Constitutional Amendment Trivia
Do you know what year Kentucky ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments (abolishing slavery, extending equal protection of the laws to all persons, and giving non-whites the right to vote)? 1976.
Mississippi has never ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Tennessee has never ratified the Fifteenth Amendment.
Do you know what year Mississippi ratified the Nineteenth Amendment (giving women the right to vote)? 1984.
[Eric informs me that Mississippi ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in 1995.]
King Kong (2005)
At the end of the first hour I was swearing to myself that I would never, ever see another Peter Jackson movie.
There are no monsters in the first seventy minutes of the movie, just people getting to Skull Island. You don't need monsters to make a good movie, but apparently Peter Jackson does, because the script is woeful, the exposition is ham-handed, the dialogue is often wretched, and development of some of the characters (e.g., Jimmy) is completely pointless. Even the computer-generated special effects in this part of the movie aren't good, as when the video game ship is tossed on the rocks with little video game people hanging on to the deck.
The movie does take a turn for the better after Kong finally shows up. All the monster special effects look better, maybe because monsters are easier, or because the filmmakers put more effort into them. Action scenes that involve either Kong or other monsters from Skull Island are generally pretty good, but sometimes they violated my suspension of disbelief, e.g.:
- Apparently blonde starlets are tyrannosaur heroin, even small quantities are worth pursuing at all costs regardless of whatever else may be going on.
- A person with oversized insects crawling all over him can be safely hosed off with a machine gun, even by someone without prior experience with guns.
- A taxi driver is driving away from a giant ape. Someone gets in the back of the taxi and asks him to turn around and drive toward the ape. The driver's reaction is to give his taxi to the passenger.
The best parts of the movie are the scenes where Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) bonds with King Kong. I liked the vaudeville subplot and the portrayal of Kong's interest in Ann Darrow as not necessarily sexual in nature.
Old-Time Fast Food
Added Portillo's and Fosselman's to the
restaurant list.
I'm just a bill
Joe's First Amendment playlist inspired me to come up with tracks for some of the other Amendments. Here's what I've got so far:
Amendment IPersonal Jesus, Depeche Mode
Revolution 1, The Beatles
Amendment IIThe Partisan, Leonard Cohen
Amendment IIIWelcome to the Occupation, R.E.M.
Amendment IVLife During Wartime, Talking Heads
Amendment VIt Wasn't Me, Shaggy
The Gunner's Dream, Pink Floyd
Amendment VIWhat Have I Done To Deserve This?, Pet Shop Boys
Criminal, Fiona Apple
Amendment VIIStill Crazy After All These Years, Paul Simon
Amendment VIIITo Kill the Child, Roger Waters
Amendment IXDemocracy, Leonard Cohen
Relevant Elephant
It is interesting when the random words in the subject lines of spam email manage to hit on a combination that resonates with you, so it seems like the email
might actually be addressed to you, from a Nigerian relative that your mother never mentioned, and you're tempted to read it.
I think it would be an interesting experiment: out of all the words in the dictionary, which words or combinations of words do you think are more relevant to you than to the average person? What percentage of the dictionary do people stake out as "theirs"?
On another subject [line], I got a spam email today that said, "Ignoring this offer again is definitely not a good idea." Great... vaguely threatening spam!
Celebrity Non-sighting: John Goodman
We went to see
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which by some trick I had never seen before. John Goodman was supposed to be the marquee star, but he didn't show tonight. A groan went up from the audience. But actually the understudy was pretty good as Big Daddy.
It is a very segmented play. The whole first act is practically a monologue by Maggie, the better part of an hour long. The first act could be a one-woman show with cardboard props to be the other characters. At the end of the first act I was scratching my head wondering if there were any other characters in the play, and why Jennifer Mudge, the actress playing Maggie, was given fourth billing in the program.
Then the second act is a monologue by Big Daddy, followed by a dialogue between Big Daddy and Brick.
In the short third act, the other members of the family are given a brief opportunity to say something.
Walkers Left Standees Right
This sign is above the sliding walkways at the Pittsburgh Airport.
Why "standees" and not "standers"? Granted that standing is a passive activity, still, I am standing on the right, not being stood on the right.
Maribeth's investigation reveals that in American English, since the mid-19th century, -ee is sometimes used to indicate the subject of an intransitive verb (like "stand") as well as the object of a transitive verb (which I think is more common).
I guess it just seems funny to me in conjunction with "walkers"... note, not "walkees," even though "walk" is also an intransitive verb.
A Man Without A Country
Did you know Kurt Vonnegut has not written a book since 1999? Until this one, which is a collection of essays that he's written elsewhere. As you might expect from the title, the running theme is Vonnegut's dissatisfaction with the current U.S. administration.
The essays in
A Man Without A Country are okay. Some better than okay. But I was disappointed. It's one of those thin books that really shouldn't cost $23.95 retail. I had already read some of the better essays--on the Internet, I guess. And in at least one case, the version I read on the Internet was better than the one in the book.
As Long As They Spell Your Name Right
Hey, I made
Defense News.
This Week On Television
Seth and Summer sent off their applications to Brown. It would be surprising if their college ambitions are realized. Meanwhile,
Veronica learned that despite her long-held plans to depart Neptune, California, immediately after graduation, she might be tempted to stay by a scholarship to nearby Hearst College.
It's kind of sad that when television characters graduate from high school they always have to go to college in the same town.
Get To Know
Geoffrey Pullum says that the sentence:
* If you don't know her, get to.seems ungrammatical to him, but he doesn't know why.
I would suggest it's because "get to know" has an idiomatic meaning which is a bit different from the generic use of "get to [verb]." The idiomatic meaning suggests a gradual process of acquaintance, the generic meaning emphasizes a special opportunity to [verb].
"I get to know her over drinks," (idiomatic) means something different from "I get to know the password, because I have a security clearance." (non-idiomatic)
The asterisked sentence sounds strange because the listener wants to apply "get to..." in the generic way, but the speaker is using it in the idiomatic way.
Catch-22
I read
Catch-22 in high school and I thought it was about the greatest book ever written.
Then many years passed during which I didn't read the book again. And during the last decade, every so often I would encounter snarky comments about
Catch-22. "Yes, I liked it as a teenager, who doesn't, but I found it wore thin when I read it again." That sort of thing.
I became afraid to read the book again.
But, I finally did, and it holds up fine. Actually, I had forgotten how it ended... The ending is great, I'm not sure I fully appreciated the ending the first time through. This is one of the best books ever written.
Conclusion: People who don't like
Catch-22 must be stupid.
I was pleased to find that students at the Air Force Academy
aren't stupid.
Brick and Mortar Bookstores
It's one of those single-data-point observations, but the local Borders seems to have expanded its Magazines section and its Other Crap section (stationery, calendars, etc.) at the expense of Books, perhaps attempting a marginal retreat to a less online-threatened product mix.
It doesn't seem like a strategy that can be carried very far.
I continue to think that the sales tax collection gap is the most serious competitive disadvantage facing the brick and mortar bookstores. It would be interesting to know if they are faring better in the few states with no sales tax.
