FIVE RECENT FAVORITES

In response to a writing prompt at Mama’s Losin’ It:

List your five most recent favorite things.

I decided to choose one thing from 5 different categories of things I like.

1. FOOD: After living in Brazil for several years where I had the choice of 12 different varieties of bananas, here bananas just didn’t taste right to me, so I rarely ate them for nearly 40 years. In a recent attempt to add more fiber to my diet, I started to eat cereal with soy milk and a sliced banana for breakfast. 

        I like my bananas when still slightly green ---and hate them once they turn fully yellow. Luckily my husband likes them slightly riper than I do, so he can eat the ones beyond my personal expiration date, and when they go beyond his, he bakes banana bread.

2. TV: I love Life ---that is “Life” as in the TV show, the story of a police office Charlie Crews, who was framed for murder and spent 12 years in jail before being exonerated and reinstated on the L.A. police force. Charlie got life, but then got his life back.

        Besides working on current cases with his partner Dani Reese (played by Sarah Shahi) he is attempting to solve the murder for which he was wrongly accused. Cruise is played by British actor Damian Lewis ---without a hint of a British accent. Charlie is quirky. He loves to eat fresh fruit because it was scarce in prison. He has a unique, almost Zen-like, take on life. Adam Arkin plays Ted Early, his former cellmate, who is now managing Charlie’s fortune, won in a lawsuit for wrongful imprisonment.
        I like this show because I enjoy mysteries, detective stories, and police procedurals, so I like following a murder case on each episode, but I also like the ongoing mystery of the murder Charlie was accused of. And I love that “Life” has a sense of humor.

3. MOVIES: My husband and I watch a lot of movies. We pass a library from a huge library system on the way to my mother’s. There, we can find new releases, old black and white films, and practically anything from the BBC. We can order videos or DVDs online and have them delivered to that branch of the library. With our Netflix subscription we can have 3 films signed out at once. Our list there, has 420 DVDs on it ---and if we are ever without a film we haven’t watched, we can watch something instantly online with Netflix. 

        Although we sometimes enjoy a recent popular film, our tastes are rather offbeat. We like foreign films, even with subtitles, documentaries and films about nature. “A Room With A View” is on both my husbands and my top-5 list. My husband loves film noir and old horror films like the original “Dracula” and “King Kong.” I like romantic comedies, if not too silly. Among my favorites are “Moonstruck,” “Tootsie,” and “Bull Durham.” Since we don’t have cable TV, we also like to view videos or DVDs of TV shows we have missed such as “The Wire” and “Lost.”
          For a recent favorite, I have chosen “Saudade do Futuro” a Brazilian documentary about street musicians in São Paulo. You can find more about this film on a post at my other blog, A Little “Peace” of Brazil.

4. WEBSITE: I discovered hulu.com several months ago. I love watching full-length movies and a zillion old TV shows. You can also catch up on many current shows you may have missed, like “Life.” One is subjected to a few short commercials, but they aren’t extremely intrusive.

5. BLOG: It is nearly impossible to choose a favorite, but one I love is “The Big Storm Picture.” It features photographs taken by those crazy people known as storm chasers. 

        One can view photographs showing the aftermath of storms and their devastation, but the most dynamic photographs are of the storms while they are brewing. It seems odd that storms can be so destructive and also extremely beautiful. I especially like the photos that show both black storm clouds and patches of sunshine, making for dramatic contrast.
        Here are links to a few of my favorite photographs: Haybales Portal in the Sky Down With the Topmast! Supercell at Sunset Kansas