I just don't want to make a fool of myself

THE PEN!!!!

2008-05-10T22:36:00.002-05:00

New Plan: write final answers on whiteboard making sure not to touch the whiteboard.

2008-05-09T23:14:00.003-05:00

Jarchive notes. Start #509. 1986 Tournament of Champions final game part 1.

Surprise Poem of the Day: Invictus. William Ernst Henley. Last line:
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Timothy McVeigh.

End. Start with Holidays

Watch List

2008-05-08T20:59:00.003-05:00

Baseball, Disc 3
Jazz, Disc 3

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee. Mike Nichols.

Poem of the Day

2008-05-07T12:03:00.002-05:00

My Oxford Book of English Verse does not have the poem by Wilfred Owen that I wanted. It has only "Anthem for Doomed Youth," which is in a similar vein, "Strange Meeting," oh heck that one too. "Miners" is the only non-war poem.

But it does not contain the famous "Dulce et Decorum est." Here it is. It is sweet and right to die for your country. The old lie.

I vividly remember reading this poem in high school. Growing up, World War I was represented by a photo of my father as a child, dressed in a dough-boy uniform his mother had sewed. Anyone called a dough-boy could not be anything very serious. This poem exploded my childhood understanding.

Such reformulations become rarer with age, but I certainly experienced two yesterday while watching John Adams. In the first scene, a mob seized a British Customs Agent and tarred and feathered him. I have read and heard that phrase "tar and feather" so often that it never had precise meaning. Seeing someone tarred and feathered changes that. The second powerful visual for me was the inoculation scene. Several years ago I read Elizabeth Fenn's Pox Americana, which contains written descriptions of the process of taking material from an active lesion and inserting it into the upper arm of a non-immune person. Seeing is another matter.

Tuesday

2008-05-07T11:52:00.002-05:00

Unexpected day.

Watched: John Adams, finished ep. 1 and all of 2.

Reading: Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." IN, IN, IN, IN, IN, IN, IN, IN, IN

Poem of the Day: W. H. Auden, "The Shield of Achilles."

Started adding actresses from the bottom instead of the top. Janet Gaynor, Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer.

Mary Pickford, Douglass Fairbanks. Pickfair. Pickford was one of the founders of United Artists. She was also Canadian.

Monday

2008-05-05T21:58:00.004-05:00

New load of stuff from the library. Finished Cod.

Watched Malcolm X.

Best Actors are firm. A little IMDB surfing helped with Victor McLaglan (sp?) and Mr. Coleman. Need to add actresses. Grace Kelly should be easier after watching The Country Girl. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would at first. I was frightened that it would be over-controlling wife gets smacked down and put in her place at first. Fortunately it was the bias of William Holden's character that drove that suspicion and I fell for it because of my own biases about what a movie of this age would be like.

Reading: Not sure. Something new. I think I may curl up with some Poe stories.
Poem of the Day: Didn't have time. Yardwork (with lots of trivia podcasts though).

Time's Most Influential People

2008-05-05T15:47:00.003-05:00

Time's List of the 100 Most Influential People

Good for review. The authors of the tributes are as important for study as their subjects.

Found via Echidne.

GSN Recap and other updates

2008-05-04T19:53:00.006-05:00

The set of five games I played on Tivo today were really depressing. GSN aired the old Master's series and I believe the boards were a lot harder than usual. I don't remember hitting pause even once during Friday's double jeopardy (I probably did, that was just my impression). Mom didn't keep score with me, because we had just done it on Friday for the previous weeks GSN games (I got a little behind over there). On the good side, I nailed every African Capital. On the embarrassing side, I really need to review my opera.

Of course it probably doesn't help that this was the third day in a row that I stood on my feet and hit the buzzer for five games straight. My brain feels like mush.

I was going to watch the Nature special on Longfish. At first I wasn't going to, but then there was a question on a longfish. But my friend called who I hadn't talked to for a couple of months, so I'll set the VCR to pick it up tomorrow night.

Still Reading: Cod. Down to the last chapter. I will probably finish it tonight.
Poem of the day: The British Library Reading Room, Louis MacNeice (weird synchronicity because he showed up with Auden by his side in Cod)
Almost perfectly memorized: All best actor Oscar Winners. Still a few wobbles in the 30's and Mr. Ronald Coleman (Mom may have helped with the OJ hint).
Watching: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Country Girl.

Saturday Night Movie

2008-05-03T21:48:00.004-05:00

Thomas Crown Affair, original

Windmills of your Mind. Michael LeGrand. Best Song, Best Score. 1968.

Director Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night, Moonstruck, lots of others)

Glider, Dune Buggy, Polo. Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Yaphet Kotto! Seduction Chess with simultaneous game of footsie.

Remake

Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo, Sting remade "Windmills."

Strangers on a Train is on now. I saw it a long time ago. I love Patricia Highsmith. I probably won't watch. I need to get up to sing tomorrow.

What I'm doing today

2008-05-03T18:18:00.002-05:00

Today I played the games for the week 4/28-5/2 with my VCR. Weird happenings this week with two people brought back as co-champions when it doesn't really seem justified. Kudos for me for knowing composers better than the players. Bad for me, fell for a trap on a wives of Henry VIII final and didn't know my baseball terms. Of course, I don't think Ken Burns has gotten that far in the documentary at this point. Too bad the disc I got yesterday won't play. I'll have to wait until next week for the third inning.

Reading: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World Mark Kurlansky. Eyewitness Science: Astronomy.
Watching: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; The Country Girl

The Thomas Crown Affair is on PBS tonight. I'll probably watch that instead. I'll take the dog and the cod outside for a little while.

Random factoids

2008-05-03T17:54:00.000-05:00

Thirty days hath September, April, June, & November.