I heart police blotters. Especially this one.
What are your top 5 movies/DVDs of 2006?
1. Borat
2. The Departed
3. Stranger than Fiction
Those are the only ones I've seen worth mentioning. Here are two I would still like to see:
4. An Inconvenient Truth
5. Talladega Nights
I found this example on a grammar web site today:
Use capitalization in the floowing instance:
a complete sentence after a colon, e.g. The crowd all realized the same fact: The band was not sober.
For too long I've thought that once I figure out the secret to life or find some concrete belief system to adhere to, after I got those answers then I could be truly happy.
Now I think it's better to try to be truly happy during the search process as well. Could this possibly negate the end result of searching? Is the search (the means) and the answers (the end) one in the same?
In the end, although I've spent the past two - three years driving myself a little insane trying to infuse my life with some kind of extraordinary meaning to personally justify events which were so heinously unjustifiable, it may be better to relax and just be happy to have any experiences at all.
I'm just thoroughly amused by all the tags on this profile.
Duuuuuuude!
It's been sooooo long. I was in Argentina for 2 weeks getting sleepy-drunk with my parents every night and wandering around during the day.
Here's the re-cap:
Buenos Aires:
Either 70% or 30% of Argentina's entire population lives here, depending who you ask.
There are 47 barrios, we saw about 4. Maybe 5.
Our hotel, The Faena, was riiiiiiiiidiculous! It's housed in an old grain silo on the side of a canal, and the interior is designed by Philip Stark (of Target phame, hehe). It's all red, black, and white, with alot of leather and mirrors. I was somewhat reminded of the party decor from the movie "Eyes Wide Shut", which is pretty unsettling. Also unsettling is wearing your mother's underwear, which is what I had to do for a couple of days as my lugguage was stranded in Miami (recounted in chapter 45 of my life's epic work "Why I Hate the Airline Industry").
Seriously...
This is really....
What it looked like.
Yipes!
On the whole, BA was sort of pretensious. However, I, for one, have a problem taking people seriously whose idea of a modern hairstyle revolves around the mullet (with an occasional rattail).
The next section will have to be without photographic aide, for the most part, because I large part of my photos are on my parents' laptop.
Anyway, if you ever find yourself in BA. here is what you should do:
1. EAT! Oh my god! The food here is amay-may. Even for a psuedo-veggie like me. Of course there is a ton of steaks and lamb (from patagonia), but there is also a lot of fresh fish (especially... octopus?), and really, really good bread (which, like their worshipped Europeans, they slyly charge you for at restaurants). But, here's what really makes the food awesome: of their many, many immigrants, 60% are Italian. So there is fresh pasta every where! Raviolis are a specialty. It's damned good.
2. DRINK! I don't even like red wine, and yet, Argentinian Malbecs are delicious, and will set you back all of $10. And Argentinians have one custom which I haven't encountered anywhere else, and which pleased me very much: restaurants and hotels will serve you free champagne at the drop of a hat.
"Buenos Tardes! Welcome to our restaurant! Please sit down, please have some champagne. It's free!"
"Buenos Dias! Thank you for staying at our hotel. Here is a bottle of champagne. It's free!"
"Dios Mio! You dropped your fork! Would you like some champagne? It's free!"
3. SHOP! Because of the alarming alacrity with which Argentinians will burn, bomb, or ransack their own national treasures, there is not a hell of a lot in the way of interesting museums or fancy old houses or whatever. And what they do have is regarded with a sort of stoic indifference. For example, there is a lot of beautiful art deco glasswork and architecture in many public buildings (from the time when Argentina was among the richest countries in the world), that is only recently being rediscovered because, instead of pay for the upkeep on all the stained glass and metal work, they simply painted over it. Paint. On glass. Also, all four walls of the presidential palace are painted different shades of pink, and the Argentinians burned all of their major Catholic churches in an uprising in the 50s.
However, they do have an awful lot of boutique shops. And because of the recent economic tragedy, everything is cheap! Hooray for plunging an entire nation below the poverty line so that I can buy leather goods for under $20. And I don't even like leather!
The best place to buy crap is in Pallermo, which is a Soho-ish type barrio with lots of indie Argentine designers.
4. SHOP MORE! Kidding, it really gets old after about one day anyway. So instead
5. WALK! BA has a lot of beautiful public parks.
6. WATCH! Polo. Argentina has the monopoly on the world's best polo players. Of the top ten players in the world, 9 are Argentine. And the best polo ponies come from Argentina as well. We went to an early game of the Argentine Open, which is like the World Cup of Polo. It's really an amazing, beautiful, simple sport. Basically, there's not many more scoring rules than 'hit ball with mallet in direction of goal'. However, the whistle got blown a lot, making me think that there's some sort of complicated fouling-technicality system of which I am unawares.
Yeah, there's a lot of rich people at these games. If you play, the norm is to be able to own one pony for each chukka (a period or set within a match) and there are 6 - 10 chukkas per match. Plus, the gear is expensive ($100 for a polo hat, which I coveted badly), and you have to have a feild to play on. The Argentines tend to actually watch the sport, though. For the most part, the crowds are very quiet, although the players yell at each other a lot. For one match we saw, one team had acquired some soccer fans because the team's star player had once mentioned the fans' soccer team in an interview. So they were yelling and holding up signs just like they were at a UT game.
Oh, and the preferred beverage to watch the sport with: champagne (it WAS free)!
7. SLEEP IN! Nobody eats in Argentina until at least 10:00 p.m. They don't go to the bars or clubs or whatever until at least midnight. They don't get up and do stuff until at least 10:00 a.m. This was a very difficult concept for my parents to grasp.
8. DANCE! The tango was created in the outer barrios of BA. Something about men dancing with each other while waiting in line at whore houses. The official version is that it was a form of communication between all the disperate immigrants who lived together in little apartments in tennament houses.
9. LOOK! The best museum in BA is called MALBA and it's modern latino art. Diego Riviera, Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, and tons more. They had great temporary exhibits there as well. The building is also really cool, as is the gift shop. Also worth checking out is the awesome cemetary in Recoleta. More on that later.
Too bad it's actually a satirical opinion column.
"I don't make my Jukebox selections for the recognition"
Also, there is apparently a way that you can directly blog Onion articles onto your site, but I am a little too stupid to figure it out.
So, last weekend at Stitch, I had the pleasure of running into Tyler and Naomi Adams, who are Dentonites that relocated to Leander a while ago. Besides being really rad people and Corn-Mo fans, Naomi also makes some seriously bad-ass quilted things. So Naomi was displaying her wares and Tyler was shilling for her, and if I had more spending money than my temp lifestyle affords, i would have totally thrown down for a skull quilt, or a I heart tattoos throw pillow, or (my personal fave) a Vegas-baby wine carrier. I didn't even have the bucks to get an awesome fabric postcard! But I did pick up Naomi's biz card, and visited her web site:
http://www.killerbeedesigns.com/index.html
The holiday season being upon us, if you are out of super rad original gift ideas or know someone who is, please check this site or pass it along.
Also, if you are of the crafty persuasion, under Free Goodies, Naomi will send you your very own fabric postcard patterns once a month. Sweeeeeet!
What song makes you rock the karaoke mic?
Submitted by Ann.
Songs I have actually sung: "Like a Virgin"
"Bull in the Heather"
"This is Hardcore"
"Bang a Gong"
I would only consider singing Bull in the Heather again.
Fantasy Song: "Gigantic" by the Pixies. I know all the words and thankfully it only requires maybe a quarter of an octave to sing.
Why does everyone always want to sing Neil Diamond at Kareoke?
here's some stuff I did this past week, and my reccomendations
1) Thurs - Dorkbot - Oooooohhhhh, this is so cool. You know when you are so bored, it's after work and you are sitting on your couch with a bud light watching a Seinfeld rerun and thinking to yourself 'there has to be a better way to have fun' or 'I know that some people are sort of productive in their spare time', but you wonder where these people are, because everyone you know in your age group is also sitting on a couch somewhere, drinking some beer, watching some sitcom? Dorkbot is full of the people who actually use their free time to create things. And most of the times the things they create also create things and all these wonderful little creations are on display at Dorkbot. Like the Spinart machine, or the Sand art generator, or the homemade musical instrument. Anyway, it's a totally fascinating get together, which happens sporadically around Austin. Next time you hear of it, go! You won't regret it. And, best part, it's freeeeeeee!
2) Friday - Grand Opening of Irie Bean - Free Red Stripe at the opening. The lovliness of this promotional giveaway was somewhat counterbalanced by a fantastically crappy band. Still, Irie Bean is a nice, laid-back, independent coffee shop, with food and smoothies and beer and wine as well. Plus, it's about .20 mile from the Del Curto shack, which is nice. Oh yeah, and a lovely garden and free copies of the NY Times crossword puzzle. I would recommend stopping in if you are in the area.
3) Saturday - Stitch fashion show - This was $10 to get in. My friends and I skipped out on the fashion show, as there were a bazillion people there and no chairs. However, the shopping portion was quite nice, and even affordable. Like those city-wide art fests minus the obligitory stand full of photgraphs of quaint doorframes and windows from all over the world and wooden cat sculpture. Also, nice people watching. Next year must try to perservere for the actual fashion show.
4) Sunday - Hyde Park Bar and Grill on Westgate - For brunch. This place just opened up in the shopping center that also has central Market etc... It's just as good as the actual Hyde Park location, but the restraunt itself was not near as quaint, with gigantor windows that concentrated all the available sunlight directly at your table and a very bizarre broken glass garden going on outside.
5) Monday - Anusara Yoga at Clear Springs South - I go to this class as much as possible. Which is not nearly enough. I love it because the instructor, Charley, manages to get at least 90% of the class into these fantastically difficult poses which make you feel like a super hero contortionist. It's not too strenous, and there is plenty of time for meditating and chanting. Also, the first class is freeeeeeee!
6) Tues and Weds I worked too damned hard to do anything active after work. Boo.
