HOUSEKEEPING @ PLG

Someone has a birthday coming up.... PLG will celebrate it's one year anniversaire in August and as is customary when planning a party, I realized I needed to clean house.

Not this house, actually this one is pretty clean.  But my cyber home at blogspot is in a wee bit of a state of neglect.

These random photos, for example.  What to do?  They are awesome yet have not made their way into a post.

I did tweet this one but...

It just goes really well with this one.  Riding the subway has become a lot more tolerable thanks to this high level of poster art.

So back to cleaning up the blog... Ugh.  Aside from having a bunch of cool photos ( that I will interject without comment henceforth) that got sort of lost in the shuffle, there was a good bit of rearranging and cleaning to be done on the blog itself.

First I realized I never quite finished off my profile.  My favorite movies looked like someone else had filled it out, maybe 4 favorite books and no interests...

So that's all pretty much up to speed.  Then my blogroll was ancient.  I don't remember ever going to some of the blogs I "hearted".   That's been updated.

My favorite iphone apps needed a little primping as well.  Then there was "pages"...

Nothing much to do there.  Fairly orderly.  I do need to take more graffiti photos and eventually add to the poetry collages but that will take some time.  (Maybe in time for the party ?)

I felt compelled to switch out the travel log slide show for something a little more relevant and a lot more delicious.   Watching all that food go by, it's kind of amazing I made all those dishes but even more amazing that I ate all those dishes.  Oh well, just prove my theory that homemade food doesn't make you fat.  Or my other theory: sometimes when you have a lot on your plate : ) you don't have time to eat.

Anyway, I also added a 'subscribe to this blog' widget.  We'll see.

MOVIES

    It's about time I wrote about one of my favorite things in life - movies.  Since I first discovered Shirley Temple when I was about 4 years old, I have been in love with classic Hollywood.  That day after sitting in front of the tv, hypnotized by this little girl, my age, singing, tap dancing, acting her heart out, I was made aware of a bigger world out there.  The fantasy world of the black and white, classic Hollywood moving picture.   I spent a lot of time in those childhood years watching the classics.  So when I thought about this post, a few times, I didn't know how to attack it.  I love modern movies too!  It's very hard to organize this subject.  So, I just picked off the top of my head.  I didn't research or ponder, I just decided to make lists of the first things that came to mind.  I started with :

HEART-STOPPING BEAUTIES  (character name and actress)


'Slim' played by Lauren Bacall

'Scarlett'  played by Vivien Leigh

'Lise Bouvier'  played by Leslie Caron

'Baby Doll'  played by Carroll Baker

'Barbarella'  played by Jane Fonda

'Bonnie Parker'  played by Faye Dunaway

'Kim Macaffee'  played by Ann Margaret

'Maggie Dubois'  played by Natalie Wood

'Natalia Landauer'  played by Marisa Berenson

'Lady Jessica'  played by Francesca Anis

These are the first 10 that came to mind.  And they are indeed a collection of spectacular characters played by spectacular actresses.
  I naturally had to follow that with a list of actors.

KICK ASS MALE CHARACTERS

'Sam Spade'  played by Humphrey Bogart

'Nick Charles'  played by William Powell

'Egbert Souse'  played by WC Fields

'Adenoid Hynkel'  played by Charlie Chaplin

'Homer Parish'  played by Harold Russell

'Father Fitzgibbon'  played by Barry Fitzgerald

'Maxim de Winter'  played by Lawrence Olivier

'James bond'  played by Sean Connery

'Edward Scissorhands'  played by Johnny Depp

'Hawkeye'  played by Daniel Day Lewis

  All of these characters, male and female, have touched me deeply.  Each one brave in some way, maybe a little ahead of their time or outside the box or just stubborn and strong.  I love them all.

  I then tried to think of lines from movies that had stuck in my head over the years and I actually came up with a few.  There are more modern movies in this list, not sure why...

"I think we can walk to the curb from here"  Annie Hall

"Mmm  Italian food."  Mafia

"Just be careful with your comins and your goins and your what-not"  Observe and Report

"I got to get organise"  Scarface

"Kurtz got off the boat"  Apocalypse Now

"Oil can what?"  The Wizard of Oz

"The next time a woman slaps you, you'll take it and like it"  The Maltese Falcon

"Why these are great on   ...    or even plain"  Holiday Inn

"As soon as you grow hair and get younger,  I'll stop calling you old and bald."  Baby Doll

"I'll take the next one"  Ghostbusters

"Simone, let's talk about your big butt"  Pee Wee's Big Adventure

 "I'm afraid of heights.  I get dizzy walking on thick carpet"  My Favorite Brunette


There is no way I can make a list of top 10 movies.  I would first have to make top 10 categories I think. I don't know.  This is just the first movie post.  I will have to think of how to proceed from here but I'm off to a good start.  Movies, i love you !

FUN & GAMES

Summertime always brings memories of family vacations and long days at home trying to amuse oneself.  We always played a lot of card games in the summer.  Both my mom and my grandmother were big card players ( bridge ...) and you could always get them to play a game of gin.  But in the summer there were games of Hearts and Spades with the whole family and I loved it.  The cards would just sort of stay out all summer and kids would come over and teach each other card tricks and new ways of playing solitaire.

  There was always some poor soul who hadn't yet heard of 52 pick up.
Then things got really fun when someone's Dad, or in my case Grandfather, pulled out the chips and got all the kids playing poker.  Those were fun games!

We always went on rather rustic kinds of vacations.  Not that Balboa Island or Lake Tahoe are off the radar, but the beach house was very low key, intended to be sandy and full of kids and NO TV.  It's almost hard to believe.  But those beach houses or lake cabins etc were usually stocked with board games  and paperback books and puzzles and starry skies. And my big brother would actually play with me as opposed to the school year when I was the little sister cramping his style.  I relished the attention.

Bingo is one of those beach house games.  It was so exciting calling out the letters and getting to yell Bingo.  I guess the excitement takes on a new twist once one becomes a senior citizen, I don't know.  I  will just have to wait and see.

Then there was Yahtzee.  We played Yahtzee on my Grandparents boat around the kitchen table after dinner ( or I guess it's the 'galley table' ).  I assumed it was a game invented for playing while 'yachting' hence the name.  It all made sense.  And I was ever the Captain of the ship.  My Grandfather would put a captains hat on me and let me steer for a whole 3 minutes - long enough for him to grab the camera and take my picture grinning ear to ear ( missing a tooth or more). Yahtzee is dear to me.

Scrabble plays on.  Even now when I'm all grown up and almost never without my iphone in my hand I am involved in several games on 'Words With Friends'.  It's technically not Scrabble but whatever.  Actual Scrabble is even more fun and it's not very hard to get a table top Scrabble game going.  It's amazing how many people are way into Scrabble.  Like kind of aggressively.  I know several people who would say they rule Scrabble.  That's pretty impressive for a game invented in 1938 that involves spelling... not everyone's passion.  Board games are still lots of fun.  You can control the pace, take breaks, get people of all ages together and someone is going to be the winner!  I hear that in some schools they don't keep score at the team games etc to avoid the winner/loser situation.  First of all that is insane, and secondly, that's taking away the profound joy of winning that lasts about 3 minutes and then everyone moves on.  I played all these games this weekend, and surprisingly had no trouble getting people to play ( including the OCD gamers in the house).  I was able to tear people away from their computers and tv and we had a ball!  ( by the way - I played 2 bingo cards, 1 for me and 1 for the dog.  Of course the dog won!  She is extremely clever.)
  Life hasn't changed that much ( except that without my grandfather keeping score, Yahtzee was a bit of a disaster.)  Slow it way down, play some cards or board games, let the little ones stay up late ( and let them win... ) and enjoy summer!!!