12 Days of Christmas Music: Day 3

Feeling a little better today, less overwhelmed with the sadness of yesterday's events.  I think it helps that I spent the day helping friends move back to the state (yay!) and then went to a super fun Christmas party hosted by good friends Mike and Christine (yay times two!) at night.  They have a yankee swap where everyone needs to bring a gift from their house, and it's always entertaining to see what crap people have lying around.  My coworkers should be expecting a sushi maker on Monday at our work swap, as I try to pass it off as a nice gift.

I think in the vein of old friends, I'll post a song by the Royal Guardsmen.  The reason being is because when I was in elementary school chorus we had to sing this song, which I always thought was a crazy song.  Then, years later, I found out that someone wrote it in the 60's sincerely, and it was a pop hit... not just something weird our chorus teacher thought up.  I also felt the same feeling of "wait... people knew that song in real life?" when I found out that he wanted us to sing an Alan Sherman song at a concert.

Weird song performed quite sincerely by a bunch of Brits.  I promise tomorrow's song won't be Peanuts- themed.

Fifty Fifty

Last week, I was at a party when my friend Meg told me about this challenge she's doing, where for a year she's reading fifty new books and watching fifty new movies.  I thought it sounded like a good idea, so I decided to start as well.  From September 30, 2012-October 1, 2013 (I realize it's over a year, but I liked that it was a rounded-ish number) I'm going to try and read 50 new books and watch 50 new films.  I figure it will not only help with expanding my reading/viewing horizons, but will also help keep stress down with wedding planning.

So far, I'm in decent shape on both fronts.  For the books, I have read Mindy Kaling's book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me and I am winding down on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.  I am lucky in that Ricky was also an English major in college, so he has a big bookshelf of potential.  (not a euphemism).  For the movies, I am also in decent shape, though I'm not worried about the movies because it's easy for us to watch a movie a week, as we have a Netflix Subscription.  We've seen Hamlet 2, The Secret of the Kells, and the new Frankenweenie movie. 

I'm lucky to have a good amount of time each day on public transportation, so it's making the reading part easy.  Are there books I should check out?  Movies I should watch? 

I'm recording dates and reviews on my Pinterest Page, but I think I'll recap in tens here as well.  Keep an eye out, since I only have 2 books and 3 movies, for this to come in a few weeks.

MFT Day 19: Instagram

I am late to the game, but my grandfather just gave me a hand me down iPod touch, which I've been enjoying while commuting.  The battery life is a lot longer than all other iPods I've had (disclosure:  they've all been about 4 years old and from him, which may have something to do with it) and I like having access to apps and the internet while on the train.  One app I've been really liking is Instagram.

This iPod doesn't have a camera on it, so what I've been doing is taking my favorite photos from the last few years and "Instagramming" them.  I like how low tech and slightly warped the images look, especially since they were so crisp on my digital camera.  I'm planning on getting an iPhone in the months between the two weddings I'm in (my current phone is on the decline, but I'm trying to avoid having to purchase a new phone to save money) and I can't wait until I have an Apple product with the camera so I can take new photos and Instagram them on the spot.

I wish there was a way to print some of them, because I love how they look and would definitely frame them.  Above is a photo of a barn I took when visiting my cousin's farm in Vermont.  I liked the photo before, but I LOOOOVE the photo now. 

Oh Phil

There's a Facebook meme going around where you post the #1 single in the country where you were born the week you were born.  I had high hopes of something cool and awesome, but instead... I had Phil Collins' Against All Odds:



Fortunately it seems everyone born in 1984 has similarly crappy/cheesy #1 songs.  What's crazy is when you go down the rabbit hole of #1 songs for your much younger family members.  Like my Gorrell cousins...

Zach:  Alannah Myles' Black Velvet




Calvin:  Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You




Walter:  TLC's Creep (this is when it gets a little sad times/rough, because I definitely remember having this song played at Middle School dances...)




Henry:  Spice Girls' Wannabe




Joseph:  Cher's Believe





So yeah, that happened. 

Name that tune

Today an ensemble was playing a song in the room next to my office, and it got stuck in my head.  I knew the song, but couldn't place it.  I then spent about 15 minutes googling various things to try and find it.  I knew the following things:

--It was from the late 60's/early 70's
--It was used in an old game show
--It was also used in an old meme this girl Chloe I went to high school with used to love when we were in high school.

And (not) surprisingly, it was hard anything on the internet using all of those criteria!

After lunch, I decided to try to find it using the instrument that I heard playing it -- marimba -- and lo and behold, I FOUND THE SONG.

Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert.  You will also recognize it as the bachelor music from The Dating Game:




Note:  I changed the video, because I found a better one in all its 60's television music spot glory.

The 30 Day Song Challenge

Many people on Facebook have been doing this, which I always think is cool because it shows a lot of insight into who they are. Plus, the backstory is always very interesting. Now that Commencement is over and the summer should be less stressful, I think it's time to start my own 30 Day Song Challenge.

That being said, I can about 99% guarantee I will not post this daily, but I can guarantee that every day I do post, one of the posts will be this. I don't want this to become Springtime NaBloPoMo.

(side note, Lewis has been the craziest kitten in the world today, knocking over my CD rack not once but twice. This may also have inspired me to write about music)


Day 1: Your Favorite Song
This one is really hard, since I have so many favorite songs. It's also based on mood, time of day, where I am in my headspace, and onward. What to pick??

I think for this, I will have to go with Arcade Fire's "Rebellion (Lies)" because when I first heard that album, I cried pretty much start to finish at the beauty of it, that song gets me fired up, and I love the message. And A week doesn't go by where I fire up Funeral and play at least 2 tracks off of it.

Facebook Friend Mashup is awesome

It's not called that, but it might as well be.

I noticed last week a new feature on FB which is where you can compare two friends of yours and see their friendship: the posts they commented on each others walls, the events you've attended, the shared interests, and the photos they're both tagged in.

What makes it awesome/addictive for me is that they show a photo of the two people. Ricky and I have been paring friends to see what Facebook has deemed THE photo of the friendship. Ricky and I are a photo of my Mad Men Meme, which is funny. Our friend Jon and Megin are the two of them with their daughter, which I found fitting. Me and Erin is one of my fridge where I tagged the two of us as a fridge magnet for when we went to Cleveland, which is odd. Me and Tim are a photo of us in Worcester one summer at a Moe's, which I actually have framed in my house. But my favorite is the photo of my two best friends from high school, Amanda and Jess:


If there was ever a photo that summed up their awesomeness, it'd be this. Happy while dancing at Amanda's wedding, full of joy. Hair a-flowing. It's just so perfect.

10 days!

This past year, I did what many friends have told me to do for years and started watching Mad Men. Holy crap, that tv show is made of awesome. Love it. I'm dying to see what happens in Season 4, since so much shit went down at the end of Season 3. (I won't say what for those of you who haven't caught up or what have you)

Anyways, I saw a friend of mine (the very talented musician Brian E. King of Oranjuly) Mad Men-ized himself this morning. I took some time and did it for myself as well. So here I am, just hanging with the boys in the office. No big deal.



And an up close on my City Loving-Gal face:


A nice way to waste a few minutes, and if you watch the show, the sets and accessories are clever and fun to use. You can make your own Mad Men here.

I also took a minute and made a Ricky. Note that the accessories are a lot more fun for the girls than the guys.



UPDATE:
Ricky came home and made his own Mad Men. This is how he envisions himself in a board meeting... guns a-blazing and Metro West section a-reading.




And an up close version. Ricky's version looks more accurate, albeit a bit more smug... but that may be because he has a gun. Hard to tell.

Listen to 92.5 The River for tracks from my new album

I could also make reference to the last track on Harry Nilsson's The Point, "Buy My Album"

It's a Facebook meme involving Wikipedia, quotes, and flickr. I made mine last week. I'm a big fan. My coworkers decided that when Lilith Fair comes back, I'll be playing the second stage. I think that's accurate.

Book meme

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.


Here's the list:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x+)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (x)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (x)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x+)
6 The Bible (x)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (x)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (*)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ()
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (x)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x+)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ()
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (x)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (*)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (*)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ()
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (x+)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( x)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (x)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x+)
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 (x+)
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 (x)
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 (x)
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 (x)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown ()
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ()
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving ( )
45 The Woman in White - () author??
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (x)
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 (x)
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 ( *)
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 (*)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ()
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ()
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (x)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
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 (x )
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (x)
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 (x+)
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 (x+)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ()
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Toole ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas ()
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ()



37 if my math adds up. In my defense, I was an English major in college... so many of these I read for one class or another. Oh, and I'm a giant nerd. That's also in my defense.