"For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers." - President Barack Obama

Cheney pulls back muscle, in wheelchair for inauguration

I immediately thought of Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life.

"Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about...they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him. But to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they're cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you'll ever be." - George Bailey.

This video makes me so happy.

"As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me."

NEW LINK

I recently bought the Illusion of Gaia for Super Nintendo. It looks awesome, and I can't wait to play it. Love those old school RPGs.

Movie Quote Quiz

1. Pick 15 of your favorite movies.
2. Pick a quote from each one of them (use IMDb.com for help)
3. Tag friends who would know the movies
4. No googling/IMDb searching when guessing
5. Guess all the ones you know even if someone already guessed it (but don't read their answers to get your answers - that's cheating). Everyone who guesses the movie will get their name by the quote. The person with the most correct guesses out of the 15 wins.
6. If you played on facebook/blogger, you can't play on here and vice versa

The Quotes - I don't have much hope of people guessing many of these correctly, just because I like random movies, so I tried to throw in a few obvious ones, too.

1. Why would a reviewer make the point of saying someone's not a genius? Do you especially think I'm not a genius? You didn't even have to think about it, did you?

(Note: It was hard to pick one quote from this movie! But I figured I should pick lines said by only one character, not a conversation.)

2. "No, I like you very much. Just as you are."

3. "I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow."

4. "It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. I've outrun Imperial starships. Not the local bulk cruisers mind you, I'm talking about the big Corellian ships now. She's fast enough for you, old man. What's the cargo?"

5. "How do I look? I mean, do I look Amish?"

6. "Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest so long as I live on! I killed you. Haunt me, then! Haunt your murderer! I know that ghosts have wandered on the Earth. Be with me always. Take any form, drive me mad, only do not leave me in this dark alone where I cannot find you. I cannot live without my life! I cannot die without my soul."

7. "You're mistaken, Mr. Darcy. The mode of your declaration merely spared me any concern I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner. You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it. From the very beginning your manners impressed me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit and your selfish disdain for the feelings of others. I had not known you a month before I felt you were the last man in the world whom I could ever marry!"

8. Character #1: "Jesus is never mad at us if we live with Him in our hearts!"
Character #2: "I hate to break it to you, but He is - He most definitely is."

9. "Your son has been pretending to be a substitute teacher, lecturing the students, uh, giving out homework, uh. Mrs. Glasser has been ill, there was some confusion with the real sub. Your son held a teacher-parent conference yesterday and was planning a class field trip to a French bread factory in Trenton."

10. "No! I'm madly in love with you and it's not because of your brains or your personality."

11. "It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage."

12. "Of course I have a secret identity. I don't know a single superhero who doesn't. Who wants the pressure of being super all the time?"

13. "Good. Someday, and that day may never come, I'll call upon you to do a service for me. But, until that day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughter's wedding day."

14. "I killed two people. One was...yesterday? He was just a boy and I led him into quicksand. The other was...well, before Aqaba. I had to execute him with my pistol, and there was something about it that I didn't like."

15. "Neighbors bring food with death, and flowers with sickness, and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a knife, and our lives."

Books Read, 2009.

I do enjoy keeping lists, so perhaps this little table will inspire me to actually finish a book this year.

Finished	Book Title	Author	Genre	Pages
In Progress	Song Yet Sung	James McBride	?	?

If you have the Tiger version of Mac OS X, I would strongly suggest not using OnyX.

Both times I tried to use, it effed up my computer, giving me an error and "invalid node structure" every time I ran Disk Utility.

The first time, I had to wipe everything off my computer and start clean.

This time, I'm trying to get Disk Warrior and see if it can do anything. I don't feel like losing all of my stuff again, thanks.

19-0 (at home)!

Hey, punk-ass Boston Celtics, why don't you schedule some training in good sportsmanship into your practices?

...actually, why don't you just focus on playing basketball, since you've lost seven of your last nine games?

Fourth quarter, six minutes left in the game, Cavs player Ben Wallace is NOWHERE NEAR THE BALL, when the Celtics deliberately foul him.

Why?

Because the Cavs are kicking their ass, and Wallace has one of the worst free-throw percentages in the game. The Celtics want to foul him and hope he misses so they can catch up.

They go on to do this four more times.

Wallace makes five out of the 10 free throws. We'll take that. Cavs gets the rebound on one of the misses, and LeBron makes a basket. (Although, on one of the fouls, LeBron had just made a three pointer, so it didn't count.)

But, come. One time, okay. Doing it five times? Four of them for four Cavs' possessions in a row? That is bullshit.

Celtics, you have no class.

("The chant here in Cleveland is 'overrated.'" - announcer on ESPN)

Cavs, 98
Celtics, 83

These bowl games should be played on neutral turf.

It's bullshit that, when the BCS National Championship game involves the Florida Gators and Oklahoma Sooners, the game is played in Florida.

That's giving a home-field advantage to the Gators, when the home team usually wins.

And the last BCS National Championship game? In 2008, between the Buckeyes and Louisiana State University? Where was it played? In the Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans, Louisiana!

I mean, come on.

This year, OSU played the Texas Longhorns in the Fiesta Bowl in Arizona, which is right next to, I don't know, Texas. And who won?

And the Rose Bowl? Penn State played USC in...California. Who won?

Don't be giving one team a huge advantage like that.

I'd like to see these SEC teams play a game in a cold-weather state. Let them come up to Ohio and Michigan and see how they do. Wimps.

Yea!

Masterpiece Classic on PBS is showing a new version of Wuthering Heights next Sunday!

After the great adaptations of Jane Eyre and the Jane Austen novels, I was hoping one would be done of my favorite novel!

Round up the usual suspects.

This weekend I watched the movie Valkyrie. Yes, that movie with Tom Cruise playing a German soldier (not a Nazi! They are two different things. Learn your damn history, people.).

Now, I am not thrilled by Tom Cruise as a person, but I enjoyed this movie. It was good. I would watch it again.

You may not know, but this movie reunites the writer and director of The Usual Suspects. You know what that means.

A twist at the end of the movie!

I hear you ask, "But iWoman, this movie is a historical thriller set in Nazi Germany during World War II, depicting the actual July 20, 1944 plot of German army officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler. We all know how history turns out. How can there be a twist?"

There can be a twist because most people probably never even knew that officers in the German army tried at least 14 times to assassinate Hitler. So you don't know all of history, do you, smarty pants?

Now, I will tell you the spoiler here, but only read it if you don't mind being surprised!

S
P
O
I
L
E
R

B
E
L
O
W

Hitler is Keyser Soze!

The cat is so lazy. I'm sitting in the den, listening to MICE in the walls. Yes, mice. Most cats would be interested in the noise and, I don't know, try to get to the mice. Not this lazy one. He just looks up like it's interrupting his beauty sleep and then goes right on ignoring it. Thanks a lot, cat.

My new favorite song.

"The Show" by Lenka.

The Terrible Trivium.

Soja, I found that passage from The Phantom Tollbooth I was referring to, that I said I loved.

Now, I don't know that any child could appreciate this passage more than someone reading it as an adult. I'm referring mainly to the last four paragraphs.

Who hasn't been beaten down by the the Terrible Trivium?

The Terrible Trivium
--From The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

The Humbug whistled gaily at his work, for he was never as happy as when he had a job which required no thinking at all. After what seemed like days, he had dug a hole scarcely large enough for his thumb. Tock shuffled steadily back and forth with the dropper in his teeth, but the full well was still almost as full as when he began, and Milo's new pile of sand was hardly a pile at all.

"How very strange," said Milo, without stopping for a moment. "I've been working steadily all this time, and I don't feel the slightest bit tired or hungry. I could go right on the same way forever."

"Perhaps you will," the man agreed with a yawn (at least it sounded like a yawn).

"Well, I wish I knew how long it was going to take," Milo whispered as the dog went by again.

"Why not use your magic staff and find out?" replied Tock as clearly as anyone could with an eye dropper in his mouth.

Milo took the shiny pencil from his pocket and quickly calculated that, at the rate they were working, it would take each of them eight hundred and thirty-seven years to finish.

"Pardon me," he said, tugging at the man's sleeve and holding the sheet of figures up for him to see, "but it's going to take eight hundred and thirty-seven years to do these jobs."

"Is that so?" replied the man, without even turning around. "Well, you'd better get on with it then."

"But it hardly seems worth while," said Milo softly.

"WORTH WHILE!" the man roared indignantly.

"All I meant was that perhaps it isn't too important," Milo repeated, trying not to be impolite.

"Of course it's not important," he snarled angrily. "I wouldn't have asked you to do it if I thought it was important."

And now, as he turned to face them, he didn't seem quite so pleasant.

"Then why bother?" asked Tock, whose alarm suddenly began to ring.

"Because, my young friends," he muttered sourly, "what could be more important than doing unimportant things? If you stop to do enough of them, you'll never get to where you're going."

He punctuated his last remark with a villainous laugh.

"Then you must -----" gasped Milo.

"Quite correct!" he shrieked triumphantly. "I am the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit."

"We'll take a cup of kindness yet, For auld lang syne."

Happy New Year!