movies


30
Jan 12

Back to it

The first day of the semester. Samford has a Jan-term, an accelerated short term in between the holidays and the spring term. My department didn’t have classes, so I got to work on things like recruitment, a new lesson plan, reading and so on. Today, though, is our first day back.

And so, of course, today was the day my printer decided to miscount the number of things I asked it to print. It also decided to jam about 90 percent of the way through.

“So it is going to be a Monday, eh, HP?”

My printer had nothing to see. Its gears were full of mutilated pulp.

Dig the paper out, successfully pulling out only microfibers at a time. I have some special chemical blend of paper that shears at the subatomic level. You can pull on this stuff for hours and not get it out from the reticent printer’s teeth.

Beeson

With every passing year this becomes more entertaining to me. My youngest step-sibling is working her way through undergrad, but she’ll be done soon. When that happens I won’t be able to try to convince the new students that I understand their plight. “We’re practically the same generation,” is the implication, despite my silvering hair.

This has turned itself into a running cinematic joke in my classes based on a conversation I had with students a couple of years ago. For whatever reason the gag hinges on Spaceballs as the denouement of movie humor. I don’t have a real theory that we crossed some boundary in 1987; Spaceballs was simply the high water mark of post-modern film parodies, he said, hoping it made him sound sophisticated.

Anyway, almost everyone in the class said they’ve seen the movie.

“One day” I told them, “I will start a semester by saying if you haven’t seen the film don’t come back until you do. I will give bonus points for the first person that catches a Spaceballs reference.”

They all sat up.

“That will not be this class,” I said.

They slid back down into their seats.

Two posts on my school blog today. One links to a great list of necessities for every mobile journalist. The other asks the question “Can a good journalist be a good capitalist?” More and more we should be thinking of questions like that.

Flush and full, busy first day back. By tomorrow, perhaps Wednesday, everything will be moving at a normal speed again.

Except the printer.


18
Dec 11

Happy Birthday

Lazlo Hollyfeld, the impossibly old undergrad living between the walls in Real Genius was 28 when he won 32.4 percent of the Frito-Lay “Enter-as-often-as-you-want” sweepstakes.

By the age of 30 Alexander the Great had built one of the largest empires the ancient world had ever known, ranging from the Ionian Sea to the Himalayas.

Rocky Balboa — in Rocky III! — was a washed up ex-champ fighting to regain his title at the age of 34.

Me

I’m now older than all of them.


3
Dec 11

“The sun after all is just fuel, burning ferociously”

Can you name the movie?

Sun


17
Nov 11

Twilight time


14
Nov 11

“It transpires that the lifeboats are useless”

Gov. Bentley, on the state’s new immigration law.

That’s via The Daily State. (Update: That site later noted the most prominent sponsor of that bill has lost his job as head of the senate rules committee. Sen. Scott Beason has been … less well-measured than the governor.)

Speaking of politics, Newsweek is dropping the best feature they had:

It has been one of Newsweek’s signature ventures and a staple of American political journalism since 1984.

Every presidential election season, the magazine detached a small group of reporters from their daily jobs for a year to travel with the presidential candidates and document their every internal triumph and despair — all under the condition that none of it was to be printed until after the election.

Then two days after Election Day, the sum of their reporters’ work would appear in the magazine. But the ambitious undertaking, known inside the magazine simply as “the project,” is no more. Newsweek, bleeding red ink and searching for a fresh identity under new ownership, has decided the project would not go forward this election season.

They’re blaming the faster news cycle, because rich, in-depth coverage gets trumped in 140 character increments. But not always.

As indulgent journalism goes, this was good stuff, but the bigger problem for the series is money. Following the campaigns at length is an expensive proposition. Shame, too. I stopped reading Newsweek years ago, but always picked up this election edition, but it will be no more.

There is an alternative.

Politico and Random House have teamed up to produce serialized campaign e-books that will be released in four installments as the presidential race unfolds. The first is due out Nov. 30 and already has a title: “Playbook 2012: The Right Fights Back.”

Might be worth checking out.

Speaking of e-books, the Los Angeles Times is publishing their first one, an expanded version of a two-part series, one of their most popular stories of the year. They’ve got several more in the pipeline, which seems a good idea. That might be a nice piece of supplemental content in the near term.

Otherwise your typical Monday, preparing for classes and things. Wrote a current events quiz I decided not to give. Did some more reading. Watched Pirate Radio, marveled at the music and the musical anachronisms. The movie was set in 1966, but a lot of the songs were newer than that. And there was a great Seekers line, but they were never played, as far as I noticed. This wouldn’t fit into the feeling of the film:

The writing was rather witty, the title of this post comes from late in the action, though not much that took place was unexpected. Still, a fine thing to listen to in the background. This was in the movie, but it is from 1968:

Same deal here, two years too young, but a fantastic song:

Cutting edge Australian rock from 1966:

And I could have put Dusty Springfield here, or the Isley Brothers. But a 1962 Otis Redding track is in the movie, and so it really isn’t a consideration:

Wondered where the day went, even as it was full of little things here and there that filled up the afternoon. Today having already slipped into some realm of memory, and tomorrow remaining out there on a horizon of possibility, maybe it is more important to know where tomorrow is going.

I have a pretty good feeling about that.