Halloween 2011: How A Nerd Spends Halloween

Part of the reason I know I'm a nerd is acknowledging how I decided to spend my Halloween night this year.  I was nominated for candy duty, but I had a lab report and prelab writeup due the next day.  Thus, I totally set up my laptop outside on a little table next to the bowl of candy.  I looked up a Halloween playlist from www.youtube.com and listened to Monster Mash and various other Halloween songs while I worked on my lab report.  I made the best of the situation.  After handing out candy until 8 pm, I went inside to watch How I Met Your Mother.  Then, I proceeded to work on my prelab writeup indoors.

The silly thing about this is that I had fun, singing along to Halloween tunes and working on a lab report.  I'm so nerdy that it shows in everything I do.  It was so much fun to experience Halloween this way.

However, I really do need to hone my pumpkin-carving skills for next year because my pumpkin was falling apart after I carved it.  I also acknowledge that I probably need to wait and carve it the night before.  I carved it three days before this year and it was starting to look less than optimal on Halloween night.  To be fair, the weather has been rather unusual this year.  So perhaps this is just an issue to acknowledge for this year.

Jerry Orbach: More Than Meets The Ear

Due to ABC Family showing Disney's Beauty and the Beast and Disney's Aladdin on a repetitive basis, I found myself going to imdb.com to read the names of the voice actors for the different characters.  Most of the actor identifications seemed reasonable to me.  Yet, there was one character whose human counterpart's name I was very amazed at reading.  This character was Lumiere, the candlestick from Beauty and the Beast.  I was taken aback to find that Jerry Orbach, an actor from Law & Order and/or the father character from Dirty Dancing, provided that voice to that epic Disney film.

This above picture is from the following website: http://beautybeast.enchanted-rose.org/beautybeast+cast.php

The title of the webpage is "Tale As Old As Time 1991-2011" and it is a fansite for this amazing movie.

Jerry Orbach seemed to me to have a very deep manly voice and a serious manner in his live-action roles, so finding that he had played a lighthearted flirtatious French candlestick really made me think, "What?"  I was also very sad to read on imdb.com that this actor had died in the year 2004 (imdb.com).  After I accepted that Orbach had such amazing talents in voice acting, I felt it was even more of a shame that he died.

However, in truth, there are many actors that die and many people are not introduced to their talent until they have already left this plane of existence.  As such, I want to acknowledge that Jerry Orbach had vast voice acting skills beyond anything I imagined.  Not only was Jerry Orbach an impactful character on the series Law & Order and in the movie Dirty Dancing, but he could play silly animated characters.  He was a versatile actor and I am impressed by this talent.  

RIP Jerry Orbach.

For more information on Jerry Orbach, refer to the aforementioned Internet Movie Database Webpage (imdb.com) for Jerry Orbach: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001583/  

Periwinkle Picture in November 2011

I took pictures of my periwinkle plants today.  I figured it might be a good day for a photo shoot, since the weather is changing to reflect winter.  My favorite photo today is this one:

The reason I like this photo best is that the water reflects well on the ground to compliment the flower.  There is also nice framing with its mother plant on the left and the weeds on the right side of the shot.  Lastly and most importantly, the petals are in focus and the flower is the star of the picture.

I am not a professional photographer, but I can definitely appreciate a beautiful plant or landscape picture.  This picture is awesome!!  I'm just glad that I managed to keep these plants alive for so long, given that winter approacheth.  As I've quoted on Facebook as well: "Jack Frost could murder them any day now!!"  That is one of the consequences of winter: death of the flowers (well, for the ones that aren't biennials).  Biennials come back to life, like Jesus or chipmunks kept at low temperatures (saw the chipmunks on Nova).