Weekend Recap

Oh lawd...where to begin?

So as it turns out, my co-worker does not have lice, but just a really bad case of dandruff. Thank god.

Spent Friday night cleaning the apartment for a couple of reasons. First off, Max was shooting his commerical parodies for his White People group and we needed to get the tub clean for the big "suicide" scene, which I will talk about in a second. The tub eventually had to be cleaned anyway since Josh will be staying at our place this week while he Pig sits and I don't want him to be grossed out if he has to use ourshower. Also, my relatives are coming in town the weekend after we return from Michigan, so I needed to start getting the place relative-ready. So, not a very fun Friday night, but it was really productive. Again I'm going to tout the best cleaning product ever - Bar Keeper's Friend. That stuff gets out everything and makes things shiny and new again!

Saturday morning a whole bunch of the gang came over to shoot the two commerical parodies Max had written for their website. I mainly just hung around and tried to keep myself and Pig out of the way. When I got bored, I either napped (hey, it's my apartment too!) or took some production stills. Here are some of my favorites from that day (actually these were taken by Amol):






In this last pic, you can see that they're prepping for Josh's big "suicide" shot. Max had rigged up a whole system of pumps and hoses to make it work. I think it turned out quite well. I took this pic, which I think is thoroughly creepy:



I really wanted to post this on myspace and and scare people, but I decided that might not be very nice to the friends who don't know Josh and don't know that these guys make little films and stuff all the time and that this undoubtedly is fake.

But in case you are creeped out, no worries! See, he's fine!!


In between takes, I amused myself by taking pics of Pig:





Max dubbed this as "Barka Pig"

After the shoot, we cleaned up and went to Jessie's birthday party. She had booked a 50 person private karaoke room. It was super fun - I did take a lot of pics, but since it was so dim in the room, they turned out pretty crappy so I'll leave them off the blog.

Since we had barely any time to rest over the weekend, Sunday was our official lounge-around-day. After getting Pig walked and fed in the morning, I actually went back to bed and didn't get up until noon. Ahhh....so nice. Finished re-reading (again) the first Harry Potter book and decided at around 7 p.m. to head to Border's to pick up Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which is the 2nd Harry Potter book. I used to have it, but lent it to someone and now it's the only one missing in my collection, and the one that I've read least. Definitely due for a re-read. Of course while at Border's I got sucked into a 3 for 2 deal and picked up a few other books that I'm really excited about. Since I'll be on vacation next week, I figure I'll have plenty of time to do some reading. The books I got are:

Into the Wild by John Krakauer (Non-Fiction)
After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods. Maps. 35,000 first printing; author tour.

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (fiction)
Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing—with compassion and clarity—on individual human dramas.

And this last one, which I think sounds awesome and fun-
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (fiction)
Surreal and hilariously funny, this alternate history, the debut novel of British author Fforde, will appeal to lovers of zany genre work (think Douglas Adams) and lovers of classic literature alike. The scene: Great Britain circa 1985, but a Great Britain where literature has a prominent place in everyday life. For pennies, corner Will-Speak machines will quote Shakespeare; Richard III is performed with audience participation … la Rocky Horror and children swap Henry Fielding bubble-gum cards. In this world where high lit matters, Special Operative Thursday Next (literary detective) seeks to retrieve the stolen manuscript of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. The evil Acheron Hades has plans for it: after kidnapping Next's mad-scientist uncle, Mycroft, and commandeering Mycroft's invention, the Prose Portal, which enables people to cross into a literary text, he sends a minion into Chuzzlewit to seize and kill a minor character, thus forever changing the novel. Worse is to come. When the manuscript of Jane Eyre, Next's favorite novel, disappears, and Jane herself is spirited out of the book, Next must pursue Hades inside Charlotte Bront‰'s masterpiece. The plethora of oddly named characters can be confusing, and the story's episodic nature means that the action moves forward in fits and starts. The cartoonish characters are either all good or all bad, but the villain's comeuppance is still satisfying. Witty and clever, this literate romp heralds a fun new series set in a wonderfully original world. (Jan. 28)


I can't wait!