I have already touched upon this subject by mentioning those fly-by-night performers on a certain reality show becoming Broadway performers but the practice of bringing big names in an attempt to fill New York audiences is nothing new. I found it rather interesting to discover that in 1969 Muhammad Ali sang in the musical Buck White. According to the Internet Broadway Data Base, the show only ran from 12/2/69-12/6/69. So, bad example… I never said the shows in which the names appeared were successful.

-Julia Roberts was in the play Three Days of Rain from April-June, 2006.

– In Fall 2007, Jennifer Garner starred as Roxanne opposite Kevin Kline’s title role in a limited production of Cyrano de Bergerac.

-Perhaps most notably and most successfully has been the continuing revival of the musical Chicago. This seems to be a revolving door of pop culture names appearing on stage. Melanie Griffith, Bebe Neuwirth (so she was a stage actress prior to Cheers), Wayne Brady, Joey Lawrence, Usher, Brooke Shields(?), KELLY OSBOURNE(?!… as Mama Morton), ASHLEE SIMPSON. Ok… so even most of the names do not appeal to me. Most would turn me off of the show (which is good seeing live). But the musical is still running.

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Quite a few years ago my wife gave a speech about being hard of hearing. I found her hand written speech today. I wasn’t looking for it, but I was cleaning out a drawer looking for an old “Windows” disk. For those who know me and my safe places, it is amazing that I found the disk.

Anyway, today I held in my hands something my wife wrote. That is a very strange feeling. In reading her words, I can hear her voice, I can see her smile at certain parts of the speech. I can even see parts of this speech where I’m quite certain her anger/disappointment would show through. I never saw her give this speech, but I did today.

From her speech these words I remember because they were said more than once.

[ Quote from SJO]

… Over the years I have become quite adept at conversation by reading lips and body language, anticipating what will be said, filling in blank spaces in a sentence with the correct word or phrase based on subject matter, number of syllables in the words, and placement in the sentence.

Certainly, I am wrong frequently. This causes embarrassment and confusion, but the alternative is silence – no conversing because of fearing embarrassment. I don’t enjoy embarrassing myself, but I am not afraid of embarrassment — it does no permanent damage. …

That last sentence, if my girls would have learned only one thing from their mother, this would be right at the top of the list. We don’t enjoy embarrassing ourselves in any aspect of our lives, but as my dear wife said “it does no permanent damage.

To SJO 1962-2003. A life not long enough, but lived fully.

As my fellow blogger so eloquently posted, I would also like to send my thanks to all the readers, commenters (even those I have just now begun to spam because they seem to be worthless… don’t worry all ye faithful die-hard fans you are not among the spammed).  I too have enjoyed sharing my views on entertainment, news, and other bits of life.  Along the way, I have discovered even more about myself and the people I like to call friends.  I also send greetings from Indiana (or In-di-ana) via Morat who will be covering the vote tomorrow.   Even talking about  my not so favorite movies like Howard the Duck has been entertaining as hopefully I have entertained my readers.  Here’s to the next 100.

In my ongoing effort to catch up on old episodes of The Office, I watched a hilarious repeat from season 2 (two episodes air Tuesday nights on TBS at 9PM eastern time thank you DVR).  “The Client” featured a guest appearance by Tim Meadows of Saturday Night Live fame as a client who actually is receptive to Michael’s particular brand of customer interaction.   Also along for the  meeting at Chili’s was Jan Levinson-Gould (no Gould….HAHAHAHA).  “Awesome Blossom!”

While back at the Scranton branch of Dunder-Mifflin, Pam discovers a screenplay that Michael had written in which he changed some of the names of the staff into characters in a spy movie.  Agent Michael Scarn, Dwigt (his sidekick), “Catherine Zeta Jones” also appeared in the screenplay (surely as a love interest for Agent Scarn).

A very hilarious episode.

This is my 100th blog post!  What a long way I’ve come from my first blog post, aptly and boringly titled, “First Post” – it was a description of me learning to blog!  And what a variety of subjects I’ve covered, from retractable sharpie pens, to kids’ blankies…  from movies and tv shows to animals, trips, and family life…  It seems like forever ago that I was taking you all through the 11, 572 snow days we had, and it’s been fun to share all these aspects of my life on the internet while learning things about my friends and family who read and/or comment on my posts.  So thanks to all my readers, even if you just read because I make you, thanks anyway…  I truly appreciate each and every comment I receive – written and spoken, keep it up!  And might I add that I’m the first tangents.org blogger to achieve this milestone…  hope to have others join me soon!

Since this is my fourth pregnancy, I’ve experienced a wide variety of the symptoms that go along with being “with child”.  It’s amazing to me how every pregnancy is different, even when they are experienced by the same woman.  Pregnancies are as different as the personalities of the children that result.  Is it possible then, that a child’s personality can actually be displayed through the symptoms of the mother’s pregnancy?  For example, my aunt told me that when she was pregnant with my cousin, she craved spicy food after not really liking it before.  My cousin, the result of the spicy food pregnancy, is now 31 years old and has always been a fan of spicy food!

When I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, my husband would blend a huge glass of juice for me every morning with lots of fruits and veggies in it.  My oldest daughter now prefers snacks of fruits and vegetables to junk food.  I didn’t really crave the fruits and veggies, so that’s a different example, but it’s still an illustration of how womb behavior may affect the child throughout life. 

My second daughter was, for lack of a better word, crazy in the womb.  She was the last thing I felt before I fell asleep at night, and the first thing I felt in the morning, and let’s not forget all those middle of the night bathroom trips…  she was kicking and rolling during those too.  I would often joke that I didn’t know if this baby ever sleeps.  Once she was born, I got the answer:  she doesn’t ever sleep and never did apparently.  It felt like she was tearing me apart from the inside out with her strong movements in the womb, and to this day, she is our strong-willed, “spirited” child.

My third daughter was very gentle as a fetus.  She rarely moved – compared to her older sister at least – and when she did, it was always in one spot.  As a toddler, she has a very sweet, patient, and obedient demeanor.  So, as for #4…  so far she moves a lot.  I don’t want to jinx anything here, but her movements remind me of our second daughter – the spirited one.  But I’ve also experienced some strange symptoms with this pregnancy that I haven’t felt before.  First, I’ve been having nightmares.  It’s common in pregnancy to have more vivid dreams, and I’ve experienced that, but lately I’ve had lots of nightmares, ones where I actually wake up too creeped out to go to the bathroom…  Strange.  And with this pregnancy, red fruit has been especially tasty.  I don’t crave it, but things like tomatoes, strawberries, and especially red grapes (I’ve always preferred green to red until now!) taste extra yummy to me.  It’s so weird to me how tastes can change during a pregnancy.  I’ve never liked bologna and still don’t, but during my first pregnancy, I liked it and ate it quite often.

There is probably some scientific research out there that speculates about how much a mother’s pregnancy symptoms impact the resulting child, but rather than research it, I think I will just wait and see what my girls are like when they enter adulthood and we can sit down and read my pregnancy diaries together, compare their personalities with that of their womb behavior, and share some good laughs.

This is the THIRD time I’ve gotten this email forward, so I thought it was worth mentioning in my blog.  The subject line of the email reads:  Fwd: Dangerous Spider Bite – Brown Recluse Spider (Graphic pictur…
The body of the email shows some awful pictures of someone’s infection on their hand that they supposedly got from a spider bite.  Since I am a skeptic of ANYTHING I get via email forward, I looked up this warning on snopes.com, the website that investigates possible urban legends and their origins.  Actually, while I was at it, I looked up snopes on snopes.com, seeing what they’d say about their own site being an urban legend, but that’s another post…

Anyway, back to the spider bite warning.  Instead of posting the pictures of the infection here, I will just provide a link to the snopes.com entry about it since the pictures are pretty gross…  Click here if you have a morbid curiousity and you’d like to see what the inside of someone’s hand looks like.‏  So anyway – and I find myself saying anyway again, which means lots of tangents in this post :).   Anyway, when I looked up the brown recluse spider bite warning on snopes.com, it said that the status of this legend is undetermined, which means that they don’t know if it’s true or not.  Evidently, the photos are real, and it’s really an infection in someone’s hand that is pictured, but the origin of the infection is not necessarily the spider bite.  Here is a description of the incident by the victim her-(or him) self:

 I suspect a spider bite was the cause.  I was out in
the wood at Caddo Lake and noticed a bite on my thumb.  The doctor I was
seeing thought it was a spider bite.  Other doctors told me it was a brown
recluse bite.  It was also a MRSA infection.  It became so infected
because the first antibiotic I was on was not doing any good and I tried
to finish the semester before going in to see the doctor.
It was a very interesting experience and I no longer wait to go in to the
doctor.  Whether or not it was a brown recluse bite or not I can’t say.  I
saw some very good doctors who specialize in spider bites and they thought
it was.  But you have probably seen the latest info on MRSA infections
being misdiagnosed as spider bites.

Umm…  this person described this experience as “interesting”?  Wow, what a mellow personality one must have to possess a wound that looks like that and describe it as interesting… 

So, the moral of the story is, be careful with spider bites.  Be even more careful with email forwards, and most importantly, (especially if you’ve read my post called, “Don’t Let a Hospital Kill You) take good care of skin infections before they become as serious as the one pictured in the spider warning email, or you will have an “interesting experience” of your own!

In the town where we live, I’ve noticed a weird phenomena:  there are many houses with second floor doors that lead seemingly nowhere.  Well, they lead outside, but that’s it – no stairwells, no balconies, no screened-in porches.  Just random doors on houses.  Perhaps there used to be something there, maybe a staircase, etc.  It would be one thing if there were only a few houses like these, but in my town alone, there are at least 10, one being next-door!  In a town this small, that is a lot.  Actually, they aren’t all second floor doors.  The church down the street has one that is about 3-4 feet off the ground – enough to see that it’s a door to nowhere, but not enough to be on the second floor.  I wonder what the purpose of these doors are and why there are so many?  Maybe it’s something to ask the library historian about, or maybe some of you fellow NW Ohioans who read this blog and have lived here longer than I can enlighten me – people didn’t waste doors in Chicago!

This will be my first and only post on this subject so as not to beat it over the head but at the same time give my opinion on the matter. The past week has been drenched with the controversy that is Miley Cyrus. It must be terribly difficult to be a 15 year-old girl who is a “star” with a hit Disney Channel show, singing career, and millions of adoring fans but at the same time feel the pressure of “looking ahead a few years” and feeling the need to re-invent herself and “grow up” as her audience grows. However, I do not think that she thought about her entire audience that stretches way beneath her 15 year-old age. Not to mention the company that she is contractually obligated to.

It may not have been solely her responsibility as her father (country singer Billy Ray Cyrus) and her mother were present during the photo shoot and both felt that it was a tasteful, artistic display. In my opinion, a teenager appearing to be wearing nothing but a bed sheet pulled up over her with a rather “come-hither” expression on her face  does not look too tasteful. The best explanation for the shoot seems to be that it is too hard to say “No” to famed photographer Annie Leibovitz. A bit of peer pressure coming from an adult.

My question is: what are the parents of the fans to do about all this? Do they attempt to shield them entirely from it? Do they wait until the children ask about it? Do they wait and hope the controversy blows over? Or do they entirely forbid their children from watching Hannah Montana? In an attempt to make amends and save her contract (which is more important?), Miley has issued an apology. But will that be enough to prevent her from becoming the next Britney Spears who ironically started on The New Mickey Mouse Club?

Recently, I encouraged a fellow blogger to post a review of a film which I had heard was absolutely rotten. Since, I had not seen such, I decided to see for myself just how terrible it was.

Some genius decided to give one of the most popular characters in the Batman franchise her own shot at a solo picture on the big screen. Unfortunately, the character bore almost no resemblance to the character at all. Instead of going too far indepth, I will tell you what it is not.

Catwoman in the movie is not Selina Kyle who was introduced decades ago as the sometimes feline nemesis and sometimes love interest of Batman. Instead, she is given the convoluted name Patience Phillips. I had NO patience with this mess and as most people will tell you, I usually do have some degree of patience. She is also endowed (after dying and being resurrected by a cat) with superpowers. The only power I am aware of that the feline fatale possesses is her cat-like reflexes and her nine-lives that she seemed to have used up in the movie Batman Returns. The movie Catwoman does however make a silly attempt to allude to other women who put on the cat-suit including Selina Kyle. Too little too late I’m afraid. That is as far as I feel I need to waste space remarking on this tragedy of a movie. I cannot believe that Bob Kane, creator of the original character, would have his name anywhere near it. He should have sued.

Halle Berry accepted her 2005 Razzie Award in person with her Oscar in hand and made the following statement:

“First of all, I want to thank Warner Brothers. Thank you for putting me in a piece of _____, god awful movie… it was just what my career needed.”

I am so glad that I did not have to spend a dime to see this thing. I only wish that I could have my 90 minutes + returned to me.