What Makes Me Laugh

Thanks to Adam Freetly at archGFX for writing a widget-friendly version of Depo Clean. Now I have my blogroll, comments section, and all sorts of treats back, plus a great new design. Boy, do I love the word free.

I hope you like the new theme at What Makes Me Laugh. It’s by Derek Powazek and it’s called DePo Skinny. I think it’s more stylish than my old theme, but I do miss my old header. And I’m missing a lot of other stuff too – like my blogroll, and other sidebar widgets. Plus, the footer is still incomplete, so please bear with me as I figure out how to widgetize this theme and work the kinks out. It may take a while.

So, I went to see the movie Julie & Julia last Friday night. And I loved it. Mostly because the heroine is a blogger who achieves fame and fortune and it appealed to my fantasies, but also because I love to cook. I also despise the Joy of Cooking (my mother will be shocked and my husband will be shocked – he swears by it). I also love Nora Ephron and all of her books and Meryl Streep is simply brilliant.

I never really thought about Julia Child all that much. I might have seen her cooking show once, maybe twice? I don’t know. I like French cooking, but it’s a little heavy on the butter and the force feeding of geese for their livers. Deboning a duck? I don’t think I’ll ever try it. But I must admit it was a genius idea for a blog. Now that I’m jealous about.

Hannah demonstrates her "jazz hands" on the trail to Lake Agnes

I get very annoyed with magazine editors who run teasers like, “The Top 10 secret hiking spots, or secret small towns, or secret erogenous zones, or some such nonsense.”

I mean, c’mon, do we have to advertise the best places to the whole world? Why can’t some things remain undiscovered?

So, it’s with some regret that I will announce my new favorite hiking trail. Though it’s really no secret. Lots of people visit it already. Just don’t tell anyone else, will you?

Last Friday we hiked to the teahouse at Lake Agnes, a beautiful glacial lake in the Canadian Rockies. The teahouse has no running water or electricity and all of its goods are brought in by foot, or horseback. It even has its own facebook page (so it’s not too secret). To get there, you hike about 3.4 kilometers from Lake Louise in Banff National Park. That’s the only clue I’m giving. You’ll just have to be adventurous and find it on your own from there.

Lake Agnes teahouse

Anyway, my sister Laura planned the hike and though Doug and I dragged behind a little bit, she and Hannah patiently waited for us to make it to the teahouse.

When we arrived, I was stunned by the selection. They don’t serve just any old tea. We chose Adams Peak Rare White Tea because Laura insisted that having Earl Gray would be a little like going to a specialty ice cream shop and ordering Vanilla. Point taken.

The Teahouse menu

Our waiter sold us on the tea when he explained that it is one of the few teas to be harvested above 8,000 feet on “a mountain sacred to almost all of the world’s religions” with a peak called “the footprint of Buddha.” Well … this tea must be tried. It was delicate and flavorful, just like my lemon poppyseed cake, and it gave me some extra oomph in my step as we climbed the next 2 kilometers to the peak of the Beehive for a spectacular view of the Canadian Rockies.

At the Beehive summit

On the drive back, we passed by Canmore, where Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt used to share a home. It was at this moment in the drive that Hannah turned and repeated a question to me that she overheard two other women puzzling over. It was a question so complex and concerning that I’m not sure it will ever be answered to anyone’s satisfaction.

She looked over at me in the car and said, “Why do you think Jennifer Aniston can’t keep a boyfriend?”

And so it is that I leave you with that little brain puzzler of a question, to be discussed over a pot of sacred tea in the heights of the Rocky Mountains. Truly, the answer may be the world’s final hidden secret.

We turned off our television for the summer, and after going through withdrawals that included turning up the volume on a Steve Earle album and playing air guitar around the house for entertainment, I decided to get Netflix as a television substitute. Not that dancing around the house isn’t good for us, we agreed to do it more often, but one can only play so many games of Scrabble and dance for so long before looking for mind-vacating entertainment again. 

Anyway, I’m a big fan of Ricky Gervais. I love his standup. I love the BBC’s The Office. And I love Extras, the series he did for HBO. But I didn’t catch the second season of Extras, which is a show about Ricky Gervais and a friend playing extras on film sets while not-so-secretly wanting careers as “real actors”. So, I ordered it from Netflix last week.  Each episode includes a famous actor letting down their guards on the set and saying some things you would never imagine would come out of their mouths. Well, not to give too much away, Ricky’s character Andy Millman gets a big break in the second season, and starts his own sitcom. One of the episodes includes Daniel Radcliffe, the actor that plays Harry Potter in the series of movies based on the books.

Anyway, I laughed so hard I cried over the scene with Daniel Radcliffe, Ricky Gervais, Dame Diana Rigg, and Ashley Jensen that I’m including it in this post. For Harry Potter fans, this may be blasphemous, but it makes for incredible comedy, and includes a lesson in the usage of can or may. I couldn’t ask for more. Ricky Gervais is simply brilliant!

I don’t know what to say. I’m astounded by this video. A friend of mine forwarded this on, and when I finally had time to watch, my mouth hung open in awe as shepherds and their dogs moved sheep around a hillside to make designs. Now this takes some work (and some serious time). I think these sheep should be featured in the next summer Olympics in London. Please, if you need a smile, watch the Baa-Studs present “Extreme Shepherding.” You won’t regret it!

I am no Trekkie, so it’s surprising that I found myself sitting in a movie theater, wondering why you can never grab more than three kernels of popcorn at a time, and watching a creature with a gray walnut-head walk around the big screen.

When the credits started to roll, I turned to my friend and said, “Was that supposed to be a comedy or a drama? I couldn’t tell.”

What made the movie funny was the over-the-top cliches. Why do script writers always throw in a pregnant woman giving birth in a difficult situation saying things like, “James, the baby’s coming. It’s coming now!” It was like watching a satire of Star Trek.

I won’t spoil the plot for you, but I will say that a spaceship that looks remarkably like a giant black squid figures prominently, and some old cast members appear like tanned ghosts, and Spock continues the interracial or interspacial affair that made him famous in the first place.

If you don’t want to go to the theatre, I suggest checking out John Belushi’s 1970’s Saturday Night Live satire in Star Trek: The Last Voyage. It’ll make you laugh too.

I’m in love with the Playing for Change project that brings musicians together to sing (from their own locations) songs of peace and change.  Bob Marley’s song, “War/No more trouble” that I’ve embedded above made me shed a few tears. I hope you take the time to watch it. It will move you. From the producer’s blog:

“As we made our way around the world we encountered love, hate, rich and poor, black and white, and many different religious groups and ideologies. It became very clear that as a human race we need to transcend from the darkness to the light and music is our weapon of the future. This song around the world features musicians who have seen and overcome conflict and hatred with love and perseverance.” 

One of the best parts about blogging has been discovering other writers and their unique voices. But it hasn’t been easy. I’ve really had to search. 

The reason why I’m writing this post is because even though we hear about how many millions of blogs there are in the blogosphere, it’s hard to actually find ones you enjoy on a consistent basis. So, I thought I would share my favorites in case others are looking for a few good blogs, and hope that readers will recommend some more in the comments section.  What I look for in a blog is either something consistently funny (which goes with the theme of my site) or a personal blog that is well-written, engaging, and includes some humor.

Catherine Sherman was my first good find. I found her blog through Wordpress.com which offers free hosting for bloggers. A lot of my friends use blogspot, and I kind of regret not going that route myself because it would have been simpler but I learned a lot purchasing my own domain name and it offers a lot more flexibility.

Anyway, Catherine is a Kansas blogger who wrote a post about Flight of the Conchords, a television show we both adore, and I immediately liked her writing style and the layout of her blog. It also turned out that Catherine had visited Australia and more specifically, Tasmania, this year so we had a lot to compare notes on after that.

From Catherine’s blogroll I found Kiwibloke, Planetjan, and Middleground. I’ve mentioned Kiwibloke several times in my posts about Flight of the Conchords because he also follows the show and chronicles all things New Zealand. Planetjan is written by a California teacher with a witty sense of humor and great research skills. She wrote an excellent series about narcissim and Narcissistic Personality Disorder that I greatly admired. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since because I’ve had a few close encounters with narcissists myself and it isn’t pretty. I’m just getting to know Middleground  but it’s written by a southern married mother of one with a dry sense of humor .

I recently added Montana For Real to my blogroll. This is written by a friend of my family’s who writes about life on a working Montana ranch. She does an excellent job of capturing the essence of modern day ranch life on a daily basis. She is also an aspiring fiction author, like me.

Barnes and Noble introduced me to Dooce through the audio series Meet the Writers. Heather Armstrong writes Dooce from Salt Lake City, a blog that started in 2001 and famously got her fired from her job. She just finished a memoir called, “It sucked and then I cried: How I had a baby, a breakdown, and a much needed margarita.” I’ve put it on my reading list. She also is witty and honest about parenthood. Can you sense a theme here in what I like?

The others on my blogroll, like 1000 Awesome Things or Indexed aren’t personal. They mostly chronicle life in a unique way, or make fun of things like passive aggressive notes, or apostrophe abuse. I check them out occasionally for a chuckle, but I like the personal blogs better.

Anyway, that’s all of my endorsements for this Saturday afternoon. I hope you can add a few more in the comments section. Now off to enjoy the good weather!

Robin trying to stay warm

It’s been a long winter in Montana. It started snowing in October and it’s still snowing at the end of April. This morning I heard the dreaded “winter storm warning” on the radio again and cringed. Fortunately, I am now the proud owner of a full-spectrum lamp that helps mimic the sun, but it hasn’t banished cabin fever completely. The cats are antsy. I’m antsy. And all I can say is that if it doesn’t end soon I’m moving south. For good. 

My parents live on a ranch in northern Montana and today they bore the full brunt of the latest winter storm. My mom said they are supposed to get another 12 inches by tomorrow. Good Lord! In the midst of it all, she took some amazing photographs that I’d like to share with you. Please enjoy a little winter beauty in spring.

Asia, on the left, and Julie, the snow-covered blob on the right, in the snow

A group of robins tried to find shelter on the ranch

My dad took pity on the birds and threw the sparrows some crumbs

My favorite photo, a pair of pheasants