Tuesday, February 17, 2009

How Well Read


Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:


1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X++++++
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell +
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare /(read some, not into them)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams *
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X+
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X+
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown *
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving X++ ;-)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X+
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel *
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X++++++ (one of my FAV books)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X++
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath *
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X +++
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom *
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X++
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The Run Down:
Read: 30
Loved: 10
Plan on Reading: 5

Not too shabby ;-)

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Happy Valentine's Day



Enjoy the candy, flowers, dinners, sexy time, or however you're gonna spend the day!

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Plane Crash in Buffalo!


Please keep the victims and their loved ones in your thoughts and hearts. A Continental Plane from Newark to Buffalo (same flight I used to take when with Cisco) crashed this evening and it's just a horrible horrible thing to happen to an already hurting city.

What a horrible thing. Absolutely horrible.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

"To Be, Or Not To Be......A Promoter"


Several weeks ago, I decided to venture into club promoting for a "try-and-see" experience. I knew the initial details: 1. Get people to come. 2. Make sure more guys than girls show up. 3. Get more and more people for the following week.
Easy. I thought.
My first promoting venture happened this past Saturday at Hiro Ballroom. The group I was working for had a table there, with some free drinks and a "meeting" spot. I thought it was going to be great- Jen and Rosey from Chicago were coming, and a huge group of friends from NYC.

We get there and it is a "high-level" club- only people that know people, or are in promoting usually get in without spending an exorbitant amount alone on entry. Luckily, Jen, Rosey, Viv, Elvin and I got in at 11:15. The rest of the group? Not allowed access (strike 1).
The group table was flocked with needy girls, all waiting for a free drink and trying to be the promoters best friends. My group didnt even get close enough to say hello. (Strike 2)
The prices for drinks were a bit astronomical. (Strike 3) We ended up buying a bottle, and were splitting it between the 5 of us.
The other promoters, as well were not the type of people I enjoy spending time with (Strike 4). They were into it like it was the game of all games, and they were hot shit. I went in with the notion of have fun, meet people, and relax. Being a Promoter is NOT relaxing.
All these strikes would make someone flighty and run away with their hands in the air, and their mind behind them. But, the positives were I got a check from practically showing up and saying I was there. I also got to see Jen and the group and we had a great time together. The best part though was the cirque du soleil-style aerial act in the middle of the dance floor and everybody going nuts.
So, to be or not to be a promoter? I honestly do not know if it is "my thing". I may try it out again for the fringe benefits. But aside from that, I'd rather just go out and enjoy myself, rather than being a face in an empire of liquor bottles, skanky girls, and drunk moneybags....

Friday, February 6, 2009

Monday, February 2, 2009

Sometimes Political Cartoons Are Funny

Being a HUGE Spongebob fan, I thought it was only appropriate to share this poly cartoon with you all. Bear in mind, I could care less about the Blagojevich scandal, but got a kick out of this:


(By Chris Britt)

Gotta love it...