Hey everyone, happy 4th!
Today I received an email for "Subscriptions for Soldiers" from magazines.com, soliciting $10 donations, which would provide a soldier with a free year-long magazine subscription. I thought it was a pretty good idea, so I did it. I thought some of my neighbors might like to as well.
I'm against the war, but I know these guys go through a lot. And they could probably use a little slice of home in the form of their favorite magazine.
As you may know, I'm a big proponent of local food. I like knowing where my food came from, and having some connection to it. I think that having a strong connection with your food encourages a healthy relationship with food.
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
This is going around my neighborhood, and I really like the idea of encouraging people (including myself) to read the classics. However, I'm changing the game, because I prefer the Modern Library's list of the 100 best books of the 20th century over The Big Read list.
1) Bold: I have read.
2) Italics: Those I intend to read.
3) Underline: Books I love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track dow these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them
1.
1922
Ulysses
James Joyce
2.
1925
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
3.
1916
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
4.
1955
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
5.
1932
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
6.
1929
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
7.
1961
Catch-22
Joseph Heller (started it, never finished)
8.
1940
Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler
9.
1913
Sons and Lovers
D. H. Lawrence
10.
1939
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
11.
1947
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry
12.
1903
The Way of All Flesh
Samuel Butler
13.
1949
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
14.
1934
I, Claudius
Robert Graves
15.
1927
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
16.
1925
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
17.
1940
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
18.
1969
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
19.
1952
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
20.
1940
Native Son
Richard Wright
21.
1959
Henderson the Rain King
Saul Bellow
22.
1934
Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara
23.
1938
U.S.A. (trilogy)
John Dos Passos
24.
1919
Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson
25.
1924
A Passage to India
E. M. Forster
26.
1902
The Wings of the Dove
Henry James
27.
1903
The Ambassadors
Henry James
28.
1934
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
29.
1935
Studs Lonigan (trilogy)
James T. Farrell
30.
1915
The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
31.
1945
Animal Farm
George Orwell
32.
1904
The Golden Bowl
Henry James
33.
1900
Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser
34.
1934
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh
35.
1930
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
36.
1946
All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren
37.
1927
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder
38.
1910
Howards End
E. M. Forster
39.
1953
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin (haven't read this but he's my favorite author)
40.
1948
The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene
41.
1954
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
42.
1970
Deliverance
James Dickey
43.
1951-
1975A Dance to the Music of Time (series)
Anthony Powell
44.
1928
Point Counter Point
Aldous Huxley
45.
1926
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
46.
1907
The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad
47.
1904
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad
48.
1915
The Rainbow
D. H. Lawrence
49.
1920
Women in Love
D. H. Lawrence
50.
1934
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller
51.
1948
The Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer
52.
1969
Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth
53.
1962
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
54.
1932
Light in August
William Faulkner
55.
1957
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
56.
1930
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
57.
1924-
1928Parade's End
Ford Madox Ford
58.
1920
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
59.
1911
Zuleika Dobson
Max Beerbohm
60.
1961
The Moviegoer
Walker Percy
61.
1927
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather
62.
1951
From Here to Eternity
James Jones
63.
1957
The Wapshot Chronicle
John Cheever
64.
1951
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
65.
1962
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
66.
1915
Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham
67.
1902
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
68.
1920
Main Street
Sinclair Lewis
69.
1905
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
70.
1957-
1960The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell
71.
1929
A High Wind in Jamaica
Richard Hughes
72.
1961
A House for Mr Biswas
V. S. Naipaul
73.
1939
The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
74.
1929
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
75.
1938
Scoop
Evelyn Waugh
76.
1962
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
77.
1939
Finnegans Wake
James Joyce
78.
1901
Kim
Rudyard Kipling
79.
1908
A Room with a View
E. M. Forster
80.
1945
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
81.
1953
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow
82.
1971
Angle of Repose
Wallace Stegner (loved Crossing to Safety)
83.
1979
A Bend in the River
V. S. Naipaul
84.
1938
The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen
85.
1900
Lord Jim
Joseph Conrad
86.
1975
Ragtime
E. L. Doctorow
87.
1908
The Old Wives' Tale
Arnold Bennett
88.
1903
The Call of the Wild
Jack London
89.
1945
Loving
Henry Green
90.
1980
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
91.
1932
Tobacco Road
Erskine Caldwell
92.
1983
Ironweed
William Kennedy
93.
1965
The Magus
John Fowles
94.
1966
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
95.
1954
Under the Net
Iris Murdoch
96.
1979
Sophie's Choice
William Styron
97.
1949
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
98.
1934
The Postman Always Rings Twice
James M. Cain
99.
1955
The Ginger Man
J. P. Donleavy
100.
1918
The Magnificent Ambersons
Booth Tarkington
Share a song you listened to in 6th grade.
How have you changed in the past year?
Submitted by littleduckling.
One year ago today I owed $30,000 in credit card debt. I had accumulated it during the divorce, and dealing with that, and other things.
I have never been good with money. Saving it was a joke, and i never really made a budget. I also really had no plan of how to deal with it.
Today, I have a balance of less than $800, and I could pay this off today. What's amazing about it is that I've done it with nobody else's help. I just cut out a few things I was doing.
It's hard to explain how different you feel after doing something like this. One of the things you get is the feeling that no matter what, you aren't trapped anymore.
I had to laugh when I saw this ad in my Oprah magazine:
"It's all about freedom of expression."
Botox paralyzes the muscles in the face, which is how it prevents wrinkles. So isn't that like, the exact opposite of freedom of (facial) expression? Um, helloooo...?
I'm in marketing, and I have to write taglines all the time. It's actually one of the more difficult things we do. But you usually take the product benefit to write the tagline. I mean, how about something about looking good, feeling young? Or maybe, "Botulism isn't so bad after all."
Last night I had dinner with my dear friend J at the Farm House Cafe, which I had been wanting to try since I read about it. It took over some of the old space The Linkery used to occupy (it has since moved to a bigger space), and like The Linkery, Farm House Cafe specializes in farm-to-table cuisine.
Let me begin the review by explaining one thing -- that I think the first impression you have of a restaurant can greatly color your review. When I judge a restaurant, I not only judge the quality of the food, but also how I feel when I first walk in and dine. I'd like to feel immediately welcome, like going to dinner at the home of a friend who really wants to cook for me. A restaurant should give particular care to making you feel welcome, and just... good.
The Farm House Cafe occupies a small but really cozy space, nicely decorated. My only beef with the space is that there's no real hostess area. You walk in and you're in the middle of the restaurant. There's a small sign in front of you that says "See the bartender to be seated." I don't like that. It makes me feel unwelcome. I turned to the bar, and the bartender wasn't there. Several waiters passed by, and one said, "Do you have a reservation?" We didn't, and he said, "Yeah, you can just wait for the bartender then." I wouldn't say that's outright rude, but it's not how I would treat a guest at my house, which is the standard of service to which a good restaurant should aspire.
Anyway, we were seated at a nice table. The wait staff was friendly during service, and the menu was limited but good. I much prefer that to a large menu that's not well thought out. Since they're a big local food proponent, I expected to see information on ingredient sources on the menu, but it was lacking. I really enjoy reading about where my meal came from, though some people might find it comes off as elitest - so you could go either way on this one.
J ordered Atlantic salmon (maybe this place isn't about local after all?) with white bean ragu. It was rustic - nothing over the top. I appreciate simplicity, and this was good, but not great. The flavors didn't pop out at me. The salmon was cooked a tad more than I like.
I ordered lemon ricotta gnocchi with chicken in a lemon rosemary sauce. The gnocchi were perfect. Little fluffy pillows of cheese pasta goodness. The sauce was very good - lemony but not overpowering, creamy, but light. The chicken was good, but I'm not really a white meat chicken fan, and this didn't convert me, either. I really ordered for the gnocchi.
That was all we had, because we headed over to Elipse Chocolat for dessert. [Eclipse was closed by the time they got there, but they let us in to get a couple of truffles.]
Now, to be fair to Farm House Cafe, I'm going to link to a positive review from a trusted local food blogger, Alice Q. Foodie. Alice, like me, appreciated the quality of the food but didn't mention ambience... and she went for lunch.
The final word
(1-5 rating: 1=BAD, 2=mediocre at best, 3=ok, 4=wow, pretty good!, 5=one of my all-time favorites)
Food (Taste, Quality): 3.7
Value: 2.8
Service: 3
Ambience: 3 (2 for the entrance but 4 for the rest)
Memorable Experience: 3
Price: $18 - 24 per entree
Menu recommendations: not sure... I didn't sample enough
Notes: This could grow into a solidly good restaurant if they pay more attention to detail for each aspect of the dining experience.
Would I make a point to go again, paying full price?: No, though I wouldn't balk at going again