Geekfest 2006

Hopefully, this will be a short blog day because I’m tired, I’ve already been on the internet too long as it is, and I just at a whole footlong from Subway and I’m feeling kind of nauseated.  (not “nauseous,” which is incorrect.  “Nauseous” means to make someone sick, not to feel sick.  So, if you feel “nauseous,” you actually feel like you make someone sick.  I very often feel like I make others sick, but not at this moment, since the only other being in the room is Shadow.  I feed him, so he likes me.  Also, he’s asleep.)

Holy English Lesson!  I become geekier by the hour, don’t I?  

So, I totally got in on this phenomenon at the last moment.   I started watching My Name is Earl and The Office (the American version) on Thursday nights before Without a Trace.  These shows are freaking hilarious!  I mean, I don’t drop everything to watch them (if I do that with any more shows, I might as well just lock myself in my house and arrange to have a hole knocked in the wall when I die, because I will weigh a thousand pounds and that’s the only way they’ll be able to get my body out before it starts to stink.)  They’re fun when I do watch them, though. My Name is Earl because I feel like it’s a portal into the Bootheel, which is the redneck capital of Missouri and where I grew up.  I mean, sometimes when I watch that show, it’s eerie.  And I love The Office because I loved the British one.  I’m not sure which one I like better.  The American version has an awesome cast (Steve Carrell, Rainn Wilson, and that tall good-looking one who plays the same part Martin Freeman did in the British show) but the British one is so… British.  Anyway, these shows are the funniest thing on TV right now, especially since Arrested Development was cancelled.  

Speaking of TV, right now I’m watching a 20/20 special on Grey’s Anatomy.    I’m going to be brutally honest here.  Even though they’re showing real-life medical stories that are interesting and heartwarming, a small, shallow part of me just wants to see Patrick Dempsey.  There, I said it.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got.  Tune in some other time when I have more to say.  Let’s hope that someone does something interesting around me so I can document it.  (Come to think of it, this may be the reason people don’t do interesting things around me.)  Till later,

Brianne <><

Especially for Erin

Well, I was just going to respond to Erin in my comments space, but she was too funny and my responses were getting too long.  So, here it is:  

1. I have to confess something.  I like having Shadow around.  There, I said it!  Not that I won’t freely give him back when you come down at the end of this month, but he’s a lot of fun.  He doesn’t like our friends, though.  Last night Caleb and Ben came over to watch Blazing Saddles and he didn’t come out from under the dining room table until the movie was almost over.  He does like my sparkly black sandals, though.  I think he’s going to be pooping out shiny black beads for a month, sorry.  


2. I don’t know what Jen did to get skinny, but I have a feeling that it has something to do with all the spy butt she kicks on a weekly basis.  I will never be in that good shape.  And she’s probably on some stupid microbiotic diet that means all she can eat is brown rice and chicken for every meal.  Since I got my new car, I have eaten at Sonic like, four times in two weeks.  I was there just yesterday morning with Daniel.  I had the chicken strips dinner with texas toast.  I look like I have Emma inside me.

I’m sure there’s more, that’s all I’ve got right now.  On to the pop culture update.  A short one today.

1. I haven’t blogged about Everwood in a long time, but it has been particularly good as of late.  I mean, every episode has been spot-on.  Mostly I’m glad that Ephram isn’t acting all crazy-like anymore, like he was at the end of last season.  Amy has been insufferable in the last few episodes.  This is basically what she has been saying:  “Look at me, I’m Amy!  Everyone should think the exact same way I do because I’m Amy and I’m always right!  Oh, and by the way, you can’t be my friend if you don’t agree with me.  What are you looking at?”  However, she was reasonably tolerable in this most recent episode, mostly because she wasn’t in it so much.  Also I’m incredibly mad at Bright for cheating on Hannah, and I really hope that he’s not the one who dies.  That preview for next week does not look promising.  I still love you, Bright!


2. I taped Austin City Limits the other night because Ben Folds was on there and I’m watching it again right now.  I didn’t hear his first couple of songs because we were watching SNL with Tom Hanks (not even he could make some of that stuff funny) but as usual, I just love him to death.  He’s awesome- creative lyrics, dense piano parts, and an interesting, clear voice. He has an incredible handle on writing about people.  He wrote his Rockin’ the Suburbs CD about his friends and family, and right now I’m listening to a song he wrote about his daughter.  I’m a little sad that he didn’t play “The Luckiest” because that’s my favorite of all his songs, but hey, you can’t have everything you want.  Also, there was a new-ish artist called Ray LaMontagne on there.  I had heard some of his stuff before (I think I heard one of his songs on Alias once) and I really like him.  He’s a little different than Ben Folds, but, you know, I like lots of different kinds of music.  (Shut up, Danielle, I do and you know it.)


3. House is on tonight!  Oh, Hugh, how I love thee.  I am fully aware that I am completely obsessed with a man who is almost twice my age, but hey, you can’t help who you love.  Like I’m sure I’ve said before, I would make myself sick just so he could make me better.

That’s it for today.  Look at me, I’m blogging on a semi-regular basis!  What a good person I am.  More… sometime,

Brianne <><

It's Sunday, I'm Blogging

Okay, so here’s the deal.  The phone jack in Danielle’s room is busted, so that means that I have to physically shift her computer so I can run the internet cord from her room to the living room.  That means that I hardly ever get on the internet anymore, and when I do, I usually don’t have time to blog.  This makes me sad because I like blogging.  Not that I usually have much to say, but since it’s been a month or so since I unloaded my thoughts on life, love, and TV, let’s play a little catch-up, shall we?

1. I got a new car!  Yes, you read it right.  The Beast is no longer.  Actually, The Beast is currently sitting in the Lost Tree parking lot with no license plates on it.  It’s a long, drawn-out story, but the short version is that members of my church donated money for me to be able to have this car payment-free.  You heard me right:  I was given a car.  Praise God for his huge blessings!


2. Danielle and I planned a community concert we entitled “Not Your Mom’s Broadway” and it went really well.  We invited all our talented friends to sing and play with us, and we had a lot of fun.  The whole point of it was to do some stuff that wasn’t incredibly familiar to the audience- we called it “a shamelessly biased overview of musical theatre showtunes from the last fifteen years.”  I made a dorky, irreverent program and we did stuff from shows like Bright Lights, Big City, which no one knows and doesn’t have any sheet music released for it.  I was pleased with the way it went: no one blatantly forgot their words, and everyone more or less showed up on time.  Like I said, it was fun.  However, it stressed me out so badly that I vowed to never plan something like that again.  Seriously.


3. My birthday came and went, and the best two things about the day was that Danielle and I spent it at the library booksale in Springfield and she got me Jason Robert Brown’s solo CD, Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes.  It’s been a week and a half and I’m still listening to it every day.  Actually, I’m listening to it right now.  Oh, good Lord, it is beautiful.  (There are clips of it up on Amazon.com, or you can go to his website for more details.  I’ll try and put a link to it in my sidebar.)  My favorite songs: “Someone to Fall Back On,” “Getting Out,” “Music of Heaven” “Nothing in Common,” and “I Could Be in Love with Someone Like You.”  He says on his website that “I Could Be in Love with Someone Like You” was the jumping-off place for his superb musical The Last 5 Years (my favorite of all his musicals, partly because Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott recorded the original cast album.  We really want to produce it for TLC with Daniel and Alison in the two roles.) Oh, and another good thing about my birthday:  I went to church that night and the kids all sang happy birthday to me, all gross and off-key.  It was the most beautiful rendering of “Happy Birthday” I have ever heard.


4. Alias returned.  (Erin, if you’re reading this, you may want to stop right now, because I will most likely divulge spoilers.)  I have never been so happy to watch a TV show.  Vaughan Lives!  Will returned!  SpyMommy is still evil, Jack still loves his baby girl, Gina Torres returned as Anna, and Sloane killed Nadia?  Holy crap.  I’m going to give Sloane the benefit of the doubt and say, “We didn’t actually see Sloane kill Nadia,” but right now, it doesn’t look good for him.  Oh, and Prophet Five cloned Syd using Anna.  That made me a little sad because I love, love, love Gina Torres as Anna (she was spectacular on Firefly.)  This week, Vaughan is back and we get some Sark action, which I have been waiting for ever since he and Rachel had their little, ahem, tryst earlier in the season.  No matter what people say, I’ve liked this season.  I like the new characters and will be sad to see them go.  This is what I say:  Alias movie!  Alias movie!  Alias movie!  J.J. Abrams himself could direct.  Which leads me to…


5. Danielle and I watched Mission Impossible 3 this weekend solely because J.J. directed it, and I am happy to say that he didn’t disappoint.  Frankly, Tom Cruise scares the junk out of me for a variety of reasons (that permanent crazy look on his face, for one,) but I so thoroughly enjoyed the supporting cast I almost forgot the psycho was in it.  Jonathan Rhys- Myers (love him, I’ll talk about Match Point in a second) and Keri Russell (who knew Felicity could handle a gun like that?  If we had known that during her freshman year, maybe she and Ben wouldn’t have been mugged and she would still have her grandmother’s necklace.)  Shaun of the Dead as the Marshall-esque computer nerd back at APO (oops, I mean IMF.)  Not to mention Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the bad guy, and let me say, he was the best bad guy I’ve seen in a long time.  No “monologuing,” and he didn’t die due to his own arrogance, which is a theme in movies like this.  He just laid down a solid performance, not over-the-top.  Altogether, the movie was great.  I kind of felt like it was a long episode of Alias with Tom Cruise as Sydney.


6. I had a banner movie rental weekend last weekend.  I rented Match Point and Speak.   Match Point was by Woody Allen and say what you will about him, this was a fantastic movie.  I’ve never watched a movie that so clearly had the end in minds from the very first scene.  I as a viewer didn’t know what the end would be, but the filmmaker did, and it showed.  I won’t ruin it for you by giving you the end (I’m not Neil Ward) but let me say: it starts out as a little movie about relationships and ends up as something completely different.  Speak was also very good, in a completely different way.  It’s based on the book of the same name by Laurie Halse Anderson, and I suggest it if someone you love is a teenager or if you work with teenagers in any way.  It offers chilling insight into their view of cliques, teachers, and what’s really going on when they’re not talking to you.  Anyway, what made this movie so good was that it kept Melinda’s (the main character) narrative line so strong through the whole movie. Melinda doesn’t really speak, due to a traumatic event that happened before the school year started, and in the nook we get her thoughts through internal monologue.  In the movie, they changed those to voice-overs, and they weren’t cheesy like they could have been.  It’s a great movie.

All right.  Tons more has happened to me in the last month, but I know when to quit.  Maybe I’ll be back for part two tomorrow, maybe not.  Right now, I have to go detach Shadow from the internet cord, he’s chewing on it again.  A bientot, (or not,)

Brianne <><