You have won a tiny Dundee

I was reading the NPR pop culture blog, Monkey See, about the upcoming Oscar nominations and how there is a possibility that more "popular" (read made a huge amount of money) movies may get nominated this year like "The Dark Knight" and "Wall-E" or as a super long shot "Iron Man". The blog linked to a couple other stories like on a the New York Times that pointed out that ratings for the past few years Oscar shows have been done and the highest ratings were in 1997 when Titanic won. And that the combined box office for the last five Best Picture winners (Babel, Crash, The Departed, No Country for Old Men and Million Dollar Baby) is was less that the last big box office movie to win Best Picture (The Return of the King in 2003). I think I would be more interested in the results of the Oscars if there wasn't so dependent on when the picture is release since a majority of movies hoping to vie for Oscar nominations are released between October to December. And since, apparently, members of the Academy have short term memory, at lot of performances and movies get overlooked that are released earlier in the year. Two examples of this in the past couple of years in Chris Cooper excellent role in "Breach" and David Fincher's "Zodiac", not to mention the great performances of Robert Downey Jr, Mark Ruffalo, Jake Gyllenhaall and Anthony Edwards in that movie. And there have been some movies that I didn't like that were nominated for Best Picture (i.e. Ghost).

"We are going to see 'The Flowers of Time' with Charlton Heston and Ethan Hawke. This is their third movie together. The first two went straight to video." - Peggy Hill

Quality of Life

This week's review (finally) will be about Lush Life by Richard Price (finally). It took me a while to finish the book mostly due to time rather that the quality of the book. It details the aftermath of the shooting of a young man on the East Side in New York City. The book examines the reactions of police, the other victims of the crime, the perpetrator, and the family of murdered man. It also touches on the politics associated with solving the crime (like timing a meeting with the press to get the best reaction). I really liked to book because it looked at the crime from so many different points of view. Richard Price wrote for the show "The Wire", which was written in a similar style. I think that this style of writing really sets him apart from other writers in this genre. I also liked Price's examination of the history of the East Side of New York City. Apparently, a good portion of immigrants lived in that area until recently when a larger majority of upper class people began moving to the East Side. Anyone who enjoys crime novels would enjoy this book (even though you know who did it from the onset).

Free Pass to Kooky town

I recently mentioned to my mom that I'm looking forward to when I can be completely inflexible and then it can be chalked up to : "I'm old to change" or "I'm just eccentric". Which has made me think about quirky famous people who make the weirdest things and no one seems to care. The video below is an example of 3 people who totally have a free pass to kooky town:

If you have seen any Coen brothers film, you know that they can really throw something from left field into a movie. Gwen Stefani is perhaps that best example of a person that is really eccentric (in music, dress, and influences) and people really don't care, probably because she is so confident in herself.

"Which is why so many people are suddenly allergic to peanuts. The peanuts are emitting toxins as an evolutionary defense mechanism. They're tired of being eaten, and now they're fighting back." - Dale

We let down the funky bunch

This guy at work looks a little like Andy Samburg (including the hair), so from now on, I'm going to be reminded of this clip every time I talk to him.




or this (watch Andy Samburg run away, it's hilarious):

I have feelings of ennui

Work has been really hectic (and stressful) for the last week and as a side effect, I have been neglecting my blog a lot. I haven't posted in about two weeks, so I'm going to try and post more often and do a book review this week. I will try to be better about posting. I think that I will let Andy Bernard express my feelings

Mind the Gap

These two topics are completely unrelated but I've thinking about both of them so they are getting squished together.

• I've been watching Mr. Bean on DVD and it is distributed by A&E Video which means there a a short promotional clip prior to menu which show David Suchet from Poirot and scenes from their excellent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth. And I realized that I miss the old A&E. The one that used to show PBS/BBC mysteries and Law and Order (including a "Kids Kill" marathon for one New Year's Eve) and made really good literary adaptions of Jane Eyre, Emma, Tom Jones and Horatio Hornblower. I am not digging the current A&E at all. I will still watch City Confidential or American Justice from time to time, but the rest of the shows are just crap like Criss Angel and Gene Simmons. And the their TV movies are few and far between and terrible. I watched the new Andromeda Strain which was just terrible (and strayed so far from the book that I didn't even watch the 2nd half). So seeing the clips from A&Es glory days (in my opinion) really bummed me out.
  
• The announcements from the Nobel Prize have been made throughout this week and the prize for literature will be made in the next few days. But there is little likelihood that an American writer will receive the prize because the permanent secretary for the association, Horace Engdahl, said that recent American writers are not deserving of the Nobel prize. He claims that ""The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining." This of course has caused a firestorm in the American literary community. Not only are people upset about the insult to some of the great current writers like Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike and Philip Roth (I love his book The Plot Against America), but the Nobel committee has become more political in their choices, especially honoring writers how dislike the US (and I was reading the history of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Wikipedia and that article mentions that the committee strove to be more neutral during and after World War I). Last year's winner Doris Lessing said that the September 11th attacks were "neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as [Americans] think," and said of Americans that "They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be." There is a really great article at Slate.com about this issue (read it here!). I personally hold little stock in the Nobel Prize in any subject because of the lack of acknowledgment for Roslind Franklin's contributions to determining the structure of DNA (she had passed away before Watson and Crick won but she was barely mentioned in their speech) although I did get to hear a lecture from a Nobel Laurete while I was at Iowa.
  

PEGGY: Let's practice. I'll be Kahn. A-hem: You are a dumb redneck!
HANK: That sounds more like Minh.
PEGGY: Leave my wife out of this, hillbilly!

This makes me smile everytime

I love this commercial so much, it makes me giggle every time.

Conflicted

Today, sitting in my mailbox, were information packets about Ohio State University and Indiana University law schools. My older sister Rachel thinks that I would make a good lawyer and know that idea has begun to grown on me, hence the info on law schools. Both that packets were really informative and got me kinda excited about law school. On the other hand, I'm nervous about applying. I'm not saying that getting into grad school was really easy but applying to law school is much more intense and competitive. Not to mention that law school is a lot harder. I'm also nervous that everyone would be much smarter than me. And that the first day of law school is going to be like this:

Monsterous

The book for this week's review is the Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi. The book tells the story of the search for the "Monster of Florence", a serial killer of several couples in Florence over about a 15 year period. Mario Spezi is a crime journalist that covered the Monster killings for the onset and as a result is considered an expert on the crimes. Douglas Preston (an author of thrillers) moves to Florence with his family and learns (from Spezi) that the house that he has rented is near the site of one of the killings perpetrated by the Monster of Florence. Preston and Spezi decide to write a book about the killings and discover that the people of Florence have a short-term memory when is comes to the killings. And that was the most interesting part about the crime because it was never really resolved (not everyone was convinced that the murder was caught). It was interesting to hear about the investigation and how it was so obviously shaped by the people in charge. And how the Italian government (and the police force) can control the press (journalist can be charged for hampering prosecution through the press). But I did learn a cool Italian term. During one (of the many trials about the Monster of Florence), one of the friends of the suspect keeps saying that he doesn't know the suspect very well, they were just "picnicing friends" and to this day, this term is used to described friends that are involved in sordid doings. I enjoyed this book that explored a well know European crime that is not known very well in the US and apparently Thomas Harris borrowed some the details about the Monster of Florence for his Hannibal Lector novels. And this book made the news when Mario Spezi was arrested and jailed for crimes relating to the Monster of Florence (which just shows how sensitive to these crimes).