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Written by: Hedon      Where we are: Texas      Current Boobery Status: Medium

Rassles over at Sometimes I Make Lists had a really good post to her sisters concerning (in part) a person’s top ten favorite movies list. I won’t really spend much time touching on the get-the-stick-out-of-your-ass-and-lighten-up-for-god’s-sake angle of her post because I think we all know that particular sentiment goes without saying around here so it stands to reason that I agree with her completely.

I was just thinking that she is right in that your top ten favorite movies list does say a lot about you. If one of your top ten is Police Academy 5… well huh. I’m not saying we’re not gonna be friends anymore, but clearly our senses of humor are going to have difficulty meeting on common ground. I’m just saying.

I thought a lot about it and put together my top ten favorite movie list. At least it’s my list for today. Ask me next month and I may have an entirely different list. Here’s mine:

1. The BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. Yes, I know it’s actually a six hour mini-series but I don’t care it’s my favorite and it’s my list.

2. Bound  –   Jennifer Tilley, that other chick, and that guy from all the mob movies in a brilliant debut piece of work from the Wachowski Brothers. Film Noir. Beautiful plotting. Beautiful filming. Expert pacing. Tension. Drama. Jennifer Tilley in a slinky little black dress. Brilliant movie.

3. G I Jane  –   Demi Moore goes off to be the first female to attempt Navy SEALS training. Who can forget a ragged, bloody Demi yelling, “Suck my dick” at the top of her lungs? Stace says this is my version of a man’s Top Gun  by which she means that I sit around in my boxers watching it and secretly thinking, “I could do that” while eating nachos on the couch. I probably could do it too… if I had the time that is… and maybe a few weeks to work out before hand.

4. Fried Green Tomatoes  –   Kathy Bates just kicks ass  —  I love her in anything. And Jessica Tandy… seriously?! I love that movie right there. I’ve read the book and they did an excellent job of adapting it to the screen.

5. Cold Comfort Farm  –   This is one deuced funny movie. It’s one of my favorite comedies of all time. “I know you did, but did it see you?” Good stuff.

6. The Usual Suspects  –   One of my very favorite movies. Obviously. This one makes you wish you could delete memories so you would be able to watch it again and again as if it were the first time you ever saw it.

7. The Color Purple  –   Well… what can I say? Seen it a million times and yet the next time I watch it when that Shug starts singing “God is trying to tell you something” and marching toward that church I am still probably going to get choked up and have a sudden attack of “allergy eyes” or something.

8. Dangerous Liaisons  –   Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Swoozie Kurtz, and Uma Thurman. Seriously. Wonderful movie in all respects. If you’ve ever seen the movie and understand the time period at all you will never forget that scene with Glenn Close sitting at her dressing table. That shot of her is truly haunting.

9. The Lion in Winter  –   I just love Katherine Hepburn. I was torn on this spot between this and Philadelphia Story  cause she kicks ass in just about anything but especially those two films. But I ended up giving the nod to The Lion in Winter  in part because once you add in Peter O’Toole and Anthony Hopkins you’ve got a winner on your hands. The story is great and the mood and setting and cinematography of the piece is pretty damned cool, too.

10. The Piano  –   Truly stunning visuals. Superb cast including Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Anna Paquin, and Sam Neill. Won virtually every award offered somewhere or another. I could watch this movie a hundred times and still not feel like I had completely absorbed all the symbolism in the cinematography. I know that sounds a little fancy-pants arty-farty and all but it really is a stunning visual movie. As for the plot, I’m not sure many men get this one. I know Roger Ebert loved the film but at one point he called it a great love story. I mean honestly… a love story?! It is a spectacular film… it is not a love story.

Honorable Mentions: Silence of the Lambs, Boys on the Side, Philadelphia Story, Big, Young Frankenstein, Tea with Mussolini, Misery, Requiem for a Dream, The Hours, Notes on a Scandal, Armageddon, Belle Époque, All of Me, Enchanted April, A Room with a View, Amadeaus, The Mission, and The Matrix trilogy.

So in no particular order (and if you read Rassles post you’ll know that’s not true ) what are your top ten favorite movies of all time?

Written by: Hedon      Where we are: Kettleman City, CA      Current Boobery Status: Extreme of course

Ugh! They are working us to death! To death I say!

I guess it’s a good thing in the abstract, but in the up close and personal it’s not so cool.  We are not 7,000 miles a week sort of women.  Haven’t had anything to post because our brains have been in the drive-sleep-drive cycle (stupor) for days.  I did finally get the rest of our pictures uploaded during the past week so there are some new pictures pages. If you click on “Road Pics” you will see a line of links right under the main link bar listing some of the new pages. When you click on them you should be able to start a slide show.  Let me know if it doesn’t work for y’all cause I’ve not been able to test it on different platforms yet.

On a bright note, I’ve been listening to Vanity Fair  which is excellent.  That Becky is a piece of work but I still like her better than Little-Miss-Perfect-What’s-Her-Name who is supposed to be the hero I think.  I recommend the book if you haven’t read it, and I know Stace liked it as well.  So I guess that’s officially two thumbs up for yet another piece of classic British Literature.  Go figure. We’re just rebels that way.

On another bright note all this running is certainly helping the truck fund. Which is good cause I was thinking we were going to have to follow this guy’s example and start some sort of part time enterprise to save money for the truck:

Working for yourself never looked so good

Written by: Hedon      Where we are: Who knows? All I know is it’s hella-hot here    Current Boobery Status: Typical

Some of the comments over on that post Stace wrote about the “Congress-created Dust Bowl” signs have made me think about the government handing out subsidies — whether water-related or otherwise – to farmers, ranchers, loggers and well really everybody. I don’t agree at all with subsidies.

I think it’s a damned shame if you can’t make a living off the farm or whatever, but I don’t for the life of me understand why I should be handing you cash through government hand-outs to help out. If you can’t make a living at what you’re doing you should probably look around for something else to do.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m born and bred in the Ozarks and farming is definitely a part of my family. I have nothing but respect for the job they do as I would rather do just about anything than farm. I like living in a rural setting, but actually farming for a living strikes me as only slightly less mind-numbingly boring than say… watching paint dry for a living.

First you have to look at the fact that most farming subsidies are rammed through the government by the clever use of the “American Family Farm” crisis and fashioned as the only way to save our historic way of life. The fact that most of the cash made available seems to be handed out to big corporate farms is almost never mentioned. Because really who wants to go out of their way to save big corporate farms, anyway? Well except for the big corporate farmers and the politicians they buy that is.

Second you have to really think about this save-the-family-farm business. I suppose I could quote a line from Pride and Prejudice  here when I admit that, “I’m not romantic, you know. I never was.” But frankly, I don’t know why we need to go out of our way to save the family farm. If the family farm isn’t capable of making it then maybe its time has passed. And, while I like farmers just fine, I don’t know what makes them any more worthy of being saved than say the family buggy-whip makers or the family candle makers that we as a society allowed to fade into history years ago.

I understand that the farmers think they should be saved and that a subsidy is a good idea. Why wouldn’t they? They desperately want to hang onto their way of life. But that way of life doesn’t seem to be working out. I would desperately like to sit at home in my boxers and live off writing blog posts every day. But since the BlogHer ads are only bringing in about $12.38 per month and Congress has yet to enact a Blathery-Blog-Post-Writer’s subsidy… I have to subsidize my dream of living off my blathery wits on my own… with a job. Surely the farmer can get an outside job if needed to make ends meet if they are really committed to staying on the farm.

The whole thing smacks of socialism to me. I thought we were all worked up and scared to death that President Obama was going to make us a socialist state… have any of those people who were so horrified at the idea looked around at what has been going on in this country for years and years? It’s certainly not just farmers getting subsidies. Trucking companies get them if they will provide schooling to disadvantaged newbies. I know there for a while the scuttlebutt about a couple of the biggest newbie trucking companies who had schools was that they made as much from government handouts related to the schools as they did hauling freight. Seriously? What the hell? No wonder they can bid to haul freight for rates so low that owner operators can’t compete.

What do you all think? Am I wrong on this idea? Do I have things turned around in my head? I just think all subsidies should end immediately. To big and small alike. Quit giving the big corporations federal handouts of any kind. That would go a long way toward leveling the playing field. Then let everyone compete as best they can. If whatever you’re doing doesn’t work out then you need to look into something else. Sorry.

Unless they want to enact a Blathery-Blogger subsidy of some sort. That would be ok I guess.

Written by: Stace      Where we are: Nashville, TN      Current Boobery Status: Fair to middlin’

First, Ed McMahon died on Tuesday. Second, Farrah Fawcett died Thursday morning. Then third, Michael Jackson died Thursday afternoon. Three icons of my youth, gone in three days.

My memories of Ed McMahon are sparse since he and Johnny were on the air past my bedtime for most of my young age. When I could stay up later, I rarely watched “The Tonight Show,” but tuned in later on NBC for David Letterman.

Still, you could not be alive in this country and not know who Ed McMahon was. I think I mostly knew him from the Publisher’s Clearing House commercials. Haven’t we all fantasized about Ed showing up at our house with a giant sweepstakes check? Oh well. Maybe that was just me. I even bought a few magazine subscriptions once, thinking that would increase my odds of winning. Ah, youth.

Farrah. Now there was an icon. I never thought she was the most beautiful of Charlie’s Angels; that title went to Jaclyn Smith, in my opinion (Hedon believes the title belongs to Kate Jackson). Farrah had the famous hair and the poster, though, and I hesitate to even imagine how many nights she and her clingy swimming suit appeared in the dampened dreams of teenage boys. Okay, probably there were more than just teenage boys, but I don’t want to go there, either.

I watched “Charlie’s Angels” as a child, and don’t remember much about Farrah’s character. She wasn’t on there very long, was she, before going off on her own? I certainly remember all the brouhaha surrounding her role in the TV movie “The Burning Bed.” I thought it was silly the way people were all agog that Farrah “allowed” them to make her look less than beautiful in her role of an abused wife. It must have been barrier-breaking in some way, I assume, to create such a furor of surprise and admiration. I clearly was too far out of the loop to get it. And too young.

And that brings us to Michael. MTV and music videos were born in my teenage years, and by the time I was in college, Michael Jackson was the emperor of MTV. I remember all of us in the dorm huddling around the television in the lounge, clamoring for the premier airing of the “Thriller” video. It was everything we had hoped it would be, and more.

I had a poster of Michael on the wall of my dorm room, the one from “Off the Wall” where he’s wearing the yellow sweater. I didn’t dream of him, but I did think him beautiful.

We all moonwalked, if we could. We knew every word to every song on the “Thriller” album, except for some of the words to “Billy Jean” since they were deliberately obscured in places, something Michael loved to do. We all debated the ethics of Billy Jean falsely accusing Michael of being the father of her child. We all wanted to wear one glove, but most of us did not succumb to that need (myself included, thankfully). We were all appalled and aghast when Michael was burned during the filming of that Pepsi commercial.

Michael is a huge part of my memories of my freshman year in college. Oh yes, we had Madonna, too. But for the girls in particular, it was all about Michael. We were frustrated by his desire for privacy. Had there been a 24-hour Michael Jackson channel, we probably would have watched it until falling into a coma from lack of sleep.

By the time “Bad” appeared on the scene, I’d moved away from pop music for the most part. I couldn’t get away from news about him, though. Who he dated. Who he married. Where he went. What he bought. What he did. It’s no wonder he fought so long and so hard for a modicum of privacy. I eventually tuned it all out.

Michael returned to my attention in later years because of his repeated visits to the plastic surgeon, and the allegations that he was a child molester. I thought it was sad that he had spoiled his looks, and wondered what madness underlay his need for physical change. And I refused to believe he had been molesting children. It would have to be proven to me.

I thought.

Then, years later, I watched that interview Michael had with that British guy. While it wasn’t proof, Michael admitted to sleeping in the same beds with these children, among other strange things, and I found these disclosures disturbing enough to open considerable doubt. I’m still unsure.

I know that many people in the days to come will want to ignore the allegations of child molestation, and say we should focus instead on the musical artist that was Michael Jackson. They want to keep the musical master separate from the man himself. I’m not sure one can actually do that. Van Gogh was a master of painting, and the fact that he was insane enough to whack off his earlobe as a gift to a prostitute is part of who he was as an artist, not just who he was as a man. The human is his/her art, and vice versa.

I want to just remember the beautiful Michael in that poster which hung on the closet door in my dorm room. But what I want is impossible. Will he forever be an enigma?

Three icons. Gone. Ed, Farrah and Michael. May you all rest in peace.