Vesselideation, via designers block.

Matte Stephens via [BB-Blog].

POW!

This blog always amazes me. It’s got all sorts of wonderful recipes for Finnish food, recipes that I’ve actually cooked rather than saved in a text file on my hard drive. I unsubscribe from it every once in a while because the posts aren’t coming anymore, and then somehow find it again in some really absurd google searches that make me want to resubscribe. This time it was because of this Leningrad Cowboy. I’ve decided that’s going to be my Halloween costume this year.

BTW if you’ve never heard of the Leningrad Cowboys or seen them Go America, I give you Leningrad Cowboys (and the Red Army Choir):

Amid strenuous efforts in recent days by the city and the province to get Ottawa on board, Mr. Baird continued to insist that the city’s pitch to replace 204 aging streetcars does not qualify for his government’s $4-billion federal Infrastructure Stimulus Fund.

“It’s a fantastic project,” he said of the streetcar initiative. “It’s just not eligible for this program. And [that's] not just a technicality.”

He said the federal stimulus funds are intended for projects that create local jobs over the next two years. By contrast, jobs for the streetcar project would be mostly in a Bombardier assembly plant in Thunder Bay, not in Toronto.

He also said, “They should fuck off.”

How is job creation within the province not economic stimulation? How is “Thunder Bay is not local enough” not a technicality? Why is John Baird such a massive douchebag? These are the questions I am pondering this morning.

Additionally, when accompanying some male engineers over the border, I have also been asked whether I was carrying their bags. So with youth comes assumptions that I am not a scientist. Oh well, I’ll take youth, am I right, girls?

I’ve spent the last few months scouring travel books for things to do there that don’t involve Disney, and I’ve found quite a few. For example, for $205 some Orlandinians are willing to both hypnotize and massage you.

Also,

MANATEES!!!!

I am super-excited about this manatee thing. I’m even considering buying a fancier waterproof camera this time, to take full advantage of the MANATEE INSANITY. I may make this snorkeling SCUBA business a regular thing. I quite like it. It’s like a natural high that, instead of costing $10, costs $100.

I’ve got another few books to pick up tomorrow from the li-barry; ones that are more recent and involve establishments that were not destroyed by a hurricane. I’ve also recently collected recommendations to go to Waffle House and Kissimmee, the gaudiest place on earth. If you have any other recommendations, send them my way. I may or may not blog in Orlando, but I’ll certainly take note of the better and worse things and mention them when I get back.

Europe, Explained. This is quite hilarious; check out Iceland.

Coincidentally, you see the little star that says Artwerk, the source of this map? I will be there at the end of July. Yay!

But I’d wager that most of our joyful tears were fueled by the moral implicit in Susan’s fairy-tale performance: “You can’t tell a book by its cover.” For such extraordinary artistry to emerge from a woman that plain-spoken, unglamorous, and unyoung was an intoxicating reminder of the wisdom in that corny old cliché.

Here’s some more hyperbole:

Then she began to sing. [Eve: such an innovative beginning to the big twist-ending paragraph.] …There is beauty, and then there is sheer gorgeousness. This was one of the all time stunningly beautiful vocal performances. [I am going to go out on a limb and assume that this person has never even set foot inside an opera house.] If she does get to sing for the Queen, there will be two queens in the room.

This has been a surprisingly unanimous opinion. Which is why I’m so happy to finally hear some dissent by Anne Buelteman (also in The Huffington Post).

Susan Boyle has a plain voice. BAM! It’s out there now! Take that society! She is an adequate singer.

Full disclosure: I’d seen an opera just two days previously, so perhaps my standards for holding a tune were a tad higher than usual. But even without that influence, I believe I would still have been unimpressed by Susan Boyle, and I will tell you why. When emotions are evoked through song, I become a wreck. My tears are a pretty effective barometer for the success of a soloist. So if you’re good at conveying emotion in your voice, you can pretty much assume that I will weep from the first note to the last. For Susan Boyle, I did not.

When I hear something like O Mio Babbino Caro (done well), I find it impossible not to cry. Any time I see a TV commercial with that duet from Lakme, I have to carefully position myself away from other people so they don’t see me tear up. So when I saw Susan Boyle on that stage, I knew what was coming, and I tried to make sure I was outside of eye-shot from my friend so she wouldn’t see the impending waterworks. And then… Nothing. Didn’t feel a thing. No emotion whatsoever. Is this what passes for a majestic solo these days?

This story isn’t about how a Sarah Plain and Tall proved that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. It’s about an audience so expectant of a massive surprise that they took any chance they could to be flabbergasted. They wanted to find a diamond in the rough, so they artificially constructed one. If the woman hadn’t been as plain as she was, they wouldn’t have been so shocked and they wouldn’t have raved as much as they did.

This is the last verse of I Dreamed a Dream:

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

She sang this with a smile on her face, and her hands cheesily outstretched. No big crescendos or diminuendos. She didn’t really sing with any passion, and her voice was a little strained when she had to stretch out a single note. I will give her this: she was good for an amateur. Good. But she’s no Bayrakdarian or Netrebko.

So please, for the love of Pete, stop putting her on the covers of newspapers. I am tired of seeing her face and being reminded that the world has no taste. If you want to put an “ugly” person on your paper to show that you’re enlightened, might I recommend Rush Limbaugh.

ZING!

Or hey, let’s maybe completely ignore all the trivial bullshit that the media is currently obsessing about and have a talk about what an immense talent for science Stephen Hawking has, and let’s all hope he gets out of the hospital and lives another 67 years.

[ ] 1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
[X] 2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
[ ] 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
[X] 4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
[ ] 5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
[X] 6 The Bible (most of it but mostly Old Testament, which is the more badass testament)
[ ] 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
[ ] 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
[X] 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (Just the Golden Compass so far)
[ ] 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
[ ] 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
[X] 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
[ ] 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
[ ] 18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
[ ] 19 The Time Traveller’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
[X] 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
[X] 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
[X] 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
[ ] 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
[ ] 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
[X] 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
[ ] 34 Emma – Jane Austen
[ ] 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
[X] 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
[O] 37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein
[ ] 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
[ ] 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
[X] 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
[X] 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
[ ] 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
[O] 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[ ] 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
[O] 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
[X] 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
[O] 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
[X] 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
[X] 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
[O] 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
[ ] 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
[ ] 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
[X] 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
[ ] 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
[O] 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[ ] 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
[X] 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
[O] 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
[O] 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
[ ] 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
[ ] 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
[ ] 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
[X] 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
[ ] 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
[ ] 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
[O] 75 Ulysses – James Joyce
[ ] 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
[X] 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
[O] 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
[X] 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
[O] 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
[ ] 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
[ ] 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
[O] 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
[ ] 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
[ ] 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
[O] 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
[O] 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
[ ] 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
[ ] 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
[X] 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (Why is this one not included in the complete works?)
[X] 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
[ ] 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo