And Saturday morning

Just some random stuff.

First off: Mary Tyler Moore, as most of you know, died last week. I actually knew her better from re-runs of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (some channel, maybe Nickelodeon before it plexed off Nick at Night, used to run it in the evenings and when I was in grad school I sometimes watched it because it was funny without being the "hard-edged" funny that some modern sitcoms are). I guess The Mary Tyler Moore show was on when I was actually around - a kid - but I didn't watch a lot of tv as a kid and I only vaguely remember it.

But the opening is pretty iconic, and I think most single women out in the workforce have thought of themselves that way at least once or twice. No, I have never thrown a beret in the air and I tend more to come down on the side of "I hate spunk" than of being spunky, but...the opening music is memorable.

And it's been done in alternate forms. I ran across someone posting the (record) version of Joan Jett doing it on Twitter, and was struck - it's one of those things that you would think would not work, but it does. And I almost feel like it works *better,* at least for someone like me.

I joked on Twitter that this would have been more suitable of a theme song for me when I was the age Mary Richards was, than her original theme song, but I really WASN'T a rock chick*. But I still like it. (And I think the recorded-live version from Letterman is a bit better - it's just a little "crunchier" than the record version and I like that)



(*Probably the most appropriate version for me would be having it rewritten to be something like a Handel aria or one of Bach's little piano pieces. Which, knowing music enthusiasts, probably already exists somewhere)

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Gonna be a bit slow getting off to work this morning (and I feel I have to, sigh - there are no manuscript-elves who come and write your Results and Discussion sections late in the night)

But anyway. Today is one of the what-feels-like-30 annual fun-runs in my town (Anais Watterson: "things with "fun" in the name are never all that fun - "Fun sized, fun-run, Fun-gus...."")

Anyway. The north-south "spine" - one of the streets that runs the whole length of the middle of town - has been blocked off. I ran out to the Mart of Wal (no time to go to Sherman this week; maybe next week, if it's not snowing or some darn thing) and had to drive far out of my normal way to get there, and I had to drive a bit out of my normal way to get back home.

And I realized something: I GET that the point of a fun run is for people to raise awareness of something, and I also get that running in circles on a track is boring*. But: we have a "multi-sports center" here in town. I would add, one that the populace voted in (well, not me) and agreed to pay a penny or something on every dollar spent in town on - yeah, our sales tax, which I would remind non-Oklahomans we ALSO pay on groceries, helps to fund it.

And I have heard complaints it's not being used all that much.

It strikes me there's a solution to the blocked-streets-on-Saturdays and the under-utilized sports center problem here....

Like I said: I get that it's to be "in everyone's faces" (especially those who are trying to get to work, or trying to get to the grocery BEFORE going to work) but....it's kind of an annoyance for those of us with places to be on Saturday morning.


(*But I do a version of that, 2-3 times a week, for 40 minutes at a go, on a cross-country ski exerciser, so I get "cardio.")

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And yeah. I do need to figure out something "fun" for me once I get through this bottleneck of stuff having to be done (exam written, stuff prepared for Science Olympiad, manuscript written) because I can feel myself getting more irritable and feeling slightly resentful of people who are having fun or getting some kind of recognition for what they are doing.

***

On to happier things. Better photos, actually taken with a camera, will come later, but I need to get over to work, so.

This is Baby North Star (not to be confused with Baby Glitter North Star). She came yesterday. I am very pleased because this pony hits several of the things I like about these - small and rounded, Pegasus with the funny lumpy G1 wings, nice color combination, AND she is a First Tooth Pony, which is a sub-line in the baby ponies I find amusing and wonderful.

Hard to tell from the lighting but her hair is a pale lavender color.

The ribbon is probably not original to her (the Ponies used to come with brushes and a ribbon to tie on their tail) but the seller used it to tie the baggie she had put North Star in, so I kept it.

A better photo of the cutie mark:

I wonder whose job it was to come up with these. (My hand was shaking a little, so you might not be able to see that it's a N/S compass arrow with a blue star).