Bob Saget

Last night, I watched the new Bob Saget comedy special on HBO. Halfway through watching it, I expected my parents to burst through the front door and yell at me. It's so vulgar and inappropriate. It's also pretty funny. If you don't mind hearing the word "fuck" a hundred times, then this is a comedy special for you.

My only advice is not to watch it if you want to keep your image of Bob Saget to the person who was the dad on Full House or the host of America's Funniest Home Videos. But, who wants to admit they watched that?

Is Anyone Else Watching This Show?

I have been watching the first season of Flight of the Conchords on HBO and have to say that it's refreshing. I hope I'm not the only one out there enjoying this show.

Elly's List

My friend Elly posted this on her blog, and I thought it would be an interesting goal. Especially since I'll be spending alot of time indoors reading this winter. Those in bold, I've already read. Some of these books, I've read halfway through, those are in italics. Sometimes, I start a book, and then find one I'm more interested in at the time. I really need to finish them. I also understand that this is a list generated by Time magazine, but there's some I've been meaning to read for a while on this list.

Time's 100 Best American Novels post-1923

The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral
Philip Roth

An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm
George Orwell

Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume

The Assistant
Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Beloved
Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder

Call It Sleep
Henry Roth

Catch-22
Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron

The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen (I refuse to read this book. Someone should convince me otherwise)

The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance
James Dickey

Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone

Falconer
John Cheever

The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles

The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius
Robert Graves

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

Light in August
William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies
William Golding

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving
Henry Green

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead

Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis

The Moviego
Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch
William Burroughs

Native Son
Richard Wright

Neuromancer
William Gibson

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

1984
George Orwell

On the Road
Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth

Possession
A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run
John Updike

Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions
William Gaddis

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller

Ubik
Philip K. Dick

Under the Net
Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry

Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise
Don DeLillo

White Teeth
Zadie Smith

Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys

Move into new house - check.

On one of the hottest days of the year, my family and three awesome friends helped us move into our new home. It's strange living somewhere new for the first time in five years. But, we're adjusting, and trying not to feel so exhausted this week. I hope everyone else out there is doing well. I'll post some pictures in a few weeks when there are less boxes lying around.

Grandma's Caramel Nut Rolls

When I first started dating my husband, he lived in Frederick in an awesome apartment on Market Street. We would visit with my Grandma and Grandpa almost every weekend. Usually, we would go over for brunch on Sunday mornings. My Grandma made these sticky buns all the time. They were also the first thing I made in my new home. They are pretty simple to make, but take time. This recipe makes a double batch.



Caramel nut Rolls (our sticky buns)

2 pkg. dry yeast (4.5 teaspoons)
2 cups warm water
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp. salt
4 Tbs. soft butter or margarine (I use butter)
2 eggs
7 cups flour

Dissolve yeast in warm water in a large mixing bowl. Stir in sugar, salt and butter. Add eggs one at a time. Add flour - one cup at a time, beating well after second cup. Work remaining flour in until dough is easy to handle. (I throw all of these into a kitchenaid equipped with a dough hook). Cover tightly and refrigerate overnight, or up to 4 days.

Caramel Nut Mix
Combine
1/2 cup sugar and 2 tsp. cinnamon
Melt 2/3 cup butter or margarine.

On floured board, roll dough into a 15"x9" oblong. Spread with some of the melted butter (margarine) covering dough well. Sprinkle with cinnamon mixture.

Combine remaining melted butter or margarine, 1 cup packed brown sugar, and place in bottom of 13"x9" oblong pan (I use a lasagna pan). Sprinkle 2 tsp. corn syrup and 2/3 cup chopped pecans over mixture.

Roll dough up tightly, beginning at wide end. (I brush butter on the dough as I'm rolling) Cut into 1" slices and place in prepared pan. Cover and let rise about 1.5 hours.

Bake at 350 degrees for 20-30 minutes on top rack of oven. Do not overbake. Turnout to cool.

Note: When you turn these out, there will likely be some of the topping still in the pan. Take a spatula and gently drizzle the extra evenly over the buns. It is not easily spread.

In Memoriam

One of my most favorite people ever, my Grandma, Margaret Rose, passed away yesterday. I could go on and on about how she was one of the best Grandma's a little (and big) girl could have ever wanted, and maybe I will some other day.

But, for now, I will share one of my favorite recipes of hers. Some of the best times with my family were spent over this vegetable dip in the living room of Elm Street. It is best enjoyed with Gibbles potato chips. If they are hard to come by in your neighborhood, I suggest Grandma Utz.

Margaret Rose's Rainbow Dip (makes a double batch)

2 packages Philadelphia Cream Cheese
1/2 Cup Mayo
1 Tbs. Red Wine Vinegar
2 Tsp. Sugar
1/2 Tsp. Salt (or more to taste)
1 Fairly good size cucumber
1/2 Green Pepper
4-6 Radishes, depending on size

Pulse cucumber in food processor and drain excess water. Pulse green pepper and radishes and place in bowl with cucumber. Pulse together remaining ingredients. Add vegetables to food processor and pulse until smooth. Chill at least 2 hours to allow flavors to meld. Serve with salty chips made with lard.

I have to be honest in saying that sometimes, this dip is served straight away.

I will be back later in the week with her recipe for sticky buns.

Things Are Lookin' Up

The Perry Bible Fellowship is one of my favorite comics. I found out today that there will be a book coming out in a few weeks! How exciting!

Knitting

I know I haven't written many knitting updates. It's because I haven't really been knitting. Soon, I will have successfully moved into a house with my very own room. I promise after that, there will be knitting and sewing updates galore!

Also, I am trying to read Jane Austen for the first time, and I'm finding it tedious. I'm guessing the movie version of Pride and Prejudice is more fun.

The End of Indie Rock

Today, while hopefully scouring the news at pitchfork for an upcoming Les Savy Fav tour outside the realm of NYC, I came across this unsettling picture.

No, this is not photoshopped. This is an actual cd that is being released in the United States by those people who release "Now That's What I Call Music". I know that I should be glad that the release of the first, of what will likely be many, cd's of this nature will bring good music to the ears of those who've been stuck in Dave Matthews Band Land for too long, but I am not.

I know this shouldn't come as a suprise to me. Indie Rock is everywhere in mainstream culture now. Many more indie bands are signing to major labels, and putting out some of their best albums so far (most notably Sleater-Kinney and Modest Mouse). Their songs have been selling everything from minivans, to VW's, to phones.

I think what makes me sad/angry is that now indie rock will just be another buzz word for the music industry, whereas it used to be basically underground and not talked about in Rolling Stone except for in the tiny margin stories.Here's a quote from the marketers of this cd:

"We're partnering with MTV2, and the focus is going to be Wal-Marts, big box stores, red states, and TV advertising-- to really go beyond... We don't really expect indie rock stores to support this record. It's for the casual fan."

This quote is also bothersome. They're not going to release it in indie stores. YOU KNOW WHY? Because people who shop at indie stores already HAVE all of these albums and have been listening to these bands for years.

So, now, we'll be fighting all these assholes at shows who have only heard one song off of this compliation and drunkenly scream for that one song at shows. It will not be good. Maybe it's a good thing that I bought a house this year and can't afford to go to many concerts afterall.

I guess my hope for this compilation is that there's some kid out there, who's stuck listening to all the stupid pop crap his/her friends are listening to, and mistakenly buys this cd at Target only to discover that there really is REAL HONEST music out there worth spending your parents dollars on. That would make it all alright, I suppose.

Update

Sorry I've been MIA these past few weeks. I've been working in a far away place.

Here's the answers to some popular questions I've received lately in order to get you back on track:

1. Yes, I finished Harry Potter the day it officially came out and I loved it.
2. We don't move into our house for a few more weeks.
3. The Elvis Reese Cups are a little too sweet for my taste.
4. I love Costco.

I will try to bring you other news of life and random findings soon. Until then, enjoy the summer my five readers!