Summertime

It took a little while, but it seems to be officially summer in Chicago. The best of summer.
Camping:


Short sleeves:


The beach:


Blockbusters:

Menagerie

I'm a little itchy to get back to Lincoln Park zoo, which I hadn't realized was free until last year. I can't even think of all the time I wasted not visiting. It's too sad. Anyway, here's some nice animal-themed images I seem to have accrued. This and the last post are just evidence the zoo trip needs to be soon.

A pig scared of the mud. Its owners gave it some boots. Here.


The anatomy of a gummi bear. Here.


Connect the dots using the tube. Here.

Chocolate animals

I am a sucker for chocolate shaped like animals. Not the hollow Easter kind, but the over-priced handcrafted kind. Sigh. Overpriced. Mice. Ladybugs and bees (via Design is Mine). Whales.

Redhead

As prompted by this post at Frolic, I've started thinking about dying my hair red again. I've always wanted to be a redhead; I'm not really sure why. The most popular girl in elementary school was a redhead, and Anne of Green Gables was a redhead as frolic-Chelsea pointed out. But my love of redheads has continued into adulthood: Cate Blanchett and Julianne Moore are two of my favorite actresses, and I'm not sure it's just because they can act. And all this is DESPITE the ginger episode of the South Park. But I recently found out that my grandmother always wanted to be a redhead as a young woman also, and at some point started dying her hair red. And it pretty much stayed that way until the 70s when she shifted to blond. Nonetheless, this makes me feel a little less shallow about wanting the red hair; it's both okay and a nice connection to my grandmother who passed away when I was 14. Nonetheless, this won't actually happen until I find more gray hair. I'm just that lazy. Pony-tailed Cate and Julianne from here and here.

Movies in the Park 2008

Mmm, I'm not sure how I feel about the schedule this year for Chicago's Outdoor Film Festival in Grant Park. Here it is:

8:57 p.m. July 15: "All About Eve" (1950)
8:51 p.m. July 22: "The Odd Couple" (1968)
8:44 p.m. July 29: "The Blues Brothers" (1980)
8:35 p.m. Aug. 5: "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951)
8:25 p.m. Aug. 12: "Touch of Evil" (1958)
8:15 p.m. Aug. 19: "An Affair to Remember" (1957)
8:03 p.m. Aug. 26: "Grease" (1978)

I'm most excited about "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (which I've never seen) and "Touch of Evil," but really you need at least one scary movie on the docket. I love hearing all of Grant Park gasp together. Is "The Odd Couple" good? I would probably like that too. Image courtesy of here.

Back in the Day

Wow, I never put two and two together, but the frightened maid from Amadeus . . . . is Cynthia Nixon. Photo courtesy of here. Lots of other nice then and nows for Amadeus.

Sick of NYT columnists

In the past few months, I've grown really frustrated with my two favorite columnists, Frank Rich and Paul Krugman, and their increasingly bitter support for Obama and Clinton respectively. Their post-Obama-wrap up columns have just confirmed this for me. Do we really need potshots at either candidate at this point? See here and here.

Stuff I love, in linked pairs

1a) Watership Down--So this has to be the most epic book about bunnies ever written. Much more so than Rabbit Hill, which I remember more as a bunny domestic melodrama. I love the way that Richard Adams has conceptualized rabbit life with their own language and the way rabbit memory works and how storytelling is essential to rabbit life but art is a corruption of authentic rabbit life. It's all very Cold War--a democratic bunny kind of society is cool, especially compared to the fascist and authoritarian bunny societies. I loved it.

1b) This dish drier--Seeing this guy is the only time I've ever been sad we had a dishwasher. Bunnies!



2a) Battlestar Gallactica, season 4--last week's episode sucked, but that made this week's episode all the more enjoyable. I loved the Adama/Roslin consummation; I loved Gaius Baltar from start to finish; and I loved the direction they took the newest #8 sister, diet Athena, who began by just sort of hitting on Helo. I thought initially it would be all about Helo's temptation by this other Sharon or some bizarre affair, and instead it became this really creepy but also sweet and sad interaction once diet Athena admitted she had downloaded Athena Original's memories. And I loved the AV Club's comparison of the basestar to "a nightclub after all the lights have been switched on and you can see how sticky the floor got." I also loved . . .

2b) Lucy Lawless, back as the #3 model. Between Battlestar and her cameo in this past season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, I'm tempted to check out Xena. How great is Lucy Lawless?

3a) the sexual politics of Daniel Deronda. So I have to admit that I kind of hated the Jew part of Andrew Davies' interpretation of George Eliot's novel. I suspect I would hate the Jew part of the book too because Davies usually makes that stuff better not worse. But George Eliot fucking nails sexual politics. First, her indictment of marriage is amazing and on par with the harshest critiques by 19th century feminists. It's hard to say what was original to Eliot and what Davies added, but Gwendolyn Hareth's reluctance to marry since it limited her independence, her consent to do so because of economic circumstances, the financial and legal status of a child born out of wedlock, and the reality of marital rape were all spot on. The culmination of her story was mind-blowing. Wow; if that story is intact, it's a million times more subversive than what I ever would have expected from late 19th British fiction. Middlemarch is one of my all time favorite books, but I really disliked Silas Marner. This book seems to combine the two; I might try Daniel Deronda and just skip the Jew parts.


3b) The Last of the Mohicans. Speaking of the Jew parts, the Jewess in the movie was played by Jodhi May, who also played Alice Munro in the Last of the Mohicans. I loved her in LotM, and she was great here as well. And was joined by . . .


3c) Lee Adama who had the funniest facial hair ever.


3d) Marihuana. And to circle back to sexual politics, I tivo-ed Marihuana from Turner Classic Movies' Forbidden Hollywood series. It's described as "A woman discovers the evils associated with marijuana, including possible pregnancy, in this early pseudo-documentary." Umm this movie, from 1936, is hilarious. There are extended scenes of women doing absurd shit under the influence of "the funniest cigarette I ever saw" aka "giggle weed." Including being sprayed in the ass by seltzer water and skinny-dipping. And then they SHOW the women's naked asses running into the ocean. And then one dies. And then another gets knocked up and gives the baby up and then becomes a drug dealer. And then she kidnaps her own sister's kid. Which turns out to be her own kid she gave up for adoption. And then commits suicide when she finds out. And another woman trades her engagement ring for some pot. Anyway, a diatribe against marijuana is pretty much the best excuse ever for watching butt naked women I've ever heard of.

Photo credit courtesy of here, here, here, and the AV Club.

Links

I added some links to my sidebar. It was a lot less intuitive than I thought it would be. They are NOT in alphabetical order. Not double spaced.