The song I'm loving today

Bless Your Beautiful Hide from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

Okay, the truth is I'm not so much loving it as it's been stuck in my head ever since I saw the movie. I'm hoping that if I can get it stuck in your head, it will leave mine alone. So watch the video!

The link above has Italian subtitles and spoken word, but was the highest-quality clip from the movie I could find. The video below is in English, but is a montage of pics of Howard Keel, not the scene from the movie:



Bless your beautiful hide
Wherever you may be.
We ain't met yet
But I'm a willin' to bet
You're the gal for me.

Bless your beautiful hide
You're just as good as lost.
I don't know your name
But I'm a-stakin' my claim
Lest your eyes is crossed.

Oh, I'd swap my gun 'n' I'd swap my mule
Tho' whoever took it would be one big fool.
Or pay your way through cookin' school.
If 'n you would say I do.

Bless your beautiful hide
Prepare to bend your knee.
And take that vow
Cause I'm a-tellin' you now,
You're the gal for me.

Pretty and trim but kinda slim.
Heavenly eyes but oh that size,
She's gotta be right to be the bride for me.

Bless your beautiful hide
Wherever you may be.

Pretty and trim but not too slim.
Heavenly eyes of just the right size,
Simple and sweet and sassy as can be.

Bless her beautiful hide
If she's the gal for me.

Oops - I slept in

This morning I slept through practice for the first time since I started coaching :-(

Typically, I set two alarm clocks for about 4:45, get up about 10 minutes later, and am out the door by 5:15. Not today.

I'm trying to get through this book I'm reading, which I'm accomplishing very slowly. I can get through about 3 pages a night before I fall asleep. I was reading last night and fell asleep without turning on my alarms. My bad.

I woke up and noticed there was some light coming through the blinds. Weird. I looked at the clock. 6:51. Weirder. I should be at practice right now. Maybe it's all just a dream and if I stay in bed and go back to sleep, my alarm will go off in 10 minutes.

Sadly, not. So if anyone is up at 5:00 in the morning and wants to call me and just make sure I'm awake, that would be appreciated.

What I Watched -- Seven Brides For Seven Brothers

Ahh, nothing like an old classic to teach girls how to be a wife. Cooking, cleaning, having a "beautiful hide," and "lots o' book learnin'" - those apparently are the skills and attributes I need to acquire.

Seriously, this movie has lots of contrived singing and dancing and is quite amusing. It starts out when Adam goes to town looking for a wife - and he finds one. Milly marries him and moves with him up to his cabin in the woods, only to discover that he lives there with his six brothers (Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, Ephraim, Frank, and Gideon). Milly whips the boys into shape, and takes them to town for a barn raising when they are sufficiently dignified. They fall in love with six girls from town; in a misguided effort to win them over, the brothers go to town and kidnap the girls for the winter. Epic fail. Milly is angry, the boys have to live in the barn, and the townspeople are spittin' mad. But as it always does in old musicals, everything works out in the end.

Bottom line: an awesomely funny and melodic reminder of what we girls no longer have to deal with.

Can you handle the truth?

A few weeks ago, Joe Klein wrote an editorial in Time Magazine. The big idea wasn't new, but it's always intriguing - perhaps because it rarely actually happens. The idea is deliberative democracy, and it goes all the way back to ancient Athens. The kleroterion, he explains, was like a giant lottery ball picker-outer, and all the eligible citizens (free males, in Athens' case) had a lottery ball in the pot. Every day, several hundred lottery balls would be selected, and it would be the task of those men to make major decisions for the people of their city.

And what's more, it's happening even now! In Zeguo, China, 175 people are selected every year to make decisions for the district. They represent a cross-section of the society (60% of them are farmers). The procedure goes something like this: they are polled on their opinions on issues; they get briefed by disagreeing experts; they meet in small groups and come up with questions for the experts; they meet in a big group and have their questions answered; more small meetings; another big meeting; then a final poll. Astonishingly, 70% of people change their opinion during the course of this meet-and-discuss format.

But wait, the fun isn't over yet. It's even happened here in the U.S.! A consortium of utilities in Texas put together a deliberative democracy process, and the members (customers of the utility) eventually agreed that it was best if everyone (including the people voting!) paid more so that they could install reliable wind energy resources. Imagine that!

Just a few weeks before the Time editorial, there was an article in The Economist about job creation. Buried within that article, and somewhere in the back of my brain, was a reference to YouCut, a Republican initiative designed to give the public a chance to be heard. Here's how it works: you go to the website, read about federal programs on the chopping block, decide where you want to cut spending, and text your vote to the number provided. The first project cut was a "scheme to subsidize jobs for the poor." The second week, it was a federal employee pay raise. We're now nine weeks in, and the score card is available here.

All of this seems shocking to me. Why? Probably because I'm totally disillusioned and can't stand politics or anything related to it. Yeah, but why? Because it's all a dirty game.

But maybe it doesn't have to be. Joe Klein quotes James Fiskin, a Stanford University professor who has been studying deliberative democracy for 20 years: "If you give people choices and real consequences, they will make real decisions." What a revolutionary idea.

What I Watched -- Nine

I didn't know what this movie was about when I rented it. I just knew it had an incredible cast and I hoped they could all get together and do something great.

This time, not so much. Like I said, the cast is amazing: it stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, and Judi Dench, and also includes Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman, Sofia Loren, and...wait for it...Fergie!

The concept is interesting. Day-Lewis plays a struggling screenwriter and director. He's trying to write a script for a movie, but just can't come up with anything. He gets flashes of inspiration, usually in the form of scantily clad women stimulated, as it were, by some scene in his real life.

Cotillard and Dench did a wonderful and understated job supporting and challenging the filmmaker, and they really made the movie - at least as much as they could. On the whole, though, it just felt very choppy. The scenes were individually interesting, but didn't weave together to make the movie I think they could have - something in the style of Chicago.

Bottom line: great song and dance by Kate Hudson and Marion Cotillard, and a MUST-see for anyone who has the hots for Penelope Cruz! If you're not interested in the aforementioned, skip the movie and the clips below.

How much is enough? $75,000 is enough, it turns out.

A number of weeks ago, I read in Time about a study which found a correlation between household income and happiness. (Also reported in Inc., U.S. News & World Report, and the Washington Post.)

The study was conducted by researchers Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton at Princeton University and published a month ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The results show that there are two kinds of happiness, which are affected differently by your income level. The first type is your day-to-day mood and well-being (happy, sad, stressed, enjoying life, etc.). The second is your overall sense of the level of satisfaction with the way your life is going.

What the researchers found was interesting. The first type of happiness - one's day-to-day well-being - improves until household income reaches $75,000, but does not continue to improve when income increases above that amount. "Perhaps $75,000 is a threshold beyond which further increases in income no longer improve individuals' ability to do what matters most to their emotional well-being, such as spending time with people they like, avoiding pain and disease, and enjoying leisure." That is to say, below that threshold, every additional dollar of income makes it easier focus on one's emotional well-being rather than worrying about the costs of day-to-day life, such as food and medical care. But at $75,000, a sufficient amount of money can be directed at both daily concerns and emotional happiness. Additional dollars spent over that amount do not increase one's day-to-day well-being. (As an aside, 85% of the 450,000 polled by Gallup and Healthways reported feeling happy the previous day, and 40% reported feeling stressed. Does that add up to more than 100%? Indeed it does. It appears that those two things are not mutually exclusive.)

The second type of happiness, though - one's overall level of satisfaction with his or her life - does continue to increase with higher income levels. "Higher incomes don't seem to have any effect on well-being after around $75,000, whereas your evaluation of your life keeps going up along with income."

Statistically speaking, only 1/3 of households in the U.S. earn over $75,000 annually. The average household income is about $71,500, while the median is only $52,000. And what do those numbers mean? They appear to indicate that 2/3 of Americans could use a little more day-to-day happiness, and half of households need to bring in an extra $23,000 to get there. That's a tall order, I suspect.

Apples, apples, and more apples

Remember how I ended up with all those apples last year after going apple picking? (Discussed here and here.) Well, I've done it again! L and I headed out to the Eckert's Farm in Belleville early Sunday morning for some deliciously crisp apples. Suncrisp apples, in fact. They had lots of enormous pumpkins too, but we decided to save those for another day.







I loved that first apple crumble pie that I made so much, I think I'm going to make another one.


Later that same day...

And in fact, I did make another one! I could't find the recipe I used, so I tried out a new one. It wasn't quite as good as the ones from last year, but tasty nonetheless.




I was very busy in the kitchen yesterday! In addition to the apple pie, I made apricot bread (2 loaves), southwest creamy pasta bake with chicken (basically a pasta and chicken casserole), and chicken soup (K was over and she is sick :-( so we wanted to have non-experimental food - except that I don't think I'd ever actually made chicken soup before...hmm...). Anyway, quite a day!

Eleven Eleven

T came back from Colorado for a few days to attend to some business in St. Louis. While he was here, he took K and me out to dinner at Eleven Eleven Mississippi in Lafayette Square, and it was delightful! Food on our table included wild boar ravioli, spinach salad with mandarin oranges, beet and goat cheese napoleon salad, char grilled ribeye with cheddar scalloped potatoes, braised rabbit, pan-seared chicken with goat cheese polenta, gooey butter cake, and rice pudding. Mmmm mmmm good. And I thought you should all see a picture of how fabulous we are!

What I Watched -- Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

I hadn't really planned on watching this movie. But when I returned the last one, something drove me to browse the shelves, and I had read some laudatory reviews of this flick.

So far I have seen Michael Cera in three things: Arrested Development, Juno, and now this. And in all three, he plays the same character. A kind of nerdy, hopeful (which makes him seem hopeless) dope. So I wasn't much surprised by his performance - or really by any of them actually. But I was confused. I recognized Norah, but I could not figure out what I had seen her in before. The credits and DVD cover informed me that her real name is Kat Dennings, and IMDB informed me that she played Jenny Brier, the Jewish superbrat who was having the million-dollar bat mitzvah on Sex and the City!

Everyone knows I am a sucker for something that features Manhattan as a character. It's a good thing this movie did, because the sweet, sappy, teen angsty-ness is something I wouldn't have been able to deal with otherwise. It seems a little bit like Gossip Girl (kids running wild in the city), except without all the money, revenge, and melodrama of the TV show.

Bottom line: watch it if you wish you lived in NYC.

What I Watched -- The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Actually, I didn't watch this movie, but I tried to. I was unsuccessful. Partially I wasn't paying enough attention - and it's in French with subtitles, so I was missing every other line. Partially I had to go to bed so never even made it to the end (and it's due back to the library today). And partially it was just kinda weird.

It's the story of a group of Frenchies who are constantly trying but always failing to have a meal together. The first time, some of them arrive at the house on the wrong night. Then some of the ladies go out for tea, but the restaurant is out of tea. And coffee. Then everybody shows up at the right place and time, but two of the party members ran off to the garden to get it on. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Then they all start having weird dreams about their upcoming get-togethers, so you're not sure if what you're seeing is real or someone's dream.

All in all, other than its very true commentary on how life always gets in the way of your plans, this was some weird stuff. I don't think I'll ever finish it.

Bottom line: watch only if you're on drugs or want to be a little confused.