Aliverse

In a week and a half (give or take) I will be participating in Dewey’s Read-a-Thon.

http://24hourreadathon.com/

If luck is with me, I’ll have a full day of uninterrupted reading.  If luck is not with me, the reading will be punctuated by cries, laughter, and requests for snacks from my children.  Either way, I’m ready.  I have stacks of books to read and I am already doing a reading challenge I found on some other site (I’d link to it, but I don’t remember where I saw it or when.)   The challenge there is to read 50 books in a year.

When I decided to make that a personal challenge of my own, I figured it would be a piece of  cake.  After all, I read constantly and I can go through as many as 10 books in a week, depending on what I’m reading and how much time I have.

It never occurred to me that 50 books in a year would be difficult.  Yet here I am, already past the midpoint, still only 22 books into the challenge.  I have until the end of July.

The read-a-thon seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to get caught up.  It’s also a great chance for me to make my move here in doing book reviews.  It’s something I have been wanting to do but wasn’t sure how to segue into it.

So check back here on April 10th, as I review book after book in a 24-hour reading frenzy.   I’ll either have some really great stuff to bring to the conversation, or I’ll be wondering why I thought a read-a-thon would be a fun thing to do.

Ok, in my opinion, my pleasures should not be considered guilty.   In my mind, everything I love is worthy and I love it with abandon.  Yet, there are indulgences of mine that I really don’t like to shout out to the world.  That is, until now.

Why now? I need something to kick off my new blog location, don’t I?  I’m also hoping other people will find their way to my blog and comment on their guilty pleasures as well.

Hey, if we all have them, how guilty can they be, right?

So let me just give you my top ten, for starters.  If I can think of more, or at least more embarrassing ones, I’ll post them.

1. Cartoons. Seems simple enough, right?  Everyone has a little kid inside them (except my mom, I think she was 30 at birth.)  But I like a ridiculous amount of cartoons.  Old ones like Pink Panther are always good.  I love Tom and Jerry.  I also love Scooby Doo, and Casper the Friendly Ghost.  Now here I go into ‘kind of weird’ territory.  I love a lot of Nickelodeon cartoons.  The Little Prince? I’m there.  Rugrats?  There too.  Doug (it was on Nickelodeon first), Rocko’s Modern Life, Ahhh! Real Monsters, Dangermouse, Bananaman!, and many more from my young adult years.

So where does the totally embarrassingly humiliating come in? I like Wow, Wow, Wubzy.  It’s true. I will actually ask my 4-year-old if we can watch it instead of something more educational, like Little Einstein’s, for example.  I think Miss Spider’s Sunnypatch Friends is a close runner-up.

Maybe I need a 12-step program.

2. “-itos” - No really, let me explain.  Just about any food ending in ‘ito’ has my immediate attention.  It will probably end with me licking my fingers and will almost always end with regret.  I never feel good after eating them.  They certainly aren’t good for the waistline that I’m trying to destroy.  But how can you say no to the crunchy, orangey, fake cheesey goodness of a Cheeto? (ok, so it ends in ‘eeto’, sue me)

3. Ed Hardy shoes. Most of my friends have agreed that Ed Hardy clothes are for douchebags.  I have to admit that seeing a grown man in Ed Hardy attire head-to-toe looks a tad absurd.  But I totally love Ed Hardy shoes!  The cute Koi ones, the cheezball ones with the skulls, all of them.  Every time I look at them on Zappos.com I have to scroll on by quickly, before I’m tempted to add them to my cart.

4. Teen/tween ‘parfume’. That’s right, I said it…parfume.  Not the real perfume that I love to buy in department stores or Sephora.  Not the stuff that costs  more than a week’s groceries.  I’m talking Love’s Baby Soft, Exclamation, Cody Musk!  Yeah, baby, you know what I’m talking about.  Tween/teen summer nights at the carnival.  I have them, but I don’t wear them.  I’d feel ridiculous, but I can’t bring myself to throw them away either.

5. Popular music. Well somebody has to admit to liking it!  I listen to DC101.  I like it.  I like a lot of the new songs that come out.  I like the popular ones.  Want to know a secret?  I often buy CDs just to listen to one or two songs.  I’ll just hit repeat or skip and won’t even try the rest of the album.  Oh yeah, I’ll do it!

6. Macaroni and Cheese in the blue box. It doesn’t resemble real, homemade mac and cheese by a mile.  It is loaded with preservatives and crap.  There’s even a Crayola crayon that is actually called Macaroni and Cheese because of its bright fluorescent-like orange color.  But I love it.  You know what I love it with?  What does every pre-schooler like it with?  Hot dogs.  Mmmm-hmmm

7. V.C. Andrews novels. They’re horribly written and all of them have the same basic plot.  There’s incest and/or rape.  A young girl has her family ripped apart by some tragedy and all her dreams are shattered.  They start to put their life back together, in spite of the horrible life they are now living, and then the rug gets pulled from under them again.  Over and over, ad nauseum.  I have to read the entire Dollanganger series at least once every couple of years. (For those of you not in the V.C. Andrews know, those are the books from which the movie Flowers in the Attic was made.)

8. Candy. Iiiiii like candy. (pause for a hand-jive)  Iiiiii like candy.  I really do.  All kinds and not in large quantities, but I love it.  I love looking at it, buying it, and of course eating it.  Although the eating part is not as important as the buying and having of it.  I enjoy candy in small doses as far as consuming goes.  But at any given time you can find at least 5-10 kinds of candy in my house.

9. Hello Kitty. I almost didn’t mention her since I’ve posted about her before.  But how can I leave her out?  Hello Kitty was way popular when I was a kid, then the craze died down.  Thinking it was long dead, I suddenly started seeing the pink-obsessed kitty in stores.  Candy stores, toy stores, Asian grocery stores, and online.  I have promised my husband not to turn our house into a pink nightmare of Kitty crap while he’s in Afghanistan.  I never had to make any such promises about my cubicle at work, though…

10. Not the worst, not the best… I love video games. I love science fiction.  Yes, I am a geek.  I love geeky things.  I think most of the stuff at thinkgeek.com is awesome and I wish I could get a job at perpetualkid.com  The Ender series of books (Orson Scott Card) is quite possibly my source of philosophy in life.  When people ask “Star Wars or Star Trek?” I say both!  (but only the evenly numbered Star Treks, thank you)

So there it is, laid out for all to see.  Love me, laugh at me, hate me.  It’s just my opinion after all…

Thanks to my friend Laura, I got an update about this whole Zynga fiasco.

Here’s a link to the article explaining it all:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/04/the-zynga-haiti-controver_n_485919.html

So it looks like there was confusion among some people about the two different campaigns.  I’m not sure where that confusion came from since I saw that there were two campaigns when I read the articles yesterday.  To me, the fact that they only sent 50% of the proceeds in the first campaign was shady enough on its own.

I still think Zynga is shady.  I’ll post the articles I’ve found about them when I have time, but it isn’t my top priority.  I’m not asking any readers to stop playing their Zynga games.  I have my own reasons for stopping.  My opinion of Zynga being shady is just part of it.  The fact that the games are a huge time suck are another reason.

So enjoy your games and just make sure to read the fine print if you buy anything from these apps.

It’s just my opinion, after all.

Upon reviewing my Twitter updates this morning, something caught my eye.  Apparently Zynga, the company known for such popular Facebook applications as YoVille, FarmVille, and MafiaWars, to name a few, kept 50% of the money they raised for Haiti.  Now, in fairness to Zynga, they didn’t keep that a secret.  But they didn’t make it clear either, in my opinion, and that’s the problem.  In fact, one of the messages that would pop up in FarmVille was outright deceiving.

But you don’t have to take my word for it.  Check out the article at Gawker for more information:

http://gawker.com/5485675/

In my opinion, it sucks and I don’t think I’ll be playing my Zynga games on Facebook anymore.  No big loss to them, right? I never paid real money for anything anyway.

ali

First, let me give a public thanks to my friend Jennifer for providing me with my new blog title.  I was looking for something that was a little more descriptive of the types of things I’d be blogging.  In the end, with Jennifer’s help, I’ve decided on “In My Opinion…”

The main goal of my blog is to give everyone my ever-so-important opinion on whatever catches my fancy.  For the most part, it will be movies.  Every so often there will be a book or two.  And on a whim I’ll post about products or articles I see online.

So welcome to the new format, I hope you like it.  If you do like it, please pass my link along to a friend or friends.  Feel free to add me to your own blog, Twitter, or Facebook.

Hopefully I’ll bring you some entertainment.  Thanks and enjoy!

Ali