Favorites of the 20th Century

A few weeks ago I set out to make a list of my 100 favorite songs of the 20th century. It sorta blew up in my face because I couldn't keep it at 100. It's now at 139.
This link should take you to the Google Doc so that you can see all 139. Oh blast. 140. I forgot that Cher song. Long live mesh clothing.

My love for Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Staples Singers, Marvin Gay, Van Morrison, Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin has already been expressed.
I do need to add in Jackson Browne right here.

So can you recognize what Ralph Vaughn Williams' Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus doubles as in Mormondom?

And how about those cameos in Walking on Broken Glass. I think Annie Lennox chose poorly.
You've gotta love Biz Markie.
I can still remember my 5th grade teacher complaining about Bonnie Raitt winning the grammy for this song. He's crazy. Do you know her Angel From Montgomery?

If you're not familiar with the Estonian Arvo Pärt, you need to listen to his music. Wow.

How does one narrow down a list of Beatles songs? Well, one rotates through favorites.

And I've already mentioned Tears For Fears on my blog before. Shout and Sowing the Seeds of Love have no odd ties to my childhood, but the songs rock.

I went a bit Sondheim crazy and sorta broke my own rule of no more than 5, but I'm justifying it because they come from different musicals. Children Will Listen, No One Is Alone, Finishing the Hat, Beautiful, Pretty Lady, Children and Art, Move On and Johanna are works of genius.
Double Blast: 141. Not a Day Goes By.

Kashmir is almost universally loved.

So, yes, I'm admitting that Will Smith's Miami and Deee-Lite's Groove is in the Heart both make the list. This may change if I ever completely mature out of high school. Whitney Houston's It's Not Right But It's OK will likely never leave. I've been a closet Whitney fan for over 20 years. Rupaul's Supermodel and Right Said Fred's I'm Too Sexy were oh so close, but in the end, there wasn't enough mustard. But I'm sure you're VERY glad that I linked those two fairly awkward videos.



I'll leave it right there for now. I'm sure I'll be coming back to the list on my blog, adding more links to good songs, etc. etc. Did you make it to this sentence? Wow.

The Nexus of Knowledge for the Day

AKA, This led to that which led to yonder thing which brings us to this thingie here
subsubtitled things that might only interest me

I think I might do this more as a chronological rundown of the Nexus of Knowledge that Scottie and I learned in the last 10 minutes:

1-I'm reading book 5 of Harry Potter in Italian (shout-out: Wendy!) right now. There's a spot in chapter two where "April Fool's!" is written. In Italian it's written as Pesce d'aprile! I'd looked it up in my French (poisson d'avril!) and Portuguese (primeiro de abril!) books as this phrase is a linguistic essential.

2-So we searched on Word Reference in Spanish: Día de los Inocentes!, which is what is written in my HP5 ebook in Spanish.

3-I tell Scottie that Día de los Inocentes is actually on December 28th and that I think that it probably comes from the slaughter of the innocents by a wussy Herod who wanted to keep his throne. So we Wikipedia-ed it. Low and behold.

4-Scottie and I become curious about the roots of April Fool's Day. Hello Wikipedia again. Chaucer: HEEEE-EEEYYY.

5-A part of the Wikipedia article mentions the Feast of Fools which was held on December 28th (shout-out to #3!).

6-Suddenly 2 songs from the somewhat skanky French musical Notre Dame de Paris pop (phonetic pun intended) into my head: Le Pape des Fous & La Fête des Fous. These songs link to this part of the Feast of Fools Wikipedia article.

7-I start singing the lyrics to both songs which makes Scottie look at me like I'm slightly crazy. All the while I'm learning about the intrinsic relation that the Feast of Fools has around the Cathedral Notre Dame. I explain this Nexus of Knowledge to Scottie.

8-Scottie says that the Nexus of Knowledge always does come back to French Musicals.


addenda to today's Nexus of Knowledge:
9-It seems to me that Día de los Inocentes was yet another religious holiday that the Catholic church imposed over a pagan holiday to try to draw attention away from the ultra-fun reveling.

10-The mythological history behind Saturnalia "tomfoolery" and "buffoonery," the Titans & the Roman gods makes so much more sense to me as I just finished the Percy Jackson series.




ça, c'est fini, quoi!

Graduation + Pictures

Receiving a master's degree does not mean that you are smart enough to figure out how to put on your regalia. Don't worry, though, I finally figured it out, probably. The sleeves for a master's have this goofy extra bit of fabric that you might as well store stuff in. I should've hidden a bagel or something. However, I was in the front row, so that would've been tacky.

Sometimes the speeches can be fairly boring. But it was as if the speech at my convocation had been tailored for me. One of my favorite professors gave a talk that included many etymologies of words. Talk about awesomeness.

Walking out afterward, I saw my mom who was already tearing up. I hugged her and started to cry, of course, but mostly remained tuff. My dad cried pretty hard when he hugged me, which caught me off guard, thus destroying my composure. I am a bawl baby. Again, I reference this video.

Anyway, pictures:

Notice the nifty temari ball in my hands, that Aunt Suezie (Gretchen and Kathy's mom) made me. I'd received another one from her at the 5K that I'd kept by my computer as I finished the thesis.

Me and my mom:

Dad, me, Mom:

Dad and Mom showing the love:

My friends (Gretchen, Aunt Suezie, Kathy, me, Shannon):

I graduated at the same time as my friend Patrícia. Arwen, on the right, is the graduate secretary. She is a huge reason why a lot of us graduate, I think.

Later, my coworkers stealthily decorated my cubicle. They also gave me dried mangoes and a bag of broccoli. They know me well.

Joe:

So there you have it. I finally graduated. After 25 years of being a student, I find myself still feeling like I have homework to do at night, flummoxed when I realize that I have nothing due. I think I might take UVU up on their free 3 course credits a semester. I love learning.

City pictures key:

Bordeaux

Salzburg

Bucuresti

Londrina

Ecuador

Porto

Argentina

Lansing

Desserts, bungee jumping and ironing

There's this show on the Food Network called The Best Thing I Ever Ate. The last episode was about dessert.
Question: What's your best dessert ever?

It got me thinking, what would my best dessert ever be? I'm not a dessertmonger, but I do love a good pie. But thinking about it, I'm fairly certain that my favorite dessert is Gretchen's Gateau Basque. Many of you have had the pleasure of eating this lemon cream and almond filled circular piece of joy. (recipe on the bottom of the blog)

Okay, MO, there's this wonderful picture that you took that has my favorite dessert and three of my favorite people in it. I hope you don't hate me for showing off your photography. I can pay you in feijoada if you want remuneration for my thievery. But I wanna show off the gateau basque:
**If you want me to remove it, MO, I will.


Also, I love ironing, probably more than someone should. Although, I don't know how I feeling about this.



Here's Gretchen's recipe from her cookbook. Man, I've gone all plagiarizy in this blog entry.

travelling softballer

Larissa called sent me various emails this morning and had her friend call me a few times this morning while a was dead-to-the-world asleep, all to be able to play softball. So tonight I played hot corner. Do you know how happy this makes me? Last summer when I was contemplating going on the study abroad to Brazil, I was all stoked for the trip, and then I realized that I'd be missing Co-Ed Softball. It made me stop and contemplate what I really wanted to do. I obviously went to Brazil, but that's how much I love softball. Oh, and I got to play hot corner and be the 3rd base coach and I batted clean-up (which is actually sorta funny because I've never been a power hitter). Effulgent joy...
I also spent a good chunk of my afternoon with the nice travel ladies. They're so helpful. After spending who knows how long trying to fumble our way thru the Eurorail junk, Eva had the great idea for a rental car. I love driving, so I'm happy about this. We now get to control our own schedule instead of living and dying by the trains. I mean seriously, 12 hours from Santiago de Compostela to Bilbao??? It's because of the crazy train routes. We'd have to go from the extreme northwest of Spain to central Spain, only to have to hop up to Bilbao. Blech and double blech.
Now my goal is to convince Clark that we could go from Bilbao to Barça via southern France. It'd add only a couple of hours (if that) onto the trip and then I would have made it to southern France.