Musings and Mirth

Four Things I Learned Today

I am starting a new series here for you three readers to enjoy. I seem to gather a lot of information during the day. I figured, why not share it? Maybe this makes me Sandra Bullock in All About Steve, which I just saw the other day and found it to be a lot better than the poor reviews, and Razzie nods, would have you believe. It isn’t a bad-intentioned film at all. Some bits are clumsy, but Thomas Haden Church is brilliant in it, and hell, why not gaze at whatshisname for a whole movie’s duration? Sandra Bullock isn’t bad either. Anyway, I could kind of, sort of relate to her character in so much as I have a lot of factoids and quotes and obscurities roaming around in my head and they do threaten to come out. I then can either explain them to the blank stares I get back, or try to thwart them from ever coming out in the first place. And that, my friends, is how I have friends.

1) Did you know you could use a cup of yogurt as a measuring cup? Apparently they are clearly marked as to how much they hold. I’m always on the lookout for containers that I know equal exactly one cup. I haven’t measured the yogurt cup to see if it does, but this post will lead me to believe that yes, it’s one cup exactly, or close enough.

2. More people now use Facebook to send messages rather than email. Have you noticed that? It’s the strangest thing. People who have had my email for years now opt to send me messages via Facebook. Perhaps they feel it is a more trustworthy method, being that there is no way I won’t get the email.

3. I am both inspired and ashamed that Meryl Streep was 45 when she did The River Wild. Amazing, right?

4. I learned today that you can’t really have ice cream for breakfast in Paris. Of course, you CAN, if you know how to ask the right person.

Tempted

I picked up my old copy of Fields of Greens off my bookshelf. This was a very popular cookbook back in the early ’90s. No, I’m not kidding. I remember the early ’90s and I remember how popular this cookbook was. Copyright, 1993. It’s a vegetarian cookbook that kind of got swept away during the Atkins and Food Network revolution of the mid and late ’90s, where everything was about meat. Why? I don’t know. At least now the trend is going back to vegetarianism or at least to organic, non-factory farmed meat. At least I hope that’s the trend. I am not a vegetarian. I became one a while back while dating one, but decided it was a strange way to go about life. I don’t think humans are particularly meant to be either meat eaters or vegetarians — we can adapt to any type of diet. We absolutely need vegetables and fruit. That much we know. Meat is probably something we don’t really need, but it is a good source of lean protein. Other than the pure pleasure of it, there is probably no good reason to eat things like fatty meats, sausages and the like.

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Hawk at My Window

I have hummingbirds getting very competitive and territorial about this feeder I keep there. I am, as we speak, making the balcony area into an urban herb garden so please do not be taken aback by the poor, dead jasmine plant. It will look much better in the coming weeks. I will admit I’m not the best with interior design. I’m just not one of those people. Thus, the “old” TV, the spotty carpet, the ragged balcony area. Anyway, I humiliate myself on multiple levels to bring you this lovely natural event. Suddenly a big old hawk appeared on the hummingbird perch area. I don’t know if he (she?) was there because of the little birds or there because he/she had seen my little wild kitten staring through the window at the birds. Either way, I moved to get my camera. I didn’t manage to get to my Nikon, because that would have entailed putting a battery in and by then, surely the hawk would have flown away. I got my little camera, the Panasonic Lumix, and snapped a quick photo of the hawk. Then, after it flew to a nearby wire, I got a better shot. Big, beautiful, scary things they are.

Watching Movies with Emma: The Breakfast Club

When the Breakfast Club first came out, I was a teenager myself. I was just a year or two out of high school. I don’t even remember where I was or what I was doing. I probably was commuting to Santa Barbara, attending the city college up there, and had some involvement with a theater group. I remember this because I was given an assistant director position and quickly began dating the lead actor. The play had something to do with Henry David Thoreau. This is neither here nor there except that I vividly remember no being pretty enough to be cast as either of the two lead. One of the actresses who was pretty enough, told me she’d been trained at the Los Angeles Theater Academy. Not too long after my relationship with that actor ended (how could it go? I was 19, he was 31), I fled to Los Angeles to attend the Theater Academy. Much fun, that. But that is a story for another day.

I remember The Breakfast Club not being a very cool film to like. If you hung out with my crowd, John Hughes was lame and the Brat Pack were a group of entitled, talentless hacks. The worst of the bunch, to us, was Ally Sheedy. For some reason, she was the object of our scorn. We didn’t like the character she played in the film, none of it rang true at all. The only slight uptick from the film for us was Judd Nelson, the object of our young girl fantasies.

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Universal Studios Thirty Years Later

I grew up in California. I was a movie kid. That means, at some point during my young life I checked out of the normal world and folded into the cinematic one. Part of this was due to our moving around a lot — between fourth and sixth grade we moved to five different towns, five different schools, and five different ways of life.

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About Me

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