SeekingSolace[dot]Net

Sorry this took so long, everyone.

Album 1

Album 2

Got this from Erika (I know, you’re surprised). I’d be interested to see everyone else’s answers, too.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Here’s the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read ‘em for school in the first place.

I’m also putting a pound sign (#) next to the ones I want to read. Someday. Eventually.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell #
• Anna Karenina #
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion #
• Life of Pi : a novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote #
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses #
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey #
• Pride and Prejudice #
• Jane Eyre #
• The Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace #
• Vanity Fair #
• The Time Traveler’s Wife
• The Iliad #
• Emma #
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books #
• Memoirs of a Geisha #
• Middlesex *
  
• Quicksilver
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West *
• The Canterbury Tales #
• The Historian : a novel # - A/N: I JUST bought this today…
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New World #
• The Fountainhead *
  
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein #
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula *
  
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• 1984
• Angels & Demons #
• The Inferno
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray #
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist #
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Misérables #
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present #
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five #
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita #
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye *
  
• On the Road #
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame #
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values #
• The Aeneid #
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit *
  
• In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences #
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers

Please, everyone go read this, Andrea’s done a fabulous job of explaining why we still need feminism: Think we’ve achieved equality?  Think again.

Also, look at this post (also by Andrea, but on a different blog), about what sexism is. Pay specific attention to “unintentional sexism”: FAQ: What is sexism?

I have lots of comments/ideas for this, but I’m brain-overwhelmed today, so I’ll try to post ideas later. In the meantime, I’d be very curious to see how everyone else interprets this stuff.

ALSO: Battlestar Galactica returns tonight! W00t!!!! *cough* Back to your regularly scheduled feminist rant.

Oh, man, y’all. There’s a Greek girl playing Katie in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. What are the odds, I ask you?!

And the girl they cast as Pansy Parkinson is pretty. Her name is Scarlett Byrne. I’m jealous.

Stolen from Erika, as usual. And this was so fun, I might do more than one round if you guys (being the 2 people who ever read my blog) enjoy it.

A. Pick 15 movies you know/like/love.
B. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
C. Post them here for everyone to guess.
D. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
E. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search functions.

1) “Nothing? Nothing? NOTHING? Nothing, tra la la?”

2) “I say… that what you say… is what I say.”
Patty: “Newsies”

3) “I think not. You gandered at my ward, Johanna. You gandered at her. YES, sir, you gandered!”
Erika: “Sweeney Todd”

4) “I once fought two days with an arrow through my testicle.”

5) “You know, for kids!”
John Craig: “The Hudsucker Proxy”

6) “I was not hit by a train. Dammit, I am the paterfamilias!”
Luke: “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

7) “See? Right here. You may be young in years but the heart that beats beneath your bosom is as shriveled as an old maid’s, your soul as dry as the pages of the books to which you so desperately cleave.”
Erika: “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”

8) “At last, we can retire and give up this life of crime.”
Erika: “Serenity”

9) “Now what the Good Master is telling us all right now is that up in Heaven, there are about a hundred million little tiny angels about ‘yea’ by ‘yea’, and they all take shorthand. And every time you do something silly, they write it in a…”

10) “What! You want to look like you just came back from catching a fish? This ain’t “Dances With Salmon” you know!”

11) “You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.”

12) “You’re right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in… 60 years.”

13) “Can you count, suckers? I say, the future is ours… if you can count!”

14) “Shall I describe it to you? Or would you like me to find you a box?”
Luke: “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”

15) “Did you hear that, my pet? All these years, they’ve been looking for a baby.
Jessica: “Sleeping Beauty”

Here’s one for all my nerd friends. I didn’t write this, I just found it, but seriously, it’s pretty hysterical:

Star Wars Guide to the Candidates

Now that everyone’s got their presents, I can show pictures of what they got. The long-awaited “My Goddamn Face” scarf got finished in the nick of time, but I wasn’t 100% happy with it. But Tommy likes it, so it doesn’t really matter what I think. :P And, Erika seemed to enjoy her Slytherin scarf, which makes me happy. I’ve been working on that thing forever. I really enjoyed the glass etching work I did, and I’m pleased with how Josh’s Jack Skellington doll came out. Click on “More” below to look at all the goodies.

Read the rest of this entry »

I got this from Erika, who got it from her friend Melinda. Here’s the link to the original: http://noctua.freeshell.org/hp-50-hogwarts.html. I have bolded the ones that I think are most hysterical.

50 Things I Am Not Allowed To Do At Hogwarts

1. I will not poke Hufflepuffs with spoons, nor will I insist that their House colors indicate that they are “covered in bees”.
2. No matter how good a fake Australian accent I can do, I will not imitate Steve Irwin during Care of Magical Creatures class.
3. Growing marijuana or hallucinogenic mushrooms is not “an extra credit project for Herbology”.
4. “I’ve heard every possible joke about Oliver Wood’s name” is not a challenge.
5. I am not allowed to attempt to breed a liger.
6. I will not go to class skyclad.
7. The Giant Squid is not an appropriate date to the Yule Ball.
8. I will not use Umbridge’s quill to write “I told you I was hardcore”.
9. I will stop referring to showering as “giving Moaning Myrtle an eyeful”.
10. Polishing my wand in the common room is acceptable. “Polishing my wand” in the common room is not.
11. If a classmate falls asleep, I will not take advantage of that fact and draw a Dark Mark on their arm.
12. House elves are not acceptable replacements for Bludgers.
13. Starting a betting pool on the fate of this year’s Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher is tasteless and tacky, not a clever money-making concept.
14. I will not start every Potions class by asking Professor Snape if today’s project is suitable for use as a sexual lubricant.
15. Adding the name “Bueller” to Professor Binns’ roster is not funny.
16. “Springtime for Voldemort” is not an acceptable suggestion for the class play.
17. Seamus Finnegan is not “after me Lucky Charms”.
18. I will not refer to the Weasley twins as “bookends”.
19. I will not refer to the Patil twins as “bookends”.
20. The Slytherin prefect is named Draco Malfoy, not “Rocky Horror.”
21. It is exceptionally tasteless to tell Professor Lupin that “Once you go Black, you never go back.”
22. I will not call Lucius Malfoy “Jareth”.
23. I will not bring a Magic Eight Ball to Divination class.
24. I am not to refer to the Potions classroom as “Kitchen Stadium”.
25. I will not tell Ron and Hermione to “Get a room” whenever they start to fight.
26. The Forbidden Forest is forbidden for a reason.
27. I am not a tribble Animagus.
28. I am allowed to have a toad, rat, cat, or owl. I am not allowed to have a reticulated python, snow leopard, Tasmanian devil, or piranha.
29. I do not weigh the same as a duck.
30. Remus Lupin does not want a flea collar.
31. Sirius Black is not #24601.
32. I will not lick Trevor.
33. I will stop asking the Arithmancy teacher what the square root of -1 is.
34. I am not being repressed.
35. Calling Lucius Malfoy “Luscious Mouthful” is just plain gross.
36. I will not change the password to the prefects’ bath to “Makes getting clean almost as much fun as getting dirty”.
37. There is no such thing as an Invisibility Thong.
38. I am not a Pinball Wizard.
39. Asking “How do you keep a Gryffindor in suspense?” and walking away is only funny the first time.
40. I will not offer to pose nude for Colin Creevey.
41. I will not offer to pose nude for Dean Thomas.
42. It is a bad idea to tell Professor Snape he takes himself too seriously.
43. It is a bad idea to tell Professor McGonagall she takes herself too seriously.
44. Sir Cadogan is not one of the knights who say “NI”.
45. I will not offer to prepare tandoori owl.
46. I will stop asking when we will learn to make “Love Potion Number Nine”.
47. I will not ask Dumbledore to show me the pointy hat trick.
48. I will not greet Professor McGonagall with “What’s new, pussycat?”
49. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a fifth House at Hogwarts, and I am not a member of that house, nor am I its founder.
50. I will not take out a life insurance policy on Harry Potter.

Some of these are from late in the night on Day 3, but I’m not going back to edit that post. I’ve published it already and I’m sort of fed up with that post.

Yes, I’m finally getting them up. Sorry it took so long to take care of it.

And here are all the pictures from the Star Wars Costume Competition. My friend Julius was the MC and I was his escort, so I was in costume, but didn’t compete.

HAHA, DONE! Three days down, one more to go.