Gifties

Ok :) It's past Christmas (day) so I will begin to post again and you shall no longer be accosted with my Xmas list :) So, in the spirit of Christmas, however, what did everyone receive? I love hearing what people get for Christmas, don't you? It gives me hope in the world and belief in the good. Unlike teachers who don't really give a damn, even though they pretend to. Well perhaps teachers do give a damn. I don't know. But that's another story :P Well? (you may wait until Epiphany if you are expecting more :P)

Xmas List

Yes, that's right I said "x"-mas. X, which stands for CHRIST so there all you haters. So Ive decided to make a Christmas list, because well, I want to :D Ill add things as I go along and as I think of them. When I was a kid (ok fine I admit it, I still do it) I would tell my mom alllll year what I wanted for Christmas. It was never the same thing (except socks, I always want socks), and was usually pretty random. I never expected to get any of it, but hey, in those days I had hope, and I figured it couldn't help trying :) I don't know if my mom ever listened to me. I don't ever remember getting something that I had asked for but I never cared :) How does that happen? Shouldn't I have been sad and weepy :D lol. I liked what I got because at least it was something :) And that other stuff, meh, I ended up getting it for myself :D So either way, I win :D So I decided to keep up the tradition
Ehem.


Socks
Computer Case
Mp3 player
A partridge in a Pear Tree
A tattoo
Socks
A new car
A coat
A sweater
Notebook Paper
Books
A Fountain Pen
Snowboard Socks (different from socks mind you)
Decals
A Room of my Own
A scooter
A Hockey Stick
Books
A Life *please include a gift receipt*
A 4.0
A chain saw
A white Subaru
A hug
A sweatshirt A Gonzaga Sweatshirt
A Beanie
A teddy Bear
A Blanket
Bernini.
A cord of wood (ill chop it)
A Baseball Mitt
Socks
Henrietta Hen
Publication
Absolution
A tree
A fly swatter
A wooden Rosary
A quilt (home made)
Captain Morgan Sailor Jerry *check*
Canned Peaches
Confidence
An Aloe Vera plant
A gym partner
A boat
A spork
A Red Blackhawks sweatshirt
Cd's
A Candle
Socks
Divinum Officium
A cooling thingy for Laptops
Remittance of debt
Binding for my Liber
Silver Bells
Cockel Shells
Eye of Newt Toe of Frog
Help with Tuition
Bedspread and sheets
A frame for my Windmill
Gift Cards for Food and Books
Eduardo Verástegui
A Guitar
A Bulletproof vest
A Scarf! how could i forget a scarf!

Richard Nixon Killed Kennedy!

I have already mentioned, oh once or twice, how Stephen Colbert makes me laugh. And I love to laugh :) Here's a bit from his Oct.30th Episode. Flawless logic according to the "DaColbert Code":

"I don’t believe in polls, and 62% of Americans agree with me. No, I make my predictions by looking for superficial connections in seemingly random information. Its a power I call the "DaColbert Code.
Let me remind you how it works. Say I wanted to know who killed president Kennedy. Ok, let’s see. The movie “JFK” was directed by Oliver Stone, which leads us to the Rolling Stones, Rolling Rock, lobster boat, man overboard, waterboard, watergate, Oh my God, Richard Nixon killed Kennedy! My apologies to Fidel Castro, the Dallas Police, the Mafia, the FBI, the Masons, LBJ, Ike Turner and the Hamburgler. I never should have subpoenaed any of you.
Now let’s use the code to answer the question on everyone’s mind. Who will be our next president? The race is clearly going to be won by the biggest patriot. So let’s start with the New England Patriots, whose quarterback is Tom Brady, Greg Brady, Greg Allman, Almond Joy, Lemon Fresh Joy, Farm fresh eggs, farmer in the dell, There was a farmer had a dog and bingo was his name O-bama! No! Nonono! That can’t be right.
I just started it off wrong. Let me start again. Ok, there’s a race for the white house, so white house, white guy, Guy Smiley, smiley face,horse face, horseshoe, shoe shine, shoe box, Johann Sebastian Bach, baroque music, Baroque Obama - NO! Stupid code.
Ok, I got it. The next president is going to be a maverick, and the character Brett Maverick was played by James Garner, Jennifer Garner, Jennifer Lopez, George Lopez, George of the Jungle, In the jungle the mighty jungle the lion sleeps tonight, Bobby Knight, Bob Hope, Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama - SHOOT!"

Well he goes on of course... you get the idea. Funny stuff :)

Shipping Containers... Home Sweet Home?

Innovators:

Radical architect Adam Kalkin '84 designed something called Quik House, a kit home built around five recycled shipping containers—"the chicest weekend retreat one can buy for $99,000," according to Vogue magazine. Winner of the P/A Young Architects Award in 1990, Kalkin created a customized version of the Quik House for an exhibition at Deitch Projects' Wooster Street gallery in SoHo last year. "Suburban House Kit" featured skylights, mahogany sliding doors, a stainless-steel kitchen, custom-designed carpeting, and a stainless-steel hearth.
Quik House is all the rage among the design elite (fashion designer Cynthia Rowley and interior designer Albert Hadley are among his clients). But Kalkin envisions another use for his Quik House, as well. He is currently collaborating with the Pingry School (Kalkin is an alum) on a year-long project to build a disaster relief housing prototype on the school's Martinville, New Jersey, campus. "Our objective is to create an inexpensive, quick, and environmentally sustainable architectural system that could be used by millions of inadequately housed people around the world," says Kalkin. Students will work with Kalkin and faculty in the fine arts, computer science, and biology to address economic, agricultural, energy, health, and social issues relevant to disaster relief in addition to participating in the construction of the prototype. 'This project will benefit the student community at Pingry," Kalkin says, "but more importantly it will contribute to the discourse surrounding the issue of adequate housing throughout the world.' "

What do you think?

More: http://www.aavc.vassar.edu/vq/articles/Containing-a-Home

Random tribute

My sister and brother: I love them, I'm proud of them and I miss them something fierce.

Guy Fawkes

Remember, remember the fifth of November...

This is a really powerful video shot with just a cell phone in two cities, NY and Sydney. I think this issue is really rather complicated, nevertheless this video does a good job of removing it (a bit) from the political sphere etc...





linked from Mark Kaske

Ok so wow, I'm really sorry about all these videos! I swear, I have constructive moments! Anyway, speaking of Colbert... did anyone watch Thursday's show? It is hilarious as usual, however it hits a soft spot in my heart because of the Shakespeare references (yes I know lately I've been hating old Will, but its all in good conscience...or something like that) You can watch the whole episode or just the Shakespeare half... either way its hilarious....watch the whole episode on Colbert Nation

Stephen Colbert

So I happen to love Stephen Colbert, even though I don't get to see his show as much as Id like (or at all, as it generally seems to go). I ran across this old video on Colbert on the Late Show, and i just love how they talk about his "new show" and he says he is going to "change the world". You know what, he did. :) And that is some real truthiness.



p.s. I particularly like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert @ the Emmys. It is ridiculously funny, and always makes my bad days better. Plus Stephen Colbert uses the word "pablum"... it has to be good ! :D

Ok so maybe Im sheltered, because I get the feeling that I missed the boat on this one lol. Anyway! I found this while I was supposed to be writing a commentary on Will's Sonnet 79, so it has to be worth some sort of interest :P

Ok ...well here is the video I wanted to post Conan and Pilobolus but it wont let me embed it, and I assume NBC is going to make them take it down soon... so heres another:

Death of a Giant

"...If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.

He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor that made it all seem effortless.

Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into a craggy, charismatic old age even as he redefined himself as more than Hollywood star. He raced cars, opened summer camps for ailing children and became a nonprofit entrepreneur with a line of foods that put his picture on supermarket shelves around the world.

Mr. Newman made his Hollywood debut in the 1954 costume film “The Silver Chalice.” but Stardom arrived a year and a half later, when he inherited from James Dean the role of the boxer Rocky Graziano in “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” Mr. Dean had been killed in car crash before the screenplay was finished.

It was a rapid rise for Mr. Newman, but being taken seriously as an actor took longer. He was almost undone by his star power, his classic good looks and, most of all, his brilliant blue eyes. “I picture my epitaph,” he once said. “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

Mr. Newman’s filmography was a cavalcade of flawed heroes and winning antiheroes stretching over decades. In 1958 he was a drifting confidence man determined to marry a Southern belle in an adaptation of “The Long, Hot Summer.” In 1982, in “The Verdict,” he was a washed-up alcoholic lawyer who finds a chance to redeem himself in a medical malpractice case.

And in 2002, at 77, having lost none of his charm, he was affably deadly as Tom Hanks’s gangster boss in “Road to Perdition.” It was his last onscreen role in a major theatrical release. (He supplied the voice of the veteran race car Doc in the Pixar animated film “Cars” in 2006.)

Few major American stars have chosen to play so many imperfect men.

As Hud Bannon in “Hud” (1963) Mr. Newman was a heel on the Texas range who wanted the good life and was willing to sell diseased cattle to get it. The character was intended to make the audience feel “loathing and disgust,” Mr. Newman told a reporter. Instead, he said, “we created a folk hero.”

As the self-destructive convict in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) Mr. Newman was too rebellious to be broken by a brutal prison system. As Butch Cassidy in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) he was the most amiable and antic of bank robbers, memorably paired with Robert Redford. And in “The Hustler” (1961) he was the small-time pool shark Fast Eddie, a role he recreated 25 years later, now as a well-heeled middle-aged liquor salesman, in “The Color of Money” (1986).

That performance, alongside Tom Cruise, brought Mr. Newman his sole Academy Award, for best actor, after he had been nominated for that prize six times. In all he received eight Oscar nominations for best actor and one for best supporting actor, in “Road to Perdition.” “Rachel, Rachel,” which he directed, was nominated for best picture.

“When a role is right for him, he’s peerless,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote in 1977. “Newman is most comfortable in a role when it isn’t scaled heroically; even when he plays a bastard, he’s not a big bastard — only a callow, selfish one, like Hud. He can play what he’s not — a dumb lout. But you don’t believe it when he plays someone perverse or vicious, and the older he gets and the better you know him, the less you believe it. His likableness is infectious; nobody should ever be asked not to like Paul Newman.”

But the movies and the occasional stage role were never enough for him. He became a successful racecar driver, winning several Sports Car Club of America national driving titles. He even competed at Daytona in 1995 as a 70th birthday present to himself. In 1982, as a lark, he decided to sell a salad dressing he had created and bottled for friends at Christmas. Thus was born the Newman’s Own brand, an enterprise he started with his friend A. E. Hotchner, the writer. More than 25 years later the brand has expanded to include, among other foods, lemonade, popcorn, spaghetti sauce, pretzels, organic Fig Newmans and wine. (His daughter Nell Newman runs the company’s organic arm.) All its profits, of more than $200 million, have been donated to charity, the company says.

Much of the money was used to create a string of Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, named for the outlaw gang in “Butch Cassidy.” The camps provide free summer recreation for children with cancer and other serious illnesses. Mr. Newman was actively involved in the project, even choosing cowboy hats as gear so that children who had lost their hair because of chemotherapy could disguise their baldness......

In an industry in which long marriages might be defined as those that last beyond the first year and the first infidelity, Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward’s was striking for its endurance. But they admitted that it was often turbulent. She loved opera and ballet. He liked playing practical jokes and racing cars. But as Mr. Newman told Playboy magazine, in an often-repeated quotation about marital fidelity, 'I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?'....."

~By ALJEAN HARMETZ


A Few Quotes:

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

"If I ever feel like I'm doing something I've done before, I scrap it and start over again..."

"When I realized I was going to have to be a whore, to put my face on the label, I decided that the only way I could do it was to give away all the money we make. Over the years, that ethical stance has given us a 30 per cent boost. One in three customers buys my products because all the profits go to good causes and the rest buy the stuff because it is good."

"Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why." Reminds me of when open a new book for the first time (or an old one... lol)

"I never ask my wife about my flaws. Instead I try to get her to ignore them and concentrate on my sense of humor. You don't want any woman to look under the carpet, guys, because there's lots of flaws underneath. Joanne believes my character in a film we did together, 'Mr. and Mrs. Bridge' comes closest to who I really am. I personally don't think there's one character who comes close . . . but I learned a long time ago not to disagree on things that I don't have a solid opinion about."

"I've repeatedly said that for people as little in common as Joanne and myself, we have an uncommonly good marriage. We are actors. We make pictures and that's about all we have in common. Maybe that's enough. Wives shouldn't feel obligated to accompany their husbands to a ball game, husbands do look a bit silly attending morning coffee breaks with the neighborhood wives when most men are out at work. Husbands and wives should have separate interests, cultivate different sets of friends and not impose on the other...You can't spend a lifetime breathing down each other's necks." Thanks Paul! At least someone shares my opinion! Here I thought I was being a feminazi ...

"I've been accused of being aloof. I'm not. I'm just wary..." Bingo, more people should be like this...

"I picture my epitaph: 'Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.'"

"Once you've seen your face on a bottle of salad dressing. it's hard to take yourself seriously."

The Fourth Screen

Nokia Nseries Commercial... creatively good idea, yet simple:



P.S. If you liked this, youtube some more of the Nseries commercials. Theyre quite good. I am Nokia, Listen ... also if you like the song, its In My Heart by Moby (for whome I have a soft spot in my heart on account of his ancestry :) )

Out of the thousands of hilarious things i come across over at List of the Day .... here's one from the archives that really made me laugh...

Obituarys CNN has already written:

Roy Horn
When a tiger tries to rip your head off, it generally succeeds ...unless you're able to withstand its attack through the powers of magic, like Roy, one-half of that Ambiguously Gay, German Duo, Siegfried and Roy. Whether Montecore, the tiger, was truly trying to attack Roy or merely use him as a Pez dispenser remains a matter of some dispute. What can't be disputed, however, is that CNN is still ready to publish their Roy obituary the second he finally takes a Lufthansa flight to the Great Wienerschnitzel in the Sky....

For the Rainy Days...

Because sometimes you just need a little Miles and Coltrane....

Now would be the time I would like to write -- when I need to write, to get all these things out of my head and onto paper in some sort of a cohesive fashion. Get something flowing; anything, whatever it is. A poem, hiding in those deep recesses, waiting to be treated properly, brought out in the light where it belongs. A thought that has been hibernating, but never has the chance to see the spring or summer. But now is also the time when I can't write, because I haven't the time. I haven't the clarity. There is always that paper, those papers, in the back of my mind, due tomorrow, but against which my very being rebels. I don't really have the time to write it, because I'm tired and it's been a long day, but if I did have the time, would I write it? I don't even have the will. What happened to me? When did I stop loving this? It was all I had left... and now? That idealism that used to be my fuel is all but turned to cynicism... I don't know. And winter is come again...

More Firefox stuff

I love when people figure things out....

Block Facebook Adds

...more to follow on this subject when I get a minute to think...

The Onion is great :D



Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life


Totally reminiscent of one of my favorite Monty Python Skits:

WoRdLe!!! lol ok, this is just some silliness, but kind of fun. Ive always been a calligraphy fan, so this kind of caters to that hankering for word art :) This is a wordle from CaughtintheDawning


Image created by: http://wordle.net/

I Met the Walrus

Beautifully done and thought provoking... besides the fact that I love the Beatles :)
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace :

Also, here is an interview with the Josh Raskin, I couldn't find it the other day, but i ran across it accidentally again. Yay!

Editing John Lennon: Josh Raskin on Making I Met the Walrus

You're Insane! No one uses Microsoft Works!!!

Sorry this gets cut off GRRRRR... go watch it here: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1823766

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Periodic Table

Hahaha YES!!!! Why didn't we have chem teachers like this? So these guys have a video for every element on the periodic table and then some :). Bloody brilliant if I dont say so myself :D




www.periodicvideos.com or their Youtube channel http://uk.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos

MLK

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Martin Luther King Jr.