Have you been watching Call The Midwife on PBS? Season Two just ended and those of us addicted to the show are bereft. Its the adaptation of a series of books by British nurse Jennifer Worth which chronicle her years working as a midwife in the East End of London. Set in the 50s, each episode is a vignette detailing issues of the time, such as racism, the lack of reliable birth control, prostitution, separation of the classes, and changing rules of propriety. Read the rest of this entry »
Call The Midwife on PBS
May 23rd, 2013Inspector Lewis
May 20th, 2013
Ispector Lewis, called Lewis outside of the States, is easily one of my favorite TV shows. Chronicling the adventures of Detective Inspector Lewis and Detective Sergeant James Hathaway the show follows the two as they solve crimes around Oxford, both the town and the university. Many of the crimes are deeply intellectual, giving a nod to the learned inhabitants of the area. The concentration for the show is not on the gore and violence (a problem many an American cop show has) but on the resolution.
AAR at the Movies: Iron Man 3
May 17th, 2013
Lord above, at least it was better than “Iron Man 2″. Tony Stark goes out with a bang (at least from the movies, but not from the Avengers), Pepper Potts kicks some serious butt, a kid gets called a pussy, and Jean wonders why Brits and Aussies are better at American accents than Americans are at British ones. Not a total waste of time, but it left me with some ethical dilemmas. Read the rest of this entry »
Summer Movies I Want to See
May 11th, 2013Summer finds my family in two places: the pool and the movie theater. This summer I will probably be dragged to several films I have no desire to see. The following is my list of the ones I definetly want to catch:
May 17 : Star Trek: Into Darkness
Earworm of the day: Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush
May 8th, 2013
Wuthering Heights is the song that originally awakened my interest in Kate Bush. I don’t even particularly like the novel, but there’s something magical and otherwordly about the song, and often it’s the first song I play when I take out my Kate Bush CDs. This video version is delightfully overacted. Enjoy!
- Rike Horstmann
AAR Goes to the Movies: Oblivion
May 4th, 2013
The last super bowl was played in 2017. Then Earth was attacked by aliens. According to soldier Jack Harper, “We won the war but they destroyed half the planet. Everyone’s been evacuated, nothing human remains.” Jack and his communications officer/eye in the sky Victoria are an “effective team”, doing what Jack calls “mop up” work. Essentially, they guard ocean rigs that drain the world’s oceans and send the water to a massive tetrahedral space station called the Tet. The Tet then sends it on to humanity’s new home, Titan, a moon of Saturn. Much of the water from the planet is gone; what remains should be drained soon.
How to celebrate Labor Day
May 2nd, 2013
May 1st is Labor Day in Germany. It’s one of the two non-religious public holidays we have here (the other being Reunification Day, October 3rd), and everyone loves having that day off.
There are marches in some cities, but not in small towns like mine, so everybody in my neighborhood feels free to enjoy the day just as they like.
This is what I had been planning for yesterday: Read the rest of this entry »
April was Autism Awareness Month
April 29th, 2013
Now that the month is closing out I thought I would mention what was special about April: It is Autism Awareness month. For those that don’t know, here is a brief description of autism, taken from Wikipedia:
Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. The diagnostic criteria require that symptoms become apparent before a child is three years old. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize; how this occurs is not well understood. Read the rest of this entry »
The High Cost of Being A Girl
April 25th, 2013
Recently I went to my favorite makeup counter to pick up some lipstick. I left empty handed. By the time I was done hearing about the possible “free” gifts and pricing out the products I was interested in I didn’t know what to do. Should I go with just the lipstick? Or by spending just thirty dollars more should I maximize my purchase by getting $100.00 of free product I hadn’t been interested in ten minutes ago? The only other product I was truly interested in was $80.00. Now what? Spend $100.00 to get $100.00? I brought my tired brain home so I could do the math in peace. No decision has been reached. Read the rest of this entry »
Consumerism at its worst
April 24th, 2013
Do you watch AMC’s The Walking Dead? I do and adore it, along with my husband, siblings, and a lot of my friends. Great show! But that’s not what I want to blog about. The topic I want to discuss is the little six or seven inch action figures that AMC is marketing. I gave the Daryl Dixon figure to my girlfriend for Christmas a couple years ago because we both like Norman Reedus. It cost around sixteen dollars. I later found two more, one each for my husband and myself, and we started collecting the entire set
Our set is incomplete now, even with the extras we bought, because we’re selling those suckers off! Have you looked at prices for them on Ebay? Daryl Dixon goes for up to Three Hundred Dollars! We just sold one for two hundred and sixty. The other main characters sell for up to two hundred and the zombies for up to one hundred. If we sell off the entire first series we’re looking at a profit of around a thousand dollars.
So my question is: Are people insane?
