Martini and Movie Night or Pink drinks all around

It's Friday, Yeah!!!!

Most Friday evenings we have a few friends over for martinis or your beverage of choice, some munchies, and entertainment.

For the beverage portion of the evening I typically go for red wine. Not because I don't like myself a good martini but ever since I had a bad case of food poisoning (damn you Pendleton, Oregon) I really have to watch my whole vodka intake (it seems I have very little willpower when it comes to vodka). My friend Julie goes for Cosmopolitans in a big way. She likes herself some pink drinks. If I could make them fizzy she'd be even more excited. Lisa is pretty egalitarian, she'll choose anything from ice water to beer to pink drinks. Lisa's like that and we love her for it.

The munchies consist mainly of nachos, quesadillas, bruschetta & cheese or whatever strikes our fancy and I have on hand. This topping is one of our favorites. I think I'll goes roast myself some tomatoes right now. BRB. Okay, their in the oven now. Oh, I can't forget the goat cheese.

For the entertainment portion of the evening we tend to watch movies, do crafty sorta stuff, talk about books we are reading, bitch about work, and chat. All kinds of chatting goes on. For tonight I think I'll offer up movies from the Library of Congress.

Does that sound weird? It shouldn't the Library of Congress (LOC) has some of the coolest old movies around. Some of you may not know but the LOC is mandated to collect one of everything published since revolutionary times. Not that they have just that they try. Sort of like I do. It's a strange government documents thing. We'll go on.

LOC has digitized a lot of their material and posted it here: Library of Congress American Memory Project. You can see broadsides from past elections back to about 1802, life histories from the Works Project Administration (WPA) and panoramic photographs from 1851 to 1991. So I check out the LOC project. Just keeping up with the competition. I have some new ideas in the works that are going to blow the socks off of their site. I can't compete in the coolness of their collection, I mean damn! But, I can have a more innovated web site. By the spring of 2009 I'll have a new homepage with our google gadget embeded and.... Oh sorry, off topic. I tend to lose myself in my geekness.

My all time favorite part of the American Memory Project is the motion pictures. These early motion pictures are fun to watch. It is interesting to think about how these men explored this new media. You can get to them from here: Online Films. The LOC has lots of stuff from Thomas Edison also: Edison Motion Pictures. Here's the Annie Oakely film that Edison did in 1894.

Another feature is the Before & After the Great Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco: "This collection consists of twenty-six films of San Francisco from before and after the Great Earthquake and Fire, 1897-1916. Seventeen of the films depict San Francisco and its environs before the 1906 disaster. Seven films describe the great earthquake and fire. The two later films include a 1915 travelogue that shows scenes of the rebuilt city and a tour of the Panama Pacific Exposition and a 1916 propaganda film."

Most of these films are quite short. None that I've come across have sound though there are sound recording that you can listen to if you want.

The Today in History and the Tomorrow in History are interesting. I urge you to take a few minutes to check out this site. I'm pretty simple so I could look at it for hours and have.

Have a fun evening.

Love,
M