I realize the headline of this blog may make you believe I’m trying to sell you an old bridge. However, I’m actually asking because someone I know slightly via Facebook is surveying people to find out what they think about old bridges.
If you’re at all interested in this topic, he is offering his survey online in a Word format here. It’s a few pages long, but it’s really pretty cool, and the data he gains from the surveys will be presented at a conference in late August.
Check it out!
If you thought you’ve seen every Jane Austen movie made in the past ten years, you’re probably wrong.
You definitely missed "Jane Austen’s Fight Club," which, unfortunately, wasn’t actually made. However, there’s a hilarious trailer for the flick, which recasts the Fight Club roles with the ladies of Austen’s books.
Lizzie throws a mean punch, and you should definitely watch out for Fannie. She’s brutal.
And in case you missed Fight Club, yes, this video is, well, violent.
For extra fun: See Ferris Bueller’s Day Off re-edited in Fight Club terms. Are Ferris and his best bud the same person?
Both Ferris and Jane were featured on BoingBoing.
Much of "The Sorceror’s Apprentice" is cliched, from the stereotypical nerdy high-school kid who suddenly gets superpowers to the pretty blonde girl he gets a crush on to the evil sorceror trying to kill him, but then again, there is some worth to a well-executed cliche, and "Sorceror" manages to be an entertaining popcorn movie despite its near-total lack of originality.
You’ve seen the plot before in "Spider-Man" or maybe "Transformers." A nerdy kid is told he has some special power or object and must defeat the evil genius who’s apparently trying to destroy the world, or maybe just a really big chunk of the world. There’s even a cute girl the nerdy boy falls for, although as usual in movies, she never quite gets enough character development for the audience to understand why he likes her so much. A powerful mentor helps the kid navigate the world of superpowers.
Dave (Jay Baruchel) is the geek. Becky (Teresa Palmer) is the girl. Horvath (Alfred Molina) is the villain.
The standout, though, is the mentor, titular sorceror Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage), who has shiny black shoes, fingerless gloves, sweater arms without the sweater and rather improbable scraggly long hair. After living more than 1,000 years, Blake has become almost unflappable in the face of death and also a little bit, well… eccentric.
Movies need a character like Balthazar to help explain the rules of magic (or superpowers) to the audience. "Sorceror," however, needs Balthazar to provide fun. The special effects in this flick are creative, featuring some clever mirror magic, shape-shifting, telekinesis and elemental control to add some interest, but an action movie really needs a charismatic character in order to be anything but annoying.
And there are a few annoyances in "Sorceror." The Arthurian myth providing some of the film’s backstory doesn’t have the depth and heft it should have had. The love interests fail to make any kind of impression at all and function mostly as window-dressing. The plot is strictly by-the-book.
Fortunately, the movie has enough special effects and Nicolas Cage in it to be reasonably entertaining anyway.
I watched "Karate Kid" this week for the first time in decades.
The last time I saw it, Daniel-san was older than me. This time, I kept thinking "Awww, he’s such a cute widdow boy."
I’d like to say the movie is a timeless classic, but unfortunately, the glaringly-80s soundtrack doesn’t really permit me to write that with a straight face. No, it’s definitely time-bound, but it is still a classic coming-of-age tale in which a high school kid learns to defend himself from bullies by painting the fence, waxing a car and sanding a deck.
I noticed a number of things I hadn’t noticed about the film when I was a kid:
Despite the funky 80s soundtrack and the (compared to current wham-bam movies) slow pace, the original "Karate Kid" held up surprisingly well. Still great after all these years.
According to a silly little internet quiz, the Dr. Seuss character I most resemble is the Cat in the Hat.
Honestly, I’m just glad I’m not one of those horrible sneetches.
In other news, I’ve been afflicted with allergies, lately, which I’ve been told are a result of the corn in the area tasseling. Yes. I live in Minnesota and I’m apparently allergic to corn.
Somebody said "At least you don’t live in Nebraska."
No one likes to make mistakes, and we in the newspaper business especially hate it when mistakes appear in print. Unfortunately, mistakes do happen, no matter how many editorial layers you have.
The good news is, sometimes the mistakes are really, really funny. Probably not to the person who made them, but to the rest of us? Hilarious.
Spellcheck and autocorrect can be a blessing. However, sometimes… well, sometimes I wonder if we would be better off without them. Here’s a pretty good roundup of the havoc autocorrect can wreak.
For example, software can "correct" a .prn file to "porn", change "Donner Party" into "dinner party" and fix "come over for a sec" to read "come over for a sex."
Then there are the mistakes we don’t even notice. You wouldn’t believe the goofy things bookstore workers get asked. They practically have to be psychic to figure out what people want sometimes.
This guy was obviously drunk as a monkey at my brother’s wedding reception. (Photo by Deb Muir of Jackson.)
There’s actually a reason for the monkey’s presence at the wedding, and it was not brought by a child or by a family who had a child.
Anyone (who wasn’t at the wedding) care to guess why the monkey was there?
(And no, he hadn’t been drinking before he got there, either.)
Edit: Check the comments for the solution.
Although my brother’s wedding went beautifully over the weekend, one of my favorite parts about it was sitting around in my pajamas after the official shindig was over, listening to my relatives from California talk about the funnier parts of their jobs.
All four of them work in schools; two as teachers and the others as school administrators. Most of the conversation, which was punctuated with chuckles from all six of the people in the room (my brother’s friend Tim being the other non-Californian there), was centered on the funnier aspects of keeping discipline in a school.
In other words, how do teachers catch students who are misbehaving? For example, how do you catch a kid who’s "messing up" the toilet paper in the boys’ bathroom, or a kid who took advantage of the special needs kid in the class and took $100 from him? Further, how do you get that money back, considering it was freely given by the special needs kid?
Turns out the tactics are a lot like what you’d see on Law and Order. For example, you can bring all the suspects into the office together, and after a few minutes, put them in separate rooms. Let them stew just a short period of time and then inform each one separately that the other "suspect" has already spilled his or her guts. Suddenly they go from "I don’t know who did it" to explaining how they did it.
And then there was the kid who brought the "murder weapon"–actually a Sharpie used to put graffiti on the bathroom wall–with him into the interview room. He pulled it out of his pocket promptly when asked, and then claimed it was his mother’s.
Best of all, because 12-year-olds are not a major part of the Law and Order-watching demographic, they generally don’t "lawyer up," either.
When my brother was just old enough to learn his numbers, and too young yet to sit still in church, I, as his bossy big sister, used to write out simple math problems for him to work on during the service. He’d sit there and work on addition and subtraction and I’d sit there working on more little problems for him, and that way, we managed to keep the bickering, elbowing, and jostling for position to a minimum.
On Saturday, my brother didn’t have any trouble paying attention at church, and he wasn’t sitting in a pew. Instead, he was standing in front of the congregation reciting his wedding vows to his high school sweetheart, surrounded by friends and family.
I ignored my brother for the first part of his life. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him; it was just that he was boring. Having a small baby around is exactly like having a small sack of flour around, except that flour doesn’t make messes or cry a lot. Until my brother could talk I just wasn’t that interested.
But finally he did talk, and immediately, it was clear that he had a lot of interesting things to say.
And when he learned to walk, it was clear that he was also quite brave. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of my brother as a toddler on the night when a broken light fixture fell from the ceiling and slashed his chin open. He didn’t cry, not even a little, even though he was bleeding pretty badly, and my dad drove him to the emergency room half an hour away. He had four stitches put in, and he did not make a sound.
My brother has always been smart, but more importantly, he’s kind and very, very patient with people. I can tell you this because I have played Halo 2 with my brother, and I think I shot him in the back about ten times. This wouldn’t have been a problem in a competitive game, but we were supposed to be on the same side. I just have really bad aim. "Can’t you tell which guy I am?" he’d ask, and I’d say "Well… no." He’d just shake his head and tell me to try again, preferably this time without shooting the wrong weird-looking alien.
He’s always been a pretty snappy dresser, my brother. I can still remember him wearing a pretty fancy white dress in his flour-sack days, when he could barely open his blue eyes and frankly, still smelled kinda funny. Later, he wore hand-me-down Winnie the Pooh pajamas that had once been mine, and often ran around the house in a Batman costume he cherished. When he got older, he traded those in for marching band, football and baseball uniforms.
And on Saturday, he traded his college-kid jeans and tennis shoes for a wide grin, a tuxedo, shiny shoes, a wedding ring, and a gorgeous, wonderful bride.
He had no trouble paying attention in church on Saturday, and the only math that mattered?
One plus one equals one.
I don’t remember a lot of specifics from my European lit class, but I do remember most of the characters in the Iliad had little epithets after their names, which helped you keep track of characters and usually indicated something important about each person in the story.
For example, Hector, the Trojan warrior who is actually one of the more heroic characters in the story, is usually called "Hector, Breaker of Horses."
I would like to nominate my coworker, Ashley, for the epithet "Slayer of Hornets."
Somehow, a hornet the size of a large cat got into the newsroom yesterday and hid somewhere, possibly under Ashley’s desk. It didn’t come out until Ashley arrived at work in the afternoon (as the night editor, she works during the afternoon and evening). Perhaps it sensed its foe was in close proximity, because it hovered between Ashley’s face and her computer, and then it was lured by the scent of sweet, sweet chocolate and peanuts, landing on a bag of M&Ms at a nearby desk.
I was poised to fight or flight, which in the case of wasps, hornets and other pointy-ended objects, means running the heck away.
Ashley, however, grabbed the nearest shoe and slew the monster, without regard for her own safety and with great bravery. I stopped hiding behind my desk.
Do you think "Hornet-Slayer" or "Slayer of Hornets" sounds better?
