lewis and clark had a journal. you, beth-annie, have a diary.

Thursday, July 22, 2004
In the words of Matt from the first "Joe Schmo Show," "WHAT IS GOING ON???"
In the past four weeks, there have been two earthquakes in Illinois (well, sort of) and one in Iowa, a 3.3, a 3.5, and a 4.2.  Is it just me, or is this getting a little spooky?

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"Look at that turtle eating a small child!  What a pernicious turtle!"
If you haven't been reading Patty's blog lately, she's been writing a LOT (and I'm finally caught up on posting them), so please do.  And please write to her as she only has a couple weeks left.  Letters are lifesavers for her.

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Movie recommendation(s) of the month.
1)  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Two-word review:  Freaking brilliant.
2)  Spider-Man 2.  Two-word review:  Ted Raimi.  Okay, just kidding.  How about:  I loved it so much I'm seeing it twice -- FIRST-RUN!  (Was that more than two words?  I'm not sure, but I don't feel like going back and counting to see.  Too much work.)
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Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Oh my gosh, the people in the Big Brother house are SO STUPID! Anything anyone says to anyone in secret makes it to EVERYONE else in the house in record time. NOBODY can keep their stupid mouth shut! And they all seem to think that what they've said or been planning is still secret when no one in that house does anything but blab, blab, and blab some more to everyone else. What a bunch of IDIOTS! I'm telling you, if it weren't for the ever-entertaining Marcellas and his brilliant internet commentary, I'd give up on this season right now.
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Friday, July 16, 2004
I'm a brilliant procrastinator, even when it comes to my blog.
As evidenced by the fact that I've still only written about one day out of the many from last week.  And I don't have the time for it today, either, as we're leaving for Iowa -- yes, AGAIN! -- to caddy for Josh's parents as they disc golf in the Iowa Games this weekend.  And then we go back to Iowa -- yes, AGAIN! -- NEXT weekend for the estate auction of my grandparents' property, and to pick up anything of theirs we're taking home with us.  And then that Wednesday we fly out to the east coast to visit Matthew and Kimberly and attend Alex's wedding.  And then the morning after we get back we have Patty's gradutation from bootcamp and get to hang out with her a bit during her "liberty weekend" before she goes off to her next Naval adventure.  THEN maybe I can relax.  Maybe.  Probably not.  I'm telling you, I don't have enough hours in the day to do everything and I don't even have a job!  Ack.  I'm fully expecting to go criminally insane once I do, or once I have a baby, whichever happens first.  So watch out.

And I'm getting pretty antsy to change my blog template -- the colors at least -- because as much as I like my current one, I've had it WAY too long, and it's not summery at all.  I need summery.  At this rate I'll be lucky to get it done before summer's completely over.  It all depends on when I can get Dreamweaver fixed so I can use it easily.  But it's coming, I promise.  Eventually.  (And at some point I'll update my movie list with the roughly 3024 movies we've seen since I last did.  If I can find where I wrote them all down.)
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Thursday, July 15, 2004
Didst thou thinketh Annie would let the Day of (Usually) Meaningless Nominations of the Award Known as Emmy pass by without so much as a "You crapulent weasels, what were you thinking?"  Surely not.
So here it is.  The good news:  "Arrested Development" received seven nominations, including Best Comedy, Best Supporting Actor (Jeffrey Tambor), and Best Writing.  "Alias" received eight nominations, including Jennifer Garner and Victor Garber, and Bonnie Hunt, who I lovelovelove, got a Lead Actress in a Comedy nomination, though her show was cancelled.  At least now she has time to work on her next movie with Don Lake.  Oh, and, surprisingly (that's not a word I use often when discussing Emmy nominations), "Joan of Arcadia" was nominated for Best Drama and Best Actress in Amber Tamblyn.  Nice.

The bad news:  yet again, "The West Wing," which has not only been consistently losing ratings but also critical support for the last couple years (and this year especially, with the departure of Aaron Sorkin), inexplicably got nominated twelve times, including Best Drama.  Snooze...  And the Academy weasels still refuse to recognize that the WB is a network, save for the "Gilmore Girls" makeup nod (for the living art episode) and the James Earl Jones guest star nod for "Everwood" (both of which I'm very glad for and deserved it).  Maybe next year when there's no "Sex and the City," "Friends," and "Frasier" to take up all the acting nominations, the "GG" cast will get its due.  Except it's not exactly a comedy.  And it's not exactly a drama.  Oh, yeah, I remember now, that's the problem.  We'll say.

A couple related-but-unrelated notes:
1.  "Gilmore Girls" five nights a week on the ABC Family Channel this fall  is reason enough for anyone to get cable, I'd say.
2.  Has Matthew ever realized that David Cross was in Waiting for Guffman?  Neither of us did until we saw him on IFC's "Dinner for Five" and they listed the movie under his name... after about three seconds, I realized who he was.  And wackiness ensued.
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Tuesday, July 13, 2004
One thing at a time...
An insane amount of stuff has happened in the last week+, so I'm going to go through it slowly.  Today we'll do last Monday.

We went to Madison, because we like Madison and Josh had the day off because of the 4th of July holiday.  We disc golfed at a very nice course we'd never been to before, one with a lot of variety:  open holes, wooded holes, elevation changes... even some holes high enough up they had a breathtaking view over the park and miles beyond.  We will definitely be back.  The other goal of our trip was to pick up some used CDs at some of the many many used CD stores in the area (and a few on the way in Milwaukee, too).  Well, we certainly accomplished that goal, and then some.  I will list them all here, in alphabetical order.  There are 28 of them, costing between $1 and $8 each.

Anberlin, Blueprints for the Black Market
Chevelle, Wonder What's Next
Harry Connick, Jr., Only You
Harry Connick, Jr., When My Heart Finds Christmas
Counting Crows, Hard Candy (for my sister Kaly)
Jamie Cullum, Twentysomething
The Detholz!, Who Are the Detholz!?
Linford Detweiler, I Don't Think There's No Need to Bring Nothin'
Dishwalla, Opaline
Dana Glover, Testimony
Joe Henry, Scar
Jem, Finally Woken
The Juliana Theory, Love
Leaves, Breathe
Lifehouse, Stanley Climbfall
Shelby Lynne, Identity Crisis
Sarah McLachlan, The Freedom Sessions
Jason Mraz, Waiting for my Rocket to Come (for my sister Sarah)
Muse, Showbiz
Sam Phillips, Omnipop (It's Only a Flesh Wound Lambchop)
Plumb, candycoatedwaterdrops
Rooney, Rooney
Josh Rouse, Home
Sixpence None the Richer, The Original Demos (for someone we know or to sell on ebay)
Mindy Smith, One Moment More
Stereophonics, Performance and Cocktails
Viva Voce, Hooray for Now
Pete Yorn, musicforthemorningafter

We were very very lucky to find a few of these, mainly Sixpence's Original Demos, which we actually already have but is very rare and could be worth a pretty penny (we'll take bids if anyone who reads this would like it), and the Detholz album, which is indier than indie.  (Viva Voce, Leaves, Sam Phillips, and Linford Detweiler were also fairly rare finds.)  Hooray for college town used CD stores!
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Tuesday, July 06, 2004
"Hey, squids -- I mean, kids..."
I'll write about my long weekend later... like, in a week or so. But for now I have way too much to do... Before this weekend I knew I was flying to Cleveland this Friday morning to spend a long weekend with my friends Liz and Marina. Then, after we left our family reunion in Iowa on Sunday, we found out my grandfather had a stroke (less than 24 hours after we'd last seen him at the nursing home) and that he probably wouldn't live much longer. So I was prepared to have to eat the $120 plane ticket if things worked out so I couldn't go. This morning my dad called and said my grandpa had died around 1am. He hadn't been doing that great for about a year or so, not exactly close to death, but also not at all the same person I was used to growing up. In the last month or so, though, he had been in a better mood than had become typical for him, and because of the family reunion, every single one of his kids and mostly-grown grandkids (and one great-grandkid) had gotten to see him that weekend, and also because of that all three of his children were there when he died. You know, some things just aren't coincidences. I can't even express how glad I am we all got to see him one last time.

Unlike most people my age, I've never had to experience the loss of a grandparent before, so this is uncharted territory for me... The funeral is going to be on Thursday, so right now I have one day to prepare for a 2-day trip back to Iowa (an 8-hour drive each way), AND my 4-day trip to Cleveland, which I'm still planning to catch my flight for Friday morning. (Sorry, Liz, I'm not gonna have time to dub those "Ed" episodes for you this time -- I'll send them to you later.) And right now I desperately need to type up a very long blog entry from Patty that I'm way late in doing. Anyway, I won't be blogging until next Tuesday. But you all can still post comments about how much you miss me.
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Thursday, July 01, 2004
I believe I promised you a rant.
So here's the deal.  When you have favorite artists, you're inevitably going to have favorite songs by those artists.  And those are inevitably going to be the songs you most want to hear when you go to a concert.  And sometimes I think artists take pleasure in depriving people like me of hearing their favorite songs live.  Case in point:  my favorite Guster song is "Two Points for Honesty" (which I know at least Kaly and Matthew have heard, assuming Matthew has actually listened to the CDs I gave him, of which I have no proof).  I have now seen Guster live three times.  They have never played this song.  I know they know how to play it, because they have all their setlists listed on their website and it shows up at about one out of every ten concerts.  To make matters worse, I've found out after the fact that they've played it at TWO concerts I thought about going to but ended up not.  AND, they also performed it when they were taping for their live DVD they put out earlier this year, but out of a whopping 19 tracks, they just couldn't find room for it there, either.  Enough is enough.  I know a conspiracy when I see one.  Because this isn't just Beth-Annie's favorite Guster song, it is factually THE BEST Guster song.  So what gives, guys?  Why you be so mean to me?

Typically the first time you see an artist live, you don't much care what they play, you're just happy to be seeing them at all.  But once you get a few concerts under your belt, while you of course still enjoy the general concert experience, you (meaning me, at least) also start focusing more and more on wanting to hear those songs you haven't been able to experience live yet.  So now we get to the meat of my gripe:  why can artists not vary their setlists?  Especially over the course of several years and several albums.  It's the same thing every time.  A new album comes out, the tour following consists of a good chunk of that album sprinkled with some oldies, usually eventually balancing out to a bit more even distribution as the need to promote the new album (and get the new songs down live) wanes, but there still seems to be a general rule of thumb that the older a song is, the less likely it is to be played live.  And the older songs they do play always come from the same pool, just played with varying frequencies.  You can say this comes from an obligation to play the "hits," and/or the fact that the band only has time to rehearse so many songs, and that's a legitimate argument, but only to a point.  There's no reason the only setlist variation over several years should be replacing old songs with new ones.  Don't you guys get sick of playing the same songs over and over and over and over and over?  Don't you want to freshen things up a bit, at least by replacing one older song with a different older song?  Come on!    And it makes it that much more painful when you ditch brilliant songs (i.e. Guster's "Love for Me;" Newsboys' "Elle G.") in favor of inane mediocrity (i.e. Guster's "So Long;" Newsboys' "Love Liberty Disco").  I'm telling you, it makes not the sense.

So, I guess all I'm trying to say is, dear Guster, you know my love for you is great, so will you please just play "Two Points" at the next concert I attend?  I promise I'll shut up then.  Oh -- and also, Counting Crows, seeing as I'm ditching half of a family reunion this weekend to see you, I'd appreciate it if you'd please play "Daylight Fading," "Omaha," and "A Murder of One."  I probably just jinxed it.  Dang.
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