Looove Songs

What are your favorite looove songs?  Or are you lookin' for love songs in all the wrong places?  The library can fix you up.  Here are some of my favorites, in case you are overwhelmed by the options!

A House is not a Home  Dionne Warwick.   Lovely and melancholy. 

Since I Fell for You  Al Jarreau.   Lovely and less melancholy. 

I Would Die 4 U  Prince.   Bouncy!  Speedy!  Dancey!  I would make a dwarf joke but Prince is pretty short so out of my great sensitivity to the issue I will refrain. 

Maybe I'm Amazed  Paul McCartney.   So beautiful.  Deep in requited love. 

Total Eclipse of the Heart  Bonnie Tyler.   Yearning;  Belting;  Bonus Falsetto. 

Just the Way you Are  Bruno Mars.   Unabashedly Romantic. 

OK, now I have to go listen to I would Die 4 U.  By the man who was born to text.

Looove Poem???

Part of  A Love Poem from Ogden Nash:
To My Valentine
More than a catbird hates a cat,
Or a criminal hates a clue,
Or the Axis hates the United States,
That's how much I love you.

I love you more than a duck can swim,
And more than a grapefruit squirts,
I love you more than a gin rummy is a bore,
And more than a toothache hurts.

Ah, the man could sweep a girl off her feet.  But only by using a broom. 

Ogden Nash Poetry

Looove Poem

Ahem.  "To Celia" by Ben Johnson
Stanza the first:
Drink to me only with thine eyes
And I will pledge with mine.
Or leave a kiss within the cup
And I'll not ask for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sip,
I would not change for thine.

Lovely, isn't it?  Unfortunately I can't read it without the sound of a very sour young voice singing in my head.  You see, all I learned about the classics came from cartoons.  This one featured a young owl who had a chance to sing on the radio and he wanted to warble: "I love to singa, about the moona and the junea and the springa...".  But his classically inclined parents forced him to sing "Driiiink to me on-ly wi-ith thine eeeeeeeeyes..." He wasn't happy and sang it very badly.  As you can see this made quite an impression on me.  Warner Bros. Cartoons.  Teaching the classics one owl at a time.

Books of looove poems
Warner Bros. Cartoons

A Touch of Politics

Just a tiny one.  Plus religion!  Two subjects you are not supposed to discuss at the dinner table for the price of one.  In 1885 a Republican from Ft. Dodge, one state Senator Jonathan Dolliver, declared:  "When Iowa goes Democratic, hell will go Methodist".  I'm not sure how he defined 'go Democratic', but I do wonder if hell went Calvinistic?  Fun Dolliver fact: he was considered a candidate to run for the Vice-Presidency in 1900 but bowed out when he heard Teddy Roosevelt was willing to take the nomination.  Either way an impressive mustache would have been featured in the campaign.

Source:  Des Moines Register, 7/25/1998 p 1M
Amazing Iowa / Janice Beck Stock

Dawning of the Age of Confusion

Did your astrological sign change?  Yeah, whose didn't, those were pretty significant shifts. And there's a new one - Ophiuchus!   So exciting!  I even know how to pronounce it because years ago I read the Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley.  Great concept - suppose aliens didn't think humans were the smartest/best/coolest species on the planet?  Maybe because we believe in astrology.  Oh, it's pronounced o-FEE-oo-kus.  So I always thought my sign fit me pretty well.  I'm ready to look up the new one, let's see what the traits of a ... not even close.  Below find a link to a TIME site that will tell you if you have a new sign, then you can use our books to discover what it all means.  And when nothing matches up, ask yourself:  has the cosmos gone mad?????
TIME Newsfeed
Our Astrology Books

Just Guess What This Is

This, my friends, is one Coendou prehensilis or Prehensile-tailed Porcupine.  The coendu was photographed walking along a branch in 1928 on the Barro Colorado Island in Panama, minding its own business.  Given the extreme level of unattractiveness and the naked tail I would have guessed it for a relative of the opossum.   But coendus roll into a ball when threatened and they are nocturnal like our prettier but scary porcupines.  So I will have to concede the porcupine essence of the creature.  By the way "Little is known about courtship and mating interactions between the sexes."  I'm OK with that.  And who says 'opossum' anyway? 

Source:  University of Michigan Museum of Zoology
The Field Museum

Snow What?

This looks familiar, right?  Someone drew a snowman in the snow and took a black and white picture. Nope.  It is an impact crater on Mars!  But are they sure?  Remember the whole Face-on-Mars thing?  This could totally be a message from a highly advanced race of snowpeople.  Or it could be what the caption describes: "Scientists ... have discovered a crater that appears to have formed on Mars in the past 20 or so Earth years, and have used it and several other similar craters to estimate the present cratering rate on Mars." I'm all for figuring out the cratering rate. I mean, we have to know!  But the alien snowman theory is way cooler.

NASA Planetary Photo Journal Collection
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS

BIG STARS, small movies

These movies are small now anyway.  Entertaining, good plots, but not the first movie you think of when these names come up.  The stars are mighty 'o big though! 

The Gift   Cate Blanchett, Keanu Reeves  Finally the perfect use for Reeves' blank eyes.  He's terrifying as a bad guy.

Taking Lives   Angelina Jolie. Nice and twisty, and she isn't as scared as the DVD cover would have you believe.  C'mon, it's AJ!

The Game   Michael Douglas plays a powerful man (oh, the stretching!) but the game - or is it a game??? - may pull him down.

Fun films for staying indoors.  Which we may be doing.

Mayhem You May have Missed

These are thrillers from the silver screen that weren't your huge hits.  No blocks were busted.  No boffo to be had.  But they are very good. 

Frailty    Bill Paxton.  A father took his sons out demon-hunting.  But were the targets demons or just plain folks?  The effect on the brothers is devastating.


The forgotten    Julian Moore.  How could everyone forget she had a child?  But all evidence of her son is gone!  Imagination?  Or something more sinister...


The reckoning   Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany. Ooooooh.  This is the coolest movie ever. In Medieval England a troupe of actors, including a runaway priest, pull a Hamlet before there was a Hamlet.  They solve a local murder and put on a play depicting the act.  Not exactly Judy and Mickey in a barn.  I should re-watch this.

Enjoy these strange, intense B-list movies!