows!
- Radio show with Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall. So much class in one Youtube clip.
Books: I just finished A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which is the first of his Martian books. I’ve read one of the later books in the series, so it was nice (and much less confusing) to begin at the beginning. Burroughs, bless him, doesn’t bother to explain at all how exactly his hero reaches Mars; the book may take place on a different planet, but there is no science to speak of in this fiction. Fine by me, in this case: the book is a rip-snorting, pulp-fiction good time that makes no claims whatsoever to scientific accuracy, which is refreshing in a way. The novel is about imaginative possibility, not scientific possibility, and it’s endearing enough that it doesn’t annoy me with its implausible action scenes.
Big news lately! I’m now an associate editor for Stengl Editing! To say I’m excited is a massive understatement. As a second job, this certainly beats retail work at Target. I’m already hard at work on my first editing project, and so far everything is going swimmingly.
The Tir Na Nog gathering was every bit as marvelous as I’d hoped, and afterwards we had a grand time hanging out at the apartment. Sarah made a Thai iced tea cake with a maple pecan glaze, which was out of this world, as you might well imagine. The cake was also surprisingly hearty; I’ve been working on trying to finish it for ages because it’s so filling. Like lembas, one piece keeps a full-grown man going for days. This is cake for the apocalypse, and I can imagine a group of people celebrating with this before going out to kill zombies. In a dystopian future, you need a cake that sticks to your ribs, and none of your typical frosted fluff. Sarah excels at improbable yet delicious recipes; I bet she could make a great roast out of radiation-mutated giant rats. I definitely want her on my side in the event of a collapse of civilization. She came over on Wednesday to teach us how to make tiramisu, which was equal parts fun and delicious.
Hilarity:
- I had really hoped that Dear Girls Above Me was fake, but the internet seems to think it’s legit.
- Continuing the trend of awful 80s Tolkien covers, The Hobbit.
- Applebee’s overnight social media meltdown.
Aww:
- Paperman.
- Adorable commercial with the Budweiser Clydesdales from the Superbowl, which apparently happened recently.
- Blind date with a book.
- Ghosts.
Intriguing:
- Rare behind-the-scenes Star Trek pictures.
- A Russian city always on the verge of being sucked into the earth. Best quote: “We will fight the holes with science.”
- I found the above article while trying to find more information on the mysterious holes that keep appearing in Russia.
- Hipster cred calculator. Confirmed hipster, in spite of my love for all of those -1s.
Music:
- “I’ve Got Friends” by Manchester Orchestra.
- “Waking Season” by Caspian, a band I just found this past week. They’re coming to Chapel Hill on the 16th, if you want to see them with me!
Books: Sam gave me a gorgeous copy of Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure by Arthur Conan Doyle. What a neat look into Doyle’s life! The book includes facsimiles of the diary itself, so you can read the story in Doyle’s own handwriting (sometimes with a quill pen, sometimes with a fountain pen). He made a lot of illustrations, most of which are gory depictions of seal and whale hunting, but with occasional, beautiful drawings of ships or the crew members. In 1880 when Doyle sailed, the whaling industry was already waning, but it was still the livelihood of quite a few coastal towns, and the diary is a fascinating look at a time period that’s difficult to imagine today.
I’ve just finished Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, which everyone but me seems to have read in high school. It was well done, but not amazingly so. Maybe I’m just biased because the main character spends the majority of the time being completely unlikable (I know, I know, that’s the point). I also got the impression it contained more pop psychology than actual, scientifically supported information, but I’m probably just being too picky. The ending was still good, if predictably very sad.
