August 3rd, 2006
I was visiting the SPOGG (Society for the Promotion Of Good Grammar) blog tonight and suddenly it felt like high school all over again. There was the chance to take a grammar quiz!
For years, I’ve dreaded any conversations about grammar. It’s not that I hate grammar. I actually appreciate a well constructed sentence. Rather, I do not like grammar so much that I’m willing to spend even fifteen or twenty minutes debating the appropriate use of the apostrophe.
This unwillingness to recognize the value of a good grammar debate has led some people to question my ability to write (as well as my ability to think). Moreover, this unwillingness to debate such issues and resolve them by searching half a dozen conflicting style guides, has often left me with the unsettling feeling that maybe I don’t know my grammar well enough.
So when I saw grammar quiz, my stomach started to churn. Still, never one to back away from a good quiz (especially since the results would not be published), I gritted my teeth, tossed aside my caution, and took the quiz.
And I scored a perfect 100. That’s a perfect 100. As in no wrong answers.
You can try the quiz here.
By the way, if you’re like me and enjoy grammar in small doses with a bit of humor on the side, take a look at the SPOGG site. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Posted in The Drawer at the Bottom of the Desk | No Comments »
August 2nd, 2006
The heat wave broke last night.
Today is the first day in two weeks that the air conditioner hasn’t run for most of the day. My windows are open; the air outside is cool and invigorating. The season feels more like early fall than mid-summer. It’s a wonderful day.
In fact, it would be a perfect day if it wasn’t for her.
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August 1st, 2006
Eternal Lovecraft, by Jim Turner and others. Years ago, during that summer when my brother was trying to teach me to love fishing as much as he did (trying is correct—it was a failed enterprise), I started carrying along a book for those inevitable moments when I became bored. At some point that summer, those books became books by H. P. Lovecraft. And so I was deep into At The Mountain of Madness when my brother caught a fourteen pound carp (ugghh!) and I suffered his anger when I wouldn’t just drop the book and help him land the monster. I read The Call of Cthulhu along the banks of a Mississippi River levee with the sun burning my neck and the chill of the story in my mind. Strangely enough, I remember The Doom That Came To Sarnath not just because of the doom, but because my brother was using bacon to catch crayfish and crayfish to catch catfish. It was a raw and real lesson on the circle of life in more ways than one. This book was hiding in the stacks of our local public library and so I grabbed it, thinking it was a collection of Lovecraft’s stories. I was wrong. Instead, it’s a collection of people writing on Lovecraftian (yes, a real word, according to editor Jim Turner) themes. In other words, people trying to write fiction like Lovecraft wrote fiction. Having made that discovery, I expected disappointment, but the collection is rather strong so far. It includes stories by Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Ron Goulart, and others.
Something Like An Autobiography, by Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa falls into that category of people whose lives are almost as famous as their art (okay, maybe not in the United States, but certainly in Japan). Kurosawa directed some of greatest movies ever made, including Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo (all ranked among the top 250 movies every made at IMDB—for what that’s worth). Something Like An Autobiography is a collection of vignettes, pulled from the memory of Kurosawa, written with visual power and arranged with care and beauty until they come to resemble a series of scenes from one of his movies.
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingslover. I’m reading this book because my wife thinks I need to start reading books by people who are still alive. I’ve not read Kingslover before and so far (I’m fifty pages into it) its seems a bit over-written. Still, I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve finished the book.
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July 31st, 2006
Today was the first day. I finally decided to loose the twenty or thirty extra pounds I’ve been carrying around for the past, oh, three years or so. The plan? Walking, then running, then weight lifting. No pain, no gain. And today was the first day.
I dug the running shoes out from beneath the bed, I stretched the long neglected muscles in my calves, I did a few calisthenics. Then I opened the front door.
It was raining.
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July 28th, 2006
Recently I’ve been revisiting some short stories from my freshman literature textbook (one of those five pound volumes that could be titled The Norton Anthology of Everything). Since I obtained this volume, several presidents have passed through the White House, Microsoft has truly become the most influential entity in the world, and I’ve lost a lot of hair and moved halfway across the country—all of which resulted in significant changes in the world and my perspective. So I suppose it’s only natural that I felt a certain melancholy as I flipped the pages of this relic from my academic antiquity, smiling as I tried to decipher my ancient margin notes.
Here were some familiar faces (Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse Winner, Roth’s Defender of the Faith), some not so familiar faces (Mansfield’s Miss Brill, O’Conner’s Greenleaf—how did I ever miss that one?), and some old friends (O. Henry’s A Municipal Report, which I consider one of the greatest short stories ever written—and which the editor of the anthology considered merely trite).
Oh yes—and then there’s Hills Like White Elephants.
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July 27th, 2006
Well, I watched The Island last night with my wife. Maybe I’ll publish my thoughts later this week, but here’s my favorite quote from the movie:
Lincoln Six Echo: Who is God?
McCord: You know, when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God’s the guy that ignores you.
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July 26th, 2006
So you’re wondering: Wow, if David Hasselhoff is doing a musical (see previous entry), who’s the next out-of-work television star do a musical? Here’s the answer to your question: a list of ten television stars who need a musical boost to their career!
And that’s not all! You can play, too. Just add a comment describing the Televison Star Musical you would like to see. Maybe, if I get enough comments, we’ll give away a prize for the best one.
So, without further ado, here’s the list:
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July 26th, 2006
Okay, the following is just too weird. Which is saying a lot for The Fisherman, who grew up idolizing drugged-up rockers who bit the heads off bats and drank their blood as part of their stage act.
According to Celebrity Week, David Hasselhoff will star in a musical about his life. Seriously. It’s called, get this: David Hasselhoff: The Musical. According to Celebrity Week, the show will feature sets from Hasselhoff’s career: The Young and the Restless, Knight Rider, Baywatch. The music will be written by Teddy Pendergrass.
Speaking to Celebrity Week, Hassellhoff noted: “It sounds like a bad joke, but it’s really going to be a good show.”
Well, he’s at least half right.
Growing up, I never got into Knight Rider. If I was bored, and here I mean completely, stupendously, the-only-other-outlet-for-my-entertainment-was-professional-wrestling-or-the Home-Shopping-Network bored, I might tune into Baywatch. Just for the plot, of course. The only episode I recollect seeing involved a lifeguard (played by Parker Stevenson) who had come to Robert Frost’s symbolic fork in the road: should he continue working as a lifeguard or should keep his job a lawyer? I don’t know about him, but a very real fear of sharks and about a gazillion dollars in student loans helped me make that decision.
Anyway, Hasselhoff’s musical foray will open in Australia, but he’s hoping it will end up in Vegas (which, by the way, is far too close to The Fisherman’s home to allow for any degree of comfort). From there, who knows? Maybe Broadway. After all, Baywatch did survive for twelve seasons.
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June 22nd, 2006
I’ve not written a significant word since April. Since I don’t have a good excuse, I won’t embarrass myself and bore you by making up a bad one.
This year, 2006, is almost half over.
A daydream haunts me. In this dream, I’m older, by a decade or more, sitting on the couch in someone’s living room, drinking something enjoyable and explaining how a lot of great authors didn’t actual start writing or publishing until they were older, even in their fifties or sixties. I’m talking about Frank McCourt and Karen Blixen, and going on and on and on about my writing and my philosophies and how someday soon, real soon, I’m going to write something important.
That someone in the room with me—who he or she is, I suppose, isn’t important—just sits across from me in a comfortable chair, listening to me with the dead-eyed gaze of the terminally bored, saying over and over, “Yeah, that’s it, buddy. Keep that dream alive.”
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Dead On Arrival
May 31st, 2006Director: Craig R. Baxley
Starring: Andrew McCarthy, Bruce Davison, Diane Ladd
NR – 780 minutes
About the time I hit college, there were a few movies everyone in my crowd was watching again and again. For the guys, it was a little David Lynch gem called Blue Velvet, starring Kyle MacLachlan and Dennis Hopper. Why I don’t know—maybe there was some adolescent male need to see a severed human ear—but inevitably the movie turned up when the guys got together. To quote the tagline: “It’s a strange world.”
For the girls, it was any of a number of Brat Pack specials by Joel Schumacher and John Hughes, including St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink. Like Blue Velvet, these movies probably filled a different adolescent need, one that centered around the acceptance and security offered by the ideal teenage romance. We ended up watching St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink a lot more than Blue Velvet; not because we liked these movies, but because we liked the girls and the girls categorically refused to watch David Lynch’s little weird-o-rama.
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