Taxation Without Scientific Representation

Recently, the governor of New York, David Paterson, proposed an "obesity tax" on non-diet sodas. A can of regular soda will cost more than its diet equivalent.

I suppose one could look at this at a way to make people to stop drinking such sugary beverages and drink healthier alternatives, but just a few months ago, study results were released that showed that diet soda could make you just as fat as regular soda.

So it's not a health concern tax. It's a money grub tax. I'll keep drinking my sugary concoctions anyway.

Analysis: The Cherry Tree Carol

At our winter concert, our school's orchestra performed a piece with a pretty melody that I'd never heard before, "The Cherry Tree Carol." A few days later, I heard the song with its words, and now I don't think can ever hear it again. I will give commentary on each verse.

When Joseph was an old man, an old man was he

He married virgin Mary, the queen of Galilee

He married virgin Mary, the queen of Galilee

(News to me that Joseph was a cradle robber and Mary was royalty, but then again, I don't read the bible too often. It was only recently that I found out that Joseph was a decendent of Abraham, too.)

And one day as they went walking, all in the garden green

There were berries and cherries as thick as may be seen

There were berries and cherries as thick as may be seen

(Jesus was totally born in December. Right.)

Then Mary said to Joseph, so meek and so mild

Joseph, gather me some cherries for I am with child

Joseph, gather me some cherries for I am with child

(Pregnancy cravings, totally understandable.)

The Joseph flew in anger, in anger flew he

Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee

Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee

(Bitch, I ain't yo baby's daddy!)

Then up spoke baby Jesus, from out Mary's womb

Bow down ye tallest tree that my mother might have some

Bow down ye tallest tree that my mother might have some

(Let's summarize that one: The fetus was talking. Holy crap.)

So bent down the tallest tree to touch Mary's hand

Said she, oh look now Joseph, I have cherries at command

Said she, oh look now Joseph, I have cherries at command

(Talking fetus Jesus uses telekinesis in order for him and Mary to have uber pwnage over Joseph.)

The End.

Two neat things (life update)

1) We received a package from our Irish cousins, with many photos of my great-grandmother's brother and his children. We'd already sent them photos of several generations of our side, so we both got to see photos of relatives we'd never seen.

2) Last weekend's several inches of snow provided a perfect opportunity to try out the reason I sprung for the all wheel drive option on my new car. And it was awesome. I drove up hills with no struggle and no fear. I did not fishtail, nor did I slip and slide along the roads. And I was driving while the snow was still coming down! I am very very happy with the car.

Tis the season to be teaching

I mainly teach at a 5th-8th grade middle school. However, there are so many classes at the elementary schools that the elementary teacher can't teach them all. So I teach a third grade class at one school and a pre-k class at another.

Last Thursday, the day I go see the 3rd grade class, the time I was there was the same time as the school's dress rehearsal for their winter concert. I arrived in the middle of the kindergarten's set. After they finished, I walked over to the other music teacher and the school principal to ask if I would still be there in time to see the third grade perform.

When I reached them, I realized they were gazing behind me. I turned and saw a custodian heading over to the risers with a mop...towards a puddle on the plastic. Guess one of the kindergarteners got nervous. The music teacher grinned at me. "Aren't you glad you teach in a middle school?"

I didn't have the heart to tell her that only hours earlier, the principal at the middle school had called an emergency faculty meeting five minutes before homeroom - to frantically remind the teachers that some children in the school still believe in Santa Claus.

And now it's time for madrigals with the Monkees.

"Riu Riu Chiu" is a Spanish Christmas madrigal from the 15th century or so. Many groups have sung it, and even I taught it to my madrigal group last year. I think this version, sung by the Monkees in its full four-part a capella harmony, is pretty nifty.

This is some serious Jon Stewart pwnage omg.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mike Huckabee Pt. 2

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Jon Stewart asks Mike Huckabee about gay marriage.

More adventures in teaching

I teach my fifth grade class last period. All the fifth graders today went on a field trip to see Cirque du Soleil, and arrived in a slow trickle as their three buses returned and the kids went to their lockers and the bathroom and such.

For a while I had only a couple of kids in the room. While they were doodling on the dry-erase board, I asked them how the show was.

Girl: It was pretty cool, but there were some weird parts, like when these two women were crawling on each other.
Boy: That part was awesome.

Hee.

Two things in the news that are making me angry.

The incumbent republican senator Saxby Chambliss won reelection in Georgia over the democratic challenger Jim Martin. I'm not mad that the republican won; I'm mad that only about half of the people in Georgia who voted on November 4th voted in this runoff election. It proves my opinion that many people simply do not give a shit about voting, but some of those people gave a shit about voting for Barack Obama.

Director Roman Polanski asks a judge in L.A to dismiss his case. He raped a 13-year-old thirty years ago, fled the country to avoid going to prison (and hasn't been back since), and now he wants this judge to dismiss his case on a technicality. Disgusting.

A farewell, and a greeting.

A little while I ago I mentioned that I was car shopping.

About a week before Halloween, I was driving home from work and I noticed that my car was kind of rocking while idling. This had happened before, twice. It was usually followed by the check engine light coming on, taking in the car for servicing, having some filter get unclogged and me being a few hundred bucks poorer. Sure enough, I stopped at my dad's house to pick up something, and when I started the car up again, the check engine light came on. I abandoned my car in the driveway and drove my dad's car to the football game that night. (Leading a pep band of less than ten people, woo!)

A few days later, the car went into the shop, and yes, there was a clogged filter, but that wasn't all: The smog protection stuff was messed up and the transmission was leaking. Total cost for repair: $1700.

I'd always told myself that if it would be less expensive to make payments on a new car than pay for repairs on my old one, then I'd go buy a new car. I'd already put two grand into car repairs in the past year alone. Sadly, it was finally that time.

For the past seven years, I have been driving a 1995 Mercury Grand Marquis. My mom had bought it when I was in sixth grade, and it had been relatively unused at the time I got my driver's license. I started out driving it on weekends when my dad would need his bright yellow Caddy, the car I took my driver's test on and also a hand-me-down from my grandfather. (The '88 El Dorado died just after I started college. Dad bought another used Caddy to replace it, and after that, a Grand Marquis. We like familiarity around here.)

Within my first year driving "the boat," I saw it go over to 80,000 miles. This year, it passed 141,000. It survived three years going back and forth to college, and four years going back and forth to Jarret's house.

While I've driven it...

• The windshield's been cracked by a rock once (adding to the crack that was already there)
• The right back window had to be glued shut to keep it from falling down
• The motors for both front windows have been fixed
• A piece of plastic has been hanging off the side for a year and a half
• The ignition column's been replaced
• I backed it into a car parked across the street from my dad's house
• I've scraped the sides against many trees, bushes, and a pole
• (Still not as bad as my mom crashing the garage door on the hood, haha)
• A lady backed into it thinking there was no one behind her at the intersection
• The brakes have been replaced...twice
• The shocks have been replaced...twice
• The horn's been replaced...once
• The master cylinder was replaced, after my brakes almost didn't work (remember, they cut out while I was slamming on them to avoid deer crossing the road!)
• I ran over a nail and didn't even notice the tire was flat until people pointed it out to me (while driving on the turnpike)
• The back window was replaced, after it randomly shattered into a thousand pieces
• The front bumper got knocked off
• The air bag light's been on for the better part of the last five years (started right after the front bumper was replaced)

And I'm sure I've forgotten stuff. Yeah, I've kinda just given an elegy to a car, but keep in mind it is something that has been an integral part of half my life.

When I went out to buy a new car, I only wanted these things for sure:

• Something smaller, so I could park better (turns out, it wasn't the car's fault that I suck at parking, oh well).
• It had to have all wheel drive. The boat only had rear wheel drive and couldn't drive normally on wet roads, and when it snowed, forget it.
• Cloth seats. I hate leather.

And for the first three weeks of searching, I drove my dad's car and everything was fine, and then my brother Bryan got into a fender bender on route 17, and now he's borrowing my dad's car and I spent a week driving Jeff's Murano. Don't like the car too much, but heated seats are nice when it's cold.

I knew that this car buying excursion had been coming for a while, so I'd saved up quite a bit for this. I put most of the car's cost down and financed the rest only to build up my credit history. I'll spare the details of the test driving and absolute frustration the various parties involved gave me in actually getting this all done, but in the end, here it is.

It's a 2009 Ford Fusion. Loaded with lots of cool features. Loving it so far. The boat, after being left in the cold and not being used for a month, has started to make high pitched whining sounds when I start it. It's time for it to be donated. And I, for the first time in my life, will look forward to driving in the winter.

Wow, good thing I'm not applying for a job in President Obama's cabinet!

This is the application questionnaire.

Holy crackers, that's detailed.

As I enter the not so lovely world of identity theft...

Thursday was a day to spend with Jarret. (As NJ teachers, we were off Thursday and Friday. Teacher's convention? Puh-leez.) We went out to lunch, and I paid for it with my credit card.

Later, we were wandering around in a store and I wanted to buy something. I handed over my credit card...where it was declined. I found the cash in my wallet, and was on my cell to check my credit limit before I even got to the car. I was still well below the limit, as I thought, but Jarret assured me that it was a cloudy day, and there was probably a glitch in the store's computer system.

We then went to another store where my credit card got declined again. Time to call the credit card company again and get a real person on the line.

"Well, yes, we stopped transactions on that account," said the security person. "There was a $3000 charge at a Circuit City in Miami."

What?!

"And a $300 charge at a Home Depot in Miami. You did not make these purchases, correct?"

After I assured the woman that I was in New Jersey (as evidenced by the charge I'd made for lunch less than half an hour before the first one from Miami) we sorted out which purchases were mine, and which weren't, and now my credit card account is closed and I'm getting a new card in a few days.

Basically, someone in Miami got a hold of my credit card number, and proceeded to buy a really nice TV and installation equipment for it. Jarret wondered how a Circuit City employee could let anyone make a purchase for $3000 without checking ID, which leads us to believe it might have been an employee at that store, or just another reason why the chain's finances are currently in the toilet, because now that my account's closed, those stores don't get their money.

Luckily, I noticed something was wrong quickly, and my credit card company is very very good with security. Because the last thing I need right before I buy a new car would be for my credit score to tank. I would have had to buy a used sub-compact!

Um, yeah, more on the buying a new car thing later.

A letter to our president-elect.

Dear Barack Obama,

Originally, I was a Hilary supporter, and it took me until August to convince myself I could vote for you. I am glad you won, and congratulations.

I just have one thing to day, on behalf of everyone who voted for you, those who believe in you and those who are counting on you.


Please do not fuck this up.

Love,

Me

I am wasting my Sunday afternoon academically pondering Beatles music. Because I can and want to.

The other day, after many rumors and many denials from me insisting that it will never happen, Harmonix and Apple announced that there will be a version of Rock Band with Beatles songs.

Why was I denying it? Because most Beatles rumors are never true, no matter how plausible they may be. I mean, we still have no digital remastering of the Beatles catalogue. They're not even on iTunes, for pete's sakes! And even though I salivate for them, I still have never seen the Shea Stadium or the Let It Be films because they were out of print long before I was even born. There are so many things that Apple could be doing for Beatles fans, but since Apple doesn't want to give more money to Michael Jackson than it has to, it's barely done anything. So the video game actually being ready for stores by next Christmas? I still have doubts (the release date for the documentary DVD of the making of the Cirque du Soleil show keeps getting pushed back further and further), but I think this will happen.

Many older Beatles fans are actually mad about this, since they want Apple's priorities to be on more important things, such as the ones I listed above. But I disagree, and not just because I love playing games from the Guitar Hero and Rock band series. At the beginning of each cycle, I asked each of my students to write down some of their favorite bands and songs. Some of them wrote down things that I knew they were only aware of because of the music's presence in those video games. Only one student, out of almost 200 so far, wrote down the Beatles. Having this video game around will help them see the light, so to speak.

What I wanted to do, since I've obsessively listened to and studied the Beatles for about ten years now, is come of with a list of the songs that should be in this video game, to better complement the way the game works. The game has roles for vocals, guitar, bass and drums, so you'd have to pick songs that at least feature most of them in a challenging and interesting way. The press on the game has also said that there would be only 45 songs available in the game from the band's original catalogue from 1962-1969. I'm taking that to mean that the two songs on the Anthology are out, as well as any of the covers from the Live at the BBC set that weren't on the albums.

My picks are probably not what's going to be in the actual game, because I'm going to include tracks that aren't as well known to the casual fan. But this is my blog, and my opinion, so nyah.

Anyway, I went through the list of Beatles tracks and came up with an original list of 57 songs that would be playable in this game's format. That meant many tracks that didn't have things such as drum and bass parts (Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby, Blackbird) were left out. Many songs were based off of piano riffs or orchestral accompaniments, so they were gone too. (Didn't pick a single track from the Magical Mystery Tour Album because of this.) Most of the cover versions were ignored because the Beatles stayed true to many of the the songs' original formats, and I wanted originality here. The notable exception is Twist and Shout, so I put it on the final list. I then whittled out 12 songs based on things like vocal difficulty (is there one part here, or three?) musical interest (sure, there's a guitar part, but it's potentially boring to play) and my personal preferences.

Here's the 12 that were on my list but I took out:

1. A Taste of Honey
2. Do You Want to Know a Secret
3. This Boy
4. If I Fell
5. I’ll Be Back
6. Eight Days a Week
7. You’re Going to Lose that Girl
8. Think for Yourself
9. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
10. Dear Prudence
11. I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
12. Two of Us

And the ones that I decided on:

1. I Saw Her Standing There
2. Twist and Shout
3. All My Loving
4. A Hard Day’s Night
5. And I Love Her
6. Can’t Buy Me Love
7. Things We Said Today
8. You Can’t Do That
9. I Feel Fine
10. I’ll Follow the Sun
11. Help
12. Another Girl
13. Ticket to Ride
14. I’ve Just Seen a Face
15. Drive My Car
16. Michelle
17. Girl
18. In My Life
19. Day Tripper
20. Paperback Writer
21. Rain
22. Taxman
23. She Said She Said
24. And Your Bird Can Sing
25. Getting Better
26. Good Morning Good Morning
27. Revolution
28. Back in the USSR
29. Birthday
30. Yer Blues
31. Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey
32. Helter Skelter
33. Hey Bulldog
34. The Ballad of John and Yoko
35. Come Together
36. Something
37. Octopus’s Garden
38. Here Comes the Sun
39. The End
40. Dig a Pony
41. I Me Mine
42. I’ve Got a Feeling
43. One After 909
44. For You Blue
45. Get Back

I have no idea when the official list comes out, but I hope it's something similar to this. That'd be cool.

Adventures in Teaching

Most of my current teaching is in a middle school. If you ask anyone in the know about teaching, most of them, upon hearing you teach in a middle school, usually say some variant of "I'm sorry." And I've found that to be true. Many of these kids are sweet as can be, but many are evil, soulless, and miserable excuses for human beings.

Case in point: I teach music as part of a set of cycle courses. I see a part of the school for eight weeks, then those kids move on and I get a new group. Yesterday was the last day of the first cycle. One kid slipped a note onto my cart (yep, I'm one of those teachers) before she left that said "You are the best mucie teacher ever." Awwww. In another class, some kids had these parting words for me: "You'll last here. We never made you cry!"

To change the subject slightly, I also spend a half hour each week with a handicapped pre-k class. This week, when the class was close to ending, I didn't turn off the CD of children's music I was using fast enough, and the song "Skinnamarink" came on. Instead of turning it off, I kept the kids in their circle and had them follow along in the song with me while I did the arm movements, which I don't think I've done in 20 years. If I did them wrong, I thought, I'll change it next week and the kids won't even remember. Imagine my surprise to go to YouTube and find out that I had them right. Woo!

Intentional or not?

I watched the beginning of last night's hockey game between the New York Rangers and the Philadelphia Flyers at Jarret's house. Jarret lives in that part of New Jersey that gets New York and Philly stations, so the game was beign covered on two channels.

The interesting thing about this game, the Flyers' home opener of the season, was that the ceremonial first puck was going to be dropped by "America's favorite hockey mom," Sarah Palin. Jarret and I were eagerly glued to the tv, waiting for the crowd's reaction.

On the Philly station, there were no mics picking up crowd noise. You just heard the ceremonial music as she walked out. On the New York station, you heard what we were waiting for: Booing. Lots of it.

The question is - did Comcast (who owns the Flyers and the tv station that broadcasts their games) intentionally mean to block the sound?

It's official: The entire country's been RickRoll'D.

Ever since the RickRoll meme has become popular, more radio stations have been adding the song to their rotation. At least the ones I listen to anyway. More people are becoming reacquainted with the two decades old Rick Astley pop tune, but I think we're feeling a little more exuberant about it this time around.

Last weekend, Jarret and I were wandering around CVS, waiting for the nearby Chinese takeout place to complete our order, when that familiar drum machine beat kicked in over the speakers. We turned to each other, giggling, whispering "hey, we're getting RickRoll'D." Then we looked around us and realized that everyone in the store, men and women of all ages, had stopped what they were doing to dance in the aisles. And I am not kidding.

A middle couple were undertaking some ballroom swing by the still-too-early-to-be-on-shelves Halloween candy, while some teenagers were bouncing up and down by the cash registers. My boyfriend and I stood by the tissue boxes, confused as hell.

(The second presidential debate is going to start in about fifteen minutes, in a town hall style format. If one of the questioners manages to start with "We're no strangers to love. You know the rules, and so do I," they'll be my new hero.)

Politics, Celebrity Style.

Sometimes, you need to be clear and concise with your words for people to respect you and your opinions. Compare and contrast these two YouTube videos. The first is Matt Damon, the second is Diddy. Both have the same things to say about Sarah Palin, but I think one gets his point across a little better than the other. You be the judge.

Sorry Jerry. Sorry Bill. Your new commercial is creepy.

Sigh. Will there ever be a Microsoft commercial that doesn't confuse me?

Short Updates

• Jonathan got rejected from Millionaire.

• Jarret knows all the words to MacArthur Park.

• And, um...I'm starting a new job in a new district tomorrow. It's a thing.
  

What I did on my summer vacation, part four

So what did my dad and I do for our five remaining days?

On Saturday, we did a bus tour. We took the train from Dublin to Limerick, where we caught the bus. From there we toured Bunratty Castle, the Cliffs of Moher, and the Burren before ending up in Galway. We didn’t go back to Dublin with the tour, and stayed overnight in Galway before heading back to Dublin Sunday afternoon.

In short on that trip:

The tour guide talked about Angela’s Ashes the entire time we rode through Limerick, even though it was painfully obvious he hadn’t read the book. (“John” McCourt. Yeesh.)

While standing on top of Bunratty castle, my dad told me, “If we hung you upside down by your ankles over the edge, that’s what it’s like to kiss the Blarney stone.” (We never made it to Blarney castle.)

The Cliffs of Moher were so windy that I had to pull back my hair, pull up the hood on my sweatshirt, and knot the drawstrings tight. And no one told me that the parking lot was at the bottom and you had to walk up!

(This way to the castle...oh, what's that in the background?)

The Burren looks like a giant stone puzzle, and I hopped along between them humming the theme to Tetris.

Galway is mainly known as the origin of the Claddagh ring. My dad managed to go his entire life before that week not knowing what they were.Also in Galway was a “Spanish” arch, built to welcome the Spanish Armada in 1584, hoping that they would kick some British ass. Um…that didn’t work out too well.

On Monday, we took a half-hour flight to Liverpool.

Yes, you read that right. I made my pilgramage to Mecca. (Would that make my trip to Abbey Road studios in 1999 Medina?)

We were only going to be there until Tuesday morning, so this was going to be my all-out Beatles fangirl day. We landed in John Lennon airport and headed to check in at the Hard Day’s Night hotel. Filled to the brim with Beatles photos, paintings, and memorabilia. The not cool part: You couldn’t take pictures in the lobby. Too many tourist problems, I guess. But I still managed to get a photo of what I thought was the coolest thing there: George Martin’s hand-written string quartet score for “Yesterday.”

We signed up for another bus tour, the Magical Mystery Tour. Dad and I knew from our previous bus tour that we wanted to get on the bus early to secure window seats. We each took a side on the bus so we could get a shot of everything. Fortunately for me, most of the good stuff was on my side of the bus.

We didn’t get out of the bus often, but we got out for George Harrison’s and Paul McCartney’s childhood homes, Strawberry Fields, and Penny Lane. We passed many other things, including the childhood homes of John Lennon and Ringo Starr, and many other things that only a Beatles fangirl like me would be interested in. Just so you know, I won the tour guide’s Beatles trivia quiz. Well, it wasn’t really a game, but the guy was asking questions and I knew the most obscure ones. Getting a round of applause was enough of a win for me.

We were let off by our hotel, because it happened to be around the corner from the Cavern Club. Even though pretty much the whole place was reconstructed, I can still say I stood on its stage. Dad and I walked over to Albert Dock to The Beatles Story exhibition. There happened to be a huge tall ships race leaving the dock the same morning, so while thousands of people were trying to leave the dock, we were trying to enter!

By the way, there were these statues all over the city. Liverpool had been named Europe's capital of culture for 2008, and they decided to put these "Super Lamb Bananas" all over the place. Here's one outside The Beatles Story, dressed up like Ringo.

I cannot express how awesome Monday was.

Tuesday we took the train to Chester, because Dad wanted to visit the cathedral. In there I found a facsimile of Handel’s score for Messiah, which was cool. The town of Chester itself was a neat little place, with lots of Tudor architechture that was actually built while the Tudors reigned. From Chester we took a train through Wales, and caught the ferry in Holyhead to return to Dublin.

Built in 1571

This is the longest place name in the world...couldn't get it all in one shot!

Wednesday was spent walking around Dublin and taking a longer look at things we’d passed while on our way to the National Library or Archives. It’s weird, because I feel like I’ve typed so much, but I still didn’t mention everything we did in Ireland or England. Like, we saw a terrible production of The Three Sisters at the Abbey Theatre. I enjoyed seeing Hancock at the movie theater down the street from the hotel more. And the Cliffs of Moher had suicide prevention signs all over the place. And the famed River Mersey in Liverpool looks terrible from the air, it's brown. And did I mention all the sheep? And cows? And horses? And llamas? Hell, I even found Jesus in a box!

Oh, and did you know that Dublin has a big pointy pole in the middle of it?

When we returned I searched ancestry.com and found Patrick and Margaret in US censuses. Patrick came over in 1885, right after his mother died, leaving his 17-year old brother and two sisters to run the family farm. Margaret came over in 1888, Mary in 1896. If there were letters between her and Thomas, I don’t have them. There must have been, for my grandmother to know that he’d married twice (and have his address in her address book).

Eunice said she had pictures she could scan and send to us, but since she doesn’t have a computer at home (or even her own email address), we haven’t received them yet. We sent them copies of photos of Mary, Margaret and Patrick that my grandmother had had framed on her wall for decades. Dad also included a photo taken at a family gathering in 1995, as it most the only photo he could send with most of all the American cousins in it. There’s a wedding coming up in a few weeks, maybe we could take another one.

Anyway, that’s what I did for ten days in July. Thanks for bringing me with you, Dad. Kind of ironic that I managed to finish this just in time for the end of summer, isn't it?

What I did on my summer vacation, part three

As with most counties in Ireland, the biggest town in the county has the same name as the county itself. So to get to County Carlow, we took a train to the town of Carlow.

We’re about an hour’s train ride out of Dublin, and it’s obvious that we’re not in the city anymore. Most New Jersey towns are busier than this. I don’t know whether that says something about Ireland or New Jersey.

We went to the Carlow library, which, unlike the National Library, put their parish records on a computer printout. It was there that one of our mysteries was solved – how Elizabeth could have started having kids at forty. Turns out the grave was wrong – She was born five years later, making her the same age at her first child’s birth as my father’s mother and my own mother. Weird.

Francis wasn’t in the book, which means he was born before the record keeping started in 1813. The grave inferred 1811, which fits. He married Elizabeth then at age 53. I have a theory that this might have been a second marriage, but I didn’t look for evidence.

Looking for similar parents in the book we found several siblings for Elizabeth – Timothy, Mary, Ellen, Catherine, and John. Siblings of Francis included Denis, Mary, Rose, and Maurice. The death and marriage records aren’t as detailed, so we found only one of these people later on, Maurice’s death in 1908. So for all we know, most of these people died as children.

Speaking of, the book revealed a great uncle my dad didn’t know he had – James, born in 1869. Obviously he had died as a child if we’d never heard of him, but to see that in there was a surprise. (When we returned to Dublin, we found out that he’d died of seizures, aged three days. The other children were four and one, so they probably didn’t remember it and the parents didn’t talk about it. Sad.)

This is where pure dumb luck comes into play.

My dad dragged me all over town, trying to find this one pub he’d eaten at three years ago. I was growing increasingly frustrated with him, since I wanted to go to another place in town to do research and he hadn’t wanted to. Dad couldn’t find the pub, so we settled into lunch at a hotel.

Where we’d wanted to go next was the cemetery that we now knew contained our ancestors. I’d written down the phone numbers of several local cab companies, but we exited the hotel to find two random cabs waiting outside. We climbed into one and showed the driver the directions to the church we’d found online.

“That’d take you 9 km out of the way!” He exclaimed. He drove up to the other cab. “Hey, Pat, can you believe these directions? They want you to take Castledermot Road!”

Turns out, the cab driver, Noel’s, son went to school at its church. He even lived in the town from where those 1940s letters came from. He had us at the cemetery within ten minutes, and told us to call his cell when we were ready to leave.

In the cemetery, Dad found the grave from the website. Finally seeing it in person solved the mystery of Thomas’s missing child. It did not say that he died in 1930 aged 31; he died in 1930 aged 3 ½. But more importantly, I found a grave with the family name that wasn’t on the website. In it were Patrick, Frank, and Luke; the three sons of Thomas mentioned in the letters. Also in that grave was a baby Padraic; this made another mystery baby, as the other grave had a baby John in it. Dad assumed they were the sons of one or two of Thomas’s sons. I mused over it. “There are three brothers here…where are their wives buried?”

Dad and I argued over where to go next. I wanted to go to the church where the actual book of parish records was kept (we’d gotten the priest’s phone number in Carlow), but Dad wanted to go to Rutland and try and track down where the farm was, even though all he had was a map from 1852. We were still debating this when the cab pulled up, but not with Noel; It was Pat, his partner. He asked about what we were looking for, and Dad happened to let the surname of the relatives slip.

“Hey, I know a Tom in Rutland!” Pat piped up. “I play football with him! He’s the only one in town, I’ll take you to his house!”

Um…what?

Sure, it was possible that he was named after who would have been his grandfather, but…was he really driving us to a stranger’s house right now?

Yes, he was, and soon we were pulling up in front of a small farmhouse. A redheaded woman came to the door when Pat knocked. Awkwardly, we named a bunch of names for her and asked if it was her family.

She said yes.

Let’s put that in perspective: My dad and I expected to find absolutely nothing about our family history when we came to Ireland and we’d managed to track down living relatives.

The woman at the door was Tom’s wife Eunice, and once realizing we were family instantly invited us in and made tea. Tom was at work. Once of her three kids managed to poke her head in the kitchen, the only blood relative I saw that day – my third cousin Ciara, the oldest at nine years old. Tom’s mother Nancy also lived with them. She was the wife of Luke, and the two babies buried in the cemetery were her children. (Like that wasn’t awkward when we found out that one.) Pat and Frank never married, we found out. Pat had died of a heart attack, and Frank in a boiler explosion accident. (Eep.)

We told them about their cousins over in America. They were obviously more interested in us, as there were a lot more of us than there were of them! But it was so weird to take out those old letters, read them out loud, and have someone sitting next to you know exactly who those people were! Yes, Thomas’s daughter Elizabeth had been a nun. Yes, the Keegan farm had been next door, but it had been sold long ago, that’s why the letters came from a different town. Marianne, Thomas’s first wife? She’d always been very sickly, that’s probably why they never had children. Yes, this is the same farm, but we had to build a new house because the old one was falling apart and full of asbestos. Would you like to see it?

Eunice walked us through their apple orchard (!!!) to reveal the house exactly as described in the census from a century ago. Of course, what do we ask first?

“Where’s the piggery?”

“Oh, we turned that into a milking station,” Eunice told us. “If it was still a piggery, you’d have smelled it from three km away!”

“Oh, so you still have cows then?”

“Yes, we have sixty cattle.”

“Um…I have a dog. Is that a cat over there?”

“Yes, we have nine of them.”

I kept asking questions of Eunice while Dad went around taking pictures of everything he could see. He picked up a clod of dirt from the ground, and announced that he was going to put it on Mary and Margaret’s grave in Queens. When Nancy saw what he had grabbed, she remarked that if he wanted weeds, there were plenty more of those he could take. Farmers, we are not.

Eunice drove us to the Tinryland church, where the priest showed us the original books. Then Noel picked us up and drove us back to Carlow, where from my Dad’s vague memories, he managed to find the pub he’d wanted to go to for lunch. Good thing he found it too, I had one of the best cheeseburgers I’d ever eaten in my life.

We were exhausted, amazed, and still slightly in shock. We’d found everything, solved all the mysteries. And we’d managed to find the one cab driver in the county at the right time to lead us to it all.

And we still had five more days in Europe!

What I did on my summer vacation, part two

In July, Dublin is about 20 degrees cooler outside than in New Jersey. I’m told they make up for it in milder winters. Even so, that didn’t placate me as I frequently tightened my sweater around me to brace against the wind. We were lucky, though. It barely rained the entire time we were in Europe, and everywhere we went, we heard about the terrible storms that had deluged them the week before.

Dad and I had arrived at our hotel around 9:30 AM, and were told that we couldn’t check in until 3:00. Tired and icky from our overnight flight, we dropped off our luggage and headed straight for the National Library. There was research to be done!

We located the microfilm to church records of what we hoped was our ancestors’ parish. All marriages and baptisms between 1813 and 1890 were on the same roll. Just as I feared, many of the pages were in illegible handwriting. Many of the pages were almost too faded to read at all. The first half of the roll was just written in haphazardly until a form was created. And yes, it was all in Latin.

I scrolled to the birth records for March 1868. And there it was. “Thoma” and “Margherita,” parents “Francis” and “Elizabeth.” And a note at the end of the page – “Thoma et Margherita sunt gemini” – they were twins. It was the baptismal record for my great-grandmother’s older siblings. We’d pinned down the first names of their parents. That was going to be a great help.

Then I scrolled down to 1878, hoping to find Mary that easily. No dice. I searched all the way backwards over the previous ten years, back to the twins. I found another sibling in 1871, and the writing was so faded that I could only identify the names of the parents. I squinted, and the first name seemed to be some latinate form of Patrick, the other brother.

We had barely been in the country a few hours, and we had already found crucial information. We knew the church parish and parents’ first names. Time to check in to the hotel and take a nap.



Now that we were sure that the tombstone transcription we’d read online before we arrived was our family, we now knew that Francis had died in 1881, and Elizabeth in 1885. This raised some questions: It said Elizabeth had died aged 60. That meant she’d had her first child at 43. Not common for 19th century Irish catholics. Even more confusing, Francis died aged 70, which meant he’d had his first child at age 57!

The next day, we walked across the city center to the National Archives, which contained microfilms of the 1901 and 1911 censuses. We wanted to know what happened to Thomas after his siblings left for America.

(After this vacation, I am now an expert at microfilm machines. Just saying.)

He’d taken over the family farm with his wife Marianne. In 1901, they’d lived in a house with stone walls and a thatched roof, two rooms and three windows in front. They had a stable, a cow house, a calf house, a dairy, and a piggery. (Dad and I spent much time giggling at the word “piggery.”) By 1911, they’d added two sheds, a fowl house, a boiling house, and another piggery!

They had no children, but Marianne’s niece lived with them in 1911. Now we had yet another mystery: The tombstone transcription said that Thomas had a son that would have been born in 1899. He didn’t show up in either census. Marianne died a couple of years after the 1911 census. The couple was well into their forties. Another Irish catholic family with no kids?! ( Hey, it’s a stereotype, but it’s what we were going by!)

We walked back across the city to the General Register’s Office, where all the civil registries were kept. Here’s how they roll: Unlike the other buildings we’d been to, this one charged you for searches. There are large index books, one for each year of the registry since 1864. Red books were for births, green books were for marriages, and black ones were for deaths. To search a five year span of one kind of book, you had to pay four euros. To have someone in the back photocopy the entry you think might be one of your relatives, it costs two euros. Of course, there was only one copy of each index book, so if someone else was using it, you had to wait. Most of the workers behind the desk were pretty lenient and let you check any book you wanted, but one bitchy lady made me put the 1878 book away when I’d paid her for 1869-1873. Grr.

Thomas and Margaret’s birth was tracked down pretty quickly (“Two for the price of one!” The worker cried with glee when I turned in the photocopy form) and it was on that form that we discovered that my great-great grandparents were illiterate – they signed the certificate with an X. I thought of checking for Francis and Elizabeth’s marriage certificate. We were in luck – they got married in 1864, the first year of mandatory registry. On the form were the names of their fathers, which we hadn’t known before. We managed to find a birth record of a Mary registered in Carlow right before the place closed, and we turned in a photocopy form before we left.

After much anticipation overnight, we returned there the next morning to find out that we had the wrong person. We then decided to search for the death records of Francis and Elizabeth. The records gave cause of death. Francis had died of prostate cancer, which he’d had for a few years with no medical attention. (If he’d had no medical attention, how’d they know it was prostate cancer? Did they do autopsies in 19th century rural Ireland?) Elizabeth had died in a mental asylum, which she had been in for a year in a half, still in depression over the death of her husband. Eep.

I decided to do a methodical search to find Mary and Patrick’s birth certificates – I searched every birth book between 1868 and 1871 and wrote down everything I found and didn’t find. It was then that we found Mary’s birth record – the one piece of information my dad needed for the dual citizenship application. She was born in 1871. She was the faded record I’d seen in the church microfilm two days earlier. I’d found my great-grandmother’s real birth year within hours of arrival, and I’d missed it! Upon returning to the library later that day, that record definitely read “Maria.”

While I was back in the library, we searched for two other things. One was a birth record of Patrick. We couldn’t find him in the civil records, and it was easier to search for free in the one roll of church records than pay to search through giant books and wait for photocopies, as we had been doing. This time, I knew to start searching in 1864, and he turned up almost instantly. Patrick was born in 1865 – he was the oldest child, which was different than what we had thought. I also scrolled to the church records of Francis and Elizabeth’s wedding – which gave the names of their mothers as well as their fathers.

Across the hallway from where I was with the microfilm machines, my dad was in the genealogy room’s computers, checking out a record of Irish land value in 1852. (Apparently the survey was so time consuming they never did it again.) There he found that Francis and Elizabeth’s families each rented farmland in Rutland. Dad tracked down a map with the farm boundaries marked off – the farms were next to each other. So my great-great-grandparents were living next door to each other, and their parents probably married them off when they realized that they were getting older. How…depressing.


There were still some questions that needed to be answered. It was time to head to County Carlow.

What I did on my summer vacation, part one

See this house?

My great-great-great-grandparents lived in it.

More on that later.

I’ve been back from Ireland a few weeks, but I’ve only gotten around to typing it up until now. So there.

My dad and I planned to spend ten days in Ireland. Our mission? Find evidence of my great-grandmother. One can get dual citizenship in Ireland if you have one grandparent that was born in the country, as my dad has.

Now one might ask, how come we never looked for this until now? Well, people have. My dad and stepmom went to Ireland three years ago and came up with nothing. His uncle and daughter went many years ago and found nothing. How were we going to find evidence on my Irish ancestors this year when the last relative to have known them, my grandmother, died over a year ago?

Here’s what we knew before my grandmother died. I decided to only include their first names. Just assume they’re all very very Irish surnames, because they are. The first names are too.

My Irish great-grandmother (Mary) was one of four children. They were from County Carlow. Three came to America (the ones that came with her were Margaret and Patrick), and one (Thomas) stayed behind. Mary and Margaret lived in Manhattan, Patrick in White Plains. Mary later moved to Queens, where she died in 1937. Margaret died in 1941. They’re buried in the same grave. The headstone says Margaret was born in 1868, and Mary in 1878. But we had reason to believe Mary was lying about her age.

Here’s what I found after my grandmother died, after I found a desk full of all her letters, which were meticulously organized by recipient:

I found an envelope labeled “Mary Kelly and Ireland.” There was one letter from 1940 or so from Mary Kelly, telling my grandmother that she’d given her and my grandfather’s address to a distant cousin in Ireland. The other letters, written during WWII, seemed to be to Mary Kelly from that cousin, and even though they were vague, they seemed to imply that Thomas, the uncle that stayed behind, had had children. One letter mentioned Frank and Pat, another Frank and Luke. Another mentioned a daughter that was a nun. These letters were from a town called Pollerton Little, in County Carlow.

Written on that envelope was a kind of family tree in my grandmother’s handwriting. It began with “Francis and Elizabeth (grandparents),” followed by “Children: Thomas and Margaret (twins), Patrick, Mary. Thomas married twice. Patrick married Margaret.” (No, Patrick did not marry his sister, I’m not including last names, remember?) The main thing about finding this envelope was that it contradicted the names of the parents listed on Mary’s death certificate. Those were listed as Thomas and Mary.

Here’s what my dad found a few months before we left:

There’s a website that lists what’s on gravestones in cemeteries in Ireland. It’s done by volunteer submission. And someone had submitted the headstones in a cemetery in Bennekerry, County Carlow, which had several of them with the surname we were looking for. One was erected by a Patrick “of White Plains, New York,” but all the other names were wrong. Another was for a Francis and Elizabeth, erected by Thomas of Rutland, and Thomas was buried there, along with his two wives. There was also a child of Thomas’s there, died age 31 in 1930, and also a baby buried in 1972. This seemed more like it, even though we had no idea where the baby came from. Rutland, Bennekerry, and Pollerton Little are all within two miles of each other, too.

Here’s what my dad and I found out within the week before we left:

My aunt had given my dad a book a few Christmases ago about finding Irish ancestry, and I read part of it. It told me that in Ireland, births were registered in parishes, and there were church parishes and civil parishes. Civil registration wasn’t required in Ireland until 1864. (Good, just in time for my ancestors to be born!) I also looked up all the places in Ireland that I could search about ancestry. I also found the website of the parish of Bennekerry, which said that before 1976, I need to be looking in the Tinryland parish. We didn’t even know if it was our relatives in that grave, but it was good to know. Also, the book told me that most of the church records back in the day were in Latin, including Latinizing most of the names. So since I was looking for a Mary, I had to search for Maria. And even then, the names might be different from what you thought they were, spelling or otherwise.

I also checked my grandmother’s birthday poster before we left. It had hung for decades on her basement door, where I stared at it from her kitchen, learning all the zodiac signs, birth stones, birth flowers, and most importantly, the birthdates of all my immediate relatives. Mary’s and Margaret’s birthdays were on it, and the more information you know, the better.

According to the book, just knowing the county your ancestors were from was a great start. We had names, approximate birthdates, and possibly the towns they lived in. And even then, we expected to find nothing.

We didn’t know how wrong we were.

I'm just here to learn CPR, I swear!

My brother Bryan is about to start his third year as a nursing major, and that means clinicals. He has to get CPR certification before he starts. I decided to take the class with him because hey, CPR is probably a good thing to know, especially as a teacher. We signed up for a class to be certified in adult, child, and infant CPR, as well as learning how to use an AED. (Though after taking the class, I realized it should be DFD - "Defibrillator for Dummies.")

The class was being held in a hospital, and Bryan and I hadn't realized that we'd walked into the wrong building of the hospital. We wandered for a few minutes before returning to the front desk and asked where room such-and-such was. She directed us to the correct building.

"It's right over there, the classrooms are upstairs," she said. "Are you here for the Lamaze class?"

I resisted my urge to turn purple.

"No, we're here for CPR." I said through gritted teeth. I waited until we were outside before I turned to Bryan and yelled "Do I look like I need a Lamaze class?"

I'll remind here that Bryan is about to go work as a nursing student in a hospital, beacuse at this point he asked me what Lamaze was. When I explained it to him, he first realized what the lady at the desk had assumed about us, and started gagging. Then he realized what she'd assumed about me, and started laughing.

We made it to the other building, and found our way upstairs. We were now a few minutes late for the class. I heard voices, found an open classroom, and walked in.

"Hi, is this the CPR class?" I asked.

"No, it's Lamaze!"

Dammit!

A Taste of Humility

Maybe it tastes a little like this.

That's a bowl of cheese soup my brother Bryan ordered in Michigan. Yuck.

Anyway.

A month ago, I decided to try out for Who Wants to Be A Millionaire again. Last year, I tried out, passed the test, had a two minute interview and was out the door. I later received a postcard telling me that I was not selected to be in their contestant pool.

So I decided to do it again this year, and this time, I convinced my brother Jonathan to come with me. We took the bus into Manhattan and took the subway up to 59th street, where we walked to the ABC studios on 66th street. While on line to get in, we met a couple from Long Island. The husband was the one taking the test, while his wife would wait outside for him.

When you get inside, you realize that you're in the cafeteria. Everyone sits at the tables and takes the multiple choice scantron test there. As we sat down, the guy coordinating the whole thing announced that there were theme weeks that you could also try out for, just by writing them on our scantrons. If you wanted to complete with your fiance on "Play to Pay for Your Wedding" week, put down your fiance's name. If your name matched a famous person's name, write down "Famous names." (Jon and I glanced at each other at that one. He shares his name with a major well-known major league pitcher, but spells his first name differently. I share my name with a D-list actress. We didn't put famous names down.) The last one was for undergraduate college students. Jon wrote "college" on his scantron.

There were 30 questions on the test. I was unsure of 12 of my answers. Not good.

When the announced the results, Jon's number was called. Mine wasn't. Crap.

I went to wait outside for Jon to finish his interview. Out there I met up again with the woman behind me in line; her husband has passed too. We waited. And waited. And waited. People were coming out from their interviews. Other people were let inside for the next set of tests. Then the door closed. They still hasn't come out.

I walked up to a coordinator on the street and asked where they were. "Oh, they probably had a video interview," she said. "They get let out on 67th."

A second interview? A video interview? I didn't have one of those last year. No fair.

After almost an hour of waiting, we finally saw them coming down the street. They'd been led up to the studio, where they'd been interviewed on camera after the first interviewed in the cafeteria.

So in one try, my brother had done better in the Millionaire tryouts than I had in two. I can take comfort in the fact that there's a possibility that the college passing score was lower. Also, I've earned more money on a game show than he has...so far.

And I would ride 500 miles in a car and I would ride 500 more...

Seriously. It's almost exactly 500 miles from my house to my aunt's in Michigan.

Had a nice time at the wedding. Saw lots of relatives, stuffed myself with food, even caught the bouquet. But for some reason, my favorite part of the trip to Michigan was while I was at the Detroit Science Center with my uncle and cousin Saturday morning.

Written on the back of a sign leading to a display was this.

"While you are reading this, I am eating your samich"

I am so easily amused.

Summer's Here!

And the time is right, for....driving hundreds of miles to my cousin's wedding this weekend. Not exactly dancing in the streets here over the long car ride. Time to load lots of video into the iPod.

So that squeaky noise in my car? The one I asked to have checked out when I took it in to get my horn replaced? It was some of the joints about to collapse. Yes, the front end of my car was about to fall off, and no one at the inspection station noticed.

Twelve hundred dollars later, my car is all better, and my checkbook cried a little. But this is still cheaper than paying for a new car.

Before I go back to sleep...

It's 5:43 in the morning. I've just gotten out of the shower. Final exams start today.

Or maybe not.

I just got two calls telling me that the town I work in has no power due to last night's thunderstorms, and school is canceled.

This completely throws off my schedule, as I needed to take tomorrow off for an appointment, and they might schedule the two finals I had to give today for tomorrow.

On the other hand, I just realized I managed to schedule two things for this afternoon at around the same time, and now that I'm free the whole day, I can hopefully move one of those things up.

That one thing would be my annual eye exam (woo myopia!), which I set two months ago because I wanted an after school appointment. The other thing? Taking my car into the shop, which I set yesterday and didn't realize that they were at the same time.

Why is my car going into the shop? Because it failed inspection. It did not fail for having the emissions of a thirteen year old car. It did not fail because of the squeaking sounds that emit from under the car when I turn the wheel. (Although I'm going to ask to have that checked out.) No, it failed because the horn doesn't work. And because the oil change sticker on my windshield was a "visual obstruction." That's just being dicky, in my distinguished opinion. But the car's going in for a new horn now, so I don't have to physically yell "beep!" whenever someone cuts me off on the highway.

Hopefully I can manage to get back to sleep now, since my town has power (although parts of it had no water yesterday, apparently), and I have an air conditioner.

Heading for the home stretch

Teachers get excited for the end of the school year too, you know. We also have a lot of hard work coming to an end that we're happy for. On a similar note, we are also happy for school cancellations, as evidenced by my jumping up and down at a phone call I received this evening, telling me that schools in my district will be closed tomorrow, due to the expected 100-degree heat. This brings the number of school days left on my calendar to eight. And I've had that countdown going for over a month now.

I have another vignette to share to end this post.

A month or so ago a fundraising company sent us two of their cookies in the hopes that we'd do our fundraising with them. We already do, but whatever, free cookies! Even though my colleague and I were wary of cookies sent through the mail with fairly flimsy packaging, we each took one, bit into them....and spat them out. They tasted like old dusty dirt.

Last Friday, I found another package from that company in my mailbox. I went back to the choir room and tossed the package of cookies to some students that were hanging out in there, warning them that it might not taste so good. Then I noticed a pink piece of paper still in the envelope.

"OOPS!" was written in big block letters on top. The note went on to say that a newly-printed brochure likely affected the taste of the cookies in the last package, and enjoy a new batch. My laughter at this attracted the attention of the students happily eating the new cookies, and I had to explain to them that their dumb teachers had eaten the old cookies. Oops indeed.

Okay, let's try this again.

Literally the day after I made my last post, my brother coincidentally mentioned to me that there's also a 1001 albums to hear before you die list. Now we're talking my language: music. But I'm going to do this one a little differently. If I have at least one song from the album in my iTunes library, I'll include it here. If I have the whole album, I'll star it.

And keep in mind, reading this list has caused me to want to make some additions to my iTunes collection, but I'll do that later. And there are several albums on here that I do own in their entirety, but don't want to put in their entirety in my iTunes, so they're not starred.

Elvis Presley – Elvis Presley
Fats Domino – This is Fats
The Crickets – The Chirping Crickets
Little Richard – Here’s Little Richard
Dave Brubeck – Time Out
Joan Baez – Joan Baez
The Everly Brothers – A Date with the Everly Brothers
Ray Charles - Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music
The Beatles – With the Beatles*
Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
Sam Cooke – Live at the Harlem Square*
Stan Getz & João Gilberto – Getz/Gilberto
The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night*
Bob Dylan – Bringing it All Back Home*
The Beatles – Rubber Soul*
Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited
The Who – My Generation
The Beatles – Revolver*
The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds
Bob Dylan – Blonde on Blonde
The Mamas & the Papas – If You Can Believe Your Eyes & Ears*
The Rolling Stones – Aftermath
Simon & Garfunkel – Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme*
The Beatles – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band*
Cream – Disraeli Gears
The Who – Sell Out
Donovan – Sunshine Superman
Jimi Hendrix – Are You Experienced
Jimi Hendrix – Axis: Bold as Love
Aretha Franklin – I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
The Rolling Stones – Beggars Banquet
Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland
Simon & Garfunkel – Bookends*
The Band – Music from Big Pink
The Zombies – Odessey & Oracle
The Beatles – The Beatles [aka the White Album]*
Crosby, Stills & Nash – Crosby, Stills & Nash
The Beatles – Abbey Road*
The Rolling Stones – Let it Bleed
Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin II
Sly & the Family Stone – Stand!
Derek & the Dominos – Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs
John Lennon – Plastic Ono Band*
Led Zeppelin – III
Van Morrison – Moondance
George Harrison – All Things Must Pass*
Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water*
Paul McCartney – McCartney
Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On
John Lennon – Imagine*
Don McLean – American Pie
Led Zeppelin – IV
Rod Stewart – Every Picture Tells a Story
Nilsson, Harry – Nilsson Schmilsson
Neil Young – Harvest
Stevie Wonder – Talking Book
Paul Simon – Paul Simon
The Temptations – All Directions
Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Stevie Wonder – Innervisions
Paul McCartney & Wings – Band on the Run
Queen – Sheer Heart Attack
Bob Marley & the Wailers – Natty Dread
Led Zeppelin – Physical Graffiti
Bruce Springsteen – Born to Run
Dion – Born to Be With You
Queen – A Night at the Opera
Billy Joel – The Stranger
Electric Light Orchestra – Out of the Blue
Peter Gabriel – Peter Gabriel
Elvis Costello – My Aim is True
Sex Pistols – Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols
Elvis Costello – This Year’s Model
B52s – B52s
The Clash – London Calling
Michael Jackson – Off the Wall
AC/DC – Back in Black
Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five – The Message
Bruce Springsteen – Born in the USA
Paul Simon – Graceland
Michael Jackson – Bad
NWA – Straight Outta Compton
Black Crowes – Shake Your Money Maker
Nirvana – Nevermind
Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream
Liz Phair – Exile in Guyville
Nirvana – In Utero
Sheryl Crow – Tuesday Night Music Club
Portishead – Dummy
Beastie Boys – Ill Communication
TLC – CrazySexyCool
Offspring – Smash
Blur – Parklife
Notorious BIG – Ready to Die
Jeff Buckley – Grace
Nirvana – MTV Unplugged in New York
Nine Inch Nails – Downward Spiral
Green Day – Dookie
Foo Fighters – Foo Fighters
Garbage – Garbage
Smashing Pumpkins – Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness
Elastica – Elastica
Oasis – (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
Beck – Odelay
The Eels – Beautiful Freak
Fiona Apple – Tidal
Fugees – The Score
Ash – 1977
Blur – Blur
Radiohead – OK Computer
System of a Down - System of a Down
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication
Coldplay – Parachutes
Eminem – Marshall Mathers LP
Gorillaz – Gorillaz
The Strokes – Is This It
The White Stripes – White Blood Cells
Norah Jones – Come Away with Me
Coldplay – A Rush of Blood to the Head
Johnny Cash – American IV: Man Comes Around
The Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
Beck – Sea Change
Justin Timberlake – Justified
The Vines – Highly Evolved
Radiohead – Hail to the Thief
The White Stripes – Elephant
OutKast – Speakerboxxx/Love Below
Rufus Wainwright – Want One
Brian Wilson – SMiLE
Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand*
Kanye West – College Dropout
Rufus Wainwright – Want Two
The Killers – Hot Fuss
The White Stripes – Get Behind Me Satan

Only 134?! Well, that's better than the other two, at least. And I've heard of a lot of the stuff on the list, but it's just not on my iTunes. Sigh. Where's the "1001 pieces of renaissance choral music to hear before you die" list? I'd rock that one.

Listy goodness to prove my lack of pop culture immersion

Through Kottke I found a list of 1001 movies to see before you die. I decided to make a list of my own of these movies, of what I'd seen. I also added some from the alterations of the list here. And like Kottke, I starred my favorites. It's only 1000 movies, right? Surely I must have seen at least 100 of them, right?

Wrong.


A Trip to the Moon (1902)
Seven Chances (1925)
The Gold Rush (1925)
Triumph of the Will (1934)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Gone With the Wind (1939)
West Side Story (1961)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)*
The Sound of Music (1965)
The Jungle Book (1967)
Woodstock (1970)
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
The Godfather (1972)
Sleeper (1973)
The Godfather Part II (1974)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Star Wars (1977)*
Grease (1978)
The Muppet Movie (1979)
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)*
Airplane! (1980)
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
A Christmas Story (1983)
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)*
Amadeus (1984)
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Ghostbusters (1984)
Back to the Future (1985)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
The Naked Gun (1988)
Big (1988)
Rain Man (1988)
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Glory (1989)
Goodfellas (1990)
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Philadelphia (1993)
Forrest Gump (1994)*
Clerks (1994)*
The Lion King (1994)*
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Babe (1995)
Toy Story (1995)
Clueless (1995)
Independence Day (1996)
Scream (1996)
Titanic (1997)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Being John Malkovich (1999)
American Beauty (1999)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Matrix (1999)
Gladiator (2000)
Meet the Parents (2000)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)*
Amelie (2001)*
Moulin Rouge (2001)*
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Adaptation (2002)
Chicago (2002)
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
Lost in Translation (2003)
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
Sideways (2004)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)

That's 73. And the problem with that is I don't even remember if I've seen some of these in their entirety. See, most of these were not seen by me by a distinct desire to go see that specific movie. I half-watched them when they appeared on cable or I watched them for a class (like I would watch Triumph of the Will voluntarily. come on). I'm just not a movie person, I guess. I don't have the attention span to sit through them. Speaking of, there's at least three movies on that list where I definitely have not seen the ending, due to my falling asleep beforehand.

Surely the number I've read on the 1001 books to read before you die will be better, right?


Beloved – Toni Morrison
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.*
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.*
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov*
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Candide – Voltaire
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Crap. Only 25, and all of them books I've read for a class for read with the intention on writing a paper on them for a class. At least I've reread many of them willingly. I shall blame this on that I either read more non-fiction, or more crappier books. (There's probably about five books on that list that I was supposed to read for a class and then didn't. Heh.)

I guess I shall be spending my summer watching movies and reading books. But it will probably end up being movies I've already seen and books I've already read. Oh well. I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that I have seen and read bits and pieces of many more on the lists, and probably know the general story of even more. This is the trick to making yourself seem smart: Know a little about a lot, and everyone will think you know what you're talking about, even when you haven't read the book, or seen the movie, or seen the movie based on the book.