The Inspirational Place

Classic Films Review:
The Seven Year Itch (1955)

Marilyn Monroe

Starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, this 1950's flick follows the story of a married man alone for the summer and his subsequent temptation with the female renter upstairs.  The movie features a number of scenes where Richard Sherman (Ewell) plays out an affair with his beautiful neighbor in his mind, yet he ultimately looses his nerve to consummate his plans and seeks out his wife.

The unnamed temptress (Monroe) is innocent yet knowing that men are just fools for her.  She drinks champaign while happily munching on potatoes chips.  She casually drops stories of lying in the bathtub, accidentally getting her toe stuck in the spigot, and calling upon a local plumber to save her...which makes perfect sense to her character.

From my perspective: I enjoyed Marilyn in "Some Like It Hot" and "Gentlemen Prefer Blonds" as the bombshell, ditsy dame with a spark of savvy.  In this film, the dialog just seems far more contrived than is believable for her character.  The male lead really seems lecherous to me, and his over analyzing self-talk becomes quite tiring after the first 30 minutes.

Is it worth seeing:  Monroe is larger than life in this film, with her icon "skirt-blowing" scene.  I had heard a story that her husband at the time, legend Joe DiMaggio, was quite upset with the filming of this particular scene..makes you wonder if it paved the road to their breakup?

Book Fun

Whats in your library

Stolen from Kelly

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

(Please note, I was an English major..so I had to read a lot of classics, some which did not make this list (i.e. Clarrisa, Call It Sleep, Tortilla Flats, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Inherit The Wind, Farewell To Arms, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Moll Flanders & the ever popular Shakespear's Complete Works)

Artists in Japan have found a way to make the mundane into art..check out these crazy designs that grace packages of local products.

Barcode Art

And more...

Bar Code Art 2

Check out more pictures at Dark Roasted Blend

In the wake of devastating tornadoes this past week, I have read through some sad stories of loss and destruction.  But I did find a few messages of hope, of courage in times of adversity.  They help us see good things can blossom from challenging circumstances ~ Please enjoy

Out of the Wreckage
A wave of tornadoes brings death, destruction—and selfless acts of bravery.
Reader's Digest June 2008
By Tara Conry, Fran Lostys, and Bridget Nelson Monroe

Greenville, Kentucky—The deadly tornadoes had swept through Greenville just days before, and as residents began to tally their losses, they wore the stunned looks of the traumatized.

But when the bright yellow bus pulled up beside the temporary Red Cross and FEMA stations, parents and kids alike perked up at the sight of the portrait on its side—a laughing baby boy who's giving the thumbs- up sign.

"Mommy," yelled one youngster, "I want to go on the bus with the happy boy!" Inside, the kids descended on arts and crafts, DVDs, and games—anything to distract them from the nightmare memories of howling winds and falling trees.

"It's incredible," says Kathryn Martin, 29, who had driven the bus more than 70 miles, from Evansville, Indiana. "They just go off into la-la land; they can be kids again."

The mobile day-care center is named for Martin's little boy, C.J., who was killed along with two other family members when a tornado struck their town in 2005. He was two years old. The idea of helping other twister victims came to her in May 2006, after a tornado blasted Otwell, Indiana. Martin and a friend headed to the scene, and she spent the day with a family who had lost their home, soothing the kids simply by coloring with them.

"From then on," says Martin, who is married with three children, "we knew we had to do something."

After donations of more than $120,000, C.J.'s Bus was launched in August 2007 and two months later made its maiden voyage to Owensboro, Kentucky, for tornado relief.

Martin says she can think of no greater legacy for her son than to help children recover from the trauma of a tornado. "This bus is not about me, and it's not about C.J. anymore," she says. "It's about those next people we're going to help."

Tornado's Gifts: Greensburg Rebuilds, Revitalizes
NPR.com
by Frank Morris

Many people in Greensburg, Kan., say that when their town was hit by last year's tornado, it was something of a gift. Residents there have worked furiously during the past year not only to revitalize the once-dying town, but also to rebuild it in a way that is both economically and environmentally sustainable.

As President Bush visits Sunday, one year after one of the most powerful tornados on record obliterated the small town, he'll find an amazing revitalization. Wind turbines, dozens of houses, and some of the world's most environmentally friendly buildings have sprouted where the tornado left only heaving, splintered rubble.

The city has committed to rebuilding "LEED Platinum," the highest standard awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council. That's no mean feat for what had been a faltering, cash-strapped little town before the licking it took from an EF5 tornado.

"The town was wiped out, but the community was not. And the community is indeed stronger than ever," says Daniel Wallach, who launched an organization to promote the green building initiative here. Wallach credits the success entirely to the community buy-in.

"These people are very used to being guided by values. You know, you don't live in western Kansas if money is all you care about, or prestige," Wallach says.

He says he believes that residents' selfless spirit vaulted this conservative little town into the forefront of the environmental movement. "I think you're going to see a state of the art, living laboratory."

Building a 'New Normal'

This weekend, the first shop to rebuild on Main Street officially opened its doors.

Greensburg's churches, all 11 of them destroyed in the tornado, pulled together to get the thrift store and food pantry open before any of them were rebuilt. And, while the building looks normal enough, Ted Kyle says it's super-efficient.

"What we had before, we couldn't hardly afford to heat and cool. It's just so much better than it ever was before, but we get to build a new normal. We get to build a new normal. I think that's exciting," Kyle says.

"We live in exciting times here in Greensburg, and we need to be moving boldly into the future," says Mayor-elect Bob Dixson. He surveys that movement from the broad front porch of his brand new house.

Achieving Platinum Certification

Students from the University of Kansas are working on a shoebox-shaped building, sheathed in green glass, shading wood recycled from an old ammunition plant. It's a new community art center, powered by sun, wind and heat from inside the earth.

The project is designed to LEED Platinum specifications, and it has been a learning experience for everybody, including professor Dan Rockhill.

"How tough is it go get a LEED Platinum certification? It's borderline impossible," Rockhill says.

Undaunted, at the John Deere farm-implement dealership, proprietor Kelley Estes says they are rebuilding LEED Platinum, too.

"Shops waste a lot of energy, like mine — tractor shops, combine shops. We're going to show how they can build them shops way more — have a payback for them all across the country. Well, if you do that all across the country, it's not just Greensburg that's paying back, it's the whole country," Estes says.

John Deere is making the store here a national model for the way dealerships should be built — just as Greensburg itself may prove to be a prototype for building communities sturdy enough to hold up against this century's crop of environmental, economic and social challenges.

Source: Reader's Digest, and NPR.com