i've really been obsessing over one song at a time, and right now its mostly mr. blue sky. curse you random episode of dr. who!
I was going to call this song obsessions update - pure pop edition,
but really it's songs I heard on the TV edition.
We Belong
is on some hotel commercial, and I Should Be So Lucky
figured in a pretty funny French and Saunders sketch I saw.
well, john came very close in his answer to our previously featured screenshot quiz bonus round, but not quite. The first screenshot is, as John correctly answered, from Dark City, and depicts Jennifer Connelly standing at the end of a pier in the movie's final scene. The second screenshot is from Requiem for a Dream, and depicts... Jennifer Connelly standing at the end of a pier in the movie's final scene! tricksy.
And in completely unrelated post, more worthy of Graham's blog: a guy running for parliament in Finland has his campaign website available in klingon. Some have thought it is blasphemy to mix politics and Klingon. Others say it is good if politicians can laugh at themselves.
First, here are the solutions to the previous screenshot quiz.
Kudos to all three of our contestants, and kudos again to leslie who besides turning in a spectacular entry, performed a remarkable feat of filmic deduction on number 1.
And now, a SUPER BONUS ROUND. Identify the following 2 screenshots, and be sure you tell me which is which:
Hey it's time to play guess the movie from the screenshot! brought you by leslie, who's own attempt at this was really easy, so i tried to make my screenshots less than obvious. pop-up text hints! hooray! also, most of them you can enlarge by clickety-clicking.
we have previously covered the eating of bánh mì, but today i went to a different bánh mì place, this time in chinatown. A Chau Deli is at 82A Mulberry St, between Canal and Bayard. The sandwiches are delicious, large (about twice the size of nicky's) and super cheap; the #1
is $3! It has a variety of vietnamese cold-cuts, some pâté, cucumber, pickled carrots and cilantro. The coldcuts seemed a little less processed and generic than what you get at nicky's. And so cheap was this that I decided to try a sardine sandwich too ($2.75). It was good, but not nearly as good as sandwich #1.
I only ate half of each one, figuring I could give the rest to a homeless person. but let me tell you, today must be a homeless person holiday because there was not a bum to be found between chinatown and the village. seriously, it must have been the first time in 20 years that there were no homeless people in washington square park. what the hell. for you conspiracy theorists, note that today is the day the city starts their annual official homeless census.
finally, coming up to nyu entails, as it so often does, the usage of a mac. i really don't dislike macs on principle (well, the DRM thing doesn't exactly enthrall me) so much as on practice. The keyboards, as previously noted are quite painful to my wrists. and now, the computers here in the library all have mighty mice
which want to right click everything until you look it up and find out that it's supposed to sense whether you are clicking on the right or left. but there is nothing about the mouse itself which suggests it does this, so instead I just sit here getting frustrated about how this computer seems to keep getting stuck right-clicking everything making it impossible to use. Then once i figure out the problem, i find i have to lift my right finger up when I click in order to reliably click the way i want to. this is, i hasten to add, exceedingly uncomfortable and I might not even be able to do it if my piano teachers hadn't made me do finger-independence exercises when i was a kid. i appreciate that this might work well with a little getting used to, but for chrissake, stop telling me that everything apple makes is so fucking well designed. attention getting and cool are NOT good design principles, i'm sorry. though i can certainly understand why they are good for sales.
soft rock edition apparently.
well, i guess only the first 2 were soft rock. oh well, the list evolved since I wrote that first sentence a couple of days ago.
this article from the times about congressional roomates is a friggin riot. don't you be eatin' my cereal again, chuck schumer!
bizarre star trek trivia for the day: king abdullah of jordan had a cameo on star trek voyager. no i am not kidding.
some comments on un-important a-doings these days.
first up, inductions to the rock and roll hall of fame! Takin' 'em one by one...
then there's the iphone (i refuse to camelcase it, i'm sorry). i've basically been thinking for a long time that apple was going to eventually be putting out an all-in-one this-is-your-life-in-your-pocket kind of a product, but i thought that the ipod would ever-so-slowly evolve into one; instead they've jumped in headfirst. it is shiny and sparkly, but still, this comment attached to david pogue's review in the times really says it all about the media coverage.
and finally, suck it mcgwire!
this shouldn't really be funny, but it's really funny: Transportation Security Administration on Service Animals.
why isn't my blog funnier? it should be funnier!!!
statistics about a google image search for the word funny
(20 pictures on the first page of links):
teh google has failed at determining what is funny by algorithmic means. comedians, consider your jobs safe... for now.
okay, originally i presented this to laura as her new favorite website ever
, but let's be honest: hi! monkey is basically the most wondrous out of all of man's creations.
Sure, I could’ve gotten all subjective about it, and said “but when I hear ‘Michelangelo’, I think of David before they think of the nunchucks,” or “Raphael is more a turtle than an artist in my mind,” but that’s a dangerous road to start down. Once you start letting your personal biases interfere with serious scientific research like this, it pollutes your data. And that kind of subjectivity not only changes the whole attitude of your research, it affects your project in unpredictable ways. The polluted data starts seeping out into other projects — infecting them, if you will — and creating these unscientific monsters, half natural phenomenon, half human bias. Fleeing the scientific community that shunned them, they seek solace underground, searching for results outside the establishment, delivering truth and justice as they see fit, living off delivery pizza. And that’s just the beginning.
So apparently technical support agents don't understand basic math. I guess this isn't a huge shock but HOLY CRAP is our education system really so woefully horrible? Or is it just that these people are willfully making themselves sound like idiots because they'd rather do that than be responsible for losing Verizon $70? Meanwhile, thank you Ms. Simon for teaching this to me by moving all the desks to the edges of the room and explaining 1's, 10's and 100's by the cunning use of the floor tiles. And then making us walk through the hall chanting "Ones! Tens! Hundreds!" like some kind of math mob.
But the real reason that math is dead, much like sting, is that my favorite graffiti in all of new york is gone. On a concrete “jersey” barrier on west 4th between Lafayette and the Bowery, where some construction has been going on for some time now, someone had spray painted the quadratic equation. It's possible it has simply moved, as it has been spotted elsewhere before. However, there are still concrete barriers there and they look freshly painted, so I'm afraid that we will never know which of the two values x turned out to be.
I had some ganache left over from the first installment of The Great Yellow Cake Bake-off and Regional Pro-Am of 2038, and I needed to do something with it before it went bad. I didn't really have enough to fill or ice a cake, so I decided: Cupcakes! Yaaaaay!
This was Cook's Illustrated's "Yellow Cupcakes with Chocolate Ganache Frosting," which is only available on their website to subscribers but was easily found elsewhere via google.
The money shot:
Vitals:
Ratings:
So, in short:
Alright, let's get it right out in the open: I am a heretic.
The Godfather is one of the most revered films we have. Consistently ranked number 1 on imdb, number 3 on AFI's list of the top 100 American films, lauded by critics and audiences everywhere, the crowning achievement of the glorious age of cinema known as the 70's.
There's a better one.
Nashville is, in my mind, far and away the best movie of the 70's. It is a film with realistic human drama, deep emotions, humorous satire and beautiful music. Perhaps most importantly, it expresses a singular vision and style betraying the mind of a true director.
Robert Altman died today. I believe he was one of the greatest directors, in part because the medium of film is intrinsic to the style for which he is so well known. There is no way to make an “Altmanesque” novel or video game. The Godfather basically never seems to be more than a film adaptation of a novel, however great that novel or its adaptation is, whereas Nashville achieves a transcendence by using film in a way that is more than just another a medium for telling a story.
This should not be read as a dismissal of the achievements of The Godfather, which in many ways is the acme of the classical Hollywood style in which the filmmaking itself is so perfectly executed as to be virtually transparent. But where Francis Ford Coppola is perfecting what is for very good reason a well established film vocabulary, Altman is creating one all his own, and on top of that, actually succeeds much of the time.
I say much of the time, as even Altman's obituaries seem to go out of their way to point out that his body of work is widely viewed as being “uneven.” Did he make bad movies? Of course he did. But to think that anyone could ever achieve greatness without the risk of failure is foolishness. Over his long career, Mr. Altman had the chutzpah to achieve greatness several times over.
And let that be my lesson for today.
