the latest news
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*** via T.Diddy - On ESPN.com, Gregg Easterbrook does a blurb on the OVERWROUGHT "mosque" issue, and it couldn't be more spot on. Really, his point about freedom in the fourth sentence says it all. Click here and scroll halfway down to find the section titled "Why Isn't the Pentagon Mosque on the Front Page?"
*** via Guitar Boy - This Baltimore record shop owner makes the A&A and Rotation mixes look unimaginative.
*** via Potter - This post is a little old, but given my love for anything and everything written by Aaron Sorkin, and the general urge we all feel to expose John Edwards for the vile human he is on an ever-greater level, check out this list of who should play who in the movie about Edwards twisted love child scandal.
[08.25.10]
Sticking with the theme of Summer of Nostalgia 2010, I'll tell you about some memories triggered by my trip to Georgia last week to visit Sarah M. I hadn't been to Georgia since 2002, and strangely enough Sarah was there that time, too. We, along with Anne M. and Adrianne H., were on a road trip of the south for spring break. Coincidentally, Sarah recently unearthed photos from the trip and brought them out during last week's visit. For the most part, we were not as cute back then. We have aged well. I kept looking at the pics and thinking, "How did I manage to nab Guitar Boy just a few months later?" But I digress. While Charleston and Atlanta were FANTASTIC cities well worth any time you spend in them, it was in Savannah that we were stranded by a car wreck. Never a good thing to have happen on a road trip. The car was totaled, and we exhausted all the things there are to do in Savannah... in about two hours. Including the "river cruise" that takes you by the Kaopectate plant. For those of you who have ever uttered the word "Savannah" in my presence, you know how I feel. That town blows. Anyone who says otherwise, and I've tested this theory, has either never been there and has only HEARD that it's nice, or just "stopped in for lunch" on their way to somewhere else. It's true. But it's cool, because Georgia has so much more to offer, like a nice visit to Greensboro to see Sarah M. :)
[08.18.10]
Reflecting on last week's post about bands of the late 90s -- and recalling a Take That sing-a-long my sister and I had over dinner recently -- I thought now would be a good time to give Sarah G. a shout-out for taking part in my formative musical education. Jenn G. usually gets a lot of the credit, particularly in the genres of 80s alternative, early 90s techno, and Warren G. But Sarah brought Counting Crows, Smashing Pumpkins, Sarah McLachlan, and Bush into my life. And we also got to share the amazing experience that was MTV Europe between 1995 and 1997. The aforementioned Take That was featured, as were bands like Wet Wet Wet and a then-little known new girl group called the Spice Girls. Many of my friends hear "Breathless" by The Corrs and think of me, because they know it's a fave of mine. I clearly remember the first time I heard it in a dressing room at a TopShop (or something like it) in England in the summer of 2000. But the reason I could identify the pop gem as a Corrs tune was because I'd become aware of them years before while watching their "Runaway" video. Some of you may think I became a fan of Pulp's "Common People" when Juniper Lane started covering it. Hardly! I was also a fan long before my friends and I were dancing to it on a sweaty frat dance floor at William & Mary. And that's because Sarah and I were watching the video on MTV Europe 15 years ago in 1995! As usual, we were ahead of the curve, much as you've come to expect.
[08.04.10]
Bess came over to my house the other night for a long-planned screening of Empire Records. For various reasons we never actually got to the movie, but nostalgia was nevertheless captured when one of us brought up "Foolish Games" by Jewel. Remember that song? Bess, Amber, Kim, and I used to do interpretive dance on the trampoline in my backyard to it. We were quite good. Somehow it was always on the radio whenever we needed it to be.
This morning at the gym, I put on Matchbox Twenty's Yourself or Someone Like You album on a lark. Obviously "Push" is an amazing song, which is why years later it found it's way onto a Rotation. But my absolute favorite on the album is "Real World," and I can't hear it without thinking of driving down East Rancier Ave in Killeen on the way to school.
The point of all this, besides a trip down memory lane (and an opportunity for you all to imagine what interpretive dance on a trampoline to an overwrought Jewel ballad looks like), is that I just have a sense that the music on the radio in the late 90s was better than it is now. A while back I had a conversation with Guitar Boy about late 90s bands like MB20, Third Eye Blind, Everclear, Fuel, the Goo Goo Dolls, and the Wallflowers. Talking about them in the context of the stuff that makes it on the radio today, he lamented, "I used to think all those bands were really bland..." To which I replied, "And now you'd give anything to have them back."
[07.28.10]
This is weird because, as I say every year, I LOVE fall. Fall is the best season, fo sho. It seems, then, that I have a problem with being over-prepared for some things, and lagging behind with others. Take, for instance, the new pics posted below from our recent getaway to Rhode Island. They replaced pics that were suuuper outdated. People were threatening to boycott A&A.com because of the lack of new pics, and I don't blame them. It had gone too far! Or take Sex and the City 2, which I still haven't seen. Completely behind the curve on that! I'm also at least two years behind on planting honeysuckle in my garden, and preemptively know I'm going to screw the pooch on celebrating fall the right way by missing out on a visit to Pumpkinville this year. But Christmas? Apparently, I'm all set.
[10.13.10]
The recent post on what it means to have truly BEEN to a place was quite timely. This past weekend, several ladies and I found ourselves in Narragansett, Rhode Island. We spent the night there, we saw a bit of the town, we overheard local accents, we dropped in on the local bar scene, we excercised our bodies and we even excercised our right-of-way as pedestrians, at some points with more success than others. After a run to the lighthouse on Judith Point, Jen S. turned to me and said, "So have we BEEN to Rhode Island?" Yes, I replied, we most assuredly have. But just to make super sure, on the way out of town we stopped at Starbucks so I could get a pumpkin spice latte. Because if all the other activities had failed to seal the deal, I knew participating in commerce would put us over the edge! Then we got back in the car and within twenty minutes, had driven across half the state. We can now say we've been to the tiniest, the smallest, the icklest of states.
Incidentally, I can also say that I have been to a secret show in Brooklyn to see the band Stars! It was fantastique. I say fantastique because they are Canadian. Or perhaps I should say, they are Canadien, as they are from Montreal. For those of you who have gotten my mixes over the years, you have gotten a heavy dose of Stars. And if you stay on my mix list, I can promise you will get more!
[09.29.10]
Guitar Boy and I have an ongoing disagreement over what it takes to claim that you have been to a state. Not IN a state, but TO a state. This came up again recently during a family trip to Louisville, wherein Guitar Boy, my two sisters, my brother-in-law, my niece and I piled into an over-sized rental SUV and crossed the Ohio River for a visit to Jeffersonville, Indiana. This was to be Sasha's and Maksim's first time in Indiana. But was it...?
See, it was a Sunday morning, rendering the sleepy (read: boring) town of Jeffersonville even more lifeless than it appears to be on other days of the week. There was really nothing to see, nothing to do, and nowhere to even go to the bathroom. And even if we could have stopped to relieve ourselves, would have have counted as having BEEN to Indiana? Can you really say you know the first thing about Indiana if you drove through and tinkled? What counts? Do you have to engage in commerce? Have a meal? Spend the night?
Guitar Boy thinks these questions are ludicrous, and that even a layover in an airport counts. Sarah G. stayed neutral, but J. Dawg was on my side, calling Guitar Boy's viewpoint "liberal" from the back of the SUV. "What do you MEAN liberal?" Guitar Boy cried. "I'm HERE!" But, really, was he?
[09.16.10]
When sudoku hit the scene five or six years ago, I was taken with it right away. The one puzzle printed by the Washington Post everyday didn't cut it - one was never enough. I wanted to do one after another after another. I found free sites and would print out multiple copies until I hit the site's limit, keeping stashes around for whenever I needed a sudoku fix. And then - poof - I was over it. Stopped cold turkey. All of a sudden I had no interest anymore. It was like I'd fulfilled the need, satiating the brain processes it took to complete a puzzle. A few nights ago I sat with Nate at Whitlow's and watched as he played scrabble with Tom R., iphone to iphone. I was sucked in. Twenty-four hours later I downloaded the app for myself, and I think it's turned into my new sudoku. I've been dreaming about triple letter scores and triple word scores. Checking my iphone has become a tick as I look to see whether Nate, Tom, or Guitar Boy have made their moves in one of the multiple games I have going on. It reached a fever pitch around the time Tom scored 111 points with the word "jetlag" and I found myself crushed, declaring to Guitar Boy that I might just delete the app altogether. But after a break induced by the mental-blocking acknowledgment of certain defeat, I carried on. Would you believe it that four days after starting the game with Tom, still 50 points down, I played my last three letters by adding D-R-U to a B to create a made-up word I was sure would be rejected. But it WASN'T. Instead, a window popped up telling me I'd BEAT TOM! What?! Turns out "drub" is a 51-point word meaning "to cream; to beat thoroughly." Oh, sweet victory!! Scrabble iphone app, I love you so!
[09.09.10]