Renee’s Neighbors

Purple, purple people

nobody@vox.com(SweetMisery) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:14:17 -0700

The first flower is there. Not open yet, but it is purple. I am so thrilled. Yee Ha A couple stumbleupon pictures then off to bed to read.

Cats2022

Hot_chick_with_nice_pussy

I didn't name them. Peace & Love Georgia & Annie

Nite Nite

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lyric of the yesterday 7/17/08

nobody@vox.com(uncagedbird) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:53:13 -0700

I gave R a bunch of mix discs yesterday. We listened to them all night. I'm a happy camper. This song is on one of them. I know it's been done by a lot of people, but this is the version I've had in my head all day.

And it's six in the morning,
Gave me no warning -
I had to be on my way.
Well there's trucks all a-passing,
And the lights all are flashing,
I'm on my way home
From the place.

Well the sun's coming up,
I'm riding with Lady Luck.
Freeways, cars and trucks.
Stars beginning to fade.
And I lead the parade
Just a-wishing I'd stayed a little longer,
Oh Lord,
Let me tell you that the feeling's getting stronger.

Well, my time has come quickly,
I go lickety-splitly
Down to my old '55.
As I pulled away slowly,
I was feeling so holy,
God knows
I was feeling alive.

Now the sun's coming up,
I'm riding with Lady Luck,
Freeways,
cars
And trucks.
Freeways,
cars
And trucks.
Freeways,
Cars and trucks ...
- (the) Sarah McLachlan (version), "Ol' 55"

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Official Mug Shot Friday

nobody@vox.com(Strive2Be) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:17:25 -0700

Tokyo Rose

Tokyo Rose

U.S.-born Iva Toguri D'Aquino, who was dubbed "Tokyo Rose" for broadcasting anti-American propaganda from Japan during World War II, was convicted of treason and sent to federal prison for about seven years (this picture was taken at the lockup in Alderson, West Virginia). D'Aquino was pardoned by President Gerald Ford in 1977.

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the NEA's advice on how to be a writer

nobody@vox.com(writebrained) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:10:07 -0700

This list of tips for writers comes from an unlikely place.... the NEA blog on reading, which I was browsing trying to find the origin of that list I just posted.

1. Join a writers group, if only for the deadline. Always, for anything you write, have a deadline. When you meet one deadline, make another. When you blow one, definitely make another, and by all means forget you ever made the first one. Guilt is not your friend.
2. Be funny. Whether you’re writing comedy or not, be funny. If you can’t be funny, be amazing, because writing well without at least occasionally being funny is almost impossible. Try to make a reader laugh, or at least smile, with the way you pace and phrase a line. If you can’t use language to provoke one of the commonest, most pleasurable experiences around — laughter — how in the world are you going to do the harder but not necessarily better thing, and make a reader cry?
3. Enlarge your vocabulary. I’m serious. Your vocabulary is your tacklebox. If you go fishing with only a couple of lures, you’ll catch the same kind of fish over and over. Bring an overstuffed tacklebox, and there’s no lunker you can’t land. Use your vocabulary judiciously, of course, because not everybody has as big a one as you do. But don’t be afraid, every once in a while, to use a word your reader might not know. How else are they going to learn? How else did you?
4. Keep it sensual. By this I don’t mean write dirty, I mean engage all of a reader’s senses, especially but not exclusively the visual. Whether with a description or a metaphor, create pictures in your audience’s head. If you want to write about abstractions, be a philosopher, and reach even fewer readers than you already do.
5. Make stuff up. There’s been a vogue lately for writing that feeds on pre-existing material: novels about a famous love affair, novels about a notorious calamity, novels about great writers, etc. This kind of novel can work, but something original is almost always better than something derivative — more surprising, more fun, more suspenseful. In fiction, as on Wall Street, derivatives are an easy payday, but they don’t create wealth; they only redistribute it. The trouble with making up a new story is, alas, that it’s harder. Does Antioch teach a full-length course in plotting? I wonder, because it’s the least teachable skill a writer needs. If only it were the least important.
A related point here: the difference between telling the truth and making stuff up is getting slippery lately. When in doubt, trust what works. If the true stuff reads better, you’re probably writing nonfiction, so take out most of the made-up stuff. If the made-up stuff reads better, you’re writing fiction, so take out most of the true stuff. If you can’t decide which stuff reads better, write poetry. There at least, the true and the made-up belong together.
6. Keep rewriting the ending till it’s perfect; then wait a week and write it again. Writing an ending is the great lost art in American fiction. With the possible exception of your first graf, your last graf is the most important. If you can’t decide between two endings, they probably both need work.
7. Go for broke. Odds are you’ll be broke anyway, so you may as well go for it.
8 . Write every day. I’ve never tried this myself, but I hear it works.

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Looking for a Tonkenese Cat

nobody@vox.com(SweetMisery) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:07:25 -0700

And I found this instead. I did find the cat and they are beautiful. Hyde Park Concert. yep

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book lists

nobody@vox.com(writebrained) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:05:06 -0700

I'm copying from Atlantis....

Some of these books were amazing experiences for me... mostly from when I was growing up, and they were my entire world. This reads like a list of old favorites :-) Atlantis says that the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books The Big Read has printed below.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own weblog / journal so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

OK, so I'm not one of them. And I skipped out on bolding anything, just underlined them all. But I am a huge advocate for some of these marvelous books! (Life of Pi, Mockingbird, Gatsby, Grapes of Wrath, Anna Karenina, Crime and P.) Also, it's amazing to see how many of these books have been written in the last 10 years. How inspirational for contemporary writers :-)

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Attwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ranson
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishigury
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Read: 62/100

I definitely want to read the Jane Austen's I have never gotten through (Emma, Persuasion), especially because I recently watched the BBC television versions, and was enchanted. The books themselves start out so much less compellingly than P&P, so I've always dropped off. I've started and never finished Catch-22 (too much in a madman's mind and too bizarre) and Lolita (too much in a madman's mind and too ordinary).

And if there is anything else out of these which anyone particularly loved, please do tell me and I will add it to my list.

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i'm on the drugs, i'm on the drugs, i'm on the drugs

nobody@vox.com(Cat) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:38:10 -0700

I'm slightly wired. I'm on the pseudoephedrine. I think its easier to buy an ecstasy tablet here than it is to buy a cold tablet. You have to hand over your license to get a packet of codrals. I guess if something happens to this pack and I go and try to buy another pack tomorrow I'll have the swat team smashing down my front door looking for a cooker. So I started the day with a pseudo and a coffee. So I feel slightly wired, yet still unwell. And dehydrated. I wonder when they say on the pack to avoid alcohol do they really mean it. I'm supposed to be going out tonight.

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LQotD: Checks in the mail

nobody@vox.com(LeendaDLL) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:04:25 -0700

Where did I put my postage stamps?

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my extended coffee nook

nobody@vox.com(jeffington) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:48:56 -0700

coffee nook ver 1.5

coffee nook ver 2.0 extended

after cleverly putting a shelf in the middle of my toster stand, i realized that i couldnt pour the water into the coffee maker

so i extended the shelf for some research and testing before painting the whole thing as i might add a stainless steel cup holder in that open corner in the picture to the right before painting it

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He Loves Me?

nobody@vox.com(Yoganaught) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:43:41 -0700

He loves me not?

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