Chickpea Salad

I'm following the Big City Cooking blog and finding some great ideas. Yesterday I made this very simple and tasty chickpea salad (picture is from their site). It was blend of great summery tastes, especially the cilantro and red onion. Living in Texas now, the thought of cooking anything that's hot is extremely unappealing, so I'm collecting good recipes for cool treats. I'd recommend adding a bit more garlic and parsley--the cilantro sort of drowns out the parsley taste, so you might want to adjust the ratio slightly depending on your own taste preferences. As a commenter suggested, I'd also add a bit of red wine vinegar next time (and slightly reduce the olive oil). Maybe some celery for a little more crunch? Lots of possible tweaks, but it was already quite tasty as is.

YUM!

Pug Pushing a Pink Stroller

Exactly what it sounds like. I'm not a huge fan of pugs, but this video may just have changed my mind. Sure to make your Monday a bit happier!

50 Movies for 50 States

Excuse my absence...I have GOT to get a new laptop! Mine is officially dead, so I use Mark's old desktop, which is in our un-air-conditioned den. Add five weeks of 100+ degree heat and you get almost no blogging from Leslie.

Anyway, here's a fun list/interactive map from Rotten Tomatoes, my favorite and most trusted source for movie reviews (along with Netflix user ratings). In celebration of July 4, the site chose movies that they feel best represent each of the states in the US. Before I started clicking around, I though, what are they going to do about obscure states like South Dakota and Wyoming and Delaware? Little did I know (or little did I remember, I should say, having seen all these), Dances with Wolves, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Fight Club are set in those states respectively.

Some of my faves from the list:

Oregon: The Goonies
Kansas: The Wizard of Oz (obviously)
Georgia: Gone with the Wind (obviously)
Alabama: Fried Green Tomatoes
Idaho: Napoleon Dynamite
Illinois: Blues Brothers
Ohio: Bye Bye Birdie
West Virginia: We Are Marshall
North Dakota: Fargo (obviously)
New Jersey: Clerks

And of special note, New Hampshire gets "On Golden Pond," a GREAT movie starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter Fonda in the late years of their careers (1981). It's a tearjerker but a must see. I saw it with my grandparents when I was young and it has stayed with me for years. Bring lots of tissues.

Georgia gets the picture for this post because I miss it. Lots.

Musings on Lady Gaga

I'm not quite as up on pop music as I used to be in my younger years, but I kept hearing Lady Gaga's music on the radio and reading her name bandied about in celebrity magazines--so I got curious. Her songs at first grated on me, but the more I heard them (especially Poker Face and Love Game) I started to love them. I saw her nutty performace on American Idol and was not sure if I thought she was a train wreck or brilliant. Either way, I was intrigued. I picked up an issue of Rolling Stone at the gym and read the cover feature on her, which was pretty fascinating (not an adjective I'd have expected to use). This link is just a slice of the article--the whole piece is worth a read, though, if you see the issue laying around.

Her entire persona, from her music to her fashion choices to the way she markets herself, is one massive piece of performance art. She compares her work to Andy Warhol's, which seems pretty on target (especially if you've read his book Popism). She's calculating, scarily self-aware, and highly ambitious about her career and the specific legacy she wants to leave on the music world. Watching her videos, they look like parodies of other pop starlets' videos but that's not how she intends them to be. You find yourself thinking, she can't be serious with this...but she is dead serious about perfecting the Pop Music Video. They aren't parodies--they are her own style, which has taken the genre to an absurd extreme that comes off as parody but is actually something new. Postmodernism at its best.

I also like this Slate article on her, especially this exerpt:

Gaga's highbrow bibliography and performance-art theatricality are key to this aura-building, but it's to her credit that she doesn't attempt a regal remove from the debased celebrity culture that trampled all over her favorite Mouseketeer. Instead, Gaga dives into the mud and wrestles with it. We see this in the canny way she plays off of the troubled legacy of her '90s teen-pop heroes. Whereas Britney debuted as a towheaded virgin whose career went on to encompass her public deflowering, Gaga debuted already-defiled: "Just Dance" is about stumbling drunkenly around a nightclub and turning your shirt inside out without knowing it. In this way, Gaga wrote her public meltdown into her very first single while remaining a deft guardian of her actual private life—a teasing pre-emptive strike. In "Poker Face," a celebration of mind games and bedroom power plays, and "Paparazzi," which compares love to stalkerish picture-hunting, Gaga plays a girl completely in control and completely comfortable among the dizzying, superficial signifiers of tabloid-era femininity.

Roker 1, Speidi 0

Al Roker is my new hero for actually calling out Spencer and Heidi Pratt's utter and complete ridiculousness and delusions of grandeur re:their own fame and claims that they aren't acting to get attention. It's pretty hilarious and pathetic to watch them try to defend their idiocy as shown on clips from that "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here" show that even I, lover of trashy reality tv, refuse to watch. Speidi of course limply attempted to strike back with Heidi playing the victim, but it's just laughable. Really? You don't know who Al Roker is? REALLY? You cried about the label being peeled off your shampoo?? Seriously? If you're acting...well, well done I suppose. If not, just WOW.

Glorious pop trash at its best and worst, and best.

He's Created a Monster!

Nothing says threat to society like amusing roadside art...good thing the fine police force of Raleigh got this NC State Dr. Frankenstein off the street! No word on what happened to Frankenstein's monster. I hope he survived the sting.

Arlington: The Rap

If you've ever spent any time in Arlington (or comparable Northern Virginia suburbs), you'll love this rap ode to the hood. I especially like the homage to the Orange Line of the Metro, a route I grew to know and love-hate during my summers spent in Nova and DC. And the Stabucks, the Starbucks, the Starbucks, the Starbucks...

Thanks to Geeps, my favorite Arlington resident, for the link.