Procrastinate on This! [Friday Edition]

“No one ever erected a statue in honor of a critic.” Whenever I hear that quote from now on, I’ll think of Roger Ebert, who finished this lifetime yesterday and should definitely have a statue put up in honor of his brilliant, brilliant mind. I wish he could have stayed with us forever.

That all honored, let’s procrastinate on this:

These 10 wedding gift suggestions from xoJane are so good, that you'll be tempted to skip your friend's registry all together. We actually forewent gifts in favor of charitable donations, but we would have been beyond thrilled to receive 7 out of 10 of these gifts. Not bad!

These 10 wedding gift suggestions from xoJane are so good, that you’ll be tempted to skip your friend’s registry all together. We actually forewent gifts in favor of charitable donations, but we would have been beyond thrilled to receive 7 out of 10 of these gifts. Not bad!

1. Speaking of brilliant minds, soon-to-be-mom Delia Hauser from Martha Stalwart pointed out to me that I needn’t have bought an expensive pumping bra. I could just cut two holes in an old running bra and voila, hands-free pumping. I tried this at home, and I won’t post a pic, but I will say it totally worked! So heads up to other pumping moms.

2. As someone who just had to use our emergency fund to pay a much higher than expected tax bill, I loved this friendly reminder about how it’s more important to build your emergency fund than pay off all your debt. [The Simple Dollar]

3. I also loved, loved, loved this defense of using current music in historical movies, citing the peasants rocking out to “We Will Rock You” in the (in my opinion) way underappreciated A KNIGHT’S TALE:

Imagine if this scene had had music that was appropriate to the period. It would sound to our modern ears like ye olde lute music, and would result in a kind of Disneyland feeling. But by using Queen’s anthem “We Will Rock You,” and incorporating it into the action (the peasants are actually clapping and singing along), we are suddenly electrified with the knowledge of what a jousting event really would have been like in the 1400s. It was a fucking rock show, people. It was not ye olde dancing and funny wee people. It was getting drunk, hooking up with one of those dancing maids, and bashing the shit out of each other with sticks. In a way, it was a rock concert and NASCAR rolled into one, big insane spectacle.

What this scene captures that no perfectly rendered BBC history could is the actual feeling of the historical event — the excitement and the nastiness. And it does this by breaking the rules of historical reenactment, by allowing a contemporary element into the drama. By making this scene anachronistic, Helgeland made it more realistic. [io9]

4. Is it rude to leave voicemails? Maybe so. I kind of hate of them myself and prefer to receive texts or emails, but I wouldn’t necessarily call someone leaving me a voicemail rude–just less likely to get a response to me, because it truly is hard for me to take the extra step of listening to a message these days. In any case, on the rare occasion that I leave a VM, I follow it up with a text for the person to check their voicemail, because I assume everyone’s like me when it comes to checking voicemail. [“Modern Mobile Etiquette: Don’t Leave Me a Voicemail Unless You’re Dying”]

5. Would your family run better if you ran it like a software development team? Check out this intriguing TedTalk by Bruce Feiler, proposing Agile programming–for the family.