December 2011
114 posts
Casey Affleck's I'm Still Here
I’m Still Here (2010) is a mockumentary about Joaquin Phoenix giving up acting to become a rapper. It sounds like a hilarious enough concept, but it’s a huge let down. Although Joaquin does a great job playing the crazy persona he invented for himself for the film, nothing else is really worth watching. The set up was successful only because of the media, who just love soaking up...
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“To find a rhyme for silver
Or any “rhymeless” rhyme
Requires only will, ver-...”
– Stephen Sondheim
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“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task...”
– Samuel Johnson
I completely agree.
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I'm sure a lot of people have heard about "Ghoti"...
Melville Dewey, who devised the Dewey Decimal System, suggested that GHEAUGHTEIGHPTOUGH spells “potato”:
GH as in hiccough
EAU as in beau
GHT as in naught
EIGH as in neigh
PT as in pterodactyl
OUGH as in though
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Can you name the movies based on the books? →
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Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Freakonomics is one of those books that everyone has either read or refused to read because everyone else has read it and they don’t like economics in the first place. But Freakonomics is not an economics book, not really. It is more a book about thinking outside of the box and about preventing outside influences from mucking up your data and your reading of data. In Freakonomics, Steven...
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“What was Kurt like in class as a teacher?
He was passionate, indignant. He...”
– Kurt Vonnegut at the Writers’ Workshop – a former student remembers what the iconic author was like as a teacher. Related must-read, Kurt Vonnegut: A Life.
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James Wan's Insidious
James Wan’s Insidious (2010) is a ghost story about a child who inexplicably slips into a coma shortly after moving into a new house. Not long thereafter, crazy, ghosty stuff begins to happen only for you to discover that it’s not the house that’s haunted: It’s the kid! The parents must go on a whirl-wind adventure to save their son from the ghosts that are trying to...
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Favorite Books that I've read this year:
I’ve gone through between 25 and 30 books this year, which comes out to about a book every week and a half. Seems like a pretty good record to me. Some of them were terrible, some of them blew my mind. As an end-of-the-year round-up, here are the best one’s I read this year:
5. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
4. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
3. American...
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