Author: Tracey

I was traversing housetops with Dan and his brother Mike. The houstops were connecting points on high mountains and they were themselves high as mountains with ground far below. The path stretched out before us for many miles and was an unbroken path; wherever a roof ended a plank or beam connected it to the next one. We came to one that was connected by a synthetic-type rubber trough maybe two feet wide and seven feet long. I could hardly imagine trying to cross it. My thought was to sit on it and inch across slowly. I think Dan and Mike were trying to decide how to cross as well. Suddenly Dan said, “Oh, watch this,” and taking two running steps jumped towards the other roof. Before I could even register that he had jumped, he fell short of the other roof and disappeared from view. In the instant he jumped, Mike must have too because suddenly he was gone and I had a fleeting vision of him also falling just short of the opposite roof. I fell backwards too exhausted to figure out which emotion to address first. In an instant I had lost both my brother and husband. I wondered faintly why I hadn’t heard either one scream. Just as the horrible truth washed over me, Dan appeared on the other rooftop saying, “Tracey, we made it. You have to jump from the wing to the propeller.” Mike was next to him. I thought to myself- is there a plane down there or flying around or what? I didn’t really want to jump after the scare I’d just had so I went across my way and the boys helped me to my feet on the other side.
Really wierd right?

Cakeshi! A cake plus sushi! It is ingenious and brilliant. I thought of it last week. You just spread out a large fruit rollup and layer yellow cake and frosting on it. Then you roll it up and slice it. Tada! Cakeshi.

Next on the menu, morphtal warftal. I need to explain this one in a story. One day while I was still living at my mom’s and my littlest sister was old enough to talk about logic things, we discovered a badly melted lolipop still in the wrapper behind a piece of furniture. My sister said, “Look a morphtalled lolipop. I mean a warftalled wolilop.” And we began to laugh at her and I said, “You mean a really warped lolipop?” So she told my mom about it saying, “I mean to say warped lolipop but I said warftalled molliwop. I mean warftal morphtal, um morphtal wolipop.” Again we dissolved into giggles and just kept repeating, “morphtal warftal.” So now when something is really garbled up and hard to understand we call it a morphtal warftal.
This story is pertinent as recently as yesterday. When my mother asked my sister what she was watching on television it was a show called “Life is Rough”. In her usual morphtal warftal way she said “Luff’s Rift”. And I rest my case.

I’ve been spending all my extra time recently either in the pool or filming with my new video camera. But when I am not doing those things I have been completely rewriting the storyline to Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith. I was disappointed with it if you remember my complaint post on the movie; so disappointed I needed to make up an alternate story to make myself happy. Here it is in synopsis form:

Anakin and Obi Wan rescue the Chancellor from (his own setup) kidnapping. Anakin kills Dooku and they use escape pods to leave the crashing ship. They return to a hanger on Coruscant and the media mob them. Anakin finds Padme waiting in the shadows. She wants to reveal their marriage in light of the fact her preganancy will soon make it obvious. Anakin tells Obi Wan of the marriage. He says the outlook for Anakin to remain a Jedi is none too bright. He agrees to keep the secret. In her senate apartment, Padme meets with several other concerned senators who worry the Chancellor will never give up emergency powers. In a council meeting at the same time, the Jedi send Yoda to Kashyik and Obi Wan to the outer rim. Anakin asks to go with Obi Wan but is told to stay put. A day or two later, Padme addresses her fears to the Senate. Palpatine promises to step down after the war. Anakin plans to ask for master status. He has the dream that Padme dies in childbirth. Obi Wan finds and defeats General Greivous. The Jedi council denies Anakin’s request to become a master and he leaves in anger. News comes that Yoda has won the battle of Kashyik. Palpatine tells Anakin the force can save lives but only sith know how. Anakin tells Padme he needs this sith knowledge and she tries to discourage him. Anakin is called to a meeting of the Jedi council. They have gotten word anonymously that Anakin is married and immediately expell him. Anakin, beleiving Obi Wan told them, breaks friendship with Obi Wan. Anakin finds Palpatine who reveals his sithdom. Anakin agrees to rid the temple of the Jedi there in exchange for life-saving abilities. Under a really scary musical theme, Anakin kills all Jedi gathered at the temple. Obi Wan comes to Padme looking for Anakin who has been gone since their conversation on needing sith knowledge. She learns that they are found out and he is expelled. Obi Wan learns Anakin has sought a sith through Palpatine. Obi Wan realizes the sith is Palpatine. He and Mace go to arrest him. Anakin tells Padme he has found the sith. She freaks out and goes into premature labor. Anakin goes for Palpatine. He finds him facing Mace and Obi Wan. Anakin defends Palpatine. Mace ends up dead and Obi Wan gets away. Palpatine renames Anakin as Darth Vader and instructs Vader to bring Padme to him. Obi Wan reaches Padme first and takes her to a hospital on Alderaan. Order 66 kills all Jedi besides Obi Wan and Yoda. Yoda flies to Alderaan meeting Obi Wan there. Yoda goes after Palpatine, Obi Wan after Vader, and Bail Organa stays with Padme. Palpatine and Yoda battle. Yoda ultimately loses and is left for dead in a senate meeting room. Bail picks him up after receiving his homing signal. Obi Wan and Vader battle. Vader falls off a cliff and is assumed dead. Back on Alderaan Yoda is injured badly and will never walk properly again (notice how he’s bent over in the next three movies… Dan). Padme gives birth to twins Luke and Leia. She dies holding Leia. Darth Vader is saved by Palpatine and outfitted with the suit. On hearing of Padme’s death by Jedi negligence, Vader begins to destroy things, throwing them around the room. He discovers the choking move, born out of his anger. On Alderaan, Yoda and Obi Wan agree to split up the twins and go into hiding themselves. Film ends with a closeup on the twins.

That is the shortest synopsis I could manage. The actual thing I wrote is insanely long. Dan says I should change the names and make it my own story but I couldn’t make it different enough for that. Anyway I got the plot line from George Lucas. I just moved a few things around to my better liking. This one was for fun. The next one will be serious and I’ll write it all myself. If I go through with this one, I will put the entire script I wrote up on this blog somewhere. Stay tuned. It may take awhile.

Just a quick bored post here. I’ve been singing that song ‘It’s five o’clock somewhere’ and realized how not five o’clock it really is. He sings ‘It’s only half past twelve but I don’t care’. If it is twelve thirty that means literally speaking it is five o’clock nowhere since time zones are different by hours and not by half hours. So he really has no excuse cause’ it’s five o’clock nowhere.

Here’s how I sing this next one:
She sees the half life dizzy go dungeon
She reaches in and grabs Napoleon
She sees the half light dizzy go function
She takes control and soon it tears you apart
(my version of invisible touch)

One final note since this was on the same scrap of paper as the other. The glucan binding gene (A) in Strep Mutans is written gbpA. The corresponding protein is GbpA and the knockout strain is GbpA- or deltagbpA.

This is my post on synesthesia (sin-ess-thee-zha) The zh sound in my pronunciation guide is that of the g in mirage or the z in azure. I only recently heard of this condition and wanted to write about what I learned. “Synesthesia” is the condition. A “synesthete” is the person having the condition.

It occurs in about 1 out of 2,000 people or 1 out of 10,000 depending on whose statistics you are reading. It is a condition that I would liken to color-blindness except the effect is almost opposite to being color-blind. (I don’t have this condition so I am not speaking firsthand here.)
What happens is this: a synesthete gets extra senses when seeing something or feeling or smelling something (or any of the 5).

They may be able to see a color when music plays, or taste something when they see a certain shape. Many synesthetes see letters and numbers in colors other than the color they are printed in. These phenomena are always the same for them. If the letter K is blue, it will always be blue. It is also individual. Someone else may see K as orange all the time. And every synesthete will get different perceptions in different amounts for one or many senses.

Like color blindness it is not a disease and cannot be caught or transmitted as such. It can run in families though the mechanism isn’t as clear cut as color-blindness. These senses are NOT delusions or an overactive imagination or a mental disorder. It is just an extra function of the person’s brain similar to the way color blindness is one less function.
Sometimes a person will not realize they are a synesthete for many years because they assume everyone gets the same extra senses they get. After all, I never question the way I sense things.

I got some of my information from a textbook and some from online sources. Here is a website with information and links:

http://www.bu.edu/neuropsychology/synvc.html

Hopefully I have explained it well enough for being a non-synesthete. I posted this info on Muppet Central in nearly identical wording before and wanted to also post it here. Most people I run into have never heard of it before so I am usually teaching them. If you know I am not explaining parts of it right please correct me.

So I went and saw “Star Wars 3 Revenge of the Sith” at the theater two days ago. I thought it wasn’t so bad, but now that I think about it there were a lot of problems with it. It was better than “Star Wars 2” in that the special effects computer graphic stuff didn’t look so terrible against the real action- they got it to blend better. There was a fairly exciting story line and some really nice fighting scenes. My favorite battle was the one between Yoda and Chancelor Palpatine. Yoda was the best I have seen him since the original trilogy. The animators finally got the CGI really dead-on and Frank Oz of course was brilliant with the voice. Everything matched up well. That is the end of the good stuff though. All the other aspects of the movie had me severely disappointed.
I thought the swiching from scene to scene was done too often and sometimes unnecessarily. By the end of the movie I was so tired of seeing the screen windshield wiper effect. Another annoying part was when the camera would “sweep” the landscape. This was one of the only problems I had with the Lord of the Rings movies too. The sweeps are always just a little too fast and blurry and I don’t like watching them because they hurt my eyes. I thought a lot of the dialogue was terrible as it was in “2”. The movie had too many cheesy lines and not enough meaningful ones. In the original trilogy the lines stick in your mind because they really “punch”. By this I mean the delivery is timed just right and they sound clever but also normal enough so someone might actually say them.
There were definitely lines that were supposed to be the memorable ones. This type of line a character would say to himself out loud when all alone with absolutely no reason other than for the benefit of the audience. Such as Obi wan looking at the blaster he just used to finish someone off with and saying, “How uncivilized.” And that’s the ONLY one I can remember from the movie. I could recite half a dozen lines from EACH of the trilogy movies.
Now for my complaints on actor chemistry; I have so much to say here. I feel like they didn’t bother putting Anakin and Padme in the same room before casting the adult Anakin. Maybe they said to themselves, “Lets just see him beg and whine and that should be close enough to acting love.” Padme had better chemistry with the child Anakin from Episode 1. I just feel so cheated in terms of their romance. With Han and Leia in the original you always had that romantic tension and no words really needed to explain what was happening. The Anikan/Padme romance is so UNobvious they have to resort to sappy dialogue to let you know they have feelings for each other. I had to look up this quote from Anakin to Padme in “2” since I couldn’t remember any of them:
“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything’s soft… [begins caressing her] and smooth…”
GAG!
In “2” Padme originally seems repulsed by this behaviour but later confesses her love to him while they are in a life or death situation. The love seems so out of the blue on her part. In “3” both Padme and Anakin seem to be whining at each other a lot. Anakin is always having fits of anger and giving Padme the silent treatment. She responds by telling him, “Don’t be this way. Don’t do this.” And that is their entire scope of emotions to each other.
My last big complaint here is about Anakin’s fall to the dark side. You could see how enticed he was by the saving-people-from-death thing Palpatine offered him but he seemed to still need convincing. So then as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing changes and suddenly he wants to become a sith and devote his life to evil. If he had really been so close to turning when Chancellor Palpatine revealed that he was the sith lord, why didn’t he join him then? Anakin is still loyal enough to warn the Jedi of the Sith, then alters course and saves Palpatine to pledge his life to the dark side. The whole transition doesn’t make sense. It was far too quick for me. Anakin feels some remorse about letting Master Windu die when he asks, “What have I done?” but a minute later he gives unwavering aleigance to Darth Sidious. It’s like he said, “Oh my God what did I just do? Ah well what the hell. I might as well join the guy I just saved.” A life changing decision like that is not going to be made on a whim.
To me this movie was a letdown. There are no more prequels to expect and this was supposed to be an amazing ending (or middle) to the Star Wars saga. I feel jipped. It was nowhere near the magic of George Lucas’s first three. None of the Episodes 1-3 were. I want to ask him what changed from the first set to the second set. Did his own expectations of himself drop? Did his ego overshadow his talent? Was he too obsessed with special effects to notice anything else? For all three new movies especially 2 and 3, I have to say in my best Alec Guinness voice, “These are not the prequels we’re looking for.”

So this is a nonsense post. I will speak nothing but the nonsense and everything but the sense. Or a little of each. Or of neither. So watching American Idol on TV has made me all the emotions listed above. Dan got me into it and now it’s done so we will have to find another show to get hooked on. The disgusted part was when BO DIDN’T WIN. What the?? I thought he was a shoe in! Well never mind. The whole making a mockery of Simon who-is-he-seeing-secretly thing was hilarious. First Randy writes a song about Simon with most of the lyrics being the word “dog”. Then the waiter in the Italian restaurant being Constantine in a moustache saying, “It was-a disgoosting.” That part cracked me up the most. Then it turns out Simon was in love with himself. The camera finds him confessing his love to a mirror. To the camera- “Just leave us alone.”
Now the bored part being now that I can’t get excited over how Bo won. Darn it!

Also this lyric has been bugging me for days. You go find this song and listen to it and tell me it doesn’t sound like this. In the song Blue (da ba dee) I can’t help hearing “I’m blue I’m in need of a diet I’m in need of a diet I’m in…”

So I usually do not have premonitions about things, but I do find I have one talent in knowing stuff before it happens. This is in determining if lost things are going to turn up or not. And I don’t feel like it is just luck or a good guess. I predicted that a man would find his wedding ring at a camp and he did. Also something in the fridge got lost and I knew we’d never find it. I mean those things are unusual. In a fridge where could something possibly go? And at a camp with water and woods and dirt you’d never expect to find a wedding ring. So I know if what you search for will turn up. That is why I didn’t expect to get a feeling about a car accident. We were driving in the rain with my brother in law and his girlfriend and I got super scared of crashing. Well don’t worry we didn’t crash. But a car ahead of us did and I knew that I was feeling that crash in my mind. For the minutes beforehand I was increasingly scared of us all going to the hospital and dying. I kept holding Dan’s hand thinking, “I want to be near him when we hit so our last moments are together.” I was praying to be wrong and then when we passed the other car I knew it was them I was sensing. It really freaked me out though and I wonder if I somehow made them crash instead of us. I don’t want to have another one of those premonitions because there was really nothing I could do about it. I did tell Mike to be careful driving though. Was God working through me to save us from death?

So I sell Tupperware now. You can get to my very own Tupperware site by clicking on “I sell this stuff”. It is up for a limited time because I don’t feel like paying for it to be up longer. If you want to buy some Tupperware I’m your contact. Ask me questions, let me throw you a party- you can even do a fundraiser with Tupperware with 40% of sales going to your organization. The easiest way for you to get some Tupperware if you live far from me is to have a party. You can do this techinically by just getting a bunch of outside orders from friends and piling them together as a party. This is known as a book party. It is nearly the same as an internet party. No consultant is needed and the party is open as long as you choose. Hosts get rewards towards free Tupperware based on party sales and the items can be shipped to the host rather than the consultant without that pesky $4 direct shipping charge. I really do recommend this stuff because of its durability- you can’t beat the lifetime warranty. I could tell you so much more, but I’ll let you ask because those who aren’t interested will just get annoyed.

On to something else. I was writing warranty and thinking of writing guarantee. And I was wondering why the two words aren’t spelled more the same. Warranty looks like an adjective like-warrant. “You’re getting arrested with the help of this warranty type paper.” And guarantee looks like you say it “g-war and tea”. Looking these up I ran across the word ‘dryad’ which is also a nice word. It means a nymph of the forest. It makes me think of a sad nymph mourning the loss of some Greek hero or a fellow nymph being turned into a tree or something.

My husband Dan and I are watching American Idol and talking about who our favorites are. I feel I have a handle on how well they all did being interested in music myself. Constantine finally got voted off the competition. We knew he would be eventually, but what really blows my mind is how he sang the song so badly last night and in his goodbye version it sounds great. It’s like, if he sang that way last night we might be saying goodbye to Scott or Anthony. It really was a terrible job last night- not to mention the fact that he has been trying to be a rocker when obviously he belongs in the showtunes genre. He needs to stick with what he’s better at and stop pretending to be something he’s not. As for Scott and Anthony, those are the other two we expect to go soon. Scott is just not very energetic and Anthony doesn’t have that sparkle that the others have. My husband and I think it is that boyband cuteness that keeps him on week after week. It certainly gives him a solid fanbase among those who follow boy bands. My personal fave is Bo because I think he really puts his heart into what he does, he has fun with it, makes it look easy, and HE CAN REALLY SING. Compare that to Constantine’s yelling most of the lyrics. It’s like night and day. Anywhen, that’s my rant.

Hello out there in radio land this is Taylor Made and THIS is a raisin news flash. It has been reported that a drain wreck is clogging up traffic at the intersection of Cartbee and Finkill road. The drain went offtrack around noon and people spilled out onto the road shortly thereafter. Minor injuries have been reported. No word yet on what caused the drain to crash…You know what surprises me is that no one has thought to call a plumber yet. A drain big enough to carry people seems like a big emergency. I would get the top six or seven plumbers on the job right away. If traffic is being held up they should at least- oh sorry this just in. A train wreck is clogging up traffic at the intersection of Cartbee and Finkill road. Geez. As if the drain leaking all over the street weren’t bad enough. Only minor injuries have been reported. That’s good to hear. In other news an 83 year old man is being fanned today for keeping more than 30 overdue library books in his home. Way to go old guy! Those library rates are outrageous nowadays. Way to stand up for- what? Oh it is free? Well that doesn’t make much sense. He certainly doesn’t need people to be his fans. Uhhh, local youth are working on a community garage. Their garage grows flowers and other plants for the benefit of the community- now hang on a second. I’m not stupid. I know what type of plants need to be grown indoors. I don’t think this is appropriate as a news item. Who wrote this anyway? Oh. OH. I have just been told that the community GARDEN grows only fresh vegetables and therefore is perfectly appropriate as a story. Umm and that’s all the news we have today. I’m Taylor Made and this has been a raisin news flush.