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March 27, 2006

Paris Chronicles!

Inspired partly by the amusing and beautifully written (although sometimes off-color) travelogues of William "Sundown" Sanders, we've decided to put up some of our Paris chronicles and pictures from our trip last summer. Hope you enjoy it! Stay tuned for our opening installment.

Posted by Tim and Jo at 7:45 PM | Comments (1)

March 25, 2006

Gruesome "Grizzly Man"

"The bears only left him alive so long prob'ly 'cause they thought that there wasn't somepin' right wi' him...like he was mentally retarded or somepin'"

-Quote from a park ranger

For a big gulp of bizzareness, watch Grizzly Man. It's about a guy so obsessed with grizzly bears that he begins to think that he's a bear, too, realizing his mistake only when he gets munched. Eeek. You don't see that--thank goodness! But the director tells the story of Timothy Treadwell through the footage that Timothy took while he was out in the wild, and through interviews with his odd, hippy friends (and a creepy smiling coroner). It sounds like a grim story, but Timothy's egocentric but dynamic personality draws you into the story, and there are very funny (albeit dark) moments of humor in it. It ends with a helicopter pilot singing along with a song "Coyotes," the chorus of which is "PoooYip, pooYip, poooo, pududooYip, poooYip poooo."

Posted by Tim and Jo at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2006

lecture videos

Woohoo! Tim has been an obsessively loyal customer of The Teaching Company for many years (I calculated that he has enough lectures to watch one hour a day for an entire leap year). (wifely commentary: he's watched enough to go way beyond any college liberal arts education I know of) To reward him for his loyal service, and because they're transferring their products into DVDs, they offered him a free lecture series of his choice. So, we picked out the mega-series on Western Literature that we drool over every time the catalog comes out, and couldn't ever afford. Yay! Obviously, it's a survey, but there are authors I've wanted to get to know and I know I'll appreciate having an introduction to their works.

Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition

Posted by Tim and Jo at 6:39 PM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2006

Spielberg as historian?

Tim has started initiating me into the exciting realms of "guy flicks". We worked our way through the Godfather trilogy, with interesting discussions on its relationship to Greek tragedies. I couldn't stomach too much more of the gangster genre--Scarface was a little too much for me.

He's also introduced me to the war genre of movies. Right now, we're working through the mini-series Band of Brothers, co-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. It's a true story of an airnorne unit in WWII, each episode introduced by interviews with surviving veterans from that unit. I get choked up by their stories before the episodes even start. The series is beautifully done. Oftentimes, the color is faded, almost like hand-painted photographs from the same time period. The show uses powerful imagery as well--an Edelweiss bud in the lapel of a dead German soldier, an upright piano in the street of a battle-wrecked village. It's rough going though, it paints a gritty picture of the realities of war (I saw on netflix that it's rated MA, I assume for the gruesome and realistic violence). I've made it through the first three episodes, with seven left to go. Hopefully I can be a brave soldier and make it through all of them.

But it's set me thinking about Spielberg's role as a historian. It seems to me (oh, I hate to admit this since I'm endeavoring to become a historian using words as my medium) that he tells stories through cinema that penetrate people's consciousness more indelibly than stories told merely through words. But then--and I think this is partly why I would categorize him as a serious historian--he connects his movies with story-telling or history-telling by the people who participated in the events he narrates, such as his work with Holocaust memorials after directing Schindler's List, and the interviews with veterans in Band of Brothers, and additionally, on the Band of Brother's website, there's a section for veterans to tell their own stories.

Posted by Tim and Jo at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2006

Hands full!

Posted by Tim and Jo at 1:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2006

Quiche

So, we're having tons of people over tomorrow--kind of a college reunion for Tim's best friends from college. How fun! I decided to make-ahead some things for this weekend for the two of us, so I didn't have to worry about that while I was trying to host oodles of people.

Needed to use up some feta cheese, so I found this easy recipe on epicurious and modified it. I used some frozen pie shells I had in the freezer, doubled (at least) the recipe, tossed in some leftover sun-dried tomatoes, and used the leftover oil from the tomatoes to cook the red pepper for some extra flavor.

Spinach, Red Pepper, and Feta Quiche

I'll find out in the morning how it worked!

Posted by Tim and Jo at 9:22 PM | Comments (2)