Entries in the Category "leaves of grass"
Osssssssscars!
I am reading all these bloggers who’ve pledged to see all the Best Picture nominees, or all the films with a non-technical nomination (that’s Sarah Bunting, and she almost did it). Some of them spent two Saturdays in a row parked in a movie theater seat watching five wannabe Best Pictures back-to-back. My major regret going into Oscar night is that I haven’t seen enough of the nominated movies. Living virtually across the street from a limited-release haven like the Cedar Lee, just about every one of these movies has crossed my path (not something I could say back when I was living in Lansing, Michigan--sorry Lansing). I went to an Oscar party in which the crowd was generally well-versed in movies—not just the big ones, but independents, foreigns, documentaries—and I wished I could have given more opinions instead of continually saying, “That looked really good. I heard that was good. I was going to see that. Everything I’ve read online says that was overrated, actually.”
The real problem is this whole being-in-grad-school thing, which will be over soon enough. I’ll be a cultural civilian again by May, and then it’s seeing movies all the time, reading books all the time, just because I damn well want to. And maybe next February I’ll plan my own Oscar film binge.
This year, I had to content myself watching the Oscars having seen only Inglourious Basterds, Up in the Air, Julie and Julia, and one-third of The Hurt Locker. I'm catching up on the other movies at my usual snail’s-pace rate. (Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning movies I have seen in the past few months: Valmont, Mrs. Brown, Frozen River, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Gangs of New York.)
Anyway, here are my totally uneducated thoughts on the proceedings.
Continue reading "Osssssssscars!"
Such is the nature of wikis
This entire story is a testament to both my undiagnosed ADD and how easily amused I am, but here it goes:
I was reading from Leaves of Grass for the Master's exam and came across "Thought" (one of maybe five to ten poems Whitman entitled "Thought") in which he mentions the President, which footnotes in the text told me was a transatlantic steamship that disappeared somewhere between New York and Liverpool in 1841. I love those types of mysteries and looked it up on Wikipedia. From there I jumped to reading about the Lost Colony of Roanoke and then looking at History's Mysteries, a show I know used to air on one of those nerd channels--History or Discovery or something. I was checking to see if it was on DVD, because if so I'd like to hunt up some of those episodes (Roanoke! the Bermuda Triangle!).
So I hit the History's Mysteries page and found that it has been wikibombed. At least, I think it's been wikibombed.
Either that, or I'm totally misremembering that show.
By the way, my apologies that this kind of thing is what passes for a hilarious anecdote these days... I've been reading SO MUCH. Happy weekend, everybody!