Sad.....

http://graphjam.com/2009/01/25/song-chart-memes-time-spent-writing-essays/

OMG-this is funny...and she's pretty good to

Check out this hilarious YouTube song.....She has a nice voice too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avxpn_MsPYs

Check out my new favorite blog!

http://wellreadchild.blogspot.com

I read about this blog in an LM_Net post, I'm already a fan!

Stop the insanity!

So, I have never ventured out into the Black Friday insanity....And now my sister-in-law Tae has provided me yet another reason today why I have no plans to start! Read THIS story about a Wal-Mart employee trampled to death while opening the doors for Black Friday shoppers. Conflicting news reports about the same stampede say that a pregnant woman either miscarried or was taken to the hospital and declared okay.

The worst part in what I read was that when they tried to close the store to investigate etc., people refused to leave, saying they had stood in line since the day before......jeez people! What is our world coming to when a man dies so that we can save a few dollars on the latest gadgets and toys. We live in one of the richest countries in the world, despite the economic downturn....I am saddened by this atrocious behavior....

The Pedestal

The old pedestal award.

The new and improved pedestal.

The "Big Read"

This list comes from The Big Read, a National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six. I've read 30, so I guess I'm above average!

Now look at the list and bold those you have read; Italicize those you intend to read; and Share this list in your blog, too, if you like.

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 read a bunch, but not all of it )

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials series- Philip Pullman (um, this is three books so I added the word series) (I've only read the first two)

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 (I've read many but not all)

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

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (why is this on here twice?Isn't it part of Chronicles of Narnia?)

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

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 (only because I had to!)

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

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 (I started it once)

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (started it once)

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

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

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(because I had to!)

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

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 (started it a couple of times....)

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 (isn't this in the complete works?)

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (the unabridged even!)

My claim to fame...

Okay, not really....it's always kind of wild when I see someone I went to college with on youtube or something similar

This is Keala Settle, who played Mama Rose in Gypsy when I was at SUU....I had several classes with Keala as well but that's the only show we worked on.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMyTCmmrTEc

She toured with Hairspray for several years and you can see her here

http://cbs11tv.com/video/?id=9040@ktvt.dayport.com

They don't mention her by name in this clip, she is Tracy, so that's her in the front.....