"My favorite kind of film is the kind where you argue when you walk outside after the film, and break up with your date."

- Director Paul Haggis, on his Oscar-winning movie 'Crash,' in the Wash.Post

Jon Stewart on the split opinion about his Oscars performance: "I 'sucked' and 'was great.'" [+]

Human Excellence: Sponsored by Big Macs and Gas Guzzlers

"[NBC] still made a nice profit on the [Olympic] Games, helped along by ads for health foods like Coke and McDonald’s fried-chicken sandwiches, and by dozens of ads for gas-guzzling S.U.V.s, the automotive shame of America, whose emissions do their part to melt the snow and ice that make the Winter Olympics possible."

-Nancy Franklin, in the New Yorker

Feelin' Groovy



The former and current presidents of my college impersonating Simon and Garfunkel at Airband 2006. The former became the first nonagenarian to appear at the event (he's 96!).

100 best first lines from novels

From the American Book Review:

Following is a list of the 100 best first lines from novels, as decided by the American Book Review, a nonprofit journal published at the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University:

1. Call me Ishmael. -- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. — Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. — Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. — James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. — George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

...

Torino, Italy, Feb. 10, 2006

Change of Subject Needed

Is there a word for a misspelling in an e-mail subject line that, embarassingly, gets repeated some 50 times in subsequent replies?

Or a subject line that is completely irrelevant after several replies and tangents?

Put It On My Tombstone

Nothing makes me blush as much as to be called "the heart of the ‘01-‘02 Campus Choir bass section" by my friend and fellow Campus Choir alum Matt. I wasn't, really, but I have little stamina in a quarrel about it; no delusions are as sweet as self-delusions. (Matt's post, by the way, is talking about this. Spread the word!)

For the First Time in Years, Professional Football Returns To Detroit

Death Row Prisons: Protecting the Sanctity of Life

From the Associated Press:

Anticipating a possible replay of his September heart attack, [76-year-old death row inmate Clarence] Allen had asked prison authorities to let him die if he went into cardiac arrest before his execution, a request prison officials said they would not honor.

"At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of life," said prison spokesman Vernell Crittendon. "We would resuscitate him."