Filch It Friday: What's in a Name

I filched this from Emma. The "use all the words in a sentence (or three)" was my fillip.

Answer the following using the first letter of your name:

4 Letter Word: Milk
Vehicle: Miata
Movie: Moonstruck
City: Madras
Boy Name: Matthew
Girl Name: Madeleine
Occupation: Minister
Something you wear: Mittens
Food: Macaroni
Something found in the bathroom: Moisturizer
Reason for being late: Migraine
Something you shout: Mazel Tov!

Madeleine drove off in the Miata to get milk and macaroni to assuage her migraine. After a judicious application of moisturizer, she donned mittens and headed for her wedding to Matthew, with whom she'd first bonded over Moonstruck. When the minister pronounced them husband and wife, they headed for their honeymoon in Madras, exiting the church to cries of Mazel Tov!

Filch It Friday: I Say

It's Friday and I'm filching from Blackbird - most of these things come out of my mouth every day.

No aimless archeology.

Hey, let's put an ad in ArtSearch! Entire staff of performing arts organization - available!

No.

Oh honey, I love you too.

Sharks patrol these waters.

And if you don't know where that last one comes from, you missed a great band now defunct because the lead singer died of a heart attack.

* * * * * * * *

I took the plunge - I bought a plane ticket and registered for Blogher. It's going to be fun, right?

Filch It Friday: Mosaic

I filched from Gina and SheShe, thinking this would be a lazy post for the end of the week. But it took longer than I expected, all that thinking and typing and cutting and pasting and outputting and uploading and posting...

The answers:


The questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. What is your favorite drink?
7. What is your dream vacation?
8. What is your favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. What is one word that describes you?
12. What is your Flickr name?

The process:

• Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr search.
• Using only the first page of results, pick one image.
• Copy and paste URLs for the images into Big Huge Lab's Mosaic Maker to create a mosaic of the picture answers.

Filch It Friday: Shuffling the Tea Leaves

Do you know how much I love my iPod? Not only does it play music, it's a fortune teller too! Here are the tea leaves of my life, as seen through the randomness of my iPod, and as inspired by Nutmeg's Filch It Friday post last week.

The rules are simple: Hit shuffle on your iPod, then answer each question by hitting next. I cheated a little - I did use shuffle (I love shuffle!), but I assigned some of answers to the questions they best fit. Poetic license?

Q: What does next year have in store for you?
A: Y Ahora Que? (Manu Chao)

Q: What does your love life look like next year?
A: The Honeymooners (Bruce Springsteen)

Q: What do you say when life gets hard?
A: Baby Plays Around (Elvis Costello & Anne Sofie Van Otter)

Q: Song that reminds you of good times?
A: Bye Bye Love (Simon & Garfunkel)

Q: What do you think when you get up in the morning?
A: It's a Wonderful Life (The Real Tuesday Weld)

Q: What song will you dance to at your wedding (let’s change that to 25th anniversary)?
A: How Long Do I Have To Wait For You? (Sharon Jones)

Q: Song that reminds you of your first kiss?
A: Moonlight (Bob Dylan)

Q: Your favorite saying?
A: What Comes Next (Yo La Tengo)

Q: Favorite place?
A: My Eyes (Laurie Anderson)

Q: Most Missed Memory?
A: Story of You (Jimmie Dale Gilmore)

Q: What song describes your best friend?
A: She Makes Me Feel So Good (Lyle Lovett)

Q: What song describes your ex?
A: You Tore Me Down (Yo La Tengo)

Q: Where would you go on a first date?
A: Down to the River and Pray (Alison Krauss)

Q: Drug of choice?
A: God Only Knows (Luciana Souza)

Q: What song describes yourself?
A: She's So Cold (Rolling Stones)

Q: What is the thing you like doing most?
A: We Shall Overcome (SNCC Freedom Singers)

Q: The song that best describes the President?
A: Heaven Help Us All (Ray Charles & Gladys Knight)

Q: Where will you be in 10 years?
A: Wide Open Spaces (Dixie Chicks)

Q: Your love life right now?
A: Three is a Magic Number (Bob Dorough)

Q: What is your state of mind like at the moment?
A: Hey Porter (Marty Stuart)

Q: How will you die?
A: Fallen (k.d. lang)

Filch It Friday: 2:42

Isis had a post the other day that made me run straight home to review my iTunes library so that I could filch it. The notion is that the perfect pop song is 2 minutes and 42 seconds long.

It turned out that, out of the 4072 tracks I have in iTunes, only 17 of them were exactly 2:42. Of those, five were Christmas songs, and two were kid's music, so I really only had ten.

1. "I want to vanish" by Elvis Costello & Anne Sofie von Otter
2. "Success" by Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3. "Blank Generation" by Richard Hell
4. "If Not For You " by Bob Dylan
5. "Taya Tan " by Pink Martini
6. "The Song Is You" by Frank Sinatra
7. "Por Eso (Me Olvido De Ti)" by Brave Combo
8. "The Book Of Love" by The Magnetic Fields
9. "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" by Chris Thomas King
10. "So Young " by Ron Sexsmith

Since Elvis Costello (né Declan Patrick Aloysius McManus) ended up on my list twice, does that make him the best pop songwriter out there?

Interestingly, I have NO overlap with Isis - though I'm sure I have some of the same songs (and I know I have similar taste in music). There are undoubtably a lot more 2:42 songs on disks in my cellar that have never been burned into iTunes.

Filch It Friday: Windows

Jen had a lovely lovely post the other day, seven windows of my soul. It was provocative, the kind of post that gets you thinking about your own soul windows, and demands to be filched.

I think of that first view of the ocean, when returning to Maine for a summer vacation. And sitting on the beach at Robert Moses in the cool of the morning, coffee in one hand, donut in the other, smelling the good sea air.

I remember dancing at my wedding, up on the kitchen counter, late at night to Prince singing Sexy M.F. And I can't walk by Tiffany's without thinking of W. and our first kiss at 57th and Fifth.

I remember stroking Miss M.'s cheek when she was first born; I was still on the table, and W. was holding her near my head. And of looking down at her little blonde head those many nights (and days) when she fell asleep in my arms.

I recall the window of my Fountainebleau room, with the little iron railing framing the view. And I'm enthralled with the view from my office window, which looks just a little like Paris.

My mind is full of snapshots, full of memory, full of small windows into my soul.

---

Others have shared their own windows - do you have some too?

jen with seven windows of my soul
Jessica with Eleven windows
Tracy from Tiny Mantras
Defiant Muse from Musings...
Kaliroz with windows
BarrenAlbion with seven windows of my soul
Arwen with windows to my soul
Somewhere in the suburbs with windows
Karen with eight windows
Jennifer with Seven views

Filch It Friday: Fire

Simply Nutmeg started a meme recently: Filch It Friday. I'm filching from Kathy Likes Pink, who posted excerpts from her town's police blotter the other day.

The police/fire/ambulance blotter is often great reading in a local paper. I always make sure to check it when on vacation in a little town. And no one in my family has ever forgotten an item that appeared in the paper in the smallish town I grew up in: "A large cardboard box was seen moving down Main Street".

Here's the Fire Department blotter from my town for last week, redacted as necessary, emphasis mine:

Thursday
8:29 a.m.- The FD responded to an automatic mutual aid call to XXXXX for a smell of smoke at the XXXXX Elementary School. After an investigation the origin of the smoke was found to be from an outside burn at a commercial property on XXXXX Road.

Friday
6:02 p.m. - The FD responded to an automatic residential fire alarm at a residence on XXXXX Lane. The alarm was set off by accident by a relative of the homeowner.
8:28 p.m. - The FD responded to an automatic commercial fire alarm at the XXXXX Middle School. The alarm was set off by workers in the school.

Sunday
10:54 a.m.- The FD responded to an automatic residential fire alarm at a residence on Devoe Road. The alarm was set off in error by the homeowner.

Tuesday
6:40 p.m. - The FD responded to an automatic mutual aid call to XXXXX for an automatic commercial fire alarm at the XXXXX Elementary School. The alarm was set off by a custodian cooking.

Happily, the Fire Department did not actually address any fires at all. But what was the custodian cooking?