Category: lists

all you need is “dude”

Late last week, jen of one plus two wrote an in-depth discussion of an important and versatile word of our times: dude. In that post, she suggested that if I were writing that post, I would include a list of song titles with the word dude. I took this as a challenge.¹ But being really, really freakin’ tired, it’s taken me a few days to get up off my metaphorical butt and figuratively rise to the challenge.

When I read her suggestion, the first song that popped into my head was the Beatles’ classic “hey, dude”. Following along with this, I bring to you a selection of dude songs from those fab four dudes.

  1. hey, dude
  2. baby you’re a rich dude
  3. love me dude
  4. I wanna be your dude
  5. dizzy dude Lizzy
  6. nowhere dude
  7. Norwegian dude
  8. with a little help from my dudes
  9. Martha my dude
  10. can’t buy me dude
  11. you’ve got to hide your dude away
  12. a hard dude’s night
  13. the dude on the hill
  14. why don’t we dude it in the road
  15. ob-la-di, ob-la-dude
  16. eight dudes a week

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¹ jen also offered a more direct challenge: for commenters to use the word dude in a haiku. My own dude haiku, which featured somewhat traditional references to nature, made me laugh. But it was late at night.

peachy keen

peach1web.jpg
This week’s edition of Themed Things Thursday is as peachy as can be, with a hand-picked selection of juicy bits of peach. Just in time for Summer.¹

  1. Do I dare to eat a peach?

    The line from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“:

    Shall I part my hair behind?
    Do I dare to eat a peach?
    I shall wear white flannel trousers,
    and walk upon the beach.
    I have heard the mermaids singing,
    each to each.

  2. The peach story of Zhang Daoling, founder of a sect of Taoism. Followers had to prove their faith by leaping an improbable distance to pick peaches. (Did they dare to pick a peach?)
  3. James and the Giant Peach
    The book by Roald Dahl, and animated movie (1996) based on the book. Involves a boy and a journey in a…giant peach.
  4. momotaro The old Japanese folk tale about the “peach boy.” An old woman finds a giant peach floating down the river, which turns out to contain a boy. She and her husband adopt the boy and name him James. No, wait. Taro.

    Another, possibly older version of the momotaro tale involved the older couple eating an unusual peach they found, being rejuvenated by said peach, and then…gasp…having sex, leading to the birth of the peach boy.

  5. Peaches have often been associated with sex, and their cleft shape has been likened to buttocks. Apparently in several cultures, such as in Japan. There’s also A Pathan song (which I read mentioned in M. M. Kaye’s The Far Pavilions) is said to contain the following lines:
    giantpeach.gif

    There is a boy, across the river
    With a bottom like a peach
    But alas, I can’t swim.

  6. There’s a South Carolina roadside attraction that is a water tower shaped and painted like a giant peach. It’s said to look like a big orange butt.
  7. Peaches, by the Presidents of the United States. (Hear the song, and see the video. But I warn you, this is a song that can get stuck in your head. It was once stuck in my head for days. Insidious, I tell you.)

    moving to the country
    gonna eat a lot of peaches
    I’m moving to the country
    I’m gonna eat me a lot of peaches
    …
    peaches come from a can
    they were put there by a man
    in a factory downtown
    if I had my little way
    I’d eat peaches every day

  8. Peaches (2004). A movie featuring a peach cannery, and a young woman who works there.
  9. The Ripest Peach, a poem by James Whitcomb Riley. Likens a woman to a peach (that’s out of reach):

    The ripest peach is highest on the tree —
    And so her love, beyond the reach of me,
    Is dearest in my sight. Sweet breezes, bow
    Her heart down to me where I worship now!

  10. There’s the expression “be a peach.” As in “you’re a peach,” “he’s a peach,” or “she’s a peach.” Means more-or-less “be nice.” There was a Bloom County comic strip once about Reagan, where one character argues for his impeachment, and another talks about what a nice guy he seemed, leading to the line “impeach the peach!”

red_peaches.jpg
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¹ It’s Summer now, for those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere. In fact, just today is the Summer Solstice, starting off the official Summer season by some calendars.

enough about me

Okay, I lied. It’s really still about me.

A little over a week ago, YTSL lobbed a request over that I should participate in this meme activity by which I list 7 little known things (or random facts or habits, if I trace it back further.) about myself.¹ I like things. I like lists. And apparently I like to write stuff about myself.²

7 things about me that I didn’t list in that other post with 6 things about me

  1. I used to be able to get into the yoga “lotus” position without using my hands. Oh, wait. I guess I still can. It hurts a bit more than I remember, though…
  2. I once had a collection of dimes. I was maybe 8 years old. They were just dimes. I found them aesthetically pleasing. Their size, their shape, the feel of them. I brought my collection to “show and tell” once, and the teacher asked what was special about the dimes. I was a bit perplexed by the question.
  3. I often have dreams that I can fly.
  4. I have a bit of a fear of moths. They give me the eebie jeebies.
  5. I like heights. I get kind of a rush from being up high. Kind of an anti-vertigo. (Funny. There was a Mel Brooks movie made in the 70s called High Anxiety that was a parody of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. At least one scene was filmed the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco, which had glass elevators that went up quite high. I loved that building, and those elevators.)
  6. I don’t watch TV. For someone who has written 26 posts to date with the tag “TV,” this seems odd. I watched a lot as a kid, but have little idea what’s even on these days. I watch things on TV, but only DVDs. Mostly movies. Some old TV series. The only current shows I’ve watched in the last couple of years have been available as iTunes downloads.
  7. I am fidgety. I have trouble sitting still. You’ll often find me twiddling a pen, shredding a paper napkin, twisting a straw…or doodling. I’ve got some crazy-ass elaborate doodles. Doodles, dood.

This is one of those things where I’m supposed to tag others. I’ve considered tagging people I don’t know at all, like, say, Kevin Smith or someone else who’s used the tag pants. Or a blog I hit by using the “next blog” function on WordPress, that gives you random blog after random blog. (And hey, if any of you, Kevin, pants person, or even more randomly selected person would like to play along, please consider yourselves tagged!) Or I can play by the self-selection, tag-free rules, as exemplified by the extraordinary KC. Anyhow, if you are reading this, consider yourself tagged. Like a polar bear or sea turtle that scientists are tracking. (Don’t worry. The tranquilizer will wear off soon.)

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¹ I also owe another meme to her. Plus I got tagged by NotSoSage for a different meme the same day. Woohoo. Meme me, baby. (I’ll get to that one at some point, too, Sage.)

² As we all know, writing about oneself is the prime motivation for 98.725% of bloggers.³

³ I made up that statistic. But anyone want to prove me wrong?⁴

⁴ Huh? Huh?

green party

I’ve been trying to live greener of late. Cutting back on waste. Reducing, reusing, recycling. And I’ve also been eating a lot of vegetables recently, greens even, which make me feel like I might turn green. However, even with all this green-ness, I’ll never ever be as green as the green dudes I’ve listed below. Because this Thursday’s theme is green people.

So here we have them. Following up on the blues and the reds, we got the greens. Green people and green people-like creatures. Sporting green fur, green skin, green what have you.

Green People

    green_giant.jpg

  1. The Wicked Witch of the West, from the Wizard of Oz, the 1939 movie.
  2. Elphaba from Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Based on the green woman of Oz. (Also in the Broadway muscial based on the book.)
  3. The Green Goddess. The title of two movies from 1923 and 1930. (I’m not actually sure how green the goddess actually was, seeing as the movies were in black and white. But potentially green.) Also a salad dressing.
  4. The Jolly Green Giant. Big. Really big. Likes his vegetables.
  5. The Green Children of Woolpit. Two children who supposedly appeared in a village in England in the 1100s. And were green.
  6. Little Green Men. Aliens. From space. Who are green. And small.
  7. Yoda. Of the Star Wars series. Green, he is.
  8. Kif from Futurama. A little, green, long-suffering and sensitive man.

    9. kif.jpg

  9. Orions from the planet Orion, as featured on Star Trek. Remarkably human-sized, as green aliens go. The Orion women have crazy-powerful sex pheromones: “They are like animals, vicious, seductive. They say no human male can resist them.”
  10. Dipsy. A freakin’ Teletubby. A bit on the chartreuse side, as greens go, but green nonetheless, and allegedly “stylish”:

    Dipsy is the second-biggest Teletubby, and undoubtedly the most stylish, but being super cool doesn’t stop Dipsy loving big hugs.

  11. Green is generally a popular color for monsters. Like Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc.
  12. Wally, the Green Monster. Apparently based on the nickname of the wall at Fenway.
  13. Shrek. Green ogre from the book by William Steig. Also from the movies (2001, 2004 and 2007). Also Fiona.
  14. Various muppets. Such as Green Anything Muppets. Also Oscar (the grouch). (And Kermit, though in his case, green is not too surprising a color. Being a frog, and all.)
  15. The Grinch. The Dr. Seuss character.
  16. The Hulk. Big. Green. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. As seen in the 2003 movie, 70s TV show, comics, and more.

wickedbookcover.jpg oscar.jpgteletubbies_dipsy.jpg

wicked_witch.jpgwally_the_green_monster.jpgyoda.jpg

learn to dance in 3 easy steps

Okay, so maybe these videos won’t teach you to dance. But they are lots of fun to watch:

  1. The Jan Pehechan-Ho dance scene from Gumnaam (1966) (and featured in the movie Ghost World )
  2. Christopher Walken dances to Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice”
  3. OK Go, their famous treadmill dance to “Here it goes again”. (Hat-tip to jeanerz, who thought she was the last person on earth to have seen this, but who was the first who showed it to me.)

kick-ass women characters I’ve wanted to be (or at least be more like)

I’m decidely not feeling kick-ass today. I have a nasty cold, and have stayed home from work to try to get some sleep. Unfortunately, sleep eludes me. And my mind keeps wandering back to the Action Heroine Blog-a-thon.

I’ve spent a lot of time putting together lists of shows and movies with kick-ass women. But so far, I’ve largely avoided committing to any sort of ranking. Sure, the first list of movies and the first list of shows had more of my favorites than the later lists in those series. But I generally have listed things by order of release date. So here I climb out on my limb, to make some sort of ranking.

Mind you, these are not necessarily my all-time favorite movies and shows, though many of those provide the source of the characters. It seems my list is a bit heavy on TV vs. movies, but let’s face it, TV shows give more opportunity for character development. And this list is about the characters themselves.

These are kick-ass women I’ve most admired for all their talents, skills, wit and strength. The kick-ass women I’ve most wanted to be like.

7 kick-ass women I’ve wanted to be (or at least wanted to be more like)

  1. Emma Peel
    The Avengers (1965-1967)
    For me, it all started with Emma. I stumbled across the Avengers when I was in high school, watching late night TV on a local channel. The show, with its British tongue-in-cheek humor and its 60s style, had me charmed right from the start. But the kicker was Emma Peel. I had never met a character like her before. She was in charge. Martial artist, sharpshooter, fencer, scientist, spy. And she had such intelligence, such a keen wit, and style to boot. (And yes, she had stylish boots.)
  2. Charly Baltimore
    The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
    It’s just possible that this is my favorite kick-ass woman movie. Sure, it’s not the best movie ever made. Sure, some of it was over-the-top. But hell, it’s an action movie. We’re not asking for real life. It had what we like to see in an action movie: action. Suspense, chases, fight scenes, unlikely escapes, plot twists, rescues, explosions and quirky characters. Samuel Jackson was great in this movie. So was Brian Cox. But the movie was about the kick-ass character played by Geena Davis. I’ll have a lot more to say on this topic at some point, but not one, but two, cool websites just independently wrote up reviews about this movie that are worth checking out: Heroine Content and The Hathor Legacy.
  3. Zoe
    Firefly (2002-2003), Serenity (2005)
    The show Firefly and the movie Serenity, featuring the same cast of characters, have quite a few strong women. There’s the gifted mechanic, the independent diplomat/courtesan, and the multi-talented and brilliant, if largely insane, teenager. But the woman that I fell for, that I most wanted to be, was the warrior woman, Zoe. I love her attitude and her dry wit. The sense that she was dangerous. A force to be reckoned with. And I love her relationship with her laid-back and playful husband, Wash. This is a woman with serious strength, but serious depth.
  4. Starbuck/Kara Thrace
    Battlestar Galactica (2003, 2004-????)
    When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a pilot. I’ve always loved flying, and couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do more. Starbuck is the pilot. An all out kick-ass, ace pilot. Plus she’s got some serious attitude. There is a character who is not afraid to speak her mind, who doesn’t shy away from a bit of confrontation. Qualities I could use a bit more of, myself.
  5. Chief Inspector Yang
    Supercop (1992).
    Okay, so in part I’ve wanted to be Michelle Yeoh, probably more so than this particular character. I don’t know a thing about her as a private individual. But I do know that she’s played some seriously kick-ass roles in a bunch of great action movies: Crouching Tiger, Tomorrow Never Dies, Wing Chun, to name a few. And you just gotta love that. Her role in Supercop was a particularly kick-ass woman: she was daring, competent, calm and man-oh-man, could she kick ass. Plus she had a prestigious job, and was well-respected in her position. If you want to read more about why I liked her character in this movie, I have a lot more to say on the subject.
  6. Samantha Carter
    Stargate SG-1 (1997-2007)
    Explorer. Adventurer. Scientist. Does she have the ultimate glam job, or what? Maybe most of what she talks about on the show is just pseudo-science, but I sure do love to see a strong, smart woman do her job. This is another case where the character’s gender is not really an issue. I can recall very few episodes where the plot was moved forward due to her being, gasp, a woman. For the most part, she’s just part of the team. And a particularly smart and kick-ass one, at that.
  7. Buffy
    Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)
    It may shock some of you that Buffy is showing up kind of late on this list. After all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of my all-time favorite TV shows. I’ve watched the whole series a number of times. (These are the DVDs that we put on when we go down to our basement to work out.) I love the cast of characters, the dialog, the bizarre scenarios. And the action. Buffy, as I’m sure you all know, kicks ass. However, this list is about women I’ve wanted to be, or at least be like. And well, while I’d love to the have the super strength and skills, be able to jump, flip, spin and kick like she does in so many of those fight scenes, there’s nothing in this world that would make me want to be a teenager again. And there’s the whole weight of the world business. That would be a bit much.

loose ends

Here I sit on my couch. Watching one of my favorite kick-ass women movies, laptop on my lap so I can jot down notes about a fight scene and look up the term “pigtails,” and eating a bowl of raw turnips.

Isn’t that what most people do on a Sunday night?

I’m hoping to have a post together for the blog event I mentioned yesterday. I’m also hoping to get some sleep. It’s been a rough week. Phoebe was sick most of the week, and not sleeping so well. She had to stay home from daycare on Tuesday, and some of Wednesday and Thursday. Also have a bit of a cold myself. Overall, I’m behind in both my work and my sleep. Which of course explains why I’m sitting here watching a movie and blogging at roughly eleven at night.

Tomorrow I go pick up my second load of veggies from the farm. As might be expected, I have not quite finished the first load. However, I have not done too terribly.

Here’s what I’ve made (prepared/cooked/eaten/served) of last monday’s crop:

  • a bunch of radishes and accompanying greens, sautéed with garlic and chives (first time eating cooked radishes. They were tasty.)
  • a head of bok choi, sautéed with sunflower seeds
  • a bunch of turnip greens, sautéed (the ones plucked off the turnips I’m now snacking on)
  • a bunch of dinosaur kale (again, sautéed)
  • a small bunch of something called Tat Soi, a dark green leafy vegetable that tasted a bit like arugula, and seems to be a relative of broccoli.
  • a salad of baby lettuce (which I did not sautée. Ha! See how creative I am?)

    • Here’s what I have left:

  • lots of flowering chives (which I’ll freeze for later)
  • a bunch of Red Russian Kale. Which is actually not red. But perhaps it is communist.
  • sitting here next to me in the bowl, two small turnips.
  • 2 and a half heads of lettuce. (I even gave one away)

    • Here are some recipes I’m considering for this week’s remaining lettuce:

  • curried lettuce stew
  • grilled marinated lettuce
  • lettuce kabobs
  • Cajun blackened lettuce
  • deep fried lettuce
  • lettuce popsicles
  • lettuce cake with whipped lettuce frosting
  • compost

    • I yam what I yam

    It’s time for another helping of Themed Things Thursdays. It being vegetable week here, in honor of my first pick-up of my CSA veggies, this Thursday Theme for Things is vegetables. Okay, the list is a bit heavy on the onion bits (with apologies to those who don’t like onions), but you can pick them out.

    some vegetables

  • beans
    Jack and the beanstalk, a fairy tale featuring magic beans that grow a towering beanstalk.
  • corn
    Children of the Corn (1984) A movie based on a Stephen King story. Horror in the corn fields.

  • spinach
    The cartoon character Popeye (The Sailor Man) gets super-duper strong when he eats a can of spinach. Even has a little song he sings when he gets all juiced up: I’m strong to the finish, ’cause I eats me spinach…
  • broccoli
    Powerpuff Girls episode 17 “Beat Your Greens“. Alien broccoli attacks.
  • cabbage
    The Kids in the Hall offers Cabbage Head, a man with cabbage for hair. (There are also the Cabbage Patch Kids, scrunched-up looking dolls that were all the rage in the 80’s, and that now have their own urban legend.)
  • pumpkin
    Peter Peter pumkin eater. A nursery rhyme. Also a song you can play on the piano using only the black keys.

    Peter Peter pumpkin eater
    Had a wife and couldn’t keep her
    He put her in a pumpkin shell
    And there he kept her very well

  • peppers
    Peter Piper A nursery rhyme and tongue twister: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”
  • carrots
    Bugs Bunny is known for his trademark carrot-munching. But did you know that his carrot-munching was a Clark Gable immitation?

    bugs

    Bugs Bunny’s nonchalant carrot-chewing stance, as explained many years later by Chuck Jones, and again by Friz Freleng, comes from the movie, It Happened One Night, from a scene where the Clark Gable character is leaning against a fence eating carrots more quickly than he is swallowing, giving instructions with his mouth full to the Claudette Colbert character, during the hitch-hiking sequence.

  • potato
    Everybody’s favorite spud has got to be the ever-dignified, interchangeably featured Mr. Potatohead (Apparently, there are many new Potatohead varieties that have sprouted, including the venerable Star Wars Darth Tater
  • sweet potato
    “Sweet Potato,” by Cracker. (Off the album “Kerosene Hat”) A rockin’ romp of a song. Be my sweet potato, I’ll be your honey lamb

  • yams
    Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. Yams play a central role in the Nigerian community depicted in this novel. (See? I can get all literary, too.) (By the way, these yams aren’t the same as sweet potatoes, which are often called yams in the US)
  • turnip
    You can’t get blood from a turnip, or “You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip” (You can also find more garden-variety cliches) An expression meaning that it’s not possible to extract something from a source that doesn’t contain that thing.
  • onion
    1. The Onion (“America’s finest news source”) My own favorite Onion article? This eerily prescient one from January, 2001.
    2. Shrek (2001) An animated movie featuring an ogre who likens himself to an onion:

      Shrek: Ogres are like onions.
      Donkey: They both smell?
      Shrek: NO! They have LAYERS. There’s more to us underneath. So, ogres are like onions.
      Donkey: Yeah, but nobody LIKES onions!

    3. The End: Book the Thirteenth, the final installation of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket begins with the following layery, teary-eyed, oniony sentence:

      If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.

  • bok choi
    Bok Choi Boy, the story of a young lad raised by vegetables to become a legendary leafy-green fighter for truth, justice and better nutrition. (Okay, I made this one up.)
  • a whole bunch o’ different oversized veggies
    June 29, 1999 written and illustrated by Caldecott award-winnder David Wiesner. A picturebook featuring gigantic vegetables raining down from the skies. A beatifully illustrated, beautifully absurd book:

    Cucumbers circle Kalamazoo. Lima beans loom over Levittown. Artichokes advance on Anchorage.

    Check out some of the illustrations on the publisher’s webpage for the book.

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    vegetable medley

    greens_album.jpg I went to collect my first CSA vegetables this evening: an impressive selection of greens, greens, greens and more greens. Fresh, fresh off the farm.

    To celebrate, I thought I’d put together a musical tribute. We all know that green-friendly classic “give peas a chance,” but do you know some of these other vegetable hits?

    A Medley of Vegetable Songs

    1. we got the beets
    2. it ain’t easy being greens
    3. smells like teen spinach
    4. rutabagas keep falling on my head
    5. give my regards to broccoli
    6. are you lonesome tomato
    7. can’t take my eyes off arugula
    8. I never loved a man the way that I love yams
    9. saving all my leeks for you
    10. when a man loves a radish
    11. first time ever I saw your kale
    12. the dawning of the age of aspargus

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