I'm mostly not ashamed to admit that I'm very fond of trashy entertainment shows on E! and VH1—all those "Starlicious Makeovers" and "Worst Song Ever" countdowns. The latest one on E! is "101 Best-Kept Celebrity Secrets," and although some of them aren't particularly secret, here's one I didn't know: in Andie MacDowell's first movie ("Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan"*), her voice was dubbed by Glenn Close, because the producers decided they wanted someone who could do a British accent (and, I bet, who had at least a minimum degree of vocal inflection). Now, if only they'd done that for all her movies; in fact, if only they'd dubbed her entire body; then I could watch some really fairly good movies without wincing every time her character's on screen. (Really, she just about ruined "Groundhog Day" and "Four Weddings" for me. "It's raining? I hadn't noticed"—ugh.)
*I just looked up "Greystoke" on IMdB; yowza, what a cast list. Ralph Richardson, Ian Holm, James Fox...what in the name of God where the producers thinking when they cast a no-talent Southern-accented former model in a major role? Well, there's no accounting for bad taste...
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Monday, June 7, 2004
Late-spring cleaning
Okay, that "hypothetical future date when I work on my Web site" is becoming slightly less hypothetical. I've done some tidying up around here—I started archiving by month to make the sidebar less crowded, and also to avoid having tiny pathetic weekly archive pages with one post on them—and I think, operative word "think," I've even got me an RSS feed thing going. At any rate, I've got this rss.xml page, which I'll get a sidebar button for as soon as practical.
So, hey, y'all come back now, y'hear? I'll get the rest of the dust bunnies out from under the couches, restock the fridge, water the plants, maybe do a spandy new paint job. And it has nothing to do with being on a manic upswing. No, really. (Well, hypomania wouldn't be bad; and I've had enough moderate depression these past few months to frippin' deserve a moderate hypomania.)
So, hey, y'all come back now, y'hear? I'll get the rest of the dust bunnies out from under the couches, restock the fridge, water the plants, maybe do a spandy new paint job. And it has nothing to do with being on a manic upswing. No, really. (Well, hypomania wouldn't be bad; and I've had enough moderate depression these past few months to frippin' deserve a moderate hypomania.)
Talking to the TV
Woman from Ronald Reagan's hometown: "How many towns can say they raised a man who became President?"
J.: "Forty-three."
J.: "Forty-three."
D-day b-day
Turned 29 yesterday. Me: "My last chance not to be thirty." J.: "You'll have plenty of chances not to be thirty. This is just your last chance to be younger than thirty." (He's turning 45 this year; he's not very sympathetic to my complaints of feeling old.)
Checked out the New York Times "On This Day" page for June 6 (don't know if the "subscription only" thing applies to this page). Turns out I was born exactly 100 years after Thomas Mann, which isn't bad. Not that having the same birthday as a famous person is actually an accomplishment; but I'd rather focus on Thomas Mann than, um, Robert Englund, or a rapper known as "Uncle Kracker." (My favorite happen-to-have-the-same-birthday people are Nathan Hale (the Revolutionary War patriot who went to Yale, and of whom there is a ridiculously handsome statue outside my freshman dorm) and John Trumbull, the Revolutionary War-era painter that my college at Yale was named after.)
I feel like I need a nice neat wrap-up line for this entry, but I don't have one. Okay, The End. (That's always a good one.)
Checked out the New York Times "On This Day" page for June 6 (don't know if the "subscription only" thing applies to this page). Turns out I was born exactly 100 years after Thomas Mann, which isn't bad. Not that having the same birthday as a famous person is actually an accomplishment; but I'd rather focus on Thomas Mann than, um, Robert Englund, or a rapper known as "Uncle Kracker." (My favorite happen-to-have-the-same-birthday people are Nathan Hale (the Revolutionary War patriot who went to Yale, and of whom there is a ridiculously handsome statue outside my freshman dorm) and John Trumbull, the Revolutionary War-era painter that my college at Yale was named after.)
I feel like I need a nice neat wrap-up line for this entry, but I don't have one. Okay, The End. (That's always a good one.)
Sunday, June 6, 2004
The bird
Me, to the bird: "You're a little feathered terror. I'm glad you're not the size of a cockatoo."
J.: "She's just a cocka-one."
J.: "She's just a cocka-one."
Saturday, June 5, 2004
My controversy's bigger than your controversy
On IFC, an ad for "Fahrenheit 911" calling it "the year's most controversial film." Hey, with "The Passion of Mel Gibsonthe Christ" having come out four months ago, that's really quite a claim to make. I say we wait till the end of the year, then add up all the column inches, online bandwidth, and number and rank of commentators, and then see who wins, okay? (I think having the Vatican feel compelled to take a public stance on your film trumps ticking off the Fox News Channel any day...)
Wednesday, June 2, 2004
Nifty etymology of the day
Words, words, words: I absolutely love words. And etymologies, the odder and more circuitous the better, and ancient and/or dead languages. Here's an etymology I'm really loving:
I'm doing electronic conversion of a Bible dictionary/concordance, and I've been amusing myself by seeing whether various things I'm interested in are mentioned in the Bible: gemstones, herbs, birds, and so forth. One thing J. and I have been paying a lot of attention to is salt, since he's on a practically-no-sodium diet, so I looked it up. In Hebrew (Biblical Hebrew; I don't know how that corresponds to modern Hebrew), "salt" is melaḥ (if your browser doesn't like Unicode, there's a dot under the "h," meaning it's pronounced like the "ch" in German; if your browser really likes Unicode, the actual Hebrew is מֶלַח). I looked at some of the other words near it in the dictionary, and found mallûaḥ, an edible herb that grows in salt marshes: in other words, a mallow. The very plant that gives its name to the candy made from it, and the similar candy that's now artificially produced: marshmallow. Yikes. (I don't know if the mallow you find in the ancient Near East is the same one you find in the U.S. East Coast salt marshes; but the basic etymology would be the same. There are plenty of American plants and animals that have nothing to do with the Old World species that homesick Europeans named them after.)
Boy, when I get parenthetical, I really obscure the basic substance I'm trying to get across...
Anyway. Is that cool, or what? The things we melt on s'mores and float on hot chocolate, the sugar-covered chicks and rabbits we put in Easter baskets, the punchline of the biggest joke in frickin' Ghostbusters, have a name that goes all the way back to the ancient Near East, to the plant Job speaks of the destitute eating (Job 30:4), whose name comes from the same thing that seasoned the grain offerings to the Lord (Leviticus 2:13) and that Abimelech sowed the conquered city of Shechem with (Judges 9:45) and that Lot's wife turned into a pillar of (Genesis 19:26).
Yikes.
(Incidentally, if you want to see what a marsh mallow plant looks like, the Connecticut Botanical Society has a nice picture. Recipes for actual marsh mallow marshmallows are few and far between; this one from Dian Dincin Buchman's "Herbal Medicine," which made its way online via alt.folklore.herbs, is the most detailed one I could find.)
I'm doing electronic conversion of a Bible dictionary/concordance, and I've been amusing myself by seeing whether various things I'm interested in are mentioned in the Bible: gemstones, herbs, birds, and so forth. One thing J. and I have been paying a lot of attention to is salt, since he's on a practically-no-sodium diet, so I looked it up. In Hebrew (Biblical Hebrew; I don't know how that corresponds to modern Hebrew), "salt" is melaḥ (if your browser doesn't like Unicode, there's a dot under the "h," meaning it's pronounced like the "ch" in German; if your browser really likes Unicode, the actual Hebrew is מֶלַח). I looked at some of the other words near it in the dictionary, and found mallûaḥ, an edible herb that grows in salt marshes: in other words, a mallow. The very plant that gives its name to the candy made from it, and the similar candy that's now artificially produced: marshmallow. Yikes. (I don't know if the mallow you find in the ancient Near East is the same one you find in the U.S. East Coast salt marshes; but the basic etymology would be the same. There are plenty of American plants and animals that have nothing to do with the Old World species that homesick Europeans named them after.)
Boy, when I get parenthetical, I really obscure the basic substance I'm trying to get across...
Anyway. Is that cool, or what? The things we melt on s'mores and float on hot chocolate, the sugar-covered chicks and rabbits we put in Easter baskets, the punchline of the biggest joke in frickin' Ghostbusters, have a name that goes all the way back to the ancient Near East, to the plant Job speaks of the destitute eating (Job 30:4), whose name comes from the same thing that seasoned the grain offerings to the Lord (Leviticus 2:13) and that Abimelech sowed the conquered city of Shechem with (Judges 9:45) and that Lot's wife turned into a pillar of (Genesis 19:26).
Yikes.
(Incidentally, if you want to see what a marsh mallow plant looks like, the Connecticut Botanical Society has a nice picture. Recipes for actual marsh mallow marshmallows are few and far between; this one from Dian Dincin Buchman's "Herbal Medicine," which made its way online via alt.folklore.herbs, is the most detailed one I could find.)
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