An ongoing exploration of the dark and gritty reboot
Consider the misquote. It lies in that same realm as citing fake news or reading only the headline. Misquoting is certainly nothing new, but the internet allows a fake quote to be retweeted a thousand times before the truth has even clicked send. I've written about this before, of course. In the summer of 2015, I wrote …
Continue reading Stop Misquoting Leonard Cohen and Ernest Hemingway. Start Listening and Reading.
Happy Birthday, Moby-Dick! Not the whale, but the book. 165 years ago today, Herman Melville's epic novel was published in America for the first time. (A different version of it had come out in England one month earlier, but today is accepted as the anniversary of the version the world knows). In honor of this …
Continue reading The 10 Best Moby-Dick Homages, Adaptations, and Celebrations
People love to shame these days. They also love to shame the shamers. And with the tendency for the internet to get hysterical about anything that seems worthy of hysteria, we have turned our outrage to the recent poaching of a beautiful and famous African lion, named Cecil. The entire world appears to be dividing …
The internet loves a good quote. Trouble is, the internet rarely cares if the quote was said by the person whose name follows it. It also rarely cares if the person being quoted would have ever, under any circumstances, said anything like what they are being quoted as saying. What troubles me about this is …
Note: This is a follow-up to The Snow Also Rises, the previous post on this blog. Read that before you read this. During a recent Q&A, one of the two producers of HBO's Game of Thrones stated that they set out to make the television show with "no prophecies, dreams, or flashbacks." It's hard to …
Continue reading The Snow Also Rises 2: Jon Snows of Kilimanjaro
Note: The following contains "spoilers" for the novel A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. Some of these spoilers are based on details that did not make it into the HBO television show (possible not yet, possibly not ever). However, there are no spoilers for Martin's subsequent novels in his A Song of …
Continue reading The Snow Also Rises: Thoughts Regarding Ned Stark, Jon Snow, and Jake Barnes
There is a new meme out there (well, perhaps it's not new, but it is all over Facebook.) It encourages people to use the Oxford Comma. And while I don't have particularly strong feelings about the Oxford Comma, the argument being made is that you must use it. I disagree with this, which is why …
Do Not Read This Unless You've Seen Midnight in Paris. Why? Because this isn't a review of Midnight in Paris. It's a recap of why I liked it so much, by categorically listing all the things that would have spoiled it for me. 10. Will Ferrell or Vince Vaughn. The cameos that were in the …
Continue reading 10 Things That Would Have Ruined Midnight in Paris