The date night culminated in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. There are worse date night movies you could watch on a “middle-aged” birthday. I’d seen the movie dismissed as “Oh Those Precocious Old People!” but, hey, these are some pretty skilled actors who are acting precocious here. And that dismissal completely overlooks the wonderful acting in the sub-plot done by the Hotel Manager and his would-be fiancé. If I were to criticize, I’d say that “jeez, it’s a country of one billion people but these guys all know each other” but I understand that Seattle is the exact same way.
Yes, it’s generally a happy/cheerful movie with people “finding” themselves and whatnot but, hey. Sometimes that’s just kind of nice.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
27 thoughts on “Sunday!”
Yes, you can in fact use the culture bomb while embarked.
In your own territory, at least.Report
I liked Best Exotic, primarily because of the amazing cast.
As for me, I just finished In The Woods by Tana French, one of those rare who-done-it genre pieces that’s written as if it were literature. Think: a Michael Chabon murder mystery. I highly recommend.Report
Happy birthday!
Reading Effi Briest.
I finished the second season of Continuum, and now I have nothing to watch! Or a lot of stuff to watch, but I dunno which to pick. It’s somewhere between those two.Report
I’m reading &Sons by David Gilbert. Imagine if Louis Auchincloss was an egotistical dick and had more of a Salinger mythos and now was an old man who wanted to reconnect to his three sons.Report
Drove 200 miles on the back roads today to see the fall colors. Listened to the Pack win. All in all a great day. Yesterday (Saturday) was the lazy rainy day. I watched Halo 4 and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire hunter.Report
There’s nothing as beautiful as fall in Sconsin. I miss it.Report
I’ll take the Hudson Valley and New England.Report
OK. Fair enough. I hear ya. Tho, there are lots of similar trees and topography and stuff. How bout this: come Fall have you gone thru impenetrable, debilitating, life-threatening heat; volumes of various voracious blood sucking bugs; mind-bendingly incomprehensible thunderstorms and down bursts; humidity which renders taking a shower a redundancy?
That’s what makes fall in the Badger state the Supreme.
We’re well into fall. The mountain has about a meter of snow up top. The leaves are changing, though I think we’re going to get our Indian Summer next week. Some seasonal Whistler porn for visuals.
Don’t knock the unique pains of an NYC and/or Northeast summer till you felt it.
We have the humidity that kills especially when combined with the reflective nature of the skyscrapper and blacktop.
Though apparently it was super-hot in NYC-metro this week and this drove my friends a bit mad. One complained about it being apparently too much to ask to need a light jacket.
This is “summer” in SF and it has been hotter than normal. It promises to be in the low to mid 50s when I am in Seattle and I’m looking forward to it.Report
I’m just happy to be home in the Mahoosuc Mountains.Report
For me going to see the colors change is more about the journey than the pictures taken. It is about having the one you love next to you, the bestest doggy in the whole wide world in the back seat, and a road to travel, with no particular destination in mind. Seeing a bit of color is just an excuse to take the back roads. I love to drive, always have, find it very relaxing and therapeutic.
We get home and Blaise transfers his images onto the computer. I always look forward to that moment. The moment when I get to see what he saw through the lens for the first time. We both see the same views, he just sees them also through the lens of the camera, with composition in mind. I think to myself, I remember that, it was pretty but wow it looks amazing framed like this. Like I said, for me it is about the journey, through Blaise’s photos I get to keep a little bit of that journey forever.
Wisconsin is where I grew up. To me fall is a barn, cows grazing the last of the green grass they will get for months, corn being harvested, pumpkins for sale on the side of the road, and trees of every color standing proudly where soon they will be bare and covered in snow.Report
NewDealer,
Oh, trust me, NYC ain’t bad. East coast ain’t bad.
You go down to Austin, you get humidity in spades.
70 degree dewpoint is bad. 80 degree dewpoint is awful.Report
buncha books on social media and nonprofs with varying degrees of ugh.
it was 87 degrees today in the mid atlantic. that is terrible.Report
I’ve been reading The Warmth of Other Suns, about black Americans who migrated from the southern states to the northern and western ones in the mid-1900s. It’s excellently written, with the stories of the lives of three different people interspersed with broader descriptions of events and shorter anecdotes. It’s really interesting.
I recently finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about the black woman who was the source of a vast amount of modern biological research. She had an incredibly aggressive cancer, which the doctors took samples of, and which enabled the first human cell culture and has been the source of the cells for most of the experiments doctors and scientists have done with human tissue. Nobody thought anything of giving the tissue samples away at the time, but it’s frustrating because her tissue has become a multi-billion dollar industry while her kids and grandkids are still very poor and struggling and feel they’ve been ripped off (and have had rough lives in a lot of other ways) and pretty much everyone writing about the whole matter has been more interested in the cells than in them and their mother’s life. So it’s about both Henrietta Lacks’ life and her family’s lives and their community, and about her cells’ effects on science. It’s another very well-written and engaging story.
Also read The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which is an excellent Dracula story set in Cold War Europe.Report
Spent 3 hours taking a test to renew my swim official’s license. That’ll spoil your Sunday. But I passed.
Reading up on Belize, in prep for a course that will take students there over spring break. Anticipated starting date, spring 2015.Report
Got some reading done while my car was having some work done, book four of The Wheel of Time.
I watched a few episodes of Supernatural (season 2) and Attack on Titan (which took an unexpected turn a few episodes in).
I also watched the first episode of The Wire. I think The Wire will be a little bit slower to get through than other shows, because it seems to be one that demands full attention. I do not see myself watching it while fiddling with something in my tablet.Report
The Wire demands more of its viewers than almost any show I have ever seen. They do not underline events that turn out to be important later (sometimes many, many episodes later…there’s a huge plot point that IIRC takes at least 8 episodes to pay off, and when it does, they don’t give you any “flashback” or anything to remind you.)
They expect that you paid attention, and remember. The tagline for S1 was “Listen Carefully”, and they mean it. I think Sepinwall or somebody wrote that great TV shows teach you how to watch them, and Wire is a great example of that. Definitely not a “watch while you check e-mails” show.
It’s also a weird experience time-wise…the episodes can feel sometimes slow and long, because they contain a *lot* of information (and each season adds a new corner of the world and its players, ultimately showing how they are all part of the same game); so episodes rarely seemed to “fly by”, as we often say about engrossing entertainment.
But at the same time, when they are over, they feel substantial, satisfying, and you have a feeling of “surfacing” when they are over; maybe this is because it engages your brain, as much as it does your emotions?Report
My first thought on reading that was, holy hell that was a lot of work you had done on your car if you read book four of the Wheel of Time while waiting.Report
OMG Luther!!!!
Watched both series 1 and series 2 in one giant huge gulp over a couple of days this week. Acting amazing, carries through even the most implausible situations (honestly, I think the plausibility of the implausible is a big part of the pull). Had to ban myself from watching series 3 until I get some work done.
I also enjoyed the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
Not sure I *finished* any books this week, though I am in the middle of several. Almost finished Redshirts. Halfway through Gould’s Book of Fish. etc.Report
Yes, you can in fact use the culture bomb while embarked.
In your own territory, at least.Report
I liked Best Exotic, primarily because of the amazing cast.
As for me, I just finished In The Woods by Tana French, one of those rare who-done-it genre pieces that’s written as if it were literature. Think: a Michael Chabon murder mystery. I highly recommend.Report
Happy birthday!
Reading Effi Briest.
I finished the second season of Continuum, and now I have nothing to watch! Or a lot of stuff to watch, but I dunno which to pick. It’s somewhere between those two.Report
I’m reading &Sons by David Gilbert. Imagine if Louis Auchincloss was an egotistical dick and had more of a Salinger mythos and now was an old man who wanted to reconnect to his three sons.Report
Drove 200 miles on the back roads today to see the fall colors. Listened to the Pack win. All in all a great day. Yesterday (Saturday) was the lazy rainy day. I watched Halo 4 and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire hunter.Report
There’s nothing as beautiful as fall in Sconsin. I miss it.Report
I’ll take the Hudson Valley and New England.Report
OK. Fair enough. I hear ya. Tho, there are lots of similar trees and topography and stuff. How bout this: come Fall have you gone thru impenetrable, debilitating, life-threatening heat; volumes of various voracious blood sucking bugs; mind-bendingly incomprehensible thunderstorms and down bursts; humidity which renders taking a shower a redundancy?
That’s what makes fall in the Badger state the Supreme.
And the colors.Report
We’re well into fall. The mountain has about a meter of snow up top. The leaves are changing, though I think we’re going to get our Indian Summer next week. Some seasonal Whistler porn for visuals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9FXzxaQaU8Report
Blue Ridge Parkway, or the Smoky Mountains, please.Report
Now I’m feelin bad dissin on my own state. Colorado’s not *bad*.
http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries/images.colorado.sanjuans/web/colorado.fall.c09.30.2003.IMG_9421.b-700.jpgReport
Leech detection went off with this link.Report
Stillwater,
Don’t knock the unique pains of an NYC and/or Northeast summer till you felt it.
We have the humidity that kills especially when combined with the reflective nature of the skyscrapper and blacktop.
Though apparently it was super-hot in NYC-metro this week and this drove my friends a bit mad. One complained about it being apparently too much to ask to need a light jacket.
This is “summer” in SF and it has been hotter than normal. It promises to be in the low to mid 50s when I am in Seattle and I’m looking forward to it.Report
http://goingplacesnearandfar.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/americancruiselines-hudson-river.jpgReport
I’m just happy to be home in the Mahoosuc Mountains.Report
For me going to see the colors change is more about the journey than the pictures taken. It is about having the one you love next to you, the bestest doggy in the whole wide world in the back seat, and a road to travel, with no particular destination in mind. Seeing a bit of color is just an excuse to take the back roads. I love to drive, always have, find it very relaxing and therapeutic.
We get home and Blaise transfers his images onto the computer. I always look forward to that moment. The moment when I get to see what he saw through the lens for the first time. We both see the same views, he just sees them also through the lens of the camera, with composition in mind. I think to myself, I remember that, it was pretty but wow it looks amazing framed like this. Like I said, for me it is about the journey, through Blaise’s photos I get to keep a little bit of that journey forever.
Wisconsin is where I grew up. To me fall is a barn, cows grazing the last of the green grass they will get for months, corn being harvested, pumpkins for sale on the side of the road, and trees of every color standing proudly where soon they will be bare and covered in snow.Report
NewDealer,
Oh, trust me, NYC ain’t bad. East coast ain’t bad.
You go down to Austin, you get humidity in spades.
70 degree dewpoint is bad. 80 degree dewpoint is awful.Report
A few pictures we tookReport
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yphUAZZBgWY/UG8e4Rc6d1I/AAAAAAAAAZw/O4fJWYFLhsY/s200/Hudson+Valley+Fall+Foliage+Autumn+Leaves.jpgReport
buncha books on social media and nonprofs with varying degrees of ugh.
it was 87 degrees today in the mid atlantic. that is terrible.Report
I’ve been reading The Warmth of Other Suns, about black Americans who migrated from the southern states to the northern and western ones in the mid-1900s. It’s excellently written, with the stories of the lives of three different people interspersed with broader descriptions of events and shorter anecdotes. It’s really interesting.
I recently finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about the black woman who was the source of a vast amount of modern biological research. She had an incredibly aggressive cancer, which the doctors took samples of, and which enabled the first human cell culture and has been the source of the cells for most of the experiments doctors and scientists have done with human tissue. Nobody thought anything of giving the tissue samples away at the time, but it’s frustrating because her tissue has become a multi-billion dollar industry while her kids and grandkids are still very poor and struggling and feel they’ve been ripped off (and have had rough lives in a lot of other ways) and pretty much everyone writing about the whole matter has been more interested in the cells than in them and their mother’s life. So it’s about both Henrietta Lacks’ life and her family’s lives and their community, and about her cells’ effects on science. It’s another very well-written and engaging story.
Also read The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which is an excellent Dracula story set in Cold War Europe.Report
Spent 3 hours taking a test to renew my swim official’s license. That’ll spoil your Sunday. But I passed.
Reading up on Belize, in prep for a course that will take students there over spring break. Anticipated starting date, spring 2015.Report
Got some reading done while my car was having some work done, book four of The Wheel of Time.
I watched a few episodes of Supernatural (season 2) and Attack on Titan (which took an unexpected turn a few episodes in).
I also watched the first episode of The Wire. I think The Wire will be a little bit slower to get through than other shows, because it seems to be one that demands full attention. I do not see myself watching it while fiddling with something in my tablet.Report
The Wire demands more of its viewers than almost any show I have ever seen. They do not underline events that turn out to be important later (sometimes many, many episodes later…there’s a huge plot point that IIRC takes at least 8 episodes to pay off, and when it does, they don’t give you any “flashback” or anything to remind you.)
They expect that you paid attention, and remember. The tagline for S1 was “Listen Carefully”, and they mean it. I think Sepinwall or somebody wrote that great TV shows teach you how to watch them, and Wire is a great example of that. Definitely not a “watch while you check e-mails” show.
It’s also a weird experience time-wise…the episodes can feel sometimes slow and long, because they contain a *lot* of information (and each season adds a new corner of the world and its players, ultimately showing how they are all part of the same game); so episodes rarely seemed to “fly by”, as we often say about engrossing entertainment.
But at the same time, when they are over, they feel substantial, satisfying, and you have a feeling of “surfacing” when they are over; maybe this is because it engages your brain, as much as it does your emotions?Report
My first thought on reading that was, holy hell that was a lot of work you had done on your car if you read book four of the Wheel of Time while waiting.Report
Ha! I am still reading it.Report
OMG Luther!!!!
Watched both series 1 and series 2 in one giant huge gulp over a couple of days this week. Acting amazing, carries through even the most implausible situations (honestly, I think the plausibility of the implausible is a big part of the pull). Had to ban myself from watching series 3 until I get some work done.
I also enjoyed the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
Not sure I *finished* any books this week, though I am in the middle of several. Almost finished Redshirts. Halfway through Gould’s Book of Fish. etc.Report