The West Wing Weekly Podcast

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From left to right – cast members of The West Wing – John Spencer, Martin Sheen, Mary McCormack, Richard Schiff, Joshua Malina.

Look at that photo. Look at it a little bit longer. It will eventually hit you. Do you see it? :) If you don’t I will mention what it is further down in the post.

If you are in any way a fan of The West Wing, you really need to get listening to this podcast. I have mentioned this podcast here before but today I really want to shout out loud about it, because they are doing some live shows – most of which are already sold out, however more live shows may appear and you might want to add the podcast on your Facebook and Twitter so you can keep in the loop about upcoming events.

I know for a lot of us in Australia, we were truly mucked around by Channel Nine when it came to viewing The West Wing. I know I gave up on trying to watch it thanks to their terrible scheduling problems. I do remember seeing episodes scheduled for prime time air way past midnight.

So once the entire series had been released here on DVD, I bought it and watched it all, finally the one in charge of what episodes I watched and when. You can do this too! The complete series – that is all 7 seasons – is now just $84 at JB Hifi.

I’ve probably seen the entire series in full at least 10 times now, at least once a year it gets pulled out for a rewatch, and I usually managed to catch it on Foxtel from time to time. Most of the episodes I know very well.

I do recommend that you watch the episode first then listen to the podcast for that episode. They now have a handy episode index. If you like you can also team this up with the excellent West Wing Episode Guide, which has some interview snippets and a bit more info.

So what is wrong in the photo, did you see it?

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The Untied States Of America. There are some who might say this was perhaps a prediction of some kind. ;) This error was fixed before filming. Lucky someone spotted it!

The West Wing

I Listen To Things

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For many weeks here on Wednesdays I have been doing reviews of movies and television shows. We will return to that yet again in the future, I promise. This week I want to talk about The West Wing Weekly podcast, Google Chromecast, and various images.

For the most part I do not set up technical things up in this house. That task falls to The Other Half. So I mostly just accept the way things are, and when my old tv box which allowed me to watch things on the server began acting up, I inherited a Google Chromecast, or at least I think I did. I truly am clueless about it.

If I watch something on Netflix or on our server, when I am done with it if I do not switch back to Foxtel images begin to appear on my screen via Google Chromecast. Many of the images are quite stunning to look at and I do enjoy seeing them. There are NASA images of the day, images from Google Earth View, and images taken in national parks across America. The image up the top there, Turquoise Swirls in the Black Sea is one of the rotating images, as is the image you see below, which is – Lakes and Rivers Have Ice Too.

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Here are some of the Chromecast Backgrounds collected together beautifully for you to view, if you like. Here you can view some of the Earth View images. Here you can find the NASA image of the day and their archives.

It may not come as a surprise to you to hear this but a big phrase in my world is “I would like to know more about that” and I love that the NASA images can easily be found by typing in their title to your favourite search engine (eg Solar Evaporation Ponds Near Moab, Utah which you are about to see a part of below, click on the link for the whole photo and story) and you get a page with a story about the photo.

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I do not love that the images for Digital Globe have no backstory attached and the images really can’t be found so much online. Most of them just have a location and if you type that location into your search engine of choice, you are going to get all kinds of odd unrelated stuff and I don’t always know what it is I am seeing. I will say though, I did NOT need to look at the location to know when I was looking at Oahu from space partly because I have spent so much time looking at it on Google Maps, and partly because of the natatorium shown.

I was surprised to find that I never listened to any of The West Wing Weekly (TWWW) podcasts. I’m not a big podcast person to be truthful with you. I listened to the Breaking Bad Insider Podcasts and deeply loved every single one of them, I recently enjoyed the Better Call Saul Insider podcasts, and somehow I stumbled onto TWWW. I have been binging like an addict. The good thing is, I know the episodes so well I do not have to watch them, so I can just put my cordless headphones on and enjoy the podcast.

While I am listening, Chromecast is throwing these gorgeous images onto my screen, which I did find distracting to begin with but now I have seen all the images and it is cycling through them, I can just enjoy the beauty of them. The earth is such an amazing and gorgeous place especially when seen from space.

television shows, The West Wing

Ready for bed @8:30pm!

The last two nights, I’ve gone to bed with Rob Lowe and frankly I am completely exhausted at this point..

I want to go to bed with him again tonight but I am not sure I have the energy.

Not only is he sexy and extraordinarily pretty but he is incredibly smart too!

And he is an amazing writer..

Of course the real truth is that I have been going to bed with his awesome book titled Stories I Only Tell My Friends.

The first night I was already tired and I intended to only read a couple of chapters. I finally managed to put it down with great reluctance when I finished chapter 8.

The second night I went to bed even earlier so I could read more of it before it was sleep time. One minute it was 10pm, the next minute it was 11:50 – where did that almost two hours go?

I was hoping I could finish it tonight but I honestly don’t know if I can manage it. I haven’t even got to the bits about The West Wing yet. I am looking forward to that.

I think maybe I’ll get an early night and seeing as I don’t have to go to work tomorrow, I might finish the book before getting up in the morning. ;)

books, The West Wing

Spring Cleaning & Retail Therapy With Photos!

Looking through my Google Reader, I see a few blogs I’m not feeling a connection with anymore. Yes, it’s time to clear out the reader. I’ll be working on this over the next week. It feels like a harsh thing to do. I don’t enjoy doing it however I am reading a lot of blogs now and I have a few projects I want to focus on so I will have a little less time for reading. I won’t be deleting anyone who’s linked to me, just so you know. ;)

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Today we went shopping. I had a voucher for Dusk. I find either you love Dusk or you hate it. I love it. They make these great tea light candles which actually throw their scent around so it’s not like burning a candle just for the sake of burning it. I was going to buy several packets of 6, then I spotted they had a bulk bag of 50 scented tealights for just under $25. These will last me ages. w00t!

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I also wanted to check out their essential oils and was surprised that they didn’t have very many of them but they DID have lemongrass which is the one I wanted. Yay! And the bottle is beautiful, that cobalt blue color.

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Aussies and US people alike, keep an eye out for this Lander product. I got it at Woolworths a couple of weeks ago and I’m crazy about it. I used to use Palmers Cocoa Butter but it doesn’t absorb into the skin very well and tends to leave a residue on your keyboard. The Lander stuff absorbs fast, you only need a tiny amount and it has this scent that I’m nuts about, because it contains coconut oil. Even The Other Half likes this stuff. It’s made in the USA so I’m guessing you can get it there too.

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I picked up the final season of The West Wing which was released in Australia a couple of days ago. I now have the full collection and I’m feeling pretty happy about that. ;)

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Yay, we got cookies too!

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Here’s all my essential oils.

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aromatherapy, blog housekeeping, feed readers, health, shopping, Snoskred hearts, The West Wing

Drive it like you stole it..

I got a phone call about 2:30pm. I was actually in the middle of a West Wing episode at the time. The caller said “10 Minutes” and I hung up the phone and raced off to get ready because I knew what that meant. 10 minutes later, my Dad pulled into the driveway for the last time in his old car. Well, not like old, it was only 3 years old. But today was the day it was going back to the dealer, never to be “ours” again.

During the time he had it I had only driven it twice and both times broke speed limits but fortunately for me did not get caught. It was a Ford XR8, and it had the power. That’s why I didn’t drive it more often, because it could have tempted me into being a very bad individual while driving on the back roads. Or any road, really.

Saying goodbye to a car is not an easy thing. The Other Half and I have recently talked about the possibility of saying goodbye to our car, and that car has been many places with us. The side mirror is a very good friend of mine. We’ve only driven 50,000kms in it, over three years, but when I close my eyes I can see images of many travels from the perspective of looking out my side mirror. I feel like I’d want to keep that part of the car. I know that sounds utterly insane. ;)

However, saying hello to a new car is a very easy thing. This new car is *beautiful*. It truly is a work of art. It’s sitting in Dad’s garage as I type this. It is very low to the ground, and the car dealer said to us that it’s inevitable that the front of the body kit will scrape and get cracked. The old one on the XR8 did. He’s got a guy who fixes it easily if you want it fixed, but he figures it’s a fact of life, live with it.

That is the one thing holding me back from saying to the other half yes, let’s get the new car. The person I was when we first got our car wasn’t the nicest of people. I get pretty angry over anyone careless enough to even look at it the wrong way, let alone go near enough to it to scratch it. When they really damaged our side door as I wrote about here (my side door, so each time I get in the car I am reminded) the more I think about it, the more I realize I probably would have really damaged that person who left the dent in my door if I had turned up when they were doing it. It still manages to fill me with such a rage. I’m not sure I’m meant to be such an angry person.

In other news, today is the first day of the school holidays, and please can everyone pray for rain for the next 2 weeks so those people across the road won’t interrupt my peace. This afternoon the kids across the road started up with a soccer ball on the road in front of my house and I have just realized, it’s two weeks of school holidays with them constantly out there making noise, and I’m still stuck in this house. I had hoped we would have moved by now.

The idea of watching one West Wing each day was dead in the water on day one, as the first episode meant the second had to be watched, and the second definitely meant the third had to be watched. I was in the middle of Episode 3, and I’m going to finish it now, and then off to bed. ;)

cars, moving on, The West Wing

The spiderman is always hungry..

The kitties have killed a few spiders over the last couple of days. It’s been raining a lot and these spiders, which I call lawn spiders because they live in the lawn currently can’t live in the lawn due to its being flooded. It’s a bit like a swimming pool in our backyard. The spiders aren’t poisonous but they are freaky and they jump around a lot. The little kitty likes to trap them under her paw.

Yesterday morning we got up early and went to get the kitty kibble. It’s the older cat who I’m not about to deny food to because she was a bit stick thin back in summer and ever since then I have been tempting her with bacon and various other treats. Her favorite is roast chicken skin. If we go shopping on a Wednesday night we usually bring home a hot roast chicken because the supermarket sells them cheap. Now, if the big kitty sees shopping bags she assumes there’s going to be a chicken and she gets all excited. You can’t just take the skin off the chicken and put it in a bowl, she wants to be hand fed a little piece at a time. Yep, she has us trained.

Over the past week or so I’ve watched all of season 5 of the West Wing in preparation for season 6. Sephy is also up to season 6 now and we’re going to watch it together and blog about it on a testing blog we made a while back. It’ll be cool to be able to discuss the episodes having both seen them fresh, for the first time. ;)

Today we did a bit of cooking and reorganized the kitchen, all to the sounds of The Cure, who are touring Australia soon. I’m tempted to go see them.

kitties, music, The West Wing

What have I been up to today?

Regular readers of this blog are aware that I have taken up art.
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You may remember this painting I did recently, which I totally fell in love with.
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I loved it so much that I decided I want to make several versions of it with different colors as the background. I’m doing 5 at once and as you see here four of them already have painted backgrounds, there is a white one you can see off to the side which is going to be red or pink, depending on how the paint mix turns out.

Five at once may sound excessive but it’s not – once each canvas has been painted the background color it is then time for the cardboard dragging. The last time I did that I had a lot of left over paint from the colors I mixed up so this time I want to try and make sure that does not happen so much. If I have 5 backgrounds ready to paint it is more likely I will have somewhere to put any excess paint. Given that I am not using cheap paints anymore I really want to be careful not to waste any.

The little pale green canvas you can see is not going to have paint dragged on it, it’s a new thing I wanted to try which is sticking a lot of sequins onto a canvas. It might turn out well. It might turn out to be a nightmare. We’ll see I guess. ;)
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Oh, these arrived during last week – this is what I got in return for The Other Half’s laptop coming to me as a surprise. I just got up to season 4 in my rewatching of the West Wing and I am going to keep watching them in order until I get to season 6. It may be a few weeks before I can unwrap the crispy plastic from these DVD’s to watch them. I want to watch the Desperate Housewives *after* Season 6 of the West Wing.

Hopefully after I am done with all that DVD watching Season 7 will be out. The fabulous news is the release date for season 7 will be August the 8th so it seems my time plan will work out pretty well, I think. As long as I don’t watch most of Desperate Housewives in one day like what happened last time.

Also, we went to my parents house to make pizza and discussed the soon to be arrival of my Dad’s new car. He is very excited. I won’t lie to ya’all – I’m terrified about it. Firstly because it is a collectors type of car, there’s a limited amount of them being made, they are worth a lot of money to begin with and with this kind of car the worth will go up providing it is in excellent condition. If anything happens to the vehicle the likelihood of getting another one is pretty much zero. He’s been lucky to get this one. It has not even been made yet, by the way – it is due to be made sometime in the next two weeks.

Secondly, there has been a recent spate of car jackings in Sydney, so my Mum tells me. I believe this might be due to that STUPID tv show on fox 8 called “Dangerous” where they glamorised this kind of thing. So there’s going to be arguments on whether or not he can drive it there. I’d rather he did not and so would Mum.

Thirdly, you can’t just take this car to the shopping centre and park it there. Someone would ding it or scratch it or damage it in some way and that would be very irritating. So really I’m not sure where he’s going in this car, if anywhere at all.

Fourthly, both Mum and I think he should install some extreme form of car alarm. Preferably something that shouts “F*CK OFF” loudly if anyone walks within two metres of it. Ok, maybe that’s not likely to be on the market (but what a market there would be for it!) but you can get ones that tell people to step away from the vehicle. It might do more harm than good, though. So instead you’d want to install a gps tracker with a kill switch or something.

It’s a shame that when you get something nice, people want to take it away from you, or damage it in some way. I personally think he should hire an armed security guard to drive around in it with him and stand watch over the car wherever he leaves it but that could be because I want to kill, maim, and generally harm the person who put a dent in my door – I wrote this post about it back in November. I thought I was over it, but apparently not. ;(

cars, desperate housewives, Snoskred Art, The West Wing

Men I love to watch – Rob Lowe

People asked for it, and now here it is.

Rob Lowe is an excellent example of a man who actually gets more attractive as he ages. Not that he wasn’t cute when he was young. But it is very difficult to find images of him when he was young on the net and I’m not sure why. Maybe it is because the older him is so cute.

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However most people now associate him with the West Wing and the excellent job he did on that show. Any fan will tell you he was one of the major characters that made the show what it was, and when he left the show there was a hole not easily filled.

For the Aussies reading this, many of you did not see the West Wing because Channel 9 really screwed around with airing it but you do not have to stay in the dark. The show was brilliant and can now be bought from JB Hifi for less than $35 per season for the first 5 seasons.

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For those of you not aware of what Rob Lowe is up to now, he is on a show called Brothers and Sisters. Because I don’t watch commercial TV I had never heard of this brothers and sisters show but it seems like I will have to add it to my must watch list. Callista Flockheart was always one of my favourites, I loved Ally Mcbeal, and now to team her up with Rob Lowe? I can tell without even knowing anything about the show that I will love it.

Here is a clip from The West Wing.

So, Rob Lowe joins Christian Slater as one of the men I love to watch. If you enjoyed this blog, you may also enjoy my movie reviews –

Shakespeare In Love
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Chocolat
Pump Up The Volume
Dead Poets Society
The Pirate Movie

I must get back to writing more of these but at the moment I’m deep into a new project and finding it hard to think of other stuff. :)

Men I Love To Watch, The West Wing

It’s never over..

The final episodes of the West Wing aired tonight on the ABC. It was unusual for an ending, because it was kind of an ending and a beginning in some ways, for most of the characters.

However it’s not really an ending because I am rewatching season 3, and the DVD’s are here on my shelf, and anytime I want I can revisit these characters and this incredible acting job they all did. And, I still have to get seasons 6 and 7 and watch them, so that’s something to look forward to as well.

I missed the sideshow, sadly. We went early to the Chinese but it is school holidays and for some reason our meal took twice as long as usual, and then the other half won $130 on the pokies. I’ve checked the guide and I can’t see that it gets repeated. ;(

television shows, The West Wing

Another Saturday Night..

Another couple of West Wing episodes. And whoa, is about all I can say. This possibly blog won’t make a lot of sense to non-WW fans.

A few weeks ago Sephy was in the middle of the 2nd season, and I said to him something like, an episode will come to you as a surprise and you’ll know what I mean by that when it happens. The episode I was talking about in that case was 18th and Potomac, where they just out of nowhere, completely out of the blue, kill off a much loved character. In the episode after it, there is a point where the killed off character makes an appearance as a ghost, kind of, which also is much unexpected.

Tonight’s episode was another one of those but on a larger scale. And when they go into the funeral service, you see all the faces of people who seem to have gone their separate ways, doing their different jobs, some still at the whitehouse and others not, and the only face missing was Sam. I kept expecting to see him but he didn’t show up. Apparently he shows up next week.

There’s still a big gap between where my DVD box sets ran out and the show as it is today, and I am really looking forward to finding out how the show gets from there to the show I saw tonight.

death, television shows, The West Wing