The Secret Life of a Care Bear

This has got to be the best Carol Channing video there is:

More music, by popular demand.

I got tired of bad radio or lame kids music cds in my classroom all the time. No one needs to listen to nursery rhymes all day. Songs that we’re currently grooving to in my classroom:

Songs we’re sleeping to:

(If I had a computer in my classroom, I think I could just loop this video to get everyone down for nap time!)

Let me share with you my new love/obsession. It is called Downton Abbey and it aired on Masterpiece Theatre in the US. You can watch it on Netflix now, or it’s available on DVD. The only downside to this show is that there is only one very short season out so far and it will be Fall before season 2 starts airing (But there will also be a Christmas special!!)!

Downton Abbey is a lovely costume drama about the lives of an aristocratic English family and their servants, set just before WWI. There is inheritance drama, love, sister jealousy, servant intrigue…oh it’s just deliciously dramatic. Also there is the beginnings of some women’s rights business with my favorite of the sisters, Sybil, and I’m sure there will be WWI drama soon!  And now, promo:

Maggie Smith plays the Dowager Countess Grantham and is just spectacular! She is one of my favorite characters. Photo!

And now, Sybil and the crazy Irish chauffeur that I am desperately hoping she will end up eloping with:

And finally, a link to more info about the characters, if you’re interested.

You’re the God of this city
You’re the King of these people
You’re the Lord of this nation
You are

You’re the light in this darkness
You’re the hope to the hopeless
You’re the peace to the restless
You are

There is no one like our God
There is no one like our God

For greater things have yet to come
And greater things are still to be done in this city
Greater things have yet to come
And greater things are still to be done in this city

This is my theme song/prayer for Peoria right now, so I thought I’d share it with you all. Enjoy.

I found it! Now you can all be appalled by this poor lady’s lack of painting skills. It was hard to find this one in English for some reason. The best I could do was English with Greek(?) subtitles. Enjoy!

This is my second post about infomercials since I started my blog challenge. This is what happens when you like to watch TV at night, but you don’t have cable!

Anyway, my favorite part of an infomercial is the part where some incompetent person demonstrates how the traditional way of doing something doesn’t work. Tonight Mark and I were enjoying a particularly hilarious one for some sort of paint sprayer. The woman was demonstrating how hard it was to paint with a brush and roller. It looked like she just slapped the roller against the wall a couple times. Anyway, enjoy this lovely video compilation of fails from tons of different infomercials.

My favorite one here is the part where the guy is berating his wife/girlfriend for showing too much cleavage at a restaurant. Honorable mention to the many clips of people trying to crack an egg.

Day 19: Something you miss

I miss choir! We were not great, but it was really fun!

This was one of my favorites, “Ave Regina Caelorum” by Isabella Leonarda. Everyone else did not like it nearly as much, because I had very different tastes in choral music than the rest of the choir! :)

This is another one of my favorites, from a different semester. Ignore the offbeat clapping at the end by someone sitting next to the camera!

By the way, I’m singing Alto in both of those videos, if that’s something you care about.  You can find more choir videos on Adam’s youtube page. Chamber Singers is the choir I was in. There’s a video of me doing a solo, but I won’t tell you which one. If you care that much, you can find it yourself! Ha.

Something you’re afraid of

Good thing this only says something you’re afraid of, not your biggest fear, or I would have to write about spiders and I would be grossed out and jumpy all day! :)

Something (else) I am afraid of is bridges! More specifically, road bridges over large bodies of water. I feel that this is entirely justified and logical. If your car goes off a bridge into a large body of water, you have to first get OUT of the car before you can even tackle the part of the problem where you have to get out of the water without drowning! At least if I just fall off a bridge not in my car, I can swim. Of course, if you can’t swim, you should probably be afraid of falling into the water in general. I know I’m a pretty darn good swimmer, so that part isn’t a problem. (Assuming that I’m not maimed or killed just from the fall, and that the water is normal temperature and free from other hazards.)

Now, there are several different facets of this fear. First, you have to worry about getting into an accident where your car gets hit and goes off the side of the bridge. Secondly, there is the other sort of accident where you somehow lose control of the car and go through the barrier. Thirdly, there is the sort of problem I’m going to focus on today, where THE BRIDGE FALLS DOWN. (Doesn’t this sound like I’m writing a really horrible elementary school expository essay?)

Okay, all of you are probably familiar with the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007, where the bridge for I-35W over the Mississippi River collapsed. If not, wikipedia can enlighten you. (I will be making prodigious use of wikipedia for this post, by the way. Also, I am aware that my grammar is often poor and that I use too many parenthetical remarks.)

You may not be aware that bridges have a nasty history of falling down. I will now provide you with some of the lesser-known and less recent examples. I apologize in advance for anyone who develops a new fear of bridges, but hey, The More You Know™ .

Exhibit 1: The Silver Bridge over the Ohio River between West Virginia and Ohio collapses on December 15, 1967 during rush hour. 46 people were killed. Only 5 people who went into the river survived.

Exhibit 2: On May 9, 1980, The Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay collapses after being hit by a boat during a storm. 35 people were killed and 1 survived. The one survivor got lucky; his truck fell onto the deck of the boat.

Exhibit 3: The Queen Isabella Causeway, between South Padre Island and mainland Texas, is hit by a boat on September 15, 2001. 8 people died and 3 survived. Drivers did not see that the bridge had collapsed until it was too late, because the collapsed section was at the top of the bridge.

Exhibit 4: No one died on this one, but it’s just freaky. You’ve probably heard about it before. On November 7, 1940 the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (aka “Galloping Gertie”) collapsed into Puget Sound during high winds. The bridge was all screwed up and would bounce and flap in the wind. It had been built in July, so it didn’t last very long. The bridge was twisting and bouncing so much that the occupants of the last car on the bridge had to get out of their car and crawl off the bridge to safety before it fell. Check out this video:

So yeah, bridges=scary. And yes, I did just move to a city next to a river that requires me to drive over large bridges on a fairly regular basis. For the record, I prefer the I-74 bridge to the I-474 bridge or US 150 bridge because if I drive in the left lane, I’m not next to an edge. (The other two bridges have two different spans.)

Day 5: A song to match your mood

Usually I like to be funny or at least slightly amusing or witty in my blog entries, but just indulge me today while I have an emotional moment. Everyone is having babies lately, so I’ve been having a pity party and this song is my party guest.