It's All Illusion Anyway...

Bold titles are titles I've read. Italic titles are ones I plan to read in the (near?) future.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (well, not complete)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The lack of the distinctive typeface and iconic soundtrack really changes the whole tone of this. The lousy voice-over text doesn't help, either.

Despite this awkward and lackluster beginning, I still loves me them movies.

Go to Google Maps, and try to get directions from New York, NY to Paris, France.

Even though I should know better - somedays, I think President Bartlett got it right.

...but I always thought that was because I had an awful body for TV and movies! ;-)

The heavy weighting towards "Boston" doesn't surprise me, even though I don't have a strong "Boston" accent at all.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Boston
The West
The Northeast
The Inland North
Philadelphia
North Central
The South
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Coasting to a stop at Whalom Park

By Jenna Russell, Boston Globe Staff
October 19, 2006

LUNENBURG -- There were plenty of signs the end was coming: When Whalom Park finally closed its gates, after more than a century as a Central Massachusetts landmark; when its ballroom burned down and its antique carousel was auctioned off, horse by horse; when a developer bought the lakefront site and made plans to build condos.

Still, for many area residents whose teenage years were defined by weekends spent at Whalom Park, who remember their first kisses at the roller-skating rink and their first dates in the Rose Garden dance hall, the end of the amusement park was not quite real until yesterday morning, when a roaring yellow excavator tore a hole in the park's best-loved attraction, the Flying Comet roller coaster (also known as "The Black Hole").

As the 60-year-old wooden coaster was demolished, a steady stream of spectators, a few choking back tears, parked by the shore of Whalom Lake and stood outside the chain-link fence to watch.

"I'm broken-hearted," said Bill Murphy, the caretaker of the 30-acre park since it closed six years ago. "It hurts; it really does. It's part of my childhood, gone."

By the end of yesterday, the roller coaster was gone, along with most of the other major structures on the property. The demolition, which began a week ago, is on track to be finished next week, officials said. Construction of 240 condominiums on the property will begin next spring, said Carl Pearson, vice president of Global Property Developers Corp., the Bridgewater firm that purchased the former park earlier this year. An appeal by neighbors who oppose the project was dismissed by a judge; they have appealed the dismissal, said their lawyer, June Riddle of Lunenburg.

Yesterday, as a piece of local history vanished before their eyes, reduced to a field of broken lumber and tangled, rusted, 20-foot sections of steel track, residents snapped photos and reminisced with strangers. Some visitors sought company, while others stood apart, quiet, seemingly lost in a fog of memory.

When it first opened in 1893, Whalom Park was a traditional, English-style park of gardens and walking paths, created by a streetcar operator in Leominster and Fitchburg as a way to lure riders on weekends. Its carousel, with 58 hand-carved animals, was installed in 1914. Animal exhibits, summer stock theater, and a dance hall arrived, The first roller coaster was built in the 1920s, according to Pearson. After World War II, with the added excitement of skee-ball, arcades, a funhouse, and bumper cars, Whalom thrived.

Its decline began in the 1970s, after Walt Disney set new standards for theme parks. The thrills of Whalom, along with other parks of its era, began to seem faded. One by one in the decades that followed, small, family-owned amusement parks were shuttered, from Rocky Point on Warwick Neck in Rhode Island to Revere Beach, once known as the Coney Island of the North.

The rides at Whalom -- the Black Hole; the Whip; the Bouncer -- "were nothing compared to today, but back then, it was the cat's meow," said Gerry Farinelli, 65, of Attleboro, as he watched the excavator crush the roller coaster.

Installed in the early 1940s, after the infamous hurricane of 1938 flattened its predecessor, Whalom's Flying Comet coaster offered sweeping lake views from its high point 60 feet above the ground, but it was just as well known for its creaks, rattles, and ominous vibrations, onlookers said.

"It would always shake, and you knew it would shake, and you went on it anyway," said Jean DiBona, 63, who traveled to Lunenburg from her home in North Providence, R.I., to bid farewell to the roller coaster. "I used to cry on the way up, and I'd cry on the way down -- and then I would go on it again."

David Pothier, 52, of Lunenberg, remembered the wooden slide in Whalom's Funhouse, where children would ride scraps of burlap. Another ride was a spinning wooden disc that children rode, without seat belts, until the speed of the rotation was enough to throw them off, he said.

Not all of Whalom's pleasures induced bruises or screams of terror. Residents recalled leisurely summer picnics under the pine trees on the property and trout fishing in the lake. An organ player provided live music in the roller rink. There were Easter egg hunts and New Year's Eve dances and car races on the frozen lake in the winter.

Perhaps the oddest attraction was featured in the 1920s, when a trained horse would ride a waterslide into the lake, Pearson said.

For many former patrons, Whalom was a place for young romance. Bill Phelps, 62, met his wife on the dance floor at the Rose Garden, where the roof opened up to the stars in the summer and some of the biggest names of the Big Band era played.

"If my wife was alive, she would be crying," Phelps said.

One section of the roller coaster's track was salvaged yesterday, along with some of its cars, and Pearson said there are plans to incorporate fragments and memorabilia into the final design of the condo development. The building where the carousel was housed may also be preserved.

Onlookers mused yesterday about the strangeness of the altered landscape and about the likely name of the condo complex.

"No matter what they call it," Nancy Nurmi said, ``people will call it Whalom Park."

I'm 5 Bottle Smooth.

GodDAMN Smooove!

Try my magic recipe of two parts silk pillows, two parts Marvin Gaye, four parts Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill, and ten parts high school girl. Trés Magnifiqué!

From the Billy Dee Williams Smoothness Test.

...we need a new way mnemonic device to remember the order of the planets.

Since "My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" doesn't work anymore, let me add my support to the following suggestion:

My Very Exotic Mistress Just Showed Up Naked

(Found numerous places online.)

Months ago, I was looking for a webcomic site that I had really enjoyed, but had lost the link to when I changed jobs a couple of years ago.

Thanks to a random browse of a MySpace blog that I otherwise don't read, I found it.

Be sure to chech out A Softer World. You won't regret it.

Dude! You're 100% from Massachusetts!

Dude! Me and Sully and Fitzie and Sean are gonna hit Landsdowne tonight after the game, hang out at the Beerworks. I'll pick you up at the Coop at 6.

How Massachusetts are you?

9:00am: I was meeting D McD for breakfast. We went to Skip's in Chelmsford, and then up to Nashua to fix a small problem with his jacket.

11:00am: I was walking around Walden Pond with one of my closest friends, picking his brain on how to have a happy marriage.

1:00pm: Ordered a chicken Ceasar salad from room service, thinking I should eat something - but just wasn't hungry. Wasn't nervous - hadn't been since November 23, 2001 - but my mind just wasn't on food (rare enough occassion that is!).

2:00pm: Enjoyed a pleasant little nap - and thought how glad I was to be the guy in this whole thing, so I had the opportunity to nap :)

4:00pm: The guys came to my room to get dressed. Much joking and laughter at my expense.

Approx 5:15pm: Did the best thing I've ever done in my life.

To this day, I'm still not entirely sure why

molly322 said yes - I just know I'm glad she did, and I keep trying to make sure she'll never regret it.

... this won't seem like I'm bowing to

diskostu13's commands.

Four things about me... things you may not have known.
(Or, particularly cared about.)

A) Four jobs I have had in my life:
1. Camp counselor
2. Prep cook
3. Newspaper copy editor
4. Consultant

B) Four movies I would watch over and over:
1. any of the Star Wars movies (esp 2, 3, 5, and 6)
2. Gattaca
3. Chasing Amy
4. Dances with Wolves

C) Four places I have lived:
1. Townsend, MA
2. Jaffrey / Dublin, NH
3. Groton, CT
4. Clinton, MA

D) Four TV Shows I Love to Watch:
1. The West Wing
2. Weeds
3. Mythbusters
4. House

E) Four Places You Have Been on Vacation:
1. Wells Beach, Maine
2. Orlando, Florida
3. Ireland
4. Cedar Rapids, Iowa

F) Four Web Sites You Visit Daily (besides LiveJournal and MySpace, of course):
1. Married to the Sea
2. Cute Overload
3. Questionable Content
4. Seth's Blog

G) Four of My Favorite Foods:
1. Spicy tuna roll
2. Steak
3. Caprese (tomato and mozzerella) salad
4. Flan

H) Four Places I'd Rather Be Right Now:
1. Home
2. Ireland
3. On the Stephen Taber
4. The Borgata

I) Four Friends I Think Will Respond/Post:
1.

molly322
2.

1_acme_journal
3.

cuffs
4.

theteeker