I happened to catch the 1960 screenplay of Inherit The Wind on Showtime this afternoon, and was blown away. I wish I had recorded it, because it’s extraordinarily timely. I’m guessing that a lot of other people haven’t seen it either. [grin]
A spam message I received this morning had this text at the bottom. I wonder where it came from? I’m guessing from the stuff I’ve seen in the past that they grab text from a website somewhere and insert it into their spam.
Exactly! roared Sykes. And do you believe Johnny St. Jay would willingly destroy his own property, his own business? Stranger things have happened in the outside criminal world, Sir Henry, said Cyril Sylvester Pritchard knowingly. In my official capacity Ive heard many, many stories. The incidents my nephew described are called diversionary tactics employed to create the illusion that the scoundrels are victims. It was all thoroughly explained to me. Oh, it was, was it? cried the former brigadier of the British army. Well, let me explain something else, shall I? Youve been duped by an international terrorist wanted the world over! Do you know the universal penalty for aiding and abetting such a killer? Ill make it plain, in case its escaped your attention-in your official capacity, of course.
Mystery solved, thanks to Google. It appears to be a snippet of text from the Robert Ludlum book The Bourne Ultimatum.
Sublime Stitching‘s site says, “This ain’t you gramma’s embroidery!” And they’re quite right. With patterns for everything from tikis, sushi bars, goth patterns, mexican wrestlers, pirates and monkeys, they make a really boring craft into something fun and hip. Well, okay, about as hip as embroidery can get, anyway.
Mame Dennis: Well, now, uh, read me all the words you don’t understand.
Patrick Dennis: Libido, inferiority complex, stinko, blotto, free love, bathtub gin, monkey glands, Karl Marx… is he one of the Marx Brothers?
Patrick Dennis: …Neurotic, heterosexual…
Mame Dennis: Oh, my my my my, what an eager little mind.
[takes the list]
Mame Dennis: You won’t need some of these words for months and months.
—
Patrick Dennis: Is the English lady sick, Auntie Mame?
Auntie Mame: She’s not English, darling… she’s from Pittsburgh.
Patrick Dennis: She sounded English.
Auntie Mame: Well, when you’re from Pittsburgh, you have to do something.
—
Mame Dennis: That’s a B. It’s the first letter of a seven-letter word that means your father.
—
Auntie Mame: Please dear, your Auntie Mame is hung.
—
MAME: You know, I was always fascinated by aviation. I never knew they did it all with rubber bands.
—
Vera Charles: If you kept your hair natural like I do…
Auntie Mame: If I kept my hair natural like yours, I’d be bald.
—
MAME: Mr. Babbit–
MR. BABCOCK: BabCOCK.
MAME: Yes.
—
Auntie Mame: Oh, Agnes! Here you’ve been taking my dictations for weeks and you haven’t gotten the message of my book: live!
Agnes Gooch: Live?
Auntie Mame: Yes! Live! Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!
—
Gloria: Don’t you just think books are so decorative?
Penguin is podcasting Dicken’s A Christmas Carol in serial form, beginning today. You can download the mp3, link to the files via RSS, or get them from iTunes.
I tried the direct download, but I’m having trouble getting it to start. Looks like they have a lot of traffic.
My friend Amy gave me Greatest Hits: The Road Less Traveled by Melissa Etheridge a few weeks ago. I’ve been listening to it, but didn’t get around to paying attention to some of the new tunes on it until this week. There’s a very beautiful song called “This Is Not Goodbye” about going into surgery and having a loved one sitting in the waiting room for you. Thank God we didn’t hear that frickin’ song earlier in the year. I can’t even listen to it now. It’s a great song, but still.
Also, check out this awesome Library of Congress photo gallery of color pictures taken between 1939 and 1943. There are some fantastic photos there, like this one. You can see even more of the photos taken by the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection at this link, though, and although it’s not as easy to navigate, you can find the high-resolution images.
A really cool video on how to perfectly fold a shirt. I’m so going home to practice this one.
Cool new board games for 2005. There are some on here I really want. I looked at “Around the World in 80 Days” and “Ingenious” at Game Preserve the other day, and they made my want list. I’m adding “Shadows Over Camelot” to the list, too.
AirTran/Wendy’s Free Flight offer: for 32 flight coupons, get a 1 way ticket, 64 coupons get a round-trip ticket. You get a coupon on every Wendy’s drink cup. Pretty awesome.
PaperbackSwap is a way to exchange paperbacks with other folks. You send paperbacks to others, and get credit to have them send some to you.
The straight dude’s guide to ‘Brokeback Mountain.’
From Uncommon Goods:
gorilla pillows – $40.00
sock monkey slippers – $15.00
monkeys on the bed – $26.00
write no evil pen holder – $75.00
FREUDIAN SLIPPERS – $24.00
I so wanted to like this movie, because I loved the books as a kid. I re-read the books in 1997 and didn’t enjoy them as much as I had when I was young, but there still was a lot of the magic there, even though some of the story bothered me.
But this movie… I hated it. I didn’t empathize with any of the characters. The story itself didn’t make any sense (which, to be fair, is also the case with the books) and a couple of inserted scenes really struck the wrong note with me.
To start out with, they spent a huge amount of time at the beginning of the movie focusing on the children and their mother in London being bombed during WWII while their father fights in the war. All of this was completely invented and never appeared in the book, where the children’s arrival at their uncle’s house is all of two sentences, and their parents both stay in London. The heavy-handedness of this insertion throws the movie off-balance later, when the children don’t hurry back home. I wouldn’t lolly-gag around being royal if my mom was being bombed and my dad was in a war.
Some of the rest of the story line seemed absurd on screen. The children’s immediate and unquestioning loyalty towards Aslan seemed odd; it’s addressed in the book but that never makes it’s way to the screen. The Narnia folk keep calling the children the saviors of the world, but there’s no reason why anyone should think that, based on the children’s behavior. And the children never actually do anything other than traipse around through the countryside, and participate in a battle that all of the folk who live in Narnia also perform valiantly in. So why do the kids get crowned, and not the beavers?
The sequence at the frozen waterfall where Peter wusses out of killing the wolf was also an invention and not in the book. I HATED this scene, mainly because it was the first of many where Peter stands around awkwardly holding a sword out away from his body. Pull your elbow in kid, or they’ll just knock it out of your hand. And while you’re at it, wave it around a bit and at least try to look intimidating. The whole scene didn’t make any sense; why not walk across the frozen falls at the top, like the wolves did, rather than climbing down to cross over the melting ice?
During the battle, Peter turns to look at his centaur general and asks “Are you with me?” I should hope so, dork, he’s standing right there.
The one bone they threw me was at the very end, where Susan kills the dwarf before it can kill a wounded Edmund. That wasn’t in the book, and is probably intended to temper the wide-spread criticism from the book that the girls are not allowed to participate in the battle (why give her arrows at all?) while the boys are.
My expectations were probably way too high for this movie, given how much I loved the books as a kid. But still, they could have tried to rise to the occasion…
I read the McMurtry fiction about Calamity Jane earlier this year. Salon reviews a new biography that debunks much of the myth.
“Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” –Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:318
