Cover Songs

Okay, here are 2 different versions of Rhianna's "Umbrella":

NOTE: you may want to right-click and select view in another window or whatever)

The Original (forgive the ads on this one. That's youtube for ya!)

The Cover

The musical differences between the two are obvious. But what I wanted to talk about was how the 2 songs made me feel. I think the way a song makes you feel is one of the most important things about it. When listening to the original, I think of it as kind of a "pump-up-jam", a song that you might listen to at a party, or when you're getting ready with your girls to go out for the night. The way this version was done makes it a more upbeat song. But with the cover, it seems more of a sincere love song to me. The acoustic feel just makes it sweeter, and seem like an actual good song, as opposed to Rhianna's....stuff.

BJD movie v. book

After watching the movie and reading the book, I noticed some striking differences. The main one was the subplot with the mother. I was glad they toned down Mrs. Jones' criminal side in the movie. The way the book had it just seemed so outrageous to me. Unbelievable, practically. I also liked that her parents got back together at the end. I'm a sucker for happy endings. Also, I feel like the Daniel in the book was much worse than the Daniel in the movie for some reason. I'm not exactly sure why. Also, was her gay friend (whose name escapes me right now, and I'm in bed so I'm too lazy to go look for it) a one-hit-wonder in the book? I kinda felt like that was unnecessary.

I really liked this movie though! Minus Renee's accent.

What is a "Writer"?

When I think of a writer, I tend to think of it in a professional sense. As in, someone who writes for a living. An author, perhaps, would be more like what comes to my mind. I tend to picture someone who will sit in a room for days on end writing a novel. In my head, this person is a male, with classes, and a sweater vest. I have no idea why he looks that way, or why it's not a woman, but that was the image that came to mind. Obviously there are many other kinds of writers. The next thing I would think of would be my sister, Lauryn, who writes alot of poetry and short stories, and at one time wrote X-Files fan fiction. I'm not sure if she looks back on that with embarrassment or not....

I don't, however, tend to think of a "writer" as someone like Bridget Jones. As I mentioned before, a writer to me tends to be someone who writes as their job. I wouldn't consider myself a writer, even though I'm clearly writing in this blog right now....

Thoughts?

2 Articles

The two articles I chose were from Cosmopolitan and Redbook magazines. They were both about sex, which obviously ties into dating and body image, two things we've talked about with BJD. Although these magazines are aimed at 2 different types of women, the young 20-30 something, and the older, married woman, I was surprised to find that they had alot of the same things to say. Although the Cosmo article was much more crude, they often used similar language. I expected the Redbook article to be completely different, but it wasn't. While the Cosmo article was longer and had a larger variety of tips, the Redbook article repeated alot of the same things.