I couldn't resist this shoutout to my friend Chris who works at Polycom. He was very excited that this new technology made it onto CNN.com's hallowed pages.
In other news, I spent the weekend in Austin with my beloved nieces who are now eight and five years old. Where does the time go? I swear they were just born yesterday! Anyway, Annika's birthday was Sunday, so we took her to Dave and Busters (her choice) where she won a giant Spongebob Squarepants doll. My brother should be sending me some pictures soon which you all can coo at when you see how darn adorable my nieces are.
The rest of my time "off" has been spent entertaining relatives or working at CNN. It's been nice to see some of my friends back at the Mother Ship, and I found out that our department won Peabody and DuPont Columbia awards for the tsunami and Katrina coverage last year.
Stephanie, satellites business manager extrordinaire, gave me my certificates yesterday. When I left for work today, I left them on my bed because I was in a hurry and didn't want them to get wrinkled in my work bag, and this afternoon my parents saw them and freaked out. They called me at CNN to share their excitement (and to scold me for not telling them about it.) I didn't realize my parents would know what a Peabody was, so I didn't rush to share the news last night. Oh well.
And now I should probably talk about something that might actually interest someone out there in Internet-land... I finally saw Psycho. The Hitchcock version. Everyone knows that I absolutely love Hitchcock movies. (North by Northwest is one of my favorite movies of all time.) His ability to use music and understatement as psychological tools was simply brilliant. No one else did what he did, but everyone still tries to mimic his methods. Film scholars have been saying these things (much more eloquently) for years, so I'll move on to my point.
Backtracking somewhat, when I was growing up, my mother always talked about how scary that film was when she saw it in the 60's. She said she couldn't sleep for weeks afterwards. She still thinks it's the scariest thing she's ever seen. So naturally, I'd always had an aversion to it as well. (In fact, I have never been a huge horror movie fan, although I love a good mystery/suspense/thriller. I just don't like zombies and people jumping out from behind corners with knives and that sort of thing.)
Being in the Arts Journalism program, I decided that I needed to face my fears and see the Hitchcock classic that set the tone for many modern horror films. So I set out to watch it in my brother's fabulous media room, with surround sound and a beautifully projected image on a big screen. Of course, I sat down to watch it alone, but during the day, just in case.
At first, I was confident that it wasn't going to get to me. This silly black and white movie couldn't possibly be as scary as my mother had deemed it to be. There are much scarier things on television these days. (O'Reilly Factor, anyone?) It simply reminded me of the genius that is Hitchcock. I already knew all about the famous "shower scene", so that didn't really scare me. I noticed the startling music in the intense scenes, and the creepy camera angles that were used whenever Norman Bates was in a scene. And oh, the black and white added such a classy touch. I felt very elite and erudite, looking at the piece from a critical perspective.
And then Hitchcock got the better of me. When the investigator was stabbed and thrown down the stairs. I admit, I yelped a little out loud. But when the skeleton in the basement grinned back at me in it's 10-foot-wide toothy glory, I literally freaked out. I turned the lights on and watched the rest of the movie with the media room door wide open, just in case.
Luckily, I was able to forget my fright quickly when I walked downstairs and joined the kids, who were watching harmless Bill Nye the Science Guy.
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