Category: Discoveries

My mother actually WASN’T very educated when she came up with this. UNH.

August 24, 2006 /

All the nine-planet mnemonics you learned were dumb, because mnemonics are dumb, period. Purge them from your brain. Good!

My mother taught me the planets in kindergarten or something, using a song she and her friend made up on the playground when they were in elementary school. It goes like this:

“Mercury, Venus, Earth

dah-dah nanananah

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn

dah-dah nanananah

Uranus, Neptune and–

Plu-to.”

And I have never forgotten them since. The best part is that now that the list has been shortened, it’s more easily converted than your elevated mastodon who just served you divorce papers or whatever.

Uranus, Neptune and–

That’s all.”

August 22, 2006 /

It occurred to me last night that yes, they must be getting ready to make a The Dark is Rising movie, and sure enough. Aside from the two attached names so far, I’m concerned that Ian McKellen already appears to be doing three movies next year. That doesn’t leave a lot of spare time, and come on, can you even conceive of anyone else playing Merriman?

Baudrillard would actually get a kick out of this whole thing

July 26, 2006 /

The phrase “Christ of the Barricades” popped into my head this evening and won’t leave. I knew I didn’t invent it, but my usual sources for cultural context nearly failed me–Maria hadn’t heard it, nor had Wikipedia, and Google gave me only one result. That result led me to historian Frank Paul Bowman, who wrote a book in French called Le Christ des barricades in 1987. Yes, in French, and no, it doesn’t appear to be available in translation.

Putting the phrase in French and applying it to 1789-1848 (the book’s subtitle) certainly places it in context, but that only makes me want to read more. Unfortunately, I know from painful experience that academic texts with intriguing titles end up being, too often, boring and labored with odd extended rants about Disneyland. Also I don’t know French. So I’ll probably never read Le Christ des barricades.

But that’s what we have participatory media for, I suppose. What does “Christ of the Barricades” mean to you? In 101 words?

April 13, 2006 /

For probably fifteen years I’ve been haunted by the image of a man falling down a flight of stairs, falling apart at the bottom to become just a coat wrapped around an IV stand, hung with dozens of tape recorders. I knew this image was from The Tattooed Potato, a bleak and frightening book I’d read (exactly once) in elementary school. Last week, while in the library, I suddenly had to go check it out and read it. (It is not actually very bleak or frightening now, and in fact that exact image isn’t in the book.)

As per NFD policy, I’m going to wait a little while before I write any more about the book–I only finished it ten minutes ago. I will say this: it’s one thing to realize that one still reads for the things one first found in middle school. It’s another to understand that the nature of names, protagonism, surreality, pacing and imagery in one’s own writing all basically derive from an author one read in fourth grade.

I talk about television too much now.

January 24, 2006 /

The WB and UPN will merge in September, creating a new network called CW (because it’ll be jointly owned by CBS, which owns UPN, and Time Warner). Presumably this means a bold new vision of alternating teensoaps with incredibly-low-production-values “urban” sitcoms and wrestling. Also maybe Star Trek?

This actually is a fairly big shakeup in the electromagnetic spectrum–a lot of areas have stations allocated to both UPN and the WB. The WB reliably does better than UPN, so that’s probably the station where CW will reside in most markets. I think it’s obvious, when all the factors are considered, that the leftover stations should go to: me.

Seriously, the first thing I thought when I read that headline was “but–but–what will happen to Veronica Mars?”