Keeping Up

I feel bad I haven't been posting to my blog. I do love pinterest, but it's still sad when I notice that there's no new months in the archive column of the blog.

So here is my latest shopping task: finding small affordable and thematically appropriate prizes for my students. In Postwar US History, I am making them host a 1950s theme DRY cocktail party in class. To make it more fun for them (since I assume it will already be awesome for me), I bought old swizzle sticks to give out at the door. I personally think these things are awesome. We will see how they feel. And then in my urban history class, I told them that I would give a small prize to anyone who had to use microfilm for their research project. I'm trying to buy enough of these tiny old license plate keychains to give one to everyone who ends up at that damn machine. So far I have 8.



(Neither of these images are things I've bought, but they're representative of what I'm going for. Ebay will no longer let me pull images for some reason).

The Future and the Past

The Future:
AT&T's really accurate commercials from the 1990s
100 Things to Look Forward to in 2011
2011 Midseason Shows
The Future of Alzheimer's Care
The Texas Omen by Paul Krugman

The Past
Young Johnny and Elizabeth Edwards. I find this unspeakably sad for all sorts of reasons.
James Tiptree Jr. in another era
Cigarette cards featuring Old Hollywood Players
Hidden Mother photos. These are deeply creepy.
Vivian Maeir. I love this genre of photography.

BONUS LINK: The Past of the Future also dealing with AT&T

Toothache

Boo.

Loving Harry Potter

Three of my favorite Harry Potter links to celebrate HP7, which I saw at the drive-in. I highly recommend the drive-in. Yes, you may accidentally watch a lot of it thru a tinted window. Yes it was cold. But they played the Star Spangled Banner, an old ad for mosquito stuff, and a PSA against PDA. Loved the drive-in; HP7 was really pretty; I had some drinks while watching; and there was some really awesome animation. Not my favorite HP, but I thought that after HP6 too. Now I enjoy HP6 quite a bit. That said, I missed you Mugg! And Evil Stefano!!! ANYWAY:

Harry Potter as a Space Opera
Good but disturbing point about Neville Longbottom
Famous peeps put into Hogwarts houses care of Flavorwire

Feeling British

This Sunday am:
Drinking tea
Eating English muffin
Tooth ache
Watching Hot Fuzz

I hate my teeth

This is the current condition of my teeth:


This is what I will replace them with:

Snow

I don't usually watch videos in blogs, but this one is both amazing and silent. That teddy bear. . . c/o here.

Love, Hate

I love this article about Michelle Obama. Muppets and wearing a dress more than once.

I hate doing pushups.

Tip of the Hat, Wag of the Finger

Tip of the Hat
1. Cookie Magazine. I'm not supposed to like Cookie since I don't have kids. But it's a nice Domino replacement at the moment.
2. Parks and Recreation. Parks and Recreation is really growing on me, which was not entirely unexpected. First, the Office people know what they're doing so it was only a matter of time. I really love Mark and April so far. The jokes are getting funnier, and the bit characters will probably be as hilarious as Stanley et al later. Also, they're inundating me with Indiana references. They're doing a really amazing job actually, including everything from Bob Knight's hand/sweater visible in the corner of a poster all through the pilot and instantly recognizable to any and all Hoosiers to using the outline of Indiana to cap off episodes to a small picture of Larry Bird alongside Leslie's collection of portraits of women in government. It turns out that this sports blog guy has noticed this as well and taken some pics for me to borrow.
3. Manny Pacquiao. Filipino pride baby! Bring on Mayweather!

Wag of the Finger
1. Lost. SPOILER ALERT. So Lost has possibly lost the thread of its time travel logic. I hate this new "variable" angle. They had a nice gig going for them: closed loop except for Desmond who could create alternate timelines in theory. I'm hoping that Daniel is either a) mistaken or b) setting Jack up to do exactly what Jack needed to do in order for the future to happen as it did. I think this is a reasonable possibility since he told Dr. Chang about Miles so that Chang would do "what he's supposed to do," ie send his wife, son, Charlotte, etc, off the island in the sub. So maybe he's similarly manipulating Jack to "do what he's supposed to do.' Otherwise, boo Lost. Boo.
2. My birthday flower, care of Angry Chicken, is not in fact a flower. A spruce is a tree, thank you very much. Still not a bad plant to be affiliated with.

Thanks Colbert for the title.

Chapel Hill

I am going to the Louis Round Wilson Library for a research trip next week. Recommendations for Chapel Hill are welcome.

Backyard

When I was a kid, we had the above enormous backyard. (This picture of the back half of our backyard is courtesy of Trulia, a badass real estate site with pictures and occasionally prices of houses all over the country. Want to know how much your friend spent on his or her house? You might be able to find out).

My brother came to adopt the alley as his territory, but I took over the row of bushes on the left that I had decided formed a playhouse. The bushes seemed to form two bedrooms, a hallway, a front door, a back door, and a living room with a "couch" created by a fallen tree. I would get one bedroom, and my best friend would get the other. For some reason, I decided the living room was sinister and was scared to go into it.

Anyway, because of my own haunted backyard, I love stories about haunted backyards. Like The Secret Garden. And The Shining. And Beloved. And this kid's book called The Shades where shadows come alive in the garden. And I love that this guy has created his own haunted yard, including this Spirited Away sculpture. Despite all those, I still think the backyard is a neglected space in haunted stories, which doesn't make any sense. The backyard's ripe for unsettling things.

Kids Book Club

Stephan has decided that I need internet evidence of our kids' book club so that when it becomes a national phenomenon, I get to go on Oprah or something. Stephan has a lot of weird versions of the future where I go on Oprah. Anyway, it does seem like it's about time that I did a post on children's book club. I don't remember how R and I came up with this--R was this your idea? where did we get this idea from?--but it is incredibly fun. It's pretty much your standard book club, except that you read a kid's book instead of adult books. The title is misleading; there are no kids at kids' book club. Anyway, our ranks have grown from 3 to 7, which isn't bad. We have a very nice group. When A hosted the City of Ember, book club got even better because A came up with the ingenious idea of making food themed to the book. In that case it was The City of Ember, and she provided canned pineapple and potatoes and something else I can't recall. This has been my favorite book club innovation, not least because we got to eat Tostino's pizza bites when we read Coraline. Now there is also a private wiki, care of A as well. It's pretty much great. I highly recommend that you start your own children's book club.

We have read:
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron
The City of Ember by Jeanne Duprau
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien

Woodland bday

This blog has become an ongoing feature about how awesome R & T are. One, they made Stephan and I homemade pizza and blueberry crumble for our bdays. And they gave me this book (top), which just reminds me how much I love woodland creatures, especially bunnies. Thank you!!!!!!
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IT Crowd

R and T gave us a copy of the IT Crowd forever ago. We FINALLY started watching it, and it is hilarious. As R and T noted, the character played by Richard Ayoade looks just like Stephan. See above. We just need to move Stephan's dimple to his chin. And do something re Stephan's hair. I love it.

Nading girls

Stephan's great grandmother, on the left.

Awesome Stuff I Loved in 2008

Websites that are bad for me: Facebook and Jezebel. Jezebel inspired this post.

Hard Liquor. In particular free shots won at trivia night at the Bucktown Pub and Bailey's during cards at R's.

Politics. Obama 08. Indiana goes blue. Minus Prop 8. Minus Blago scandals. Minus Bush's last minute policy bullshit.

Stephan's invented old-timey slang. We heard the term "jukie" in a song by Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks and decided a Jukie was a music hipster. Then Stephan invented other categories of hipster: a Nick (nickelodeon) is a movie hipster; a Nick at Nite is a horror movie hipster; and a picture boxer is a television hipster. I am proud to be a picture boxer.

Green beans. The year before it was broccoli; 2008 was green beans.

Children's Book Club: highlights include Watership Down and Howl's Moving Castle. Book club has also helped me rediscover the Chicago Public Library.

Sewing class at the Needle Shop.

Pants that were not jeans: cords, my striped guys, yellow chinos, and Bitten canvas pants.



What's going to be awesome in 2009:
*More sewing classes at the Needle Shop and more book club.
*Horses. The birds/deer of the future. Vintage horse buttons on ebay would be a good start. See above.
*Trips to San Diego, Springfield IL, and Chapel Hill NC.
*The revival of cloth napkins. My roommate did this in college, and hence I did. Now I have some pretty new ones, and I'm reviving the tradition.
*Inauguration.

Grandfathers

Melanie at You Are My Fave posted these photo booth images of her grandfather. below.

And Angela at Ruby Press blogged about how her great-great-grandmother was so sad to have only one child that she dressed her son (Angela's great grandfather) as a girl, and then a boy, for photographs. above.

I miss my own grandfather who lives very far away in Cincinnati. And my other grandfather who passed away 16 years go.

Samson and Delilah

I got super psyched watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles--not because it was a good episode, because it wasn't--but because they played "Samson and Delilah" for the first few minutes of the episode. My dad used to play that song on the guitar when I was a kid, and it was the only one of many many folk songs in his repertoire that didn't make me cry. And hence, the only one where he was allowed to sing the words. It turns out that Battlestar Master Bear McCreary is responsible for this adaptation, another of my favorite tv-music moments of all time. Between this and "All Along the Watchtower," I might want to marry that man. Thanks Michael on Alan Sepinwall's blog for the tip. Image by Lucas Cranach, 1529.

Little House on the Rock

We went to the House on the Rock for Labor Day. That place is so weird and awesome and creepy. Here are a few of our creepiest pics. I guess they're actually NSFW. Ha!

Best of You Tube, Part II

The above commercial featuring my childhood friend and this video, via kottke, is a great anecdote about the beams of New College, Oxford. It really is great enough that I'm going to watch the rest of this.