Kips love reading.
My favorite authors are:
Except for the dead ones, I have to have new books by these people whenever they come out!
Kips like movies.
I recently decided that I should see all of the movies that ever won the Academy Award for best picture. Let’s go in reverse chronological order and take things in decades (nice manageable chunks!). I’ll include my opinion for which picture should have won, ha!
Still to see:
2007 – No Country for Old Men
Already saw:
2006 – The Departed. This should have won, and it did! Yay, Martin Scorsese, yay, Boston, yay, Dropkick Murphys, and yay, Irish mob! (er, um, yeah)
2005 – Crash. Another won which should have won, and did. One of those movies that you think you hate until you discover you love it.
2004 – Million Dollar Baby. Yeah, chicks pounding on each other in the face is not really my thing. My pick for that year was Finding Neverland, because:
2003 – The Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King. OK, I liked these movies (probably the first one best). Great special effects and all that. But this one just had too much in the way of cast-of-thousands battle scenes. My pick for that year was Lost in Translation, which was just such an excellent flick, especially to those who have experienced life abroad.
2002 – Chicago. Tough call here. It was great, don’t get me wrong, and it’s always cool to see a musical win, but I have to say I was pulling for The Hours. Excellent novel, and excellent acting.
2001 – A Beautiful Mind. OK, this was a good movie. But Russell Crowe always kinds of ruins a movie for me, blech. My pick that year was Moulin Rouge (Yes! A musical!).
2000 – Gladiator. OK, Russell Crowe rule again, so, nope, not my pick. Also, see above about Johnny Depp. Yup, my pick was Chocolat. You’ve got a cute French village, Juliette Binoche, even a cameo by Leslie Caron, and tons of chocolate – how can you go wrong?
Well, then. All in all, only one movie to see from this decade. Stay tuned for the list from the next, er, previous decade.
These are Kip’s articles that have appeared in these travel publications:
Nature Lovers Welcome 
First, un bocata de calamares 
These are Kip’s articles that have appeared in the following issues of these children’s magazines:
Gene Kelly: Tough Guy or Dancer? 
Setting the Stage: Preparations for Yorktown 
The White Rose: Germans Against Hitler 
The Many Languages of Spain 
Dropping in on Normandy 
Silent Gliders
Vinnie Ream: The Girl Who Sculpted Lincoln 
Edmonia Lewis: An American Sculptress
Leni Riefenstahl: Hitler’s Filmmaker 
Multilingual Switzerland (forthcoming October 2008)
Another list from Kip. These are some new places she would like to visit. Places she has already visited can’t be on the list, sorry!
Kips like to make lists. This is her first one. These are the countries Kip has visited (in chronological order):