Listy goodness to prove my lack of pop culture immersion

Through Kottke I found a list of 1001 movies to see before you die. I decided to make a list of my own of these movies, of what I'd seen. I also added some from the alterations of the list here. And like Kottke, I starred my favorites. It's only 1000 movies, right? Surely I must have seen at least 100 of them, right?

Wrong.


A Trip to the Moon (1902)
Seven Chances (1925)
The Gold Rush (1925)
Triumph of the Will (1934)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Gone With the Wind (1939)
West Side Story (1961)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)*
The Sound of Music (1965)
The Jungle Book (1967)
Woodstock (1970)
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
The Godfather (1972)
Sleeper (1973)
The Godfather Part II (1974)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Star Wars (1977)*
Grease (1978)
The Muppet Movie (1979)
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)*
Airplane! (1980)
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
A Christmas Story (1983)
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)*
Amadeus (1984)
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Ghostbusters (1984)
Back to the Future (1985)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
The Naked Gun (1988)
Big (1988)
Rain Man (1988)
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Glory (1989)
Goodfellas (1990)
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Philadelphia (1993)
Forrest Gump (1994)*
Clerks (1994)*
The Lion King (1994)*
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Babe (1995)
Toy Story (1995)
Clueless (1995)
Independence Day (1996)
Scream (1996)
Titanic (1997)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Being John Malkovich (1999)
American Beauty (1999)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Matrix (1999)
Gladiator (2000)
Meet the Parents (2000)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)*
Amelie (2001)*
Moulin Rouge (2001)*
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Adaptation (2002)
Chicago (2002)
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
Lost in Translation (2003)
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
Sideways (2004)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)

That's 73. And the problem with that is I don't even remember if I've seen some of these in their entirety. See, most of these were not seen by me by a distinct desire to go see that specific movie. I half-watched them when they appeared on cable or I watched them for a class (like I would watch Triumph of the Will voluntarily. come on). I'm just not a movie person, I guess. I don't have the attention span to sit through them. Speaking of, there's at least three movies on that list where I definitely have not seen the ending, due to my falling asleep beforehand.

Surely the number I've read on the 1001 books to read before you die will be better, right?


Beloved – Toni Morrison
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.*
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.*
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov*
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Candide – Voltaire
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Crap. Only 25, and all of them books I've read for a class for read with the intention on writing a paper on them for a class. At least I've reread many of them willingly. I shall blame this on that I either read more non-fiction, or more crappier books. (There's probably about five books on that list that I was supposed to read for a class and then didn't. Heh.)

I guess I shall be spending my summer watching movies and reading books. But it will probably end up being movies I've already seen and books I've already read. Oh well. I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that I have seen and read bits and pieces of many more on the lists, and probably know the general story of even more. This is the trick to making yourself seem smart: Know a little about a lot, and everyone will think you know what you're talking about, even when you haven't read the book, or seen the movie, or seen the movie based on the book.

A Lack of Truth in Advertising

Yesterday, Jarret and I were wandering around one of those stores that have clothes in the front and an odd assortment of housewares in the back. We were in the housewares section when I spotted an item called a "cube shelf" - I suppose it was for displaying your special stuff a little higher than your crappy stuff.

"Hey Jarret, do you want your very own cube?" I handed one to him. He peered at it.

"It doesn't look very cubey."

"Well, maybe the packaging makes it look funny."

Jarret then turned the box over and found this.

The "cube shelf" was, by definition, not a cube.

I feel so cheated.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!

It's teacher appreciation week, and Tuesday was teacher appreciation day. My school's key club celebrated by making ice cream sundaes for all the teachers.

It tasted better because it was free.

(Update) And the national honors society provided us with brownies. Oh yeah.

Stuff You Can Find in Stores These Days

I went to the supermarket specifically searching for it, even though I thought I would be too late to find it on the shelves. But there it was, in abundance.

What makes these two-liter bottles of Coke so special, you ask? The yellow cap indicates something. Coke bottles with yellow caps are only out in stores in the US for one week per year: They are kosher for Passover. The difference between regular coke and kosher coke is this:

The second ingredient is honest to god sugar, instead of high fructose corn syrup. You know, like it's made in the rest of the world that doesn't have to use corn as its main sweetener. It's not as sticky, and tastes better, and most people in the know raid the stores for them the second they appear on shelves, which was why I was shocked to find them toward the end of Passover. Hooray!

The second thing I spotted was in my local comic book store, which has a large display of sports figurines from McFarlane Toys. I spotted this one of Andy Pettite.

Can you see that someone wrote "HGH" on the price tag?

I shall end this with something Jarret spotted while we were in his local CVS.

"Love dolphins, but not condoms? Problem solved by being smart like our friends of the sea. Dolphin condoms are the perfect mix of fun to play with and safe to ride. Be confident and enjoy knowing you're protected and secure in the most beautiful-shaped condom ever."

I don't know what horrifies me more: That this product exists or that someone got paid to write that paragraph about it.

The Hypochondriac's Best Friend

I've been sick the last couple of days. Sick enough to actually take off from work on Friday. I should probably take off Monday, too, but I'm probably not going to. My brother Bryan has been sick lately as well, and this weekend we had fun diagnosing ourselves with WebMD's symptom checker.

The problem with this thing is that it can take your vague symptoms and turn them into serious illnesses. For example, my symptoms probably mean I have a touch of the flu, which I am not happy about since I had my flu shot in November and I was almost in the clear for flu season. However, according to WebMD, I might have Legionnaire's disease. Or possibly West Nile Virus. Okay. Right.

Bryan (who will turn 20 at the end of this month, by the way) became obsessed with the fact that "foul smelling stools" was a symptom you could look up. He decided that he himself had foul smelling stools, and decided to see what he could have. Included on the list of things he could be suffering from were Crohn's disease or cystic fibrosis. Well there you go, people. If you have foul smelling poo, don't just light a match and spray some Lysol. Check yourself for cystic fibrosis.

Vignette

I'm sitting on the concrete steps in front of the school with the one student whose ride hasn't arrived yet. Two guys walk down the street past us.

"Hello, how ya ladies doin' tonight?" One says to us. I sarcastically say "hi," obviously not interested.

As they walk away, his friend claps his shoulder, laughing. "Yo, man, she don't give a shit about you!"

I turned to my student. "You know what?" I whispered. "I don't!"






(And...............scene.)

Can't make this stuff up if I tried.

Jarret and I happened to be wandering through a Sports Authority when this was spotted.

Yep. All Roger Clemens jerseys were half off. Priced to move. Get them out before opening day, I suppose. (Of course, that hasn't stopped my local Marshalls from having Randy Johnson jerseys still on the shelves, but whatever.) Notice how the display is still full of shirts? Yeah, me too.

What made this display even funnier to us was right after I took this picture, a father and his young son walked by. The young buy asked "but why are they half off, Daddy?" Unfortunately, we were too far away to hear the reply.