Friday Round-Up!
Happy Friday Dear Friends!
There were only 4 days of perusing the internets for me this week (Seriously, I didn’t even open my laptop on Monday, which is so super out of character. Here’s the buzz from this week (Juan’s pressuring me to find ten things, I’ll get there eventually!)
Let’s begin, shall we?
1. There are few things in life that guarantee smiles as much as pictures of sleeping babies. I can’t get over these. I’m worried that when I have kids I won’t remember that there is a 10 day window to bend them into hilarious poses when they’re sleeping. Someone remind me please?
2. Somewhere in the English countryside in a stately manor home Madonna is weeping! There’s a new GLEE Promo!
3. If you hadn’t heard, Jane Lynch and her girlfriend are engaged! Congratulations all around!
4. A few years ago I was at the downtown Bloomingdales and I happened to see the Roger Ebert out shoe shopping with his assistant. He seemed very at ease, writing down questions in his notebook and handing them off to her, as someone who spoke for a living Ebert has overcome a ton to accept his life as a writer and not a talker, although sometimes he speaks through his computer.
The voice is called Alex, a voice with a generic American accent and a generic tone and no emotion. At first Ebert spoke with a voice called Lawrence, which had an English accent. Ebert liked sounding English, because he is an Anglophile, and his English voice reminded him of those beautiful early summers when he would stop in London with Chaz on their way home after the annual chaos of Cannes. But the voice can be hard to decipher even without an English accent layered on top of it — it is given to eccentric pronunciations, especially of names and places — and so for the time being, Ebert has settled for generic instead.
Esquire just published this fabulous piece, that made my own favorite movie reviewer Ji-un Kwon tear up more than once.
5. Tuesday, Feb 17 was the best day for USA in the winter olympics EVER. We won three gold medals! Not bad! I’ve been trying to catch it when I can. Generally I’m distracted that this guy looks like this guy, and I can’t decide if Lindsey Vonn devoting her whole life to winning a gold is really worth it. Although it probably is.
(seriously, are there Cutting Edge statistics I can look up? I bet viewership of this movie has gone up 937458746% in the past week)
6. Gwen Stefani used to look like this. Which gives me hope.
7. This week Ray Gosling, a 70 year old BBC presenter who’s made several documentaries and appeared on a ton of BBC programming casually admitted to murder on a televised broadcast. The clip really is heart wrenching. Gosling admits that in the 70′s his lover was dying a painful AIDS related death and he smothered him in the hospital to end his suffering. Gosling been arrested for the crime since his televised confession. This report leaves me an emotional wreck. I obviously don’t think you should murder people, but I also can’t imagine seeing a loved one in so much pain. I also can’t imagine how painful it must have been for him to keep this secret so long. A tragedy, in many respects.
8. Walgreens is buying Duane Reade and I am crying inside.
9. Attention CSI haters (juan), the NYPD has a database where they can search tattoos, scars and other physical attributes to catch criminals! Excuse me while I enhance this.
10. And since I need 10 things. I got the shoes and they’re AWESOME.
Happy Weekend.
Hawkes, my love, you are a gem.
Smooshing sleeping babies has to be one of the best/most hilarious images I could ever conjure on my own.
Can the NYPD invent a device to enhance the acting stylings of David Caruso? And by enhance, I don’t mean improve, I mean MAGNIFY THE AWFULNESS.
So glad you mentioned the Ebert article. I was actually thinking about doing a longer entry on the article and Ebert in general, but I feared it would start to read like a posthumous tribute, and the man is still very much alive. So… maybe I won’t. Or I’ll wait… until I’m as good a writer as the scribe for Esquire.