Kelly Fishing for...

Fishing for...a really special place in hell

I hope the room in hell has been reserved with the possibility of an early check-in for these theives.

Copper Theft Spoils Food Bank Groceries

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July 31,2007 | INDIANAPOLIS -- Thieves stole copper pipe from a freezer at the state's largest food bank, wasting nearly half a million dollars worth of food meant to help the poor, police said.

The copper theft was captured by security cameras Friday night, police said, but the freezer's failure wasn't discovered until Monday. By then, thousands of pounds of groceries at the Gleaners Food Bank had become unusable.

It was the third time in two months that copper had been taken from Gleaners. The food bank serves more than 300,000 people through more than 400 pantries and charities in 20 central Indiana counties.

Children, families and the elderly will be hurt by the theft, said Pam Altmeyer, president and chief executive officer of Gleaners.

"It is becoming very clear that the thieves do not understand that it is those most in need of assistance who are hurt," she said.

The theft could cost Gleaners $464,000 in lost food, plus $20,000 for immediate repairs. Gleaners will work this week to solicit more donations and plans to continue distributing its nonperishable food.

Copper can be sold for around $3 per pound, and thefts have become common across the country. In the food bank's case, it is unlikely the thieves got more than a few hundred dollars if they sold all the copper tubing to a scrap yard, Police Lt. Jeff Duhamell said.

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Salon provides breaking news articles from the Associated Press as a service to its readers, but does not edit the AP articles it publishes.

Fishing for...a better place for a hero

If anyone should go on to a better place, it's Jake.  The heroic animal who searched for survivors both after 9/11 and Katrina has passed from cancer.  I hope he's with my Percy now, but that she's not leading him too far astray from his admirable character.

Dog Who Searched for 9/11 Survivors Dies

By VERENA DOBNIK,

AP

Posted: 2007-07-26 11:32:22

Filed Under: Nation

NEW YORK (July 26) - A black Labrador who became a national canine hero after burrowing through white-hot, smoking debris in search of survivors at the World Trade Center site died Wednesday after a battle with cancer.

Full article

Fishing for...unforgivable punishment

I'm strong enough to admit this about myself.  If they put an ankle monitor on me to check to make sure I'm not drinking any alcoholic beverages, I think I'd have to chew my own leg off and wash it down with a nice Pino Grigio.

Fishing for...can I survive until this long weekend?

I'm so excited to have finally booked our usual summer weekend in the wine country on the North Fork of Long Island. Since we have the new puppy, we're trying a new pet-friendly place that sounds really worthy..."The Blue". (NYTimes says: "The Blue" is fast becoming the place to be on the North Fork. With the goodwill of its party-hearty owners, the pool and bar areas are crowded all summer long. Though it retains its 1950-era motel facade, the new owners have gutted everything, bringing a new-millennium feel to it.)

I'm packing my usualy JCrew-centric wardrobe:

white jeans
red Capri pants
anchor tank
Libertine shorts (green and navy)
Zara white puffy short-sleeve blouse
seersucker pants
Anthropologie white lace nightgown/dress
Nordstrom pashmina (green)
JCrew navy sweater
2 bikinis
straw sun hat (Old Navy circa 1999)
flip flops
new wedge heels with gold leather straps
gold hoops
gold cuff (Lia Sophia)
headbands/head scarves
new digital camera
Libertine Embroidered Duffle Bag - Admiral Blue/ True White to put it all in

my husband and..

our new puppy Savvy.

Fishing for...a new "Order"

The book that was hands down my favorite, now has a movie that is my biggest disappointment.  This includes of all the films, even the earlier silly but harmless Chris Columbus ones.

The tone was off from the beginning.  Overall, it needed to move with the urgent pace that the last two films established as a rhythm.  There were long, awkward pauses that were a detriment to the actors, especially Emma Watson and Rupert Grint (Hermione and Ron).  These teens are strong actors by now who know their characters inside and out, but the director and editor allowing these terrible, Pinteresque pauses to occur, without urgent subtext to sustain them, was a real pain to watch and made the actors seem the most inexperienced they ever have.

The casting was off for the first time in the history of the films as well.  I’ve always loved Imelda Staunton so much.  She was such a delight in the films of Kenneth Branaugh, like “Much Ado About Nothing” and Emma Thompson’s delightful adaptation of “Sense & Sensibility” allowed Staunton a real chance to play an unappealing character with such zest that you liked her despite of it.  And in “Peter’s Friends” she even sang, with a lovely voice and terrific skill for phrasing.  In “Order of the Phoenix”, she’s wrongly cast and looks to be working so hard, doing everything she can to make up for what is not her fault.  Did anyone besides me read this book and picture Umbridge as the ugliest woman imaginable?  With a “toad-like face”, I was picturing bulging eyes with droopy bags, thick flaccid lips, big jowls and tiny little sharp teeth.  Casting an actor cast with a face like that, gags like the wonderfully ridiculous pink “Jackie-O” over the top suits and pill box hats would have seemed even more frightening and tell us even more about this character by the severe juxtaposition with her homeliness. 

I know it may seem like a small part, but a warning sign that things were off early on with this film came with the casting of Mrs. Figg.  That actress seemed such an odd choice and she also seemed uncomfortable.  I wanted Mrs. Figg to be that old woman everyone has in their neighborhood….badly dressed in a house coat and slippers, banging on loudly to anyone who’ll listen about her cats and what she thinks about everyone else’s business.  This woman seemed quietly subdued when she should have been brash and it set the tone off right from the start.  And where were her carpet slippers?  She was dressed almost respectably, which was a comic disappointment.

Other issues and topics from the book that I severely missed or were off, in no particular order are:

• Neville Longbottom:  He is severely short-changed here.  This is the book where we find out not only that HE could have been “The Boy Who Lived” instead of Harry, but that he was a MORE LIKELY candidate for Voldemort to choose, since he is of pure blood.  But not only is this not mentioned, but we don’t even get to see any of his important development.  I would have gladly cut out showing his steady progress in the DA classroom in order to allow time to show him stand up to the Death Eaters in the way his does in the book.  When I was reading it, the image of him with a broken nose, yelling “Stubefy” over and over in the face of danger was one of the most oddly moving of details and should have been kept in.
• And on that note, where were ANY of the young members of the DA standing up to the Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries?  In this film, the Order of the Phoenix rushes in and they hide behind a rock???  What a disappointment.  The whole point of the DA was to show the new guard, the new generation that would stand up against evil.  In this film, we saw WAY TOO MUCH of the classroom scenes, but nothing of their bravery when it counted.
• On that note, the fight scenes themselves at the end were just wrong.  They were strangely derivative of Star Wars, with blue and red shooting lights.  There was nothing tangible about them, you never saw a spell land and do damage and every spell seemed the same. 
• And the death curtain was all wrong.  What a wasted time to use CGI when a real, crumbling stone arch with a real dirty black curtain hanging in it would have been much more frightening for its immediacy then this silly computer generated concoction.
• Luna was just odd, in my opinion.  The little girl was too pretty, too ethereal.  She seemed more like the pretty little girl in the class that talks a little too much about fairies, but people like her anyway.  Luna was meant to be the one girl (everyone had one of these in their grade) who is so strange, so bravely, blatantly odd and sticks to her own ideas and says them, horror-of-horrors, out loud, that everyone just hates her for now, but remembers her later with some grudging respect.  This film didn’t capture that and bungled her relationship with Harry, which in the book was a slight connection, but not the almost romantic one that the film conjured up (possibly inadvertently?).
• Where were the various tensions that were bred through Voldemort’s return?  Sirius and Molly Weasley?  George & Fred’s with Molly?  Sirius and Kretcher?  There were the tiniest of illusions to these in places, but nothing on the scale that was needed.  Harry was left alone to carry the tension of the film’s atmosphere to the point where (through no fault of Daniel Radcliffe’s) he almost started to seem unnecessarily peevish. 
• Fred and George, on a grand scale, were also under-used.  The actors have grown handsome and really come into their comic skills, as we started to see in “Goblet of Fire”.  Their rebellion should have been built slowly over the course of the film, but instead it seemed to come out of nowhere. 
• But then, Umbridge’s rein didn’t build the way it should have.  We should have felt the repressive atmosphere but just didn’t. 
• Where was St. Mungo’s?  Where was the tragedy and fear of Mr. Weasley’s attack?  And the shame of seeing Neville with his parents?
• Oh, and why were Hermione and Ron dressed in shirts with horizontal stripes in almost every scene where they had to stand behind Harry?  Did this costume designer just graduate from theater school, Costume Design 101?

I can go on and on with this list, and I’m sure Potter fans will have many more.  And many could argue that he didn’t have time to include everything, but I’m talking about what he did prioritize.  A 5 minute scene of a paper bird flying around a classroom?  Take it out and put in something relevant!  Those long, awkward pauses?  Tighten those up and we have time for something that matters!

I’m so disappointed.  When I think of what Alfonso Cuarón could have done with this book, or Mike Newell.  Seeing what can happen to the HP books in the hands of an inexperienced director like David Yates certainly makes you appreciate what achievements “Azkaban” and “Goblet” really were.  But I didn’t need to be told.

The worst part: we’re stuck with Yates for the next film.  Where Cuarón and Newell wouldn’t sign on for another, despite the incredible results they produced, Yates was signed on for “Half-Blood” without producers waiting to see how this film was received.  A bitter disappointment.  I can only hope that with Steve Kloves back on script that it has a slight chance of improvement.

As a postscript, since I do like to end on a high note, I will note a few small details about “Phoenix” that I liked.

• Dudley and friends as “wiggers”, dressed in finest Ali G style.  Brilliant touch.
• The “proclamations” being tacked up on one wall by Filch, until his ladder couldn’t reach high enough.
• Kretcher.  Such a fulfilling CG house elf, after the Jar-Jar Binks painfulness of Dobby.  He was creepy, dirty, seemed realistically solid and I wish had been used to greater effect by a more sure hand of a director.
• The Black Family Tree was actually visually better than I envisioned it when reading the book.  How delightful.  Why couldn’t they let the artistic soul who designed that also show us Sirius’ mother’s portrait, a detail I was so excited to see fulfilled from my imagination.
• Natalia Tena as Tonks.  I wish she’d had more character development, because she’s a wonderful choice.
• Also wonderful casting is Helena Bonham Carter.  She was delightfully campy.
• The breakout and visual image of Azkaban was terrific.  As a place so many minds have been building up over time as to what it would finally look like when depicted, it did not disappoint.
• I did appreciate that they continued with what I’ve always felt in Umbridge was written with what seems a strong comparison to the Condoleezza Rice/George Bush relationship.  Condi famously referred to the President as “My husband”.  Umbridge keeps a photo of Fudge on her desk like a schoolgirl with a crush.
• Several scenes were funny and harsh with a terrific quality.  Emma Thompson was heartbreaking in the scene where she’s sacked.  Alan Rickman played the scene where Umbridge evaluates Snape pitch perfectly, as always.
• And I love the way the film opened, for the first 5 minutes.  Harry sitting on a swing, watching a mother taking her small children home for the evening was so subtle and expressive. 

I wish it had continued on with the promise of that first scene.

Fishing for...a new power source

You may not find many people who are as pro-environmental causes as I am, I'm proud to spend a Saturday night watching "An Inconvenient Truth" while sorting my recycling, sitting in the dark and only showering every other day to conserve water (um, maybe I'd do that anyway and maybe I shouldn't say I'm proud?). 

BUT after last year's 10 DAY BLACKOUT in Queens, Con Edison has been my mortal enemy.  Some of you may remember how incensed I was to get on a 7 train just two weeks after this disaster to discover fancy Con Edison "feel-good" ads placed all over it.  That was, according to the PR whizzes at Con Ed all the people of Queens needed to forget all about the 10 days with no lights, TV, or air conditioning in 90 degree weather! 

Well, they've done it again.  Now that summer has officially begun, Con Ed has plastered the 7 train with ads warning us to conserve our power use!  How fun it is to keep our lights out, hurriedly open our fridge doors and teach our kids about conserving energy!  And I'd totally agree, if this wasn't Con Ed's way of saying "See Queens, this was all your fault. You, who let your kids spend a whole 5 seconds choosing their after school snack.  Not ours for considering the people of your borough to be third-class citizens who don't deserve updated power lines and systems."

See photo of said ads.  If you happen to see them in person with angry Sharpie notes on them, they could just be mine.

Fishing for...my security guard could beat up your security guard

Sometimes I have a slightly delayed reaction to the strange things I say.  The wife of the man who founded the hedge fund I'm working for called this morning and while I was trying to transfer her, I lost her.  When she called back, no doubt from some unbelievable home in CT or Long Island, and I apologized she said "No, I was the one to disconnect.  The front gate was calling on the other phone and when they call, I absolutely must get it." 

And I actually responded "I totally understand".

What?  In what world do I relate to having a large home, with a front gate, and that I know exactly that you must answer their calls first and foremost when they come in? 

Is it total ambivalence that makes me answer this way or a pathological need to relate to everyone, even if I cannot?

Fishing for...my shopping utopia

On my recent trip to Hilton Head and Savannah, I found what is now my favorite store on the planet....The Paris Market.  Located on the super cool Broughton Street in Savannah, I would make the trip back just to spend more time in this store.  Upstairs has a hip, Euro-market feel, with original jewelry designs, collectibles, toiletries, accessories, amazing coffee table and style books, and even a little cafe with super clever 1950's style candies and treats.  My favorite part was a tiny selection of impeccable vintage cocktail dresses in the back...each one looking like it was a wardrobe item from "Breakfast at Tiffany's".  Downstairs was a vast array of phenomenal furniture and household items.

Visit both the store's site and the blog....and you too can wish you were there in person!

one of many stunning vintage dresses...

the convertible clutch, so clever...

I might not have the amount of smart dinner guest type friends to sit around this table, but I'd like to own it anyway.

and the kick ass necklace.  How inspiring!

Fishing for...an emergency order of fries and a Big Mac

Funny, this is how I finally got caught making all those obscene phone calls.

Girl, 4, Called 911 Nearly 300 Times

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July 05, 2007 | CARPENTERSVILLE, Ill. -- Authorities tracked down a 4-year-old girl who called 911 nearly 300 times last month by offering to deliver McDonald's to her suburban Chicago apartment.

Unbeknownst to her mother, the girl used a deactivated cell phone to call dispatchers 287 times in June -- sometimes as often as 20 times a shift.

Dispatchers heard the child's voice but could only track the phone's signal to the apartment complex.

So authorities used a ruse to pinpoint her.

"We asked (the caller) what she wanted. She said she wanted McDonald's," said Steve Cordes, executive director of QuadCom's emergency center, which covers Carpentersville.

"We talked with her and we convinced her if she told us where she lives, we would bring her McDonald's," he said. "She finally gave us her address. So we sent the police over -- with no McDonald's."

After police arrived, the girl's mother took away the phone, Cordes said.

Under federal law, deactivated cell phones still must be able to access 911. Many deactivated phones will contact an emergency call center if the user holds down the nine key.

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

This is an ending too young and too unfair for the man so kind he would travel all the way to Marion Ohio and help a group of small-town dancers learn the original choreography of "A Chorus Line".  You will be missed, Thommie.  Just for you, I think tonight I'll go out and break into someone else's house...you know, just to rearrange their furniture.

from Playbill News

Thommie Walsh, Tony-Winning Choreographer, Dead at 57

By Andrew Gans
17 Jun 2007

Thommie Walsh, the Tony-winning choreographer who was also a part of the original Broadway cast of A Chorus Line, died June 16 at the age of 57.

Playbill.com has learned that Mr. Walsh passed away after a battle with lymphoma.

Mr. Walsh was born March 15, 1950, and according to his official website, began his show-business journey at the age of five as a dance student at the Irma Baker School of Dance. By the time he was 23, he was making his Broadway debut as a performer in the original cast of Seesaw. At that time, the artist who would go on to win two Tony Awards for his choreographic talents, went by the name of Thomas J. Walsh.

Mr. Walsh was also part of the cast of the short-lived Rachael Lily Rosenbloom and Don't You Ever Forget It before he landed a role in the original cast of the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Chorus Line. Walsh originated the role of Bobby in the Michael Bennett musical, the character who breaks into houses, "not to steal anything, just to rearrange the furniture."

Mr. Walsh's next outing was The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, the first Broadway production where he worked offstage rather than on — Walsh was the associate choreographer for the production, which boasted direction and choreography by another Thommie, Tommy Tune. That was the official beginning of a lengthy working relationship with Tune, which also included the Broadway productions of A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine, Nine and My One and Only.

For Hollywood/Ukraine, Mr. Walsh was co-choreographer. He and Tune received the 1980 Tony Award for Best Choreography for their work.

Walsh received solo choreography credit for Nine and received his second Tony nomination for Best Choreography. On My Only and Only, he and Tune shared staging and choreography credits and received Tony nominations for both direction and choreography, winning the Tony for the latter category.

Mr. Walsh's other Broadway credits included the musical staging of The 1940's Radio Hour (1979), Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? (1982) and My Favorite Year (1992).

Mr. Walsh also directed the Off-Broadway production of Lucky Stiff, the London production of Always and the Goodspeed Opera House mounting of A Broadway Baby. He directed and choreographed the national tour of Whorehouse, which co-starred Gary Sandy and Ann-Margret.

Among the many artists Mr. Walsh directed and staged musical numbers for are Chita Rivera, Sandy Duncan, Whoopi Goldberg, Lorna Luft, Joel Grey and Barbara Cook.

Mr. Walsh also had a long working relationship with Tony winner Donna McKechnie, the singer-actress-dancer he shared a stage with in A Chorus Line. Walsh directed McKechnie’s acclaimed autobiographical concert, Donna McKechnie: Inside the Music.

With Robert Viagas and Baayork Lee, Mr. Walsh penned the tome "On the Line: The Creation of A Chorus Line."