NaNo WriMo

"Art for art's sake does wonderful things to you. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you want to take naps and go places wearing funny pants. Doing something just for the hell of it is a wonderful antidote to all the chores and "must-dos" of daily life. Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives."

Well, I'm going to do it. I'm participating in NaNo Wrimo for the very first time. Wish me luck!

Music of Chance

"Nashe understood that he was no longer behaving like himself. he could hear the words coming out of his mouth, but even as he spoke them, he felt they were expressing someone else's thoughs, as if he were no more than an actor performing on the stage of some imaginary theater, repeating lines that had been written for him in advance." ~Paul Auster

The Thomas Baker Band

I've had this song, Moonshine, stuck in my head for two days. I randomly discoverd The Thomas Baker Band while looking for a Brett Dennen song on You Tube. TBB seems to be an indie band from South Carolina, perhaps struggling to take off, perhaps not expecting to do this professionally, or will perhaps be the next Jack Johnson. I suppose only time will tell.



The video cuts off just before the end of the song, but you get the idea...

The Big Read

top 100 books


I found this on a friend's blog.

Something called "The Big Read" compiles a list of the top 100 books (i don't know what that means though...biggest sellers? classics? most popular of the classics? books someone randomly decided everyone "should" read? There's a few on there I question, and some that seem to be missing).

Ok, so I stole the entire previous paragraph as well. Why reinvent the wheel? So they say that the average adult has read 6 of the top 100 books. I've read 42. Yea for not having an active social life. And for being a giant nerd.


The bolded books I've read.
The italicized one's I intend to read.
The underlined ones, I love.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (i've never read the WHOLE thing though. maybe someday....)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (most of them)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen (the last of her novels that I have yet to read. there are a few lesser known novellas, and letters, but they're hard to find. so i'll probably never actually read them)
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (one i've passe over for years, but the movie was glorious and i now have high hopes for the novel)
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (it has been sitting on my book shelf for years. i've even started it a few times. one of these days...)
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (i'm pretty sure i actually finished this...at least i own it. but that's not saying much)
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (i just bought this a few weeks ago, which means i'll read it in a year or so...)
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (i'm pretty sure that's sitting on a shelf somewhere too)
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (i've seen a few versions of the movie, and a sequal at some point too. does that count? no?...)
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (a lot of it anyway...)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (or some of them at least)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Ohio, Damien Juardo

Out from my window across from the city
I have what's considered a good view
Two blocks from the subway, three from the fountain
Where I walk to break in new shoes

She stands on the sidewalk just waving at taxis
Like horses in parades in passing
I ask where she's headed she tells me,
"Ohio, I've not seen my mother in ages
It's been a long time, a real long time."

Out from my window "How far is Ohio?"
She laughed and pointed out east
She said, "I grew up there with my dear mother
And I haven't seen her since thirteen.

You see, I was taken while she lay sleeping
By my father's hired man
We moved to city so far from my family
I haven't been back there since.
It's been a long time, a real long time."

Out from my window please hear me Ohio
Your daughter wants to come home
She longs to be with you to hug you to kiss you
To never leave her alone

And I've gotten know her to live with to love her
It's hard to see her leave
She belongs to her mother and the state of Ohio
I wish she belonged to me

See you sometime, see you sometime

Nobody Knows Me At All

i'm digging the weepies right now.
digging. do people still say that? apparently, since i just did. but perhaps it's not meant to be used any more, in which case, i should stop singing it. singing it? saying it. i wonder if there is a way to embed just one song. like a youtube video. hmmm. perhaps on last.fm. i'm going to look into it, and if so i'll share some weepies with you.


ok, so i couldn't find just the song, so i've decided to settle for youtube. and the video i could find for the song i'm actually listening to, Citywide Rodeo, is set to a montage of baseball moments. dumb. actually all of the videos are fan-based, and they all suck. so instead of putting up a video based on song merit, i'm putting it up based on visual content. and this one sucks the least. actually i kind of like it. anyway, these are the weepies, and i like them.



so that's that.

i can't sleep again. that's not actually true. i did sleep. i just woke up. at the ungodly hour of 6 am. bollocks. i was hoping to sleep until i had to wake up. instead i slept until i woke up. that's annoying.

no major plans for the weekend. i'm going to watch some friends play football, and read in the park, and then ditch both to go to a flea market. sounds kind of fun. i haven't been to a flea market in, well probably years. but i'm not expecting to find much. this is silver spring we're talking about. probably just over priced crap that the richies didn't want lying around anymore. but maybe not. maybe there will be good finds. or good reads. i love finding books at flea markets. it's like a treasure hunt. a treasure hunt that you have to pay for. but none the less.


this is an incredibly disconnected, rambling post. i guess that's what you get from me at 6 in the morning. or rather 7:41. damn this morning has gone quickly. and yet nothing of real consequence has passed by my lips, or fingers for that matter.

i suppose i could talk about politics. but honestly i don't really give a damn. that's a lie. i do. just not right now.

or a book. but i talk about those all the time, and no one really cares anyway.

lately i've been wishing that i had conversations with people that could pick up on the book and movie references that i drop all the time. it would be rather uplifting to share thoughts on those sorts of things. instead when i do, i typically get a "what are you talking about?" or "what's that from". most recently that was followed up with "it's from that video i've been obsessed with for like the past month. i've told you about it. haven't i? i talk about it all the time." always reassuring and uplifting to know that the thoughts and passions that i share with others are actually given some amount of credence. it's a little depressing to think about it. i need new friends. or friends in general. friends that actually give a fuck about you and aren't so absorbed in their own god damn lives that they can't see you crumbling to bits right before their eyes.

oh well, so it goes.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

From the mind of Terry Gilliam, (the man who brought us: Twelve Monkeys, The Brothers Grim, Monty Python hilarity including, but not limited to, Monty Python and the Holy Grial, The Life of Brian, Monty Python's Flying Circus.) Comes yet another glorius frolick into Fantasy. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Can I just say, this makes me want to piddle...but only a little.

A Short Love Story in Stop Motion

I haven't been able to sleep lately. Sometimes when I'm trying to fall asleep, sometimes late at night, sometimes early in the morning. Generally this results in me, dragging my blankets and pillows into the living room to watch a movie. Like when I was a kid, and I'd wait for the easter bunny. One year I actually saw the easter bunny. I swear to God. Actually I didn't see the easter bunny, but rather his shadow. I saw the Shadow of the easter bunny. I swear to God. I saw the shadow of his ears and his head on the wall behind the tv. On further reflection, and about twenty years to think about it, I think that there is a chance, a small chance but a chance none the less, that it may not have been the easter bunny, but the bunny ears perched atop our 1980's Emerson TV. But to a 6 year old it was the easter bunny. I swear to God, I saw the easter bunny.

So when i can't sleep, I generally drag my blankets into the living room with the hope of exhausting myself. Well this morning, when I woke up at 5 am, I decided to switch things up a bit. So I drug my computer out of the living room, and into my bedroom, and surfed the internet.

And what did I discover? This little gem.


A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.

The Silver Lining

The National Book Festival. A delightful little affair I'd been excited about for months, mainly because Neil Gaiman was there and I was dying to hear him speak. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, I completely missed the reading...and the signing...and the the bulk of the festival. Downtrodden and dejected, I'd accepted the fact that two months of excitement had fizzled. So I clung to the hope that the next First Lady will continue the tradition, and Neil Gaiman would grace the Metro region with his presence again. That was until yesterday.

For you see, yesterday I discovered that Gaiman's tour for his new book, The Graveyard Book, is broadcast online. And better yet, at each stop he's reading one chapter! Delightful! Chapters 1-3 are broadcast on his website, www.neilgaiman.com.

And better news still, his reading at the National Book Festival is available online too!

Although it's not the same as hearing it in person, it does somehow make up for the bitter disappointment.

An Ode to the next generation

I've been rummaging through 7 cd's a coworker lent me. They were compiled by a camp kid. Can I just tell you, I'm throughly impressed with her taste in music! Stuff I didn't start listening to until I was in College. If this is anything to say about the youth of the next generation and their taste in music...there just might be hope!

Wise words from Nathean, and incoherent ramblings from Jamie...

"sometimes the VERY best intentions get mixed up in our words and spoil the beauty"

It has happened once again. The web of "churchianaity" has been cast. Like a net thrown to gather all the fish; to gather the loners and slugbeds, and bring them together. To create community where one already exists. To perfect community through human means, with human intentions, and human desires.

By forcing that which we want onto others, are we attaining our goal? Can we create community and oneness with fellow believers through "orders" and commands? Or,were they right? Is it strictly a generational thing?

Perhaps the reason I feel so trapped by the church of today is because my generation is so hell-bent on having their freedom, that we can't be contained by the whims of another.

Or perhaps, they are too closed minded; unaware of the outcome of their words.

Perhaps if you stopped putting me in a box, I'd stop trying to escape.