Favorite Things

Radnor Lake has always been one of my favorite places in Nashville, but just recently for some reason I've started going around sunset for the first time, and its just wonderful. It is less crowded, its cooler, its quiet, and the light makes everything that much more beautiful. The wildlife count also goes up: Deer, beavers, coyotes, and a copperhead (I wasn't too excited about a copperhead three feet away). I've been going there to run but sometime soon I'll take the camera.

The Word of the Week...

...is contentment.

Also, pics from Beach Week thrown into Flickr.

Indy Rated

If Raiders of the Lost Ark = Perfection,
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom = Sentimental Favorite
and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade = Weakest Link, then

Raiders >>> Temple of Doom > Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull > Last Crusade

Victory and Horror

This time, Shock and Awe worked. So far, there has not been one ant sighting in the kitchen. It is still a little hazardous to breathe in that room, but there are no signs of an ant insurgency. I'll hang my "Mission Accomplished" banner soon.

Completely unrelated to the ants, Saturday night we went to see the new Narnia movie, which is another post for another time. However, before the flick they showed what I firmly believe to be the worst preview of all time, all time being past present and future, for "Beverly Hills Chihuahua." Tagline: "50% Warrior. 50% Lover. %100 Chihuahua."

It's like the Taco Bell dog came back after however many years he's been gone and made himself a movie. The preview was an elaborate musical number performed by dozens of computer-generated chihuahuas. It was beyond bad. It was holy-crap-a-piece-of-my-soul-just-died bad. It was I-bet-this-makes-God-angry-bad. The reaction of the audience, which ranged from shocked silence to some actually hurtling insults at the screen, seemed similar to my own. After seeing this, I actually kind of want the terrorists to win. At least under their regime we wouldn't get movies like this.

Antpocalypse Now

I came home this evening to find ants in my kitchen sink. This freaked me out a whole lot, for though there only about six, maybe eight ants to be seen, perhaps thousands of others had gotten the message that, for whatever reason, my kitchen might be the place to be. I talked to my neighbors and they had also recently had a problem - the things had just migrated on next door.
I immediately went to Kroger to buy the most lethal chemicals I could find. I found ant spray, ant traps, and these little spikes you put in the ground outside to wipe out the ant colony. My goal is for nothing less of an ant genocide. I want the ants to think of my kitchen like we think of Chernobyl - a hot zone to be left uninhabited for decades.
Its fortunate I don't have any pets, because once I was done spraying and baiting I don't think they would have survived. I probably should avoid the room for a few days myself, as I got a little lightheaded towards the end of the assault. A little collateral poisoning is a small price to pay, however. The ants must die.

20 Minutes O' Josh

"If this was the Cold War we could keep each other warm..."

Though I was a fashionable two hours and fifteen minutes late to the show, I still got to hear a few of my favorites. Ritter, as always, put on an excellent show. This was my third time to see him, and its been interesting to watch his progression from the tiny 3rd and Lindsey, then moving on up to Exit/In, then graduating this time to the Belcourt. Is the Ryman his stop the next time through town? Maybe, but I'm kind of hoping he stays under the radar enough to keep to the smaller venues.

Randomisity

-I hope gluttony is one of those sins that aren't really a sin (do those really exist?), because the last couple of nights I have been guilty of this one.

-My music tastes have been feeling retro recently, circa early 90's to be exact. REM, Counting Crows, and the B-52s have all released new discs recently, and they're all pretty good. REM had a trifecta of greatness (Green, Out of Time, and Automatic for the People) in the late 80's/early 90s, but its been downhill from there. Their new one, Accelerate, rescues them from the soft-rock purgatory they've been lost in recently. Counting Crows get the All-Time Favorite 1st Lyric From The 1st Song From The 1st Disc Award. Their new one, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings is their first in several years. And the B-52s, with Funplex, sound pretty much exactly the same as they did when they were singing about the love shack. The retro mood continues, but in a much softer vein, as I've discovered the acoustic sessions by Jackson Browne. Beautiful bedtime music.

- There is a more literate post somewhere in my mind about my annoyance with the "Religious Right". I don't know the history or origins of the movement, and maybe it started in a better place than where I see it now, but once they gained enough influence and power, they, like most people who gain influence and power, became only interested in more power. I'm all about voting my conscience, but I can't find anywhere in the Bible where it is commanded/commissioned/suggested that we organize as a political movement. Imagine if the time and money and effort that we (a collective generic religious right we) spend politicizing were spent doing the things that, I don't know, Christ commissioned us to do. Loving one another more than ourselves. Acts of service. The Great Commission. We might not have to worry so much about the direction of the country. And, when the average non-churchgoing American's idea of a what a Christian is includes some visage of Pat Robertson or James Dobson, that's both maddening and sad.

-On the opposite end of the spectrum, how much do I love Tina Fey? About as much as Liz Lemon loves the Teamster Sandwich.