gogmagog: The Fourth Doctor from <i>Doctor Who</i> (OMG HUGZ)
Well, I'm typing this back in good ol' Iowa City, on my non-slow computer where I also have my own bed in air-conditioning (i.e., no more sleeping on the wicker couch) - so while I'll miss a lot of the folks from back home, I am not at all sorry to be back in my own comfortable little apartment.

My last few days in KC )

Anyways, the drive up to IC was uneventful - once we got in, we stopped at Bennigan's in the Coralville Mall to have my early birthday dinner (it was very nice). Then we headed over to my apartment, which was fortunately exactly as I left it (I wasn't robbed, yay!). Unfortunately, on attempting to pull out my sleeper sofa for the first time, I discovered that Stuff, Etc. had lied to me like the cheating hobags they are, and it wasn't a sleeper sofa at all (it's just a regular one). So my parents had to get a hotel room, and I felt bad. D:

After they headed out I went to movie night at my classmate Stephanie's, and with her and my other classmate Satya watched Transamerica (verdict: very good) and Serendipity (verdict: cute romcom). I also discovered that classes started not on Monday, as I thought, but Tuesday. Which was kinda w00t. :D

I will admit my Latin class has been more rigorous than I thought it would be. Though it doesn't help that there's an exam scheduled for Friday - coincidentally, the same day I'm going with [livejournal.com profile] bshippotemkin, [livejournal.com profile] iowayehudit and Erin (who's also in the same Latin class) to [livejournal.com profile] lordtravis' and [livejournal.com profile] teachingmusic's wedding - and so have to take the exam after class tomorrow (meaning I've had to do tomorrow's homework and Friday's this evening, in addition to attempting to cram every bit of Latin I've learned over the last, oh, TWO DAYS indelibly into my head so that I can pass this test, augh).

Anyway, back to future tense verb conjugations. It's a rollercoaster of nonstop fun here, I tell you.

Let's Positive Linking!
- Chris Claremont's secret sex scandal. Whoa, I hope they kept Chris Claremont away from Halle Berry on the set of X3. XD
- FOR THE WIN. I <3th Darth, indeed.
- SO TRUE...this is how I title all my papers. XD
- The plasticine world of photo retouching. (From [livejournal.com profile] rathershady.) Airbrushing is the least of it.
- Cate Blanchett to play Bob Dylan in film. ...oh-KAY?
- School criminology class at fake crime scene discovers real body. What are the chances? XD

Edit: Damn you, George Lucas. DAMN YOU TO HELL.
gogmagog: The Fourth Doctor from <i>Doctor Who</i> (WOES I AM SO HELPLESS AND EMO)
Dammit, it is so hot...the A/C in my bedroom broke a couple of nights ago, and so now if I want to get any sleep at all I have to sleep in my mom's recliner in the air-conditioned living room because if I try to sleep in my room I will BE ROASTED LIKE CHESTNUTS OVER AN OPEN FIRE. Then when my parents get up in the morning I generally catch a few hours of z's in their air-conditioned room, so I'm doing okay. But still, sleeping in the recliner is making my neck sore. >_<

From IMDb:
Sitcom About Gay Rock Star Won't Air
A planned ABC sitcom produced by Elton John and his longtime lyricist, Bernie Taupin, about a gay rock star will apparently never see the light of a TV tube. According to Fox News, the show, titled Him & Us, which was to have starred Anthony Head as Max Flash and Sex and the City's Kim Cattrall as his manager Samantha, was not picked up despite initial favorable reaction to the pilot. In an interview with The Stage magazine, Cattrall remarked, "It would have been a great series. Perhaps the subject matter might have been too much for some people."

...they were going to do a series with Anthony Stewart Head (a.k.a. Giles on Buffy) as a campy gay rock star being managed by Samantha from Sex and the City? And now it's cancelled? WOES

Anyway, what interesting stuff has happened this week...well, my parents have been having car trouble again (we took in their car Monday morning and just got it back this afternoon, and their bank account is $900 lighter), so I still haven't been out to get my learner's permit. I hope to do that and maybe go to the bank tomorrow, but God only knows whether that'll happen.

Also, yesterday I hung out most of the day with [livejournal.com profile] rathershady and [livejournal.com profile] courters28; they had never had Jack Stack (oh deprived children! never mind that they're both older than me) so we went and they discovered the awesomeness that is the Fiorella family barbecue sauce. Then we played Vinnie's board game Ticket to Ride, which was pretty fun (and which I won, w00t).

And this evening my stepdad dragged me and my mom to Mike Burstyn at Kehilath Israel. (Here he is on the IMDb.) I knew about him because he's the son of Pesach Burstein and Lillian Lux, two of the big Yiddish stage stars (his father was the subject of the documentary Der Komediant) and he's been on the Yiddish stage himself (and later Broadway) since he was a child. And you can kind of tell he comes from the Yiddish stage, because his patter was quite close to what I've heard of those of the entertainers at the classic Catskills resorts (you may have seen them in movies like Dirty Dancing and Sweet Lorraine). A sample joke:

My father once told me the joke about the tribe of Jewish cannibals they found in Africa. Have you heard it? See, one cannibal says to the other, "I hate my meshugginah [crazy] mother-in-law." "Then just eat the noodles," his friend tells him.

Still, he seemed nice, and the jokes were funny (if groaningly horrible). And his singing was quite good as well, though it seemed like everything he sung was either in Yiddish, from like 1958, or from musicals he'd starred in that I'd never seen, like Barnum (in which Glenn Close was discovered as his costar); the only one I recognized was "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof (since apparently he finally got to play Tevye in a recent Mormon production in Salt Lake City XD). Still it was fun and I'm not sorry I went.

The synagogue where it was being held was pretty interesting in and of itself...I'd only ever been to Reform temples before, and KI is Conservative, so I was slightly taken aback at being presented with a kippah (a.k.a. yarmulke, for you Yiddish speakers) that I had to put on before I could enter the sanctuary. It didn't help that it wouldn't stay on my less-than-obedient hair. XD

I discovered on my way out that apparently there was a place you could get hairpins to hold it on that I just hadn't noticed. D'oh.

I was also not expecting folks to just be wandering around and chatting to each other during the event itself; I guess Conservative synagogues are laxer about that kind of thing, but it just seemed rude. Also, when I used the bathroom I counted no less than three old men who were talking on their cellphones as they used the urinal. Seriously, folks, if you can't detach the cell phone from your ear long enough to take a piss, you have a serious problem. >_<

Let's see, what else...Oh yeah! I also watched Ladies in Lavender with my parents earlier in the week. Our thoughts )

Let's Positive Linking!
- Hapsburgs retake Dracula Castle. It sounds like an alternate history plotline, but it's true. Those wacky Hapsburgs.
- Army refusing to put wiccan symbol on soldier's tombstone. Seriously, what the fuck. Just slap the frickin' pentacle on the tombstone instead of stonewalling, army!
- Running backwards apparently the new hot exercise. Freaky.
- And for any of y'all in the Chicago area who are interested in cake (and who haven't seen this already, which limits it to probably none of you), [livejournal.com profile] jantalaimon has opened her Janaderia for business (metaphorically speaking, there is no actual building, just the opportunity to commission tasty tasty cakes).

...dammit, and I didn't even get around to my rants about the victim competition that takes place in postcolonial/feminist/race/gender theory, or about the Southern myth that everyone was either white gentry or black slave (and smear campaigns against folks like the author of God's Little Acre that actually wrote about poor white people and the downside of their circumstances) or the failure of feminist literary scholars to do anything with women authors like Pearl Buck (who I'm fairly certain was the first female to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, and certainly the first American woman to do so; but it took Oprah to even bring her books back into print). I guess those will have to wait for another day!
gogmagog: The Fourth Doctor from <i>Doctor Who</i> (RAISE TEH ROOF WOOO)
Went down to my second Christmas at my aunt Becky's on Sunday. It was nice, and I got a lot of swag:

- the new Harry Potter book, a soapmaking book and supplies, a book of Jane Austen's letters, and a foldable shopping cart from my parents, as well as a CD of local indie bands (which I think is the first "wtf?" item I've ever gotten from them, they normally have a pretty good idea of what I like);
- Finding Neverland on DVD from my brother;
- a gorgeous quilt, a watercolor picture of Christchurch College in Oxford, and a Barnes and Noble giftcard from my aunt Becky;
- and a Borders giftcard from my cousin Andrew.

Today I'm going to go to Barnes and Noble and shop up a storm using my TWO B&N giftcards (since my stepbrother gave me one on Thursday). Ehehehehe. >D

Anyway, the rest of the day went pretty well too...had lots of food and pie, played my cousin's new game Shadows Over Camelot (a really cool cooperative board game) with my sister and cousins (for the record, I was the traitor and so won when we lost). The game was most notable, however, for the fact that my cousin Andrew actually used the word "pwned" (pronounced "poned") in normal conversation. XD

Later in the day we played a couple of games of The Perfect Ten (which my brother had gotten for Becky), but as far as trivia goes it was pretty woeful...both my family and my aunts and cousins were too smart for it to be TOO much of a challenge, and one game only went three rounds and the other only went two (for the record, it's supposed to take up to ten to win).

Monday and Tuesday were pretty peaceful, calm days - I surfed the Net some, read some HariPo, watched some Buffy, ate some leftovers, et cetera. It was nice to have some relaxation time. (I totally would have played some PS2, too, except that I left my power cord at home. ;_;)

Today is probably going to be devoted to two things: 1) spending my B&N giftcards, and 2) packing to go to CO. :D

and a meme that turned out disturbingly accurate at times )

Let's Positive Linking!
- Accidental acetaminophen poisoning up. I'm not supposed to take acetominophen myself (it conflicts with one of my other medicationss, I think), so I should hopefully be able to avoid this. I'm not surprised this is happening, though, since I'm pretty up on my medical stuff and even I did not know that acetaminophen was used in Vicodin, Percoset, etc. (And my mom's taken both!) So I totally see how it could happen.
- Best Christmas commercial EVAR. (From [livejournal.com profile] angrybabble.)
- Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Dance Team. Warn those around you that paroxysms of laughter WILL inevitably follow watching this, and not to worry. (From [livejournal.com profile] jantalaimon.)
- A few days ago there was a story about a woman here in the metro area who swallowed (or attempted to swallow) a cellphone in order to end a conversation with her husband. Now it comes out that it may not have been voluntary. DUN DUN DUN!
- The NunBun has been stolen! (From [livejournal.com profile] eslington.)

Edit: Now it turns out that cellphone-swallowing lady was actually stalked and kidnapped by her ex, who then rammed it down her throat. Fucker, I hope somebody turns him in to the fuzz.

Profile

gogmagog: The Fourth Doctor from <i>Doctor Who</i> (Default)
Eldrad must live

December 2012

S M T W T F S
      1
2345678
910111213 1415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 4th, 2025 01:24 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios