An Education

Another Ragtag movie (how I spent my last night of Thanksgiving break). Very British, made me miss Uppingham.
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Foxy

"If you're gonna cuss, you're not gonna cuss with me, you little cuss!" -Badger, in Fantastic Mr. Fox. Great film :)
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Reading Days

"Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack." -Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting.
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Check Minus

"If Spivey felt Marathon to be unrealistic, he hasn't been in the sport that long." -Hal Higdon's reply to my review of his book on Amazon.com. Apparently finishing seven marathons - including Boston - doesn't justify my negative response to the book's ridiculous conclusion (heat waves, tornados, photo finishes, helicopter crashes, sponsorship issues, romance, supermodels and the pope?! Please.). Maybe I'd take his criticism more seriously if he realized I'm a girl (I have interviewed him, after all). See the entire fiasco here.
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Give Thanks

"Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for - annually, not oftener - if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments." -Mark Twain
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Be Alive

"A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life." -Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers.
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Holiday Pounds

"I'm having such a fat day; everything's just hanging out." -some lady in the locker room who decided to share her weight woes with me.
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Thanksgiving Break (finally)

"Come, woo me, woo me, for now I am in holiday humor and like enough to consent." -Shakespeare.
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Coen Bros. Strike Again

"Accept with simplicity everything that happens to you." -a line from Jewish scholar Rashi sets the tone for A Serious Man, which played last night at Ragtag. Definitely a film to make you think.

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The Few, The Proud

Another bumper sticker sighting...
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Evening at The Blue Note

My Mason Jennings concert review & an amazing audio-slideshow HERE.

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Winston

"We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give." -Churchill ... A quote out of my new 2010 (!) planner.
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Direction

"If stuff lights up for you, if you’re excited by certain things or feel joy, you should follow that. Trust that’s the right path." -part of my interview with Mason Jennings. Read my story here, and see him at The Blue Note tonight!
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A Blessing

"Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body, I would break into blossom." -James Wright. Full text & Garrison Keillor recording here.
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Lost in Space

"Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm." -NPR's Neil Conan references JFK during Saturday night's Ensemble Galilei's Universe of Dreams.
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Jackie Speaks

"If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much." -Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Bungle. Good word.
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Run for Your Life

My morning (not the usual weekend 5k!):

XCX - Cross Country Xtreme from Off Track Events on Vimeo.

Check out OffTrackEvents for the details...
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Up and Up

"You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall y our grandfather was." -Irish proverb.

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Research

"It's great to do what you like in life and even greater if it helps others." -MU's Dr. Stefan Sarafianos. Profiled here in today's Vox.
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Ewok Moonwalk

Sorry for another video, but this one is too funny to pass up:


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Adding Up

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." -Albert Einstein. Well said.
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Blast from the Past

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Sad but True?

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Saturday

"The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it." -F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Fashionista

"I wouldn't come to the tennis court in just a pair of shorts and a tennis shirt ... I have to approach life with my own aesthetics about style." -Andre Leon Talley in The September Issue.
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Yes They Can

"The Obamas will be the first First Couple having sex in the White House." -a professor shares her thoughts on the President's love life.
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Turn that Frown Upside Down

"Every time I smile, it hurts. But I don't think that's a reason not to smile." -a kid in my writing class explains how his face is healing after a bike accident. Aww.
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BRR 2009

A snippet from Vox's BRR ride video (yes, that is Snow White followed by me as the "Nerdy" dwarf). Check out the whole thing here. Pictures here.
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November

"Since golden October declined into sombre November and the apples were gathered and stored, and the land became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud.” -T.S. Eliot. Welcome to winter. Ug.
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Hi Hoooo

"It's a dead body!" -a young trick-or-treater freaks out at our inflatable Snow White being towed behind a bike.
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