saraewood.com

I have been tagged (thanks John), which means, I came to find out, that I need to write up 5 little known facts about myself and in turn, tag 5 other people. Here goes:

1. I have witnessed a person get eaten by an 18 foot great white shark in Australia. Grisly accident involving newlyweds on honeymoon. I have witnessed a person fall down and die in a cave in Vietnam. Also in Vietnam the axle and back tires flew off the van I was riding in with 10 other people as we were careening down a mountain pass. Also in Vietnam we were airlifted out of major floods in Danang while hundred of other people died in the storms. I was stuck in an elevator in the Congo and the elevator fell 4 floors to crash into the basement (owie!). I was deported at 5 am from Cuba. Was washed out to sea in Costa Rica and nearly drowned while my friend on the beach thought I was just playing in the waves. I was in a multi-car accident where my car flipped as did 2 others. My brother died in our back yard while playing on a tree that had been felled by lightning when I was 6. My “kinda” boyfriend in college fell down and hit his head on a rock during a hike and died as a result. A neighborhood kid drowned in our pool when I was 5. In high school there was the normal drunk-driving and suicide mishaps of friends. I could go on in this vein for some time. I have been around many freak accidents that should have or did result in death and mayhem.




2. After college while living in New Orleans I held the following jobs: Elevator repairman dispatcher for Dover elevator, bartender, waitress at the Hard Rock Cafe (average tip: 11 cents), Vaqueros (average tip: 20 bucks) and a 3 hour stint as a waitress at a strip club on Bourbon Street (where no one tips you if you aren’t on stage. I went to the nearby riverboat casino and gambled away my 9 dollars in earnings)




3. I think the Hoover Dam is beautiful.




4. I love celebrity gossip and hate that I do. I also love donuts and probably should wish that I didn’t. I love to read, and that is OK I guess. Though as a child it was an affliction as I HAD to have something to read at ALL times and would sometimes have to resort to reading packaging material (like cereal boxes) over and over if nothing was on hand.




5. I actually worked really hard to get rid of my accent, but can do a good southern, Cajun or New Orleans version if given enough alcohol. But now I speak in a weird mix of nondescript accents that may even sound worse than if I still sounded like the kid from the Shake-n-Bake commercial.

So… Paul English, Clare, Ryan, King, Bill . Have fun!

I don’t watch many videos on-line. But every once in awhile I come across something like this one (thanks Ryan), or the one after (also Ryan). My lame editor won’t let me embed the player, so you just have to click… Enjoy!

Reggie Watts: Out Of Control

Uniqlo mixplay

From the John Wilkes Encyclopedia Londinensis 1796.
Posted at The Dodo Blog » The Hooded Dodo

From “Digging for Dodos” by Ian Parker (The New Yorker, January 22, 2007):

A Mauritian told me that his elderly uncle still said how glad he was that dodos were wiped out, because they would have disturbed his flower beds and “crapped all over the lawn.”

And:

“Where are you from? Holland? Oh, you ate all the dodos.”

From “Vegetable Love” by Steven Shapin (The New Yorker, January 22, 2007):

George Bernard Shaw is said to have asked, “While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?”

(I am a fallen vegetarian, and that makes me cringe.)

We always seem to make the wrong choice. Mainly because we buy when the market is high and try to sell 1) in less than 5 years and 2) when the market is low. Real estate professionals love to see us coming.

Interesting trend in rent vs mortgage as percent of income.

Or this which looks at mortgage rates and percent we spend on paying the mortgage each month.

I under anticipated the mental and physical toll this movie would take on the viewer. I sat the entire movie with my shoulders hunched up around my ears from stress and I have felt so sad and useless since.

The movie, though, was excellent. Excellent acting, directing, filming, etc. I am a new fan of Leonardo after seeing The Departed and he was as amazing in this film as he was in that one, accents and all. Djimon Hounsou, simply amazing. And though I have never gotten Jennifer Connelly despite all my male friend’s ravings and found her a bit unbelievable in this role, it was not so much so as to distract me.

There were two nagging details about the script - not the overall story (which of course is a bit unrealistic) but in a couple of word choices. In two scenes where Danny Archer (DiCaprio) is delivering clever barbs about reality to the idealistic Maddy Bowen (Connelly) I was struck by two things he said as being out of sync with the year the story was supposed to have taken place (late 90s). One is the term “bling bling” - was that so ingrained in colloquial English that a Rhodesian diamond smuggler who had never left Africa and had little exposure to Americans would have picked up and thrown into conversation? The other is when he was saying how people like her come with their “little bottles of hand sanitizer.” I am an admitted addict to those little bottles and I never saw them in wide use until the last couple years.

There were other details I could discuss that I liked or would like more discussion about, but hard to say what they are without totally ruining the whole movie (though it is somewhat predictable anyway).

A disappointment was at the end when the credits say that it is up to the consumer to ensure that the diamonds they buy are conflict free. That was totally lame. Up to the middle-American 16 year old who goes to Zales at the mall and blows their savings from working at the local video store on some ugly sapphire and diamond flecked ring? Come ON. Why not say “don’t buy diamonds because you never really know where they come from” which was the WHOLE POINT of the movie?! Or “all diamonds are blood diamonds?” Or SOMETHING.
Anyway, have a look at Human Rights Watch site on what you can do about child soldiers.