A little film meme...

1. Name a movie that you have seen more than 10 times:

The Great Race (1965)


2. Name a movie that you've seen multiple times in the theater:

The Matrix. (The second time in a Matrix I/II double-feature and the third time in a Matrix I/II/III triple-feature... It got worse with each movie.)


3. Name an actor who would make you more inclined to see a movie:

Harrison Ford. And George Clooney. Can't think of an actress right now...


4. Name an actor who would make you less likely to see a movie:

Leslie Nielsen. I don't like him at all.


5. Name a movie that you can quote from:

Life of Brian


6. Name a movie musical that you know all the lyrics to all the songs:

Chicago and Moulin Rouge


7. Name a movie that you have been known to sing along with:

Chicago and Moulin Rouge. lol


8. Name a movie that you would recommend everyone see:

There are a couple...

• The Great Race
• Moulin Rouge
• Serendipity
• Before Sunrise / Before Sunset
• Philadelphia
• Something's Gotta Give
  

9. Name a movie that you own:

Casino Royale is the last one I bought.


10. Name an actor who launched his/her entertainment career in another medium but who has surprised you with his/her acting chops:

I can't think of one. An actor who recently surprised me with another talent though is Hugh Grant. His singing performance in Music and Lyrics was quite remarkable.


11. Have you ever seen a movie in a drive-in?

Nope.


12. Ever made out in a movie?

No.


13. Name a movie that you keep meaning to see but just haven't gotten around to it:

Ocean's 11, 12 and now 13.


14. Ever walked out of a movie?

No, but I can't say that I wasn't close a couple of times.


15. Name a movie that made you cry in the theater:

It's not rare that I cry in the theater. lol *blush* The Lake House was the last movie that made me cry in the theater.


16. Popcorn?

Not anymore.


17. How often do you go to the movies (as opposed to renting them or watching them at home)?

There are times when I go quite often, but there are also times when I don't see the inside of a cinema for 4 or 5 months. Right now it's once or twice a month.


18. What's the last movie you saw in the theater?

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.


19. What's your favorite/preferred genre of movie?

I like (romantic) comedies, a little sci-fi and fantasy and political dramas. I'm not a fan of horror or thriller.


20. What's the first movie you remember seeing in the theater?

The Lion King in 1995. (or was it 1994?)


21. What movie do you wish you had never seen?

Matrix: Revolutions.


22. What is the weirdest movie you enjoyed?

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.


23. What is the scariest movie you've seen?

The first time I saw it I found The Sixth Sense very scary...


24. What is the funniest movie you've seen?

A German film called Traumschiff Surprise: Periode 1. And Something's Gotta Give is also very funny.

12 of 12 June

Time for another 12 of 12. And today I almost forgot about it... Thank you, Maik, for the reminder! :) That's the reason why there are no morning or afternoon pictures this time. lol Once again, thank you to Chad for the wonderful idea!

Here we go...

1) 18:49

Chaos on my desk - multi-tasking with two computers and heaps of paperwork.


2) 18:55

A hastily prepared dinner, tastes better than it looks. lol My stomach had been growling for a couple of hours. I didn't have lunch and spent 4 hours at the library today, both things that make you pretty hungry. Crisp bread with Nutella - yummy...


3) 19:10

27.4°C in my apartment. :o


4) 19:11

The two pieces for Saturday's choir concert in my hometown. I had to practice them today since I haven't had too many rehearsals for this project and both works are pretty contemporary, thus a little difficult to sing and memorize...


5) 19:20

On my way to choir practice. (Not the same choir as mentioned in 4)...)


6) 19:21

Dresden's main train station.


7) 19:23

The spire of one of Dresden's famous churches.

8) 21:24

Some green in the middle of the street. The one tree in the middle struck me as odd since it's practically leaf-less...

9) 19:25

Almost there...


10) 21:45

After choir rehearsal. Apparently, for some of us, including our conductor, singing for two hours wasn't exhausting enough. lol

11) 22:50

On my way home - temporarily halted...


12) 23:07

Back home from the choir rehearsal I'm watching the last few minutes of tonight's episode of Grey's Anatomy (3.11) on German TV.

13) Bonus pic: Secret

Shh, don't tell...

Let me introduce you to...

Bert!

Bert is my new (and first) MacBook, who joined Einstein (my not so old Fujitsu Siemes desktop) on Friday. He's replacing Lila, my old Sony Vaio notebook.

I sometimes have the impression that computers, or more generally technology, and I don't get along very well. Lila started out wonderfully and I enjoyed working with her for the first year or so. Then she started freezing on me, sometimes even blue-screening. That was shortly before Service Pack 2 for Windows XP came out. I installed it and Lila started to behave again. Then I went to France for a year where I had to write lots of essays and other assignments. That's when Lila started to misbehave again. She constantly froze on me and when I had to restart an essay 6 (!) times - not even telling Word to save my document every 2 minutes helped - and ended up in tears, I knew things couldn't continue like this. So I got Einstein. Einstein has been very dependable, except that he is very, very noisy. But I've heard from several people with Fujitsu Siemens computers that they're having the same problem. He's mostly doing his work, but in times when you have to work at the computer for a couple of hours, the noise can become very annoying and even deafening.

Meanwhile, Lila had been converted to Linux and has been working nicely ever since. But since she is pretty old (I got her in 2002), heavy and the battery has a durability of approximately 10 minutes, I can't take her anywhere. And that comes in the way of researching and writing in the library (well, not in the narrow sense of the word, but since many of the books I'll need in order to prepare my finals and probably my thesis cannot be borrowed from the library I'll need to read and write on the spot). Which means that I had to buy a new laptop. And since more and more friends of mine are getting MacBooks or iMacs and are extremely satisfied with these (and other) Apple prducts, I decided to opt for a MacBook myself.

Now I have Bert, and he appears to be working excellently. And he's white and beautiful, quiet and slim, and Mac OS X is very easy to get used to. Let's hope that this time I have a couple of years until I need to start worrying about him... My dad will be taking over custody for Lila.

Being happy with Bert does not mean though that I don't have any more technological problems. My PDA (a HP iPAQ Pocket PC) decided not to read my SD cards anymore, which means that I can't listen to music or use my mobile navigation system. I'll try and contact HP later this week to ask them if this is a problem that I can fix myself, or if I'll have to send my poor little PDA (which, come to think of it, I never named...) to HP...

Yep...technology and I really aren't best friends...

Seriously?

I'm not a TV junkie... Okay, maybe I am...just a little. But I have to say that, right now, I hate myself for being a TV show fan, because every spring (or whenever it is that a TV show goes on hiatus) I go through the same ordeal:

1) *boom* A huge thing happens in one of the TV shows I like. It could be a person dying (or looking as if), a bomb exploding, someone claiming to love someone and waiting for a reaction, a sentence starting with "I never told you, but...", a person flying to a planet far, far away, someone reading something he or she should have never read, a marriage proposal, and other such wonderful things.

2) *silence* Seconds, minutes, hours passing by...

3) *zoom into a face* Mostly of utter shock, or indecisiveness.

4) *fade out* Sometimes followed by "to be continued..."

Or, to say it short, a cliffhanger.

Most of the TV shows I liked or loved at one point in my short life have brought the art of cliffhangers to perfection: Alias, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lois and Clark - The New Adventures of Superman, Gilmore Girls, Emergency Room, Charmed, and most recently Grey's Anatomy, just to name a few. They all have left me with summers of speculation, anticipation and impatience. In addition to that, some of these shows love(d) to leave you hanging with a cliffhanger from one episode to the next one. Those cliffhangers I can deal with, because it only takes six days before I know how they turn out. Season cliffhangers? Yep, not my strength.

Take for example Alias, episode 22 of season 4: "Before the Flood"... After having saved the world from ending, Sydney and Vaughn (the two main characters) are driving towards the beach. They seem happy since Sydney had agreed to marry Vaughn shortly before the world was supposedly ending. A happy song is filling the inner sanctum of the car.

Sydney: "Vaughn, what are you telling me?"
Vaughn: "Well, for starters, my name isn't Michael Vaughn."
The camera turns to the right and we see a car coming towards us, crashing right into the side of the car.
Fade Out.

Huh.

I know, it's just fictional, a TV show, nothing serious, not the main focus in life, blablabla.. I know that speech, I've given it to myself countless times. But when I watched that scene, my heart stopped for what felt like minutes. A TV show that can do that (without physically endangering its viewers) has to be a great show, I acknowledge that. And I know that cliffhangers are supposed to keep viewers interested in the show. Well, all I can say is: success!

Alias is finished, we all know how it ended. Grey's Anatomy and other shows will be back next season...

Now I have to wait until September to find out what will happen... I'm glad I have lots of more serious things that will keep my occupied all summer: trying to graduate from university, music, family and other stuff. Or: a real life... (it's a miracle I actually have one...)

One good thing about cliffhangers: All the speculations and theories about Alias brought me to an internet forum where I've made many, many friends. Thank you, cliffhangers. :)

The end.

*Fade Out*

12 of 12

Another 12 of 12! And it's a Saturday, which means that I actually had something interesting to do! To see what everyone else's day looked like, see Chad's blog.

1) 02:30

These boots were made for dancing... Just came home from a night of Dixieland at a club. Fabulous!


2) 11:00
Waking up...


3) 11.30
An apple-cinnamon muffin for breakfast...

4) 14:45
Done washing and drying my hair. It takes 45 minutes of blow-drying to make it look this good...

5) 15:45

Enjoying some self-cooked rhubarb. Yummy! I love its typical mixture of sweet and sour.

6) 16:30

Ready to go, everything I need is packed up in my new purse, which I bought 2 weeks ago.

7) around 17:25

It's the annual Dixieland Festival in Dresden - the biggest Dixieland/Jazz festival in Europe! There are Jazz and Dixieland Bands in every club and every corner of the city. Thousands of Dixieland fans are crowding the inner city...

8) around 17:30

...and that's what will be left of them at the end of the day...

9) 17:50

Going with the flow of the crowd. Target: the building on the right side of the picture.

10) around 18:15

Listening to The Dixie Ramblers from Belgium. I already heard them at the club I went to last night with a friend and they were really great! So I was more than happy when I read that they'd be playing today outside a building that is only a mere 100 feet away from the building I was supposed to be in later on.

11) around 18:30

I liked the reflection in the mirrored windows of the building.

12) 18:55

From Dixieland to Bach - after listening to the Dixieland Band I went around the corner to "my" church. We had a rehearsal at 7 pm for our 8 pm concert.


13) Bonus pic: Dreamscapes
I took this picture in March 2006, on a choir trip to Japan.

The latest addition...

...to my puzzle collection. It's a pretty famous German comic strip by an equally famous German comedian. The line in the bubble says "The egg is hard!", which - in itself - isn't all that funny, but in the context of the cartoon it belongs to it's one of the funniest lines ever delivered by a comic creature. lol

I already have a new puzzle project piled up, and it's going to be even more difficult than this one...

Another YouTube find of the day

Hilarious!!!

12 of 12

It's this time of the month again, but I almost forgot about it... But luckily I remembered just in time to make it to 12 pictures for the day. Thank you to Chad for this wonderful idea. *hugs*

Here's my day...

1) 09:09
On my way to class. The weather has been beautiful today, around 75°F...

2) 13:05
On my way to work... One of the blue windows is mine.

3) 17:47
The literature I'm using for my paper. I've been writing and writing and never seem to get any closer to the finish line. *sigh*

4) 19:19
Watching some season 2 episodes of Lois and Clark, one of my favorite TV shows ever!

5) 21:33
Listening to one of my favorite oldies...

6) 21:57
On my way to the cinema... Had to stop at a red light, which gave me enough time for this picture. This is the city hall of Dresden.

7) 21:59
Crossing a bridge...

8) 22:12
Someone stole the parking space that I wanted to take right in front of my nose, so I had to park my car in a garage.

9) 00:34
Empty streets...

10) 00:35
The beautiful scenery, this time crossing the bridge on my way back home. It's fuzzy, but it's dark and I'm driving...

11) 00:36
A sign on my way home. At the top it says "all directions", which is the sign you love the most when you are in a city you don't know. Luckily, I am quite familiar with my city and have no problems in finding my way home.

12) 00:44
Okay, technically it's not the 12th anymore, but this picture marks the end of my day. I'm back home from the cinema and about to exit my car, taking one last look at one of my favorite parts of the car. Blue makes me happy. :)

13) Bonus pic...
My random word was "watch", so this was an easy one for me...

This has been fun. I can't wait for May...

YouTube find of the day

I found this on YouTube a couple of minutes ago and I think it's awesome:



The two are very, very talented, yet not free of faults, which makes them all the more likable. I spent 12 years of my life playing the violin, but I never got this good (though I'm proud to say that I played first violin in J.S. Bach's Christmas Oratorio twice, which is a pretty good thing to achieve when you're not a professional violinist).

I have three professional violinists in my family - two aunts and an uncle. My grandfather has been building violins for more than 30 years now. I play his "Number 8" out of a current total of more than 40. He is currently working on his first cello. My parents were spared from musician genes, instead they directly transferred them to me. At one point I played violin, piano and organ and I've been singing in choirs for more than 15 years. Singing is what I'm really good at. Maybe - one day - I'll be able to turn that into my profession...

Yay!

My new TV arrived on Thursday and this time it's working! What a relief... I'm not a TV junkie (okay, maybe I am), but I like to have something playing in the background when I'm reading or working. I'm a born multi-tasking person. *nod*

Usually, I am not a list person, but I think I need to do one for this weekend. Maybe writing things down helps in getting them done eventually... So here's what I plan to do today:

• finish the reading for my history paper
• clean my windows (3 windows and a balcony door)
  
• work on my blog - done!
  
• throw away old newspapers (at least some of them)
• watch the last episode of Charmed on German TV - done!
  
• watch Casino Royale on DVD - done!
  
• watch an episode of Alias Season 5 - done!
  

Okay, those last three points should be a piece of cake... I think my to do-list looks pretty doable. Let's get started!