Sex ... and the city... spoiled ... a bit

Ok, so I was a huge fan, you can even ask about my infamous Cosmopolitan's in their honor, but here is the trailer that unfortunately tells us everything we need to know about the movie:



But I will still go to the movies and watch it !

Busy, busy

Instead of bitching and complaining, I am posting this picture, which is not only adorkable, but i sometimes wish one could just do what the kitten is doing and get away with it.


Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!

Editorial Cartoons

Yesterday reading El Pais, I stumbled upon this cartoon ... priceless



Have a terrific weekend everyone !!

Knitting and the Doctor

Friday is finally here and I can not be more thankful. Yesterday, I went to the last of sock knitting class (pictures are coming, I promise) and it was a mix of highs and lows, and the realization that I am not a skilled knitter, so lets just say that I need to work a lot on the next sock I am making, because the first one looks more like a pauch than anything else. The Crafty one, tho had no problems, she just knits like she is trotting, amazing.

Anyway, that done, we all went to dinner and then home. I was so tired, I read for maybe 30 minutes and then off to bed.

Of course today, there is rain and ice, and the day is gray, and gloomy, and to top it all off I have a doctor's appintment. I need to get allergy medications, and set up this year's physical. Ughhh, the appointment is at 1:30 and I am not looking forward to it. I hate going to the dr, I just hate it. Never liked it, never will. So anyway, I am going to go, and getting al over with. But not looking forward to it.

Falling off the Wagon

Getting off the wagon is soo easy. For the last 3 days, I have not seen either the inside of the gym or the pool, and as guilty as I feel about this, I am still alive and quite well. I mean, yes I know I am not the fittest person in the world, but I try, and I do exercise regularly. Anyhow, maybe the Argentine's plan is working better than we expected.

Today tho, I am going to attempt to do spinning at 12:15 and then go swimming in the evening before project runway. We shall see if that is possible, because I need to finish a sock I have been "working on" for 3 weeks now and there has not been too much progress. Yep, I am sorry to report, not a lot of progress has been made. The class is tomorrow, and we are supposed to start the heal - we have already done the toe - so I might have to skip swimming ans stay home and knit.

Now that is quite the conundrum, and a very appropriate one for this blog.

Absence

I been terribly busy with swim meet and work stuff lately, so busy that I have barely any time to write, but I do miss the blog, and putting some stories/ideas out there. I know, I know, I always say the same thing, and this time I am sticking to my resolution and posting 3 times per week, at least.

I am going to leave you with some lol catz, cuz they make me laugh sooo hard.


moar humorous pics


moar humorous pics

Foul Matter

I can not explain what Foul Matter means in the publishing world, because I would be giving away the ending to the book of the same title, written by Martha Grimes and reviewed by your's truly here

Go take a lookse.

Pushing Daisies survives to fight another season!

In the midst of all the bad news, the political infighting, and the rainy weather (at least in DC) today as I was reading a copy of the Express, I saw a piece of news that warmed my heart. What is it you ask? well, ABC has decided to pick up Pushing Daisies for a second season. Apparently after the writers strike, they are now trying to see hoe to save the rest of the season and looking forward to the fall, because that is where the action will be. This little notice, made me happy, because I do not know if anyone here watched Pushing Daisies, but it is one of the most imaginative, entertaining shows I have ever seen in TV. It is sooo good, it is almost unbelievable that such quality is allowed to go from written page, to TV Stage to TV sets all over the country. It is a gem. The stories are macabre and funny, touching but not overtly dramatic, it is like the best BBC writers, and the best producers at HBO got together and tried a completely new concept, blowing past anything we have seen in TV in a while.. The direction is terrific, the characters are endearing, and the art direction is out of this world.

So for all of you that have not seen it, it is time to tivo it, download it , or you start watching it. You are going to fall in love, I am warning you.

My world upside down

Things have been very quiet here lately, because work and IGLA took over my life and have had no time to blog, or even think about blogging, but slowly things are getting back to normal. Today I was going to write a book review, but stumbled upon this piece of news and I am shocked:

"The data clearly indicate that consuming a food sweetened with no-calorie saccharin can lead to greater body-weight gain and adiposity than would consuming the same food sweetened with high-calorie sugar," Purdue researchers Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson wrote in the journal, Behavioural Neuroscience, published by the American Psychological Association.

Yes, all the artificial sweeteners are not good for you, not because they give you cancer, but because they do not help with weight loss. The Argentine is happy of course, because he has been telling me this for a while and since we ran out of Splenda a week I go had been having real sugar in my coffee. Well not only is it not going to kill me, it is going to help me loose weight ??. Knitter scratches his head in disbelief. I mean to think I have been, living a lie, a lie, a total lie, from the time I was 7 or 8 when I started drinking capuccionos and started using saccharine.

Oh well the good news is I bounce back from this surprises well, and now I have decided to give up artificial sweeteners for lent.

12 Twelve

I was listening to NPR, as usual and there was this story about a publisher that was revolutionizing the industry by refusing to publish more than 12 books per year. Yes, only 12. It is a very interesting proposition, in a business very much like movies and music where publishing houses live off success and hits, many, many titles are condemned to the sale bin from the get go. It was funny also because I am reading a book about eh publishing world currently called Foul Matter, and it is a mystery/critique of the industry and it’s practices. Any how that review will be done later, when I am done with the last 25 pages, but in the mean time I wanted to talk about the story.

One of the things that has set this publisher apart is that he has managed to have many bestsellers and even in his first year of operation he managed to make it to the NYT’s best seller’s list. He says that the key is to only publish books you are passionate about. If you are really passionate about them they will be successful. It seems like a rather simple but subversive idea. Imagine that, focusing all our energy on doing 12 things really well, instead of trying to do 34 or 50 things all at once. I do know that I am one of those that tries to do too much all the time, I think that yes, I would be better off also if I concentrated on some core things, instead of trying to do many things at once. The question is if this works or seems to work at the personal level, will it work at the corporate level? I do not have the answer yet, but I have a suspicion that indeed this will turn out to be a successful mantra.

You can go to their website and see their catalogue, it is very interesting, I have not read any of their books yet. But I want to leave you with their 12 point manifesto:

1. Each book will enliven the national conversation.
2. Each book will be singular in voice, authority, or subject matter.
3. Each book will be carefully edited, designed, and produced.
4. Each book will have a month-long launch in which it is the imprint’s sole focus.
5. Each book will be nationally advertised.
6. Each book will have a national publicity campaign.
7. Each book will be published by Jonathan Karp, the editor who discovered Book Sense Book of the Year winners Seabiscuit and Shadow Divers, plus such bestsellers as The Orchid Thief, Franklin and Winston, Thank You For Smoking, What Should I Do With My Life?, The Dante Club, The Last Don, The Godfather Returns, and A Conspiracy of Paper.
8. Each book will be publicized by Director of Publicity Cary Goldstein, who for seven years was the architect of FSG's publicity campaigns for such acclaimed books as The Assassin's Gate, Sweet and Low, Natasha, and Trance, nominee for the National Book Award.
9. Each book will have the potential to sell at least 50,000 copies in its lifetime.
10. Each book will be marketed and distributed by the Hachette Book Group, the company with the best hit ratio in the American publishing business.
11. Each book will be promoted well into its paperback life.
12. Each book will matter.

Have you read any of their books yet?

Ergonomic design

The Argetine shared this piece of news in his blog, and it is sooo funny I can not let it pass unnoticed Click on the link in the text to see the company that sells this product and what their sales pitch is. Hey, at least its hump day.



We're sure there's easier ways to lose your girlfriend, but probably none more stylish. Enter HK-Ergonomics' Hip Office, a glass-fiber prototype "accessory" that slides elegantly around your spare tire and allows you to suspend a laptop from your waist. Yes, it's just the thing to match your loveless evenings alone, fluorescently lit cubicle, and unfashionable pleated pants. Watch out, cellphone holster

A most read

First of all, I want to say I have been buried in work, I have not stopped for the last 2 weeks, my neurons are burning as I type this. But I am still here. Today I wanted to post about one of my favorite magazines, it is the Atlantic, I know, I know, you are going to call me a political wonker and all that, but it is one of the best magazines I have ever read - I love the New Yorker, but lets face it who has the time for a weekly, so a monthly is as much as I can read. It's articles are very insightfull, verye well researched and usually they forsee situations that very fewpeople think will actually happen. One of the most reads for any politically inclined person that reads this blog is this month's number. It is their State of the Union issue and it has articles on:


The Atlantic's State of the Union
What, after Iraq, are the problems most urgently confronting us?

After Iraq

No Country for Young Men

Inside Guantánamo

First, Kill All the School Boards

The best line so far is “In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote. “This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.”, from the article on education.

Priceless I know.

What will the World come to?

Reading "El Pais" I found an interesting article as usual. This one is a bit frightening, British TV Broadcaster UKTV Gold, made a poll trying to see if what the British public thought was fiction and reality, here are some of the results:

58% of the people asked believe Sherlock Holmes was real

23% of those asked believe Winston Churchill is a fictional character

47% of those asked believe Richard I the Lion-Heareted is a fictional charcter just like Winston.

4% ... think Cleopatra is a fictional character and worst of all 3% think that both Gandhi and Charles Dickens are fictional characters.

This is to me proof that the Western world is in absolute decadence.

I am being lazy today, but I was reading this editorial on the NYT and it touched me because in a way it could be story of my family. We are all huge coffee drinkers. There is no day where the day does not start with coffee, and there is no one that comes through the house and coffee is not offered to them. To this day my grandmother will insist on having any one have coffee, even when the cleaning lady comes in, even if she is late, she will insist, Lupita, have some coffee, then you can hurry about.

The article is by Judith Warner, it was published the 24th of January, here it is:

January 24, 2008, 9:00 pm
Memory Refill

At home, hidden in the bread box, I have a few samples of a “delicious” herb-chicory mix given to me by my acupuncturist to help me break my addiction to coffee.

It has gone untouched for months. Today, I think I will make the bold move of throwing it out.

I love coffee. And though I have, previously, shown myself willing to forgo all kinds of food and drink in the quest to rid myself of migraines, coffee is one habit that I am firmly committed never to break.

It’s not about the caffeine. I have largely renounced caffeine. I say largely because I know that the decaf I now drink all day isn’t entirely caffeine-free. My attachment to coffee is about the taste, and the smell, and the gesture.

I mean “gesture,” now, not in the way of French subway ads, where every ice cream pop, car or laundry detergent is either of a “gesture of freshness” or “a gesture towards pleasure.” I mean the kind of gesture my mother’s brother Mel used to make, waving toward the coffee pot, when you walked into his house in Brooklyn.

There was, first, the gesture toward the pot, always on, always ready, always warm. Then there was a gesture toward a cup, then a gesture toward a chair. Mel had been in World War II. He’d been left with a metal plate in his skull. There was always something formal, something military about his bearing.

At his behest, you’d sit down at the table, in the breakfast room off the kitchen, and you’d gesture into conversation. Or the grown-ups did, at least, while my cousins Michael and Jonathan and I went off and warred with some combination of Dawn dolls and G.I. Joes.

Mel died of a brain aneurism in 1985. He developed a blinding headache driving home from dropping Jonathan off at music camp and slipped into a coma within hours.

“He was always there, with the coffee cup in one hand and the cigarette in the other,” my mother said, bitterly, after the funeral.

In the years that followed, Mel’s wife, Barbara, and my mother and I spent many hours sitting around in that breakfast room. We’d drink coffee, and we’d jump in unison every hour on the hour, as the clock in the breakfast room opened to the maddening squawk of a cuckoo.

“Mel loved that clock,” Barbara would say.

These days, no one is “always there” with a coffee cup in his hand; nor is there anyone around with a cigarette. No decent person keeps the coffee pot brewing all day. No one would dream of drinking that much caffeine. No one would dream of sitting still all day to schmooze.

The only people who would are perhaps just the sort who might sneak out into the garden to smoke an occasional cigarette when their kids aren’t looking. Appealing people, I might be tempted to say. People who live in the grip of their passions. But suspect.

My husband, Max, used to smoke. In our early life together, I didn’t much mind. But by the time we had children it became a big issue; I did not want my children to have a father who was going to drop dead one day, coffee cup in one hand, cigarette in the other.

Early on, we lived briefly in the bottom two floors of a house in Brooklyn Heights. Max used to open the kitchen door to smoke. Sometimes, on weekend mornings, the smell of cigarette smoke would combine with the smell of coffee and a certain kind of sun-warmed Brooklyn air. And I’d be transported. Farther away than to the Victorian house in Midwood. Further back — to Flatbush, to the late 1960s, to a brick row house overflowing with great-aunts and grandparents, a kitchen filled with the smells of coffee and cookies and smoked fish and, of course, cigarettes. There were so many cigarettes: Pall Malls and Kents and Lucky Strikes, I think. (Or were the Lucky Strikes the chocolate cigarettes that my Aunt Fannie bought for me?)

My Aunt Fannie had a closet filled with secret things; finger paints and shiny paper, and crayons and scissors. In my memory, they are all just for me, but of course they weren’t; they were also for Michael and Jonathan.

Many of my memories of the house are false, it seems. The rooms were not arranged the way I remember them. It wasn’t a row-house at all, my mother says; it was semi-detached. Early childhood memories are notoriously inaccurate – and incomplete. I hadn’t even remembered the smell — that coffee and cigarettes and bagels and cream cheese and, with any luck, a couple of chocolate jelly rings smell — until Max opened the back door and God in his heaven sent in that perfect beam of sunlight.

It was 1994. Mel was dead, but Barbara was then still alive. The World Trade Center was still standing on the other side of the river. My father was still alive, though within a year he would no longer be, after collapsing on the street, on the way to his office from the Gramercy Park Coffee Shop — where he had his first few cups of the day, every day.

I wouldn’t be so pretentious as to say that I have measured out my life in coffee spoons. But it wouldn’t be so far from the truth. I began drinking coffee at the age of nine – teaspoons of warm, milky coffee from my father’s cup in restaurants after dinner. By age 11, I was drinking it chummily with my Mom over breakfast. I spent my adolescence over never-empty cups in places like Joe Junior’s and Lepanto’s and the Viand. There was time for this then, in my New York.

I miss that world terribly.

When Emilie greets me, after a long day in school, she buries her head in my neck and breathes deeply.

“You smell like coffee,” she says with satisfaction.

Every Monday, we have an hour’s break between school pickup and Julia’s violin lesson. Every Monday, wishing for a coffee shop, I take the girls to our local bakery-café. Julia and Emilie eat ersatz French pastries and I order a decaf. They do their homework, and I read the paper.

On the wall there is a mural of a village scene somewhere that looks something like Provence. There’s a cat in the mural who sits on a stone wall. We believe that the cat has magical powers: he can move at will between his wall in Washington and his wall in France.

When I get bored with reading the paper, I stare into his eyes. He is an exile of sorts, never entirely at home.

But I still have my coffee.