Steve Jobs: How to live before you die | Video on TED.com

May his spirit live on in all of us!

I’m Not Julia Roberts — that’s the book I just fin­ished. This soap oprea of a book is about the bag­gage (or some­times, as Lu says “mov­ing vans”) peo­ple bring into new rela­tion­ships when they are, or have to deal with a step­mom, or step child, or mom/dad of step child.  I found it hard to put down. This could have been a quick read, if my fam­ily would have went with­out a meal or two.
I liked fol­low­ing the web of sto­ries whose char­actes lives inter­sect and inter­twine.  There are so many char­ac­ters, in fact, the book actu­ally has a “tree” in the front. Inspite of it’s mul­ti­ple char­ac­ters who aren’t always nice, you find you­self sym­pa­thic to them, even the con­trol freak of an ex, Beat­rix.
I thor­oughly enjoyed the style of writ­ing author Laura Ruby used.  It was funny and witty, with the same feel as Gilmore Grils or Weeds. As a mat­ter of fact, I think this book should be made into a movie or bet­ter yet a tv series.  Yes, it’s always fun to watch some­one else unpack their prover­bial baggage.

If you don’t know me, I have high stan­dards for movies (food, music and just about every­thing else) So you can trust when I say, “I saw a very good movie that was called A Good Woman” Really, it was a very good movie.  I know that I find movies set in the 30’s to be inter­est­ing, but the fact that there was a twist really made the movie enter­tain­ing. I have to warn you that this review is a bit of a spoiler.
It starred Helen Hunt, Scar­let Johan­son and.. some other actors. The movie was about a woman in her late thir­ties, Ms. Erlynne, who seduces mar­ried men into tak­ing care of her.  Due to the Great Depres­sion, she was run­ning out of prospects in New York, and she decided to relo­cate to a place where more wealthy peo­ple lived and frol­icked.  The moment she arrived in the sea­side port of Italy, so did the gos­sip about her and how she was a tramp. Wast­ing no time, she imme­di­ately went after a young Amer­i­can man she saw pho­tographed with his newleywed-wife on the soci­ety page. From the day Ms. Erlynne met him she had him giv­ing her money. Despite her rep­u­ta­tion, she had caught the eye and heart of a wealthy man, Lord Augus­tus. Mean­while, Meg, the new­ly­wed wife, was being pur­sued by a gen­tle­man who guided her to dis­cover that her hus­band was giv­ing money to and pos­si­bly hav­ing an affair with the new tramp in town.  When Meg decides to throw her mar­riage away, Ms. Erlynne con­vinces her to go back to her hus­band. Then she falsely incrim­i­nates her­self (even at the cost of her rela­tion­ship with Lord Augus­tus) to keep Meg from loos­ing her husband’s trust and becom­ing the lat­est gos­sip.
This movie was really good because it leaves no loose ends and it’s twist, which is not told here, if you want to know what it is, you’ll have to see the movie.