So, if that trailer the other day wasn’t enough to convince you that there’s something deeply disturbing about Mary Poppins, perhaps this will do the trick: it’s a lengthy essay that details all the ways in which the 1964 “children’s” film fulfills all three dynamics that typically characterize horror films. (The average horror film is usually predicated on only one of these dynamics, so Mary must be extra horrific!) Consider:
Although most of my all-time favorite movies are natural choices for someone of my generation — i.e., they were made during my childhood and adolescence in the ’70s and ’80 — I also have a great deal of affection for movies that pre-date me, often by decades. I guess I’m kind of unusual in that regard; I’ve met a lot of people who have no tolerance for old movies, “old” being a highly subjective definition, of course. (I know of one guy who flatly refuses to watch anything that was made more than five years ago, even if it’s something he saw and enjoyed a mere ten years ago. Yeah, I don’t get it either.) Personally, though, I’ve never seen much difference between “old” and “new” movies, aside from the obvious stylistic and technological details. Movies are movies, in my book, and they’re either effective and enjoyable or they’re not.
Remember that fake movie trailer that was all the rage a year or so back, the one that made The Shining look like a romantic comedy? If you enjoyed that one, check out Mary Poppins re-done as a horror film:
Just more evidence of how powerful editing and music can be…
[Update: If you’ve come here from Joel Schlosberg’s big meta-post, please see my contribution to the Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-a-Thon here.]
This is kind of cool… Nick Sagan, the son of the late astronomer Carl Sagan, reports on a plan to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his father’s passing:
The goal here is to make December 20th a blogosphere-wide celebration of the life and works of Carl Sagan. So if you’re a Carl Sagan fan with a blog, or you know someone who is, I hope you’ll join in and take some time on that day to share your thoughts, memories, opinions and feelings about my dad. And if you could help spread the word, it would mean a lot to me.
The Internet-spanning celebration was actually the idea of a blogger named Joel Schlosberg:
Read or reread a Sagan book and review it; discuss cool things that you’ve done that’s been influenced by him; pontificate on one of the many topics he treated (SETI, astronomy, critical thinking, the history of science, human intelligence….), or post about something completely surprising. Contact me by email or by leaving a comment, and then when the date approaches, I will create a meta-post that links to all the stuff people are doing, providing a network of the participating bloggers.
To kick things off, Joel provides a collection of Sagan-related stuff out there on the Web.
I’ve written before about Carl Sagan’s impact on me, and I’m not sure I can come up with much more than what I’ve already said. But I’m going to give it a go. If anybody reading this has their own blog or journal and something to say about Carl, consider yourself tagged. Stay tuned, everybody…
It was on a somewhat, ahem, hazy morning in Cambridge, England that the redoubtable Cranky Robert and myself first beheld the wonder we came to call “birth con-poles.” (The morning was actually beautiful and sunny, as best as I can recall; it was Robert and me that were hazy. You can draw your own conclusions as to why.)
My Internet wanderings this morning somehow carried me past the official site of Will Rogers. Best known for saying he never met a man he didn’t like, Rogers was a beloved humorist, commentator, and media personality of the 1920s and ’30s. Here is one of his observations, which I think I’m going to adopt as a motto:
“I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.”
And here’s a bonus Rogers quote, which has a somewhat darker edge in light of current circumstances:
“If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone, ‘America died from a delusion that she has moral leadership.'”
The amazing thing, of course, is that these remarks (while admittedly taken out of context) still have relevance some 60 years after Rogers first said them…
Not a surprise, but the validation is nice, especially considering how I was just complaining this weekend that I sometimes feel like I’m losing my intellectual edge:
Your Vocabulary Score: A+ |
 Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person. |
Without preamble, the items that have distracted me from work this afternoon:
Morning, kids — I’m back in the blogosphere after a few days offline. Hope my absence wasn’t too traumatic for you. I’ve been hosting my good friend (and Simple Tricks regular) from the City of Angels, Cranky Robert. I showed him some of the winter-time sights of the SLC and introduced him to the wonder that is the Star Burger (not to mention the stuffed head of Buck the dog, a.k.a. Newfy); we also toured the galleries of the local aerospace museum, drank a lot of coffee beverages, and talked ourselves hoarse about every subject imaginable, from politics to Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, and Homer, to how hot the tatooed quasi-Goth chicks in the Sugarhouse neighborhood are. It was a good weekend, and I wish weekends like it came more frequently.
I have a number of topics I’m itching to write about, but the way my day is shaping up, I probably won’t get to them today. In the meantime, here are the results an interesting little quiz that I picked up from Brian Greenberg:
| What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The West
Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you’re a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta. |
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| The Midland | |
| Boston | |
| North Central | |
| The Inland North | |
| Philadelphia | |
| The South | |
| The Northeast | |
| What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes |
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What I find interesting about this isn’t so much the specific result — I know I’m from the West, after all — as the accuracy of the result coming from the method used. Brian has several comments on his blog from people who all say the quiz correctly nailed their accents based on only 13 textual questions. Very impressive, I think…