The Very Best Of Cher: The Video Hits Collection

We got the DVD of The Very Best of Cher: The Video Hits Collection via Netflix the other day and now, it's all Anna wants to watch. I have to admit, the videos are pretty good. I'd forgotten how much fun videos used to be and Cher made some good ones. No, none of them are stellar like some of Madonna's videos are, but they are fun and cheesy and everything in between. I was especially surprised by the inclusion of the "Main Man" video which I think I saw all of once on MTV back when it was released. Cher complete with leg warmers. Hmmm. How good is that.

The one thing I had completely forgotten about was the omnipresence of the Rob Camilletti (a/k/a Bagel Boy) in the Cher videos. I wonder how he feels about being immortalized in all his 80s big-hairness by "I Found Someone", "We All Sleep Alone" and "Main Man"?

But perhaps the biggest surprise of all was the "Dove L'Amore" video which features a dance remix and Cher in her drag queen best. And the glittery eye shadow was just too much. I, of course, thought it rocked.

Anna's turning into a good 3rd generation Cher fan (after my mom and then me.) She was even trying to sing along to "A Song For The Lonely" which was just precious beyond words.

Sometimes the ace, sometimes the deuces

Ugh, today is my last day off before a 9 day stretch at work with no days off. And it was kind of a crappy day. It started with the news from a tree guy that the tree in our backyard is dying a slow death and really needs to come out. The likelihood that it will probably fall into the house if the right east wind comes along. Trouble is that the cost of getting rid of the tree is estimated at $1500. May as well be 15,000 at that. So then we take Anna to her dentist's appointment at 10AM which was good because she has no tooth decay (although she does have a slight open bite thanks to her continued use of the pacifier.) The bad thing was it took nearly an hour and a half for that whole thing to get over and done with. So by the time we got back from that, the morning was shot and I still hadn't gotten a shower.

We get home and Heidi announces that she's gonna go up and check her e-mail and deprogram for a little bit. Not five minutes later, I hear a rather urgent "Dan, I need your help RIGHT NOW!" I go upstairs to find that she's spilled iced tea on her laptop keyboard. After initially thinking that it was going to be okay, it is completely not working and has to be sent back to Toshiba for repair. Lord knows how much that will cost.

So I guess while I have that guy out there cutting down the tree in the back yard, I better have him plant a money tree as well. Because it looks like we're going to need it.

Is this the United States??

Bush Can Hold Citizens Without Charges

As my brother so uncouthly (and ironically, considering he married a Russian girl) said years ago, "Did I just wake up in Russia?"

"My Heaven"

...written by the incomparable Mary-Chapin Carpenter. And yeah, I haven't journaled or blogged song lyrics in forever and a day.
----------------------------------------
Nothing shatters, nothing breaks
Nothing hurts and nothing aches
We got ourselves on helluva place in my heaven.
Looking down at the world below,
A bunch of whining, fighting schmos
Up here, we got non of those, in my heaven.

There's pools and lakes and hills and mountains
Music, art and lighted fountains
Who needs bucks here, no one's counting
In my heaven.
No one works, we all just play
We pick the weather everyday
If you change your mind, that's ok, in my heaven.

Grandma's up here, grandpa too
In a condo with to-die-for views
There's presidents and movie stars,
You just come as you are.
No one's lost and no one's missing
No more partings, just hugs and kissing
And all these stars are just for wishing
In my heaven.

There's little white lights everywhere
You childhood dog in Dad's old chair.
And more memories than my heart can hold
When Eva's singing "Fields of Gold"

There's neighbors, theives and long lost lovers.
Villains, poets, kings and mothers
Up here we forgive each other, in my heaven.
For every soul that's down there waiting,
Holding on, still hesitating
We say a prayer of levitating in my heaven.
You can look back on your life and lot
But it can't matter what you're not
By the time you're here, we're all we've got
In my heaven.

The Lovely Bones

Just got done reading Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones on Saturday. It was a book that had grabbed my attention thanks to Mary Chapin Carpenter, of all things. She has a song on her new CD, Between Here and Gone, called "My Heaven" which by all accounts is inspired by The Lovely Bones. It paints this great picture of heaven from the eyes of the narrator--a heaven filled with all the things that she loved in life and what would have been a paradise had she had the option to create it on Earth. It's a gorgeous song in it's simplicity, mostly because MCC hardly ever overstates anything. But anyway, I picked up the book at the Ames library a couple weeks ago and it has a beginning you just can't stop reading. There were drops in the narrative toward the middle, but by the end, I was mostly just tired of hearing Susie Salmon be so self-involved. Plus when she was able to inhabit people a la The Exorcist I found myself just kind of sighing and waiting for the book to be over. It's too bad, because it could have been really good because Sebold is an excellent writer and is capable of telling a good story.

Don't get me wrong--I'm not sorry I read the book, but it just wasn't everything it could have been.

Jinkies Fred! It was actually tolerable!

Anna and I went to Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed this weekend at the dollar theater here in Ames. I have to admit that I wasn't all that excited about it because from what I was told about the first Scooby-Doo movie, it was pretty much bound to suck. But it was a 3 bucks for the two of us to get in (plus 7 bucks for popcorn and pop) and it was a night out with my daughter. Plus, she was all psyched about seeing "the big show" as she likes to call it.

And wouldn't you know it, the movie wasn't half bad. No, it's not high art or fine cinema or even especially good cheesy guilty pleasure type stuff, but it was passable entertainment that didn't bug me half as much as say Episode II: Attack of the Clones did. Freddy Prinze, Jr. did sleepwalk through most of the movie and sadly, Daphne was played by Buffy Summers played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. I'm afraid until SMG gets a little bit older, she'll have the Buffy typecast to deal with. Scooby was a pretty awful CG character, but the monsters were cool. There was Miner 49er, the 10,000 volt ghost, and some crazy scuba diver ghost that I never caught the name of but remember from the cartoons when I was a kid. To these, Anna would turn to me every now again and say "Ooh, that's a scary guy, Daddy!" and laugh uproariously.

But perhaps the best part of the movie were the times I caught her looking up at me lovingly or giving me these spontaneous hugs that told me, in her own Anna way, that she loved being at Scooby Doo with her dad.

39 degrees

Yep, it's 39 degrees on June 25th. Granted, it's 6 o'clock in the morning and we're headed for 75, but it's still surreal. I had to change to a long sleeved shirt this morning because the short sleeved one I had picked out was just too damn cold!

So I work today, and then I'm off for the weekend. This is so essential to my mental health, it's impossible for me to understate it. I feel better today than I did on Wednesday when I went to work. Wednesday was mostly just treading water until 3:30 rolled around and I could go home. I think I'll do better today but I guess that remains to be seen. I hate being so damn tired all the time but I'm not sure what to do with that, y'know?

I bought the new Heart CD, Jupiter's Darling, on iTunes last night with the gift certificate that Julie gave me for my birthday. I didn't even know that they had a new CD out!! From what I've heard so far, it sounds like pretty classic Heart. It's more 70s Heart than 80s Heart (i.e. relatively few power ballads and more guitar rock-ish) and that's great because Ann's voice is perfect for that kind of thing. I'll post more about it after I've had a chance to listen to it.

We're also going to Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight at the Varsity Theater here in Ames. We were thinking that we might have to drive to Des Moines to see it, which complicates child care tremendously, but having it here in town means we drop Anna off at Tim & Sally's and we're gone for a couple hours as opposed to the entire evening.

Father's Day

My only association with Father's Day is "IT'S FATHER'S DAY, BEDELIA!! Where's my cake?" OK, not my only association, but the one that I always think of whenever Father's Day rolls around.

And it figures--it's a zombie father.

Post-Madonna Post

(Note: This is the transcript of an e-mail I sent to a group. I don't have time to compose a brand new blog post. I'll maybe write more about it later bur as of now, I'm dead tired.)

A little bit light-hearted, but I just wanted to let everyone here know that I managed to make it to Washington, D.C. yesterday for Madonna's Re-Invention Tour. Yes, flying out of Iowa to D.C (via Detroit, which was only fitting) to go to a concert did border on insanity, but I figure it's not any different than people paying boatloads of money to go to sporting events all of the place. It was a quick trip--left on Monday, back early today and I think I'll probably be paying for it for days to come, but it was so worth it.

I can't get over how good she sounded and how much fun she seemed to be having. Whether she's faking liking her old songs or not I don't much care--if she is faking it, she's doing a good job of it. I went with my buddy Jeff who has been my partner-in-crime for all things Madonna for almost 20 years now. We went to Madonna's last tour in Chicago in 2001 (my wife was pregnant at the time and the dr. wouldn't allow her to go so she stayed back at the hotel.) This time, she stayed in Iowa with our 2 & 1/2 year old daughter.

All the hits were there--"Vogue", "Into The Groove", "Express Yourself", "Like A Prayer", "Crazy For You", "Material Girl"--such a welcome relief from the last time she toured. I told Jeff that it was totally worth every last cent just to be able to stand in an arena full of Madonna fans and scream (along with everyone else in the arena) "GET UP ON THE DANCE FLOOR!!" The crowd was electric and so excited to be there. A lot of the people that sat around us had been at the show the night before which just killed me because it wasn't like the seats were cheap.

A funny mix of people were there as well. The crowd was definitely an older crowd--meaning not many teenagers. But that's not too surprising as her fan base has aged right along with her. I commented to Jeff that this was probably one of the few places where you could see PTA style moms, grandmas, couples, gay guys, black, white, Asian, whatever. All linked by the common thread of they were there to see Madonna. It was kinda fun. And I'll tell ya one thing, the straight guys at the concert would be wise to follow the lead of the gay guys at the concert and just not think about who might be watching them and just cut loose. They looked like they were having so dang much fun!

The thing that always gets me about Madonna is that when you're listening to her music or watching her videos, you really forget what an excellent dancer she really is. And it showed in this concert. Singing (only a little bit of lip synching that I could tell--the Vogue rap and some of the more vocoder heavy songs like "Die Another Day" sounded a little bit too much like the CD) and dancing combined in a show so intricate and detailed that if anything got off by just a little bit, it could really screw things up. But she was also light hearted and engaged the audience and oddly human. During "Express Yourself" she's all "HELLO WASHINGTON, D.C.!" and then she starts singing to which she says "Oh shit! Boys and girls, do you believe in love? Cuz I got something to say about it." It was very endearing.

All in all, I loved the show. It was fun to spend time with my friend (although he's such an incredible extrovert and I'm actually quite introverted that sometimes he can be a bit tough to handle non-stop--he's *always* on.) and D.C. was not entirely unfamiliar so I felt comfortable there. Truth be told it was probably worth the extra money to fly there rather than having the hassle of driving into Chicago and parking at the United Center which is in a crappy part of the city.

If you've read this far, thanks for reading. It was the closest I'll ever get to seeing Madonna at the top of her game. She's not nearly as relevant as she used to be, but she still puts on one hell of a good show.

Once More With Feeling

We watched the all-singing, all-dancing episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer tonight. "Once More, With Feeling" is what it was called and it was a stitch. And surprisingly enough, it wasn't just a throwaway episode, but it also substantially advanced the story arc for the 6th season. It's all weird not having seen this season but having seen the 7th (and final) season. A lot of the things that kind of made you go "hmmmm" in season 7 now make a little bit more sense. And watching Willow go over to the dark side of magic is like watching an alcoholic unwittingly destroy their life and the lives of those around them.

So there's only tomorrow to work and the Jeff and I are off to D.C. to go to the Madonna show. I'm pretty excited, but I wish that I weren't so damn tired. I told Heidi this morning that I'm just sick of being tired all the time and she says not to discount the fact that I'm still learning my job. This in spite of the fact that they're going to let me work alone a week from tomorrow which has me pretty much scared shitless because I just know that I'm not going to be able to keep up with the workload. I mean, today was a prime example. If there hadn't been another pharmacist there today, I wouldn't have gotten to eat. Simple as that. And it sucks because I'm afraid of what I might miss in all the craziness that can be hospital work. It's not like I'm reading tarot cards or painting a house--people's lives really are at risk when I'm working. Not like I'm incompetent, but yet I am human nonetheless. If I screw up in a big enough way, that can directly impact someone's life--even to the point where they may no longer have a life. I always thought that at Washington when I was there, but here in Ames, it's even more relevant. I don't know if it's because people are sicker or if it's because we use higher powered drugs (I mean, please, like we were ever gonna use Natrecor at Washington) but it really bothers me sometimes. I try really hard to be accurate but you can't be so slow about it that you don't get anything done. And on the other hand, you can't be so fast that you're not accurate. So what's a guy to do?

I don't know--mostly I'm just feeling kind of overwhelmed these days so I thought I'd write it here into the void where I'm pretty sure it won't be read. It sucks to feel alone when you're some place new and could really use the external validation. A lot of the things that once were are no longer and who knows what the future holds. Mostly I'm just being cryptic, it's not as bad as it sounds. Thank goodness for Heidi and Anna. Without them, I'd be crazy.

On a lighter note, I went out and spent some money (birthday money) on some DVDs at Best Buy last night. I bought The Godfather (which I am so glad is available as a single disc and not just with The Godfather collector set--do I really need a DVD of The Godfather Part III?) and the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead. I was funny, I started watching NotLD and it reminded me a lot of those TV shows that were on on Saturday nights on the local Fox affiliate (or independent channel--not sure if there was such a thing as Fox TV) like Freddy's Nightmares or Friday the 13th: The Series. I used to watch those shows all the time--and I remember thinking a lot about how everyone else was probably out partying while I was watching them. The production values were pretty low for the most part and sometimes the stories were lame, but all in all, you can't beat a good scary flick. But what I wouldn't give for those to come out on DVD. Instead of those, we're getting Punky Brewster. *sigh*

But perhaps the horror anthology show that gave me the biggest willies was Tales From the Darkside. I'm thinking especially of the Christmas episode with the Grither. Scared me half to death as a kid and now I'm thinking I'd *love* to see it again. :)

Leaders Dead and Otherwise

I'm so tired of the whole Reagan thing. So the guy is dead. So freaking what? I mean, he was president, not God. And the thing is it's probably a blessing that he died. More than likely for the last five years or so he's been pooping in diapers and not able to remember any of his family members. What kind of life is that? Not much of one in my book. And everybody's going on and on about how great he was. I mean, he was a charismatic leader and all, but is he deserving of a National Day of Mourning? My friend Brian linked to a list of things to think about when you get to thinking Reagan was the greatest man to ever walk the face of the Earth. I'm sure you can come up with similar comments for just about any President, for after all, they are only human. I think Judson Frondorf over at Ack Ack Ack puts it best--"it's about as close as you can get to necrophilia without actually f***ing the corpse." Harsh? Sure. But this is a freaking circus. Call me callous or uncaring or whatever, but I've never seen such a fit thrown over a guy that lived for 93 years.

Personally, this has been my favorite take on the whole thing. A new Republican presidential/vice-presidential ticket for 2004.

Birthday ramblings...

I'm 32 years old today and it was a pretty good day. My mother-in-law got me a 15 dollar iTunes pre-paid card which is pretty fun to try to spend. I bought this cute little song that I heard at work while I was on hold one day--it's called "Rhode Island Is Famous For You" by Blossom Dearie. What a funny way to come across a song, but I remember writing "Rhode Island--famous for you" on my hand so that I could Google the lyrics when I got home. Only today did I remember to do that. So I'm down to $14.01 on my iTunes account.

I didn't do anything too spectacular today. Jeff came up tonight after I got off work and he, Heidi and I all grilled out. He watched the first two episodes of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and is now hooked--so much so that he had to borrow the DVDs of the first season. Heidi and Anna bought me some new shirts which I was really needing for work. I don't have enough short sleeved shirts to wear and man, I get warm in long sleeves, especially when I walk to work. After supper we went out to Wal-Mart (for the first time since we moved to Ames) and looked for some stuff for Jeff's show this weekend. We ended up at Borders where I read the first chapter of The Lovely Bones while Anna ran around the children's department. I'm going to have to check that book out from the library or borrow it from Mary--it really had an intriguing beginning.

But for now, I'm reading Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers which is just freaking hysterical. This lady knows how to write a thoroughly enjoyable book about a subject that might not be too terribly engaging.

So another birthday come and gone. It's probably for the best anyway.

I've walked to work the last three days and I'm really starting to like it. I don't know how much I'll like it once it's 98 degrees at 6:30 AM which I figure it'll do sometime next week, but for now, it's a good thing. I haven't started the car for two whole days! Even last night when I went out to Walgreens to get some stuff for Heidi, I rode my bike. I want to get to the point where I take the car as the last option, and with the price of gas as it is, that'd probably help us save a little bit of money. I've been taking my iPod with me while I walk and it's always interesting to see the mix of songs that comes up as I go to and from work. Tonight on the way home, I heard 4 songs:

+ Dave Matthews Band "Digging A Ditch"
+ Janet Jackson "Escapade (Shep's Housecapade Mix)"
+ Debbie Gibson "Between The Lines"

Quite the eclectic mix--not many songs as it's just about a 15-20 minute walk depending upon how fast I go.

The Day After Tomorrow

So we went to The Day After Tomorrow on Saturday. All I can say is wow. I expected special effects to beat the band and the random destruction of both east and west coast cities. But what I didn't expect was to actually care about the characters. Nor did I expect to think about it much longer than 5 minutes after I left the movie theater. But I did care about the characters and I have found myself thinking back on it several times in the last couple of days. While it wasn't the most intelligent summer blockbuster to ever be made, it is a lot better than the mediocre reviews it's getting might indicate.

Sure, the science is totally whacked. This kind of scenario could never happen in the time frame that is set up in the movie. But what did reviewers expect? Did they expect this to happen slowly over the course of 20 years and by the end of the movie all the characters that we were introduced to hadn't aged at all or were played by other actors? It was the fact that it did come on so fast and that it was a life or death type thing that drove the human element of the story. It was so nice to see that the story of the people being affected by the storm was not ignored.

It was also great to see that they didn't blow all their great special effects shots in the first 20 minutes of the movie. I mean, hell, the famous frozen New York City scene didn't even show up until at least an hour into the movie--and it was probably later than that. Heck, it took a long time for the storm to even affect NYC. I thought for certain that would be the first thing to happen. But thankfully, it wasn't. The pacing was, if not perfect, pretty damn good for a summer effects picture.

But according to Wendy, Jake Gyllenhaal has lost all his indie movie cred now that he's been in a big summer movie like The Day After Tomorrow.

So it's Memorial Day and I work in an hour. Still getting used to the schedule and I'm kinda irritated about not really having a day off this week because my day off will be Friday and we'll be flying to Arizona that day. It'll be okay though. I'm going to try to walk to work today because it's a totally beautiful day out and I'm wondering if I could do that and drive less. Plus that'd be a way to get some much needed exercise in my life. So who knows. We'll manage, as we always do.

Oh, and here's one more cool link. I'm not sure how this works, but it's a blog that's blogging 1,000,000 love songs. Take a look. This week's are pretty interesting. If what they've done so far is any indication, at 30 songs per week, it'll only take 641 years to finish. Guess they better get crackin'!

Average Everyday Sane Psycho...

Yeah, the Liz Phair song "Extraordinary" is stuck in my head today. Funny how it ended up on the Queer Eye For The Straight Guy soundtrack CD, but I suppose if you listen to the lyrics closely, it fits in pretty well. Heck it was probably used in one of the episodes and that was the only inclusion criteria that it had. I haven't bought that CD and I think I probably won't because I just don't know what kind of shelf-life it might have. It could easily be one of those things that you buy and listen to a lot initially and then you never listen to it again.

So here I sit listening to some bonus tracks from Fleetwood Mac's Say You Will CD (which is a CD that has really grown on me a lot) and it's been a pretty good day overall. We're going to The Day After Tomorrow at 4:30 today with Jeff and Wendy while my folks babysit so it'll be nice to get away for a while. I'm reading some of the reviews of The Day After Tomorrow on Rotten Tomatoes and it's making me wonder what some of these reviewers were expecting. I mean--it's a freaking disaster movie! I don't think anyone is going to this movie expecting fine cinema. It's a Roland Emmerich picture, for God's sake!

Back later with my impressions on the movie

FOXNews.com - Foxlife - Fox411 - Madonna Tour: Does She Need the Cash?

Of course, I would expect nothing less from crappy old Fox News.

FOXNews.com - Foxlife - Fox411 - Madonna Tour: Does She Need the Cash?

And here's another article I found interesting this morning. It's about blogging. It's not very nice.

Must work.

Today was another day off and my back hurt like hell for reasons unbeknownst to anyone. It's right between my shoulder blades and from the way I feel it in my arm muscles I'd swear it was cardiac pain only there's none of that crushing chest pain as if an elephant were sitting on your chest thing going on so I'm thinking it's just stress coming out in a really bizarre way. We went to Blank Park Zoo which wasn't anywhere near as big as I was expecting it to be, but it was still a decent zoo. Most zoos just kind of depress me anyway because it seems like every single animal is endangered. It made me sick to think that there are only 300 Siberian tigers left in the wild. That's just insane! I wonder what it's like in Africa where elephants used to roam free about the plains but now I imagine theres all sorts of habitat encroachment and other such stuff. Don't misunderstand me, I'm no expert on endangered species or wildlife preservation or anything like that. But it just made me kind of sad to see a lion sitting in a cage in Des Moines, IA.

But the giraffes were really cool--they were the only animal that we took more than a cursory glance at. I'm afraid zoos just don't do for me what they did for me when I was a kid. Heidi pointed out to me that zoos really are for kids anyway but that didn't really help too much. Plus it doesn't help that Heidi doesn't have much of an attention span for zoos either. And then there's Anna--the one minute attention span wonder. Well, she is two, so that's not exactly something to be worried about.

All in all a good day. Stopped and saw Jeff on the way home which was fun as always. It's so nice to come back to Ames and be able to call it home. Wendy's going to be coming up this weekend and we're going to take advantage of my parents as babysitters so that we can all trek out to see The Day After Tomorrow which looks pretty decent. On Sunday, we're headed back down to Des Moines for the Iowa Renaissance Faire which we went to a couple years ago and had a great time. Good thing I went to their web site--otherwise I would have likely ended up at Water Works Park!!

The Re-Invention Tour kicks off

Tonight was the first night of Madonna's Re-Invention Tour--and from the pictures I've seen on the web, it's going to be pretty spectacular. For one, just get a load of this track listing:

The Beast Within
Vogue
Nobody Knows Me
Frozen
American Life
Express Yourself
Burning Up
Material Girl
Hollywood
Hanky Panky
Deeper and Deeper
Die Another Day
Lament
Bedtime Story
Nothing Fails
Don't Tell Me
Like A Prayer
Mother and Father
Imagine
Into the Groove
Papa Don't Preach
Crazy For You
Music
Holiday

Some very odd choices, but nothing as odd as "Mer Girl" from the Drowned World Tour. There's still talk of "Love Profusion" alternating with "Crazy For You" depending upon which concert your at, but it's just so good to see Madonna embracing her past a little bit rather than trying to run away from it as quickly as she possibly can.

The blog roll is back!

After much tinkering with the html code in the new Blogger templates, I have finally resurrected the Blog Roll. There are two new additions--one is The Amazon Iowan which is written by my wife. It's a lot more political than mine--I can't even really remember the last time I waxed political here, but she's mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. The other blog I added is my friend Ian's blog. Not updated nearly enough, but he's busy because he has a toddler and just graduated from college, but the world would do well to hear more of what he has to say. Smart man, that Ian.

Tonight is the last evening that I have to work for a week, which is nice because I'm getting a bit tired of them, as I imagine Heidi and Anna are as well. I'll be off work on Wednesday so I'm looking forward to sleeping in and spending the day doing what I damn well please.

Another day off...

...but then I have to work the weekend. And weekend evenings no less. 12PM-10:30PM. It might be a long shift, but it'll be okay.

Anna's in the living room right now watching Toy Story for the millionth time in 3 days, but this time she's watching it from behind her eyelids. That's good--she really needed to sleep. I think later today we're going to plan to go out and see Shrek 2 even though I really didn't like the first Shrek all that much. Too many fart jokes, which are the bottom of the barrel as far as humor goes. But I suppose that appeals to every 8 year old boy in the world and I'm not exactly the target audience for a movie like Shrek 2 anyway.

This day hasn't exactly been what I thought it would be, mostly because I got up a lot earlier than I wanted to thanks to some as-yet-unidentified noise that sounded like a cross between a wood-chipper and a lawn mower. It woke Anna up so consequently there was no more sleeping after about 7:30 this morning. Heidi wrote most of the morning which is good. Anna and I watched Finding Nemo and she got her bath and I eventually got my shower at about 10:30 or so. I'm thinking that later this afternoon before we go to the movie I might start making a new CD or something. There's all sorts of songs that are out right now (and oldies from my past, of course) that are potentials to make the cut. I was listening to this Loretta Lynn song last night on Rhapsody called "Mad Mrs. Leroy Brown" which just cracks me up. I was thinking about going out and buying the new George Michael CD Patience but I just don't know that it's good enough as an album to merit purchasing the whole thing. Rather buy a few of the good songs on iTunes and go from there. Same thing with the new Alanis Morissette CD So Called Chaos. Should just take about 5 bucks and go down to the computer downstairs and buy them on iTunes.