Thursday Miscellany
Great way to make friends at the airport: metal plates contain messages that will appear when x-rayed. I think I'd choose a message that is considerably more colorful than the one at the left. Perhaps:
"Do I look like an Abdul?"
"Security Guards Court Sheep"
"Lookin' for Gay Porn, Dude?"
I mean, if you're going to get detained for a full-blown cavity scavenger hunt, you might as well make it worth it.
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"It was horrible, officer. There were four, no wait, eight of 'em:" A Florida teenager claims he was attacked and robbed by four topless blonde women on his way to work. (I resisted the temptation to use my new picture-posting capabilities on this one.)
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Manorexia: Eating disorders for men. This is kind of like a guy coming down with breast cancer. It can happen, but how embarrassing. If you have to get ill, get a manly disease, like maybe gonorrhea or elephantitis of the penis. If you need a psychological one, how about a delusion that you're John Wayne?
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Lots of good stuff over at Godspy the past couple of days. Like this piece about Brideshead Revisited. Excerpt:
Many have criticized the latest film version of the classic Catholic novel for playing fast-and-loose with the source material, but Mendelsohn is the only critic to analyze with depth and clarity (and with reference to the novel's deep-seated Catholicism) exactly why the new film fails. The reason has less to do with faithfulness to the original story (or lack thereof) than with faithfulness to the original theme (or lack thereof). In Waugh's own words, Brideshead Revisited was “nothing less than an attempt to trace the working of the divine purpose in a pagan world.” The new film, in stifling the divine, suffocates itself.
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Marie and I went to see Eagle Eye Tuesday night. Man, what a piece of trash ("Let's have another chase scene!"). I fell asleep twice.
It's basically a movie designed to make a political statement. In this, it sins against the fundamental rule of story telling: Tell a story; don't set out to send a message. From Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners: "[I]f you ask a beginning student to write a story, you're liable to get almost anything--a reminiscence, an episode, an opinion, an anecdote, anything under the sun but a story."
