Heh. I just asked the Kid if she knew that simile, and if she could explain to me what it meant. She did, and could. How did she know what it meant, I asked. Because, she said, people are always using it when they have been repeating themselves.
So, no broken records are necessary for the understanding of this phrase.
Sometimes I get vertigo thinking about how long I've been teaching 18-year-olds--twelve years! When I first started, they seemed so much younger than me, and now, perhaps because I'm always surprised when we have something in common, I feel closer to them. Their maturity sucks, but so (often) does that of 30-somethings.
Reminds me of this, which I love. Not so much because of the ignorance (who cares about The Who?) but for the epic arrogance attached to the ignorance (how can something I've never heard of be important to anybody?).
I like The Who all right, but I'm not going to lecture the kids that they ought to study the Boomer canon.
Oh my goodness, those tweets are cute/awful! Um, those old guys barely like have any followers on Twitter? Don't criticize me! I'm a teen girl with opinions! How sad are you?!
I think it does show something has changed with the rise of "fandom" culture. I know it's not cool to say this, but it's gotten pretty fucking delusional, right? A friend of mine had a student recently come into his office, shaking and crying, to "come out" as a fan of Supernatural. It's just something that everyone in her life needs to know about her and respect about her and if you can't handle it, she'll know she can't be around you or work with you anymore.
I'm pretty sure I had delusional fandoms when I was a teen, too, but I don't think I expected other people to respect it as a lifestyle choice. I feel like time will make it clear that I am on the wrong side of history with this one.
A few years ago (maybe 2008), I asked my freshmen students for music recommendations (new stuff). I thought surely 18 and 19 yos could do so much better at finding new, cool stuff than uncool grad student me. Their first suggestion was, no kidding, Ben Folds Five. I laughed and told them to try again. Smashing Pumpkins was the next suggestion. WTF, students? I was so confused - had they been cryogenically preserved for 10 years and recently revived? I left the class worried about the future of music.
The strangest culture gap to me is movies of the 80s that I think of as canon for kids - Ghostbusters, Goonies, stuff like that. (I saw very few movies in this vein because my parents wouldn't let me, but I feel like they were pretty universal.) Not anymore.
Oh, another one: I sent a friend's kid a T-shirt with a cartoon of a manual shifter on it. She and her kid (ages 32 and 6) couldn't figure out what it was - a subway map? I didn't think it was so esoteric, but clearly, I was mistaken.
I was so confused - had they been cryogenically preserved for 10 years and recently revived? I left the class worried about the future of music.
Someone not long ago pointed out to me that access to music is becoming more like access to books -- less (although still somewhat) tied to the very present moment of publication than it used to be. People browse the archives a lot more freely and with less awareness of what's a year old vs seven years old vs. fifteen years old.
I saw Ghostbusters last week with the kid and a bunch of other kids) at an outdoor movie thing. It sucked as a comedy IMO (Bill Murray is particularly unfunny and boy did his lines not go over well) was interestingly less scary (also IMO) than a lot of the Disney/Pixar movies.
The fat kid from Goonies is now a lawyer I encounter professionally occasionally.
8: That happens to me whenever I ask students for recommendations of song lyrics to analyze for poetry classes. I'm really shocked by how few of them listen to anything newer than Nirvana that isn't bubblegum pop.
10: Certainly. It also turned out that both had recently played live shows in town. I was surprised at their thinking these two were new since they would refer to Nirvana as "stuff my Dad listens to," but these two bands (and Greenday, another rec) seem like they'd get lumped together more as old than new and cool. I'd put my request in context of being old and uncool and needing new stuff that the kids were listening to on their newfangled gadgets.
I think the volume of media targeted at 5-12yos these days is sufficient to crowd out any need to revisit decades-old "classics." In contrast, for a kid with HBO in the 80s, Ghostbusters, The Goonies, Super Fuzz, etc. were pretty much it.
Don't forget "Midnight Madness" which was on HBO IIRC about every 12 hours.
10 is certainly correct and -- I can't even be bothered to spell out implications any more. Let's talk about '80s HBO.
People browse the archives a lot more freely and with less awareness of what's a year old vs seven years old vs. fifteen years old.
I resemble that remark . . .
I don't know that I buy it however. My counter-theory (or amended theory) would be this, it has been noted that for any given form of entertainment (books, music, movies, etc . . .) they are not competing for people's time with a wider range of options (video games, facebook, the internet in general, etc . . .).
I suspect that there are fewer adolescents/20-somethings for whom music is one of their defining cultural touchstones. There are still some, and I bet those people do know what came out last year, but the person who just listens to what their friends recommend or whatever it is that they happen across and like will behave more like what rfts describes.
I'll be the kids these days have never even heard of Midnight Madness. I bet they think Michael J. Fox is just some old guy with Parkinsons and don't realize he once had a small part in a movie that sold cheap to cable.
If Molly and I try to introduce music to Caroline, she rejects it as boring old person stuff. BUT! If one of her peers suggests a band just as old (the last time this happened, it was ABBA) she totally gloms on to it.
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Last night I had a vivid dream about having to go back and repeat one year of high school, as an adult. (I think it was because of some paperwork snafu.) It was really dreadful; it brought back that feeling of not really being responsible for anything, yet everyone is yelling at you for doing it wrong.
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I have a recurring dream that I'm failing a math class because I keep forgetting to go. I hope that if I say on the internet that I'm taking no such class, the dream will go away.
6, 17: It would be interesting if the kind of fierce tribal identity formation that used to be pretty much the province of pop music preferences was being transferred to things like TV show fandom for kids today.
No idea whether or not that's the case, although AWB's story in 6 is one data point in favor.
4 was what I said.
17.last: I guarantee that's wrong. Surely that simmering psychosis exposed by the 1D fans shows just how little in touch with the adolescent mind NickS is... you probably don't even have like many twitter followers at all.
What fraction of 30-something adults actually had some phase in their life when they were really into some kind of popular music? When I think about people I knew in high school, college, grad school, and now I would form very different estimates, so it must be very dependent on social milieu somehow. (Most of the people I work with now are, by my standards, massively ignorant of pop culture. There are a couple of exceptions)
Someone not long ago pointed out to me that access to music is becoming more like access to books -- less (although still somewhat) tied to the very present moment of publication than it used to be. People browse the archives a lot more freely and with less awareness of what's a year old vs seven years old vs. fifteen years old
And I think the opposite is true with movies and TV shows, as popularly watched TV channels simply don't have reruns from more than 20 years ago anymore. Reruns are on their own nostalgia channels. A kid will never ever happen upon an episode of Gilligan's Island, M*A*S*H, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, even Cheers. And channels don't need to occupy space with old movies, either. There's an infinite supply of movies less than 20 years old they can show instead.
Why would Comedy Central show dated old "Meatballs" or "Stripes" when it can show something new and current like "Grandma's Boy" and "Good Luck Chuck" for the 413th time in a month?
The numbers of viewers for older TV shows on Netflix are apparently terrible. I may be the only person who regularly streams Rockford Files and Magnum PI.
21 is me, though in my version I have to try to talk my way into passing the class so that I can graduate from high school (that this really happened is an added bonus). Shudder.
27, you and my parents. They have an extensive DVD collection of similar shows.
I like recording episodes of "TJ Hooker" or "Charlie's Angels" on the ol' DVR, but being confronted with them on Netflix creates the paradox of choice. Which episode to watch? Do I start at the beginning? Do I pick a random one?
24 -- at my (first) high school, I'd say about 5/8 of the dominant subcultures were dominated by music -- metalheads, hippie deadheads, "college radio"/alternative music guys (very heavily Asian) and hip hop guys. The surfer/skaters were mostly about surfing and skating but were also into hardcore. Only the football jocks, water polo jocks, and the subculture-unaffiliated (probably about 20% of the school) weren't tribally defined by their music.
I've recently watched some episodes of Cheers on Amazon streaming video because I feel like it was somehow a big cultural phenomenon I was just slightly too young to have been very aware of. It's no Archer, though.
When I had dinner at my Jamaican co-worker's house on New Year's Eve, his cousin and her 14-year-old daughter were there too. At one point someone asked the daughter what kind of music she listened to, and she said "grunge." Later, she was (rather rudely) listening to music on headphones while the rest of us were playing dominoes. I could hear faintly what she was playing and, yep, it was Nirvana.
32: your observations are roughly correct but the non-subculture-affiliated were probably 90% of my school.
33: the first few seasons of Cheers are pretty incredible. We plowed through to the Rebecca years and it's amazing how big the drop in quality is. (It's not Kirstie Allie's fault really. The whole show just gets sillier.)
Further, to 32: Your subcultures are Freak subcultures. Geek subcultures are not so music-centric.
The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads - they all adore him. They think he's a righteous dude.
I'm not sure what all the anecdata adds up to. Kids have always occasionally adopted the odd oldie as their own, driven by movie soundtracks (back in my day it was The Doors) or an American Idol covers special or the idiosyncrasies of somebody's older brother (I remember having one random non-subculture-affiliated girlfriend who was obsessed with Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd for no apparent reason).
I have one teenager very into books and tv - she has gone today to visit a friend she made on tumblr because of a book series. I think just being able to easily meet other people who like what you do reinforces those likes, and makes them feel much more important. She doesn't like Supernatural though, and that student sounds a bit odd. She did get a Goonies t-shirt for Christmas 18 months ago which was her best present that year I think.
And I have one very into music - mostly new stuff, definitely not bubblegum pop. It's not so tribal for her though, but she's a more solitary child, kind of prefers to go to gigs alone so she doesn't have to worry about the other person.
And they all know who Michael J Fox is, Back to the Future is still remarkably popular.
water polo jocks,
Say what now?
All the water polo jocks I know are Hungarian or Israeli.
The link in 3 is the most beautiful thing I've read since literallyunbelievable.
You'd think everybody would know The Who from the CSI theme song.
43: Where do you think the One Direction songwriter heard the song to plagiarize it?
I can only imagine how 1991's twitter fangirls would have reacted to the notion that "Ice Ice Baby" was not wholly an original creation.
I'm in a hotel room watching a made-for-tv movie that is being shown on Nick and desire features Tom Arnold. So not tempted to get cable again.
Your desire features Tom Arnold? Keep it to yourself.
45: there's that extra cymbal hit. That makes it totally different. Off to shave sideburns and eyebrows.
re: 32
That sort of rings true, to me. Different sub-cultures, though, no surf culture in central Scotland. I don't know if I'd hazard a guess as to percentages, but I'd guess that some kind of tribal identification through music was important to a lot of people. Even the mainstream non-sub-culture kids had an aesthetic that was shaped partly by music: Bowie, various Scottish/British bands of the white-socks and pastels variety.*
My younger relatives just don't seem bound to music or fashion in the same way. I mean, they dress a certain way, but they would't identify it as a thing. Would actively oppose the identification, I think, even though they completely adhere to the dress code.
* I'm a few years too young for it to have been the Postcard 'Sound of Young Scotland' type of scene, although Aztec Camera were still popular. So it was more the 'sophisti-pop' type stuff.
I don't think the phrase "Ned culture" will ever stop amusing me.
I certainly know people online and off who identify themselves by their fandoms, but I can't tell how many of my undergraduates do. Anecdote: one older (60s?) fan proudly telling another that she had relieved the mind of a young fan, showing her that you don't have to grow out of your fandom, you can be a fan your whole life. (I can't remember how old the thing they were fanning was.)
One of the very odd things about story-fans is what they pick out as the essential bits of the plots and characters; there is, for instance, a quite competent resetting of the characters from the Cumberbatch Holmes into the Brontë's Gondal -- but no explanation of why the characters with such a different background should have the same quirks and temperaments. I suppose Moorcock did the same. Not necessarily an excuse.
I have terribly mixed feelings about valorizing growing up vs not growing up. I suppose I usually disagree with what either are said to require (careerism, children, property ownership vs drinking, fandoms, keeping one's stuffed animals).
I recall distinctly a conversation at a party in 1991 where my interlocutor complained that from now on everyone will associate that base line with Vanila Ice. I said that in 20 years, the only people who will recognize that base line are serious music fans, and they will know the Queen song. I feel like history has basically borne me out, although I had no way of knowing how reality TV would manage to keep C-list celebrities employed.
I'm not sure I understand how drinking is similar to pointless things like fandom and stuffed animals.
54: I had no way of knowing how reality TV would manage to keep C-list celebrities employed.
I think there's always been a "circuit" for the C-list and has beens--low-rent vaudeville joints, county/town fairs and local car racetracks and so on as well as local TV shows and commercials. Reality TV just a new item in that list.
As for VW: The Insane Clown Posse is one of my favorites. I'm a Juggalo* for life! To have your peers come back and respect what you do and what you've done is a great honor. That means more to me than anything.
*I continue to reap the hostility of my peers by occasionally opining on the common roots of the Juggalos and the 60s/70s youth counterculture as it played out in my area of the Midwest. Some of them really get quite hostile.
I think a lot of people are familiar with the Vanilla Ice version. It has a certain ironic currency in popular media, no? Here, anyway.
I feel like history has basically borne me out
I don't. People of my generation are much more likely to know the Vanilla Ice version.
I had not been aware of the whole back story on "Baba O'Riley" including the title being a tribute to Meher Baba and modernist composer Terry Riley. ( And via Wikipedia: It is also the official theme song of competitive eater, Joey Chestnut.)
At least in the US it was initially overshadowed by "Won't Get Fooled Again" which was out as a single. I would be curious to see the progression of the play rate of the two songs through the years.
The purchase of that album ('Who's Next") is one that is still memorable to me. Bought it in Madison where I was visiting UW (which I was slated to attend) along with "The United States of America", from the interesting early electronic/rock group (full album here).
58.1: That is how Bob Crane earned a living between Hogan's Heros and his murder.
occasionally opining on the common roots of the Juggalos and the 60s/70s youth counterculture as it played out in my area of the Midwest.
Yeah OK but one produced the MC5 and the other produced ICP.
I saw Ghostbusters last week with the kid and a bunch of other kids) at an outdoor movie thing. It sucked as a comedy IMO (Bill Murray is particularly unfunny and boy did his lines not go over well)
Disagree. I saw it again within the last year; the crowd (very much including kids) loved it and I thought it held up remarkably well. 48 Hrs., OTOH, was shockingly unfunny, abrasive, and racist/sexist. (I cannot for the life of me figure out what purpose Annette O'Toole's character is supposed to serve.)
Agree to disagree. But Midnight Madness is still indisputably a classic, and honestly the different color teams are about as useful a sociocultural schema as anything you'll get in an intro sociology course.
The MC5 recorded what, two good songs? The ICP might actually have them beat.
Actually, I take that back: Venkman's definitely more of a creep than he seemed when the movie first came out. He's still funny, but a creep.
This is the first I have ever heard of Midnight Madness.
Blume had never seen Ghostbusters, so we watched it together. I will let her speak for herself but I was painfully aware of how offputtingly creepy Venkman was by modern standards.
I was shocked how much I noticed the cigarette smoking on a recent re-watching of Ghostbusters.
69 was definitely true, also 68. 67 can only be true of a man without HBO in the 1980s.
One of Arthur C. Clarke's later books (I *think* it was The Ghost From The Grand Banks) had a character whose job it was to go through old media and redact/alter images of people smoking. I remember thinking at the time that it was absurd, but these days it seems more and more plausible...
Because the ground to Under Pressure/Ice Ice Baby was originally used in variant settings of To Anacreon in Heaven, you can also sing How doth the little busy bee/How doth the little crocodile to it.
Blume has already opined extensively on her distaste for Dr. Venkman and his 80s ass-tagonist ilk.
70: I spent all my TV time on Cinemax: After Dark. (Which is apparently still going!)
71: I think that's in one of Connie Willis' novelettes; not that that doesn't rule out Clarke.
75: Never read the Willis, but I was right, it's also in TGFTGB.
73: And I see that I mentioned my distaste for Cheers in that thread as well.
78: Do you draw any distinction between the early seasons of Cheers (which are of their time, but present a fairly nuanced relationship between Sam and Diane) and the later seasons (where Sam became a pathetic shameless hound, constantly trying to trick Rebecca into agreeing to have sex with him)?
I can acknowledge that the characters on the show are well drawn, but I just don't sympathize with Sam at all.
72: I'm missing some of the connections here. How does "How doth the little busy bee" relate to the bawdy song that became the basis of the Star Spangled Banner? How can I mash this up with Under Pressure/Ice Ice Baby?
Detain her and take her electronics.
I was just riffing reuses, rob. Although the UP/IIB ground fits into a couple old dances -- I need to egg someone into playing it as a schottische -- so the chances that you could put it under something 400 years old are, of course, pretty good.
74: "Where are they now"-type google searches for actresses from Cinemax After Dark can be extremely depressing. Tawny Kaetan has been on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, which can only mean she will die before her time. Kira Reed is now married to a man who has a wikipedia page written by a spam bot and is now shilling for his scammy-sounding internet company.
87 gave me much more joy than 56, which gave me none.
"How doth the little busy bee" seems like it has an extra syllable? Is there a recording of this somewhere on the web?
Well, at least someone is getting pleasure out of this.
71: I have a Shel Silverstein book with a back-cover author photo that has clearly had a cigarette redacted from it. Cognitive dissonance time: I'm about as appalled by the censorship as I am that the original had a cigarette.
"Under Pressure" (with Gail Ann Dorsey).
I have a Shel Silverstein book with a back-cover author photo that has clearly had a cigarette redacted from it.
Also true of this album cover (for the CD release, which I see was 1995 -- seems early to be deleting cigarettes).
89: Crocodile, busy bee: both on-off-on to my ear. How do you hear them, essear?
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I have worn out -- actually worn through -- my wool challis Black Watch pleated miniskirt, and cannot at my age see my way to buying a replacement. Toll the bell for my misspent youth.
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The strangest culture gap to me is movies of the 80s that I think of as canon for kids
Damn right. Ten years ago you could guarantee that everyone in the army had seen Predator. Now you shout at the rest of your patrol "GO! GET TO DA CHOPPAH!" and they look at you as though the top of your skull has popped open and there's a little guy inside waving at them. I feel old.
Time to roll the bottom of your trousers?
95: I thought we had previously agreed that there were no kinds of clothing that were off limits to people because of their body type. (It was a generalization on the ban on statements like "fat people shouldn't wear miniskirts.)
But surely if there are no body-type restrictions on wool challis Black Watch pleated miniskirts, there are no age restrictions.
Get a new one. Rock that look.
Oh, right. I thought clew was saying that, given her age, there's not much economic point in buying hard-wearing clothes that you won't wear very often, which seemed a bit morbid.
OP: ""Honey, do you know what a broken record sounds like?" The daughter makes a noise sort of like a dying pterodactyl."
How do you know what a dying pterodactyl sounds like?
76, 68, 73: Vaguely related: I watched Real Genius this weekend for the first time in years and I think, despite a few awkward bits, it holds up much better than the general run of low brow 80s comedies. Definitely less creepily sexist than Revenge of the Nerds or Weird Science, for example.
And boy does it ever feature some vintage 80s musical montage sequences.
Also, there are days when I definitely empathize with this guy.
100: It's the sound of one's heart being ripped in two as the last of the Great Chickens gasps its dying breath.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Properly understood, Revenge of the Nerds is a tragedy and needs to be viewed from the perspective of Ogre. It documents the shittification of the wild and free 1970s America caused by the 1980s and the rise of computers.
If viewed in reverse, it looks like the cops are helping Rodney King up, dusting him off, and sending him on his way.
Real Genius was weirdly, impressively in tune with the social life at somewhere like MIT or Caltech, especially for a mainstream comedy starring Val Kilmer. Still not sure how that happened.
Contrast to Animal House, where the Ogre-figure is the countercultural hero. By 1984, the game was up, and all team wild and free could do was shout "nerds" from the rooftop.
My parents let us watch Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds at my 9th or 10th birthday party, I forget which, but way too young.
I think I opted to watch Adventures In Babysitting for my 9 or 10th birthday sleepover.
10th birthday party was Pee Wee's Big Adventure for me.
Adventures in Babysitting is pretty good, as is Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, though the latter also documents theists of freedom to 1980s corporate power when the Christina Applegate character gets a job.
109- That's just as dirty as Nerds, in retrospect.
Oh, man alive, the sexism in the 80s nerd movies. What was that one with Peter O'Toole being still irresistible despite being a creepy old man? I am still grateful to Mu Lan for having an actual engineer heroine.
It's kind of y'all to be body-positive about the skirt. I'm not sure I shouldn't try a little change, though. I'm trying to use my five moves in eight months to make myself get rid of everything that's not really good and useful and in good condition. I have described my family's four-generation culch pile? They're enough of a hassle even if the family doesn't move a thousand miles every few decades.
21: I have a recurring dream that I'm failing a math class because I keep forgetting to go.
Oh my god, I have that same recurring dream. It's about two weeks before the end of the semester and I realize that there's this math class (it's always a math class) that I'm enrolled in that I've completely forgotten about and haven't attended since the start of the semester, and it's way past the deadline for dropping a class, and there's no way I could possibly catch up with all the assignments.
I hate that dream.
I didn't really want to comment before, but I have the dream in 113 all the time. Usually it's a math or English class that I signed up for and then negligently forgot to attend. Often the way it works is that I realize I have to take a year off of work and move back to Collegetown to go back and finish my incomplete degree. The dream has recurred so often for so many years that it now has a kind of built-in plausibility -- I've sometimes woken up and spent about 10 minutes or so thinking about logistical arrangements for the move back and completing the course until I realize, no, I really did graduate college x number of years ago, have some graduate degrees, and actually possess the diploma.
I wonder if this is a weirdly Unfogged-community-specific recurring dream, or just a common worldwide recurring dream?
100: It sounds like a person repeating themselves.
My math classes were a balm and a refuge, so I have that dream about social obligations. I have to go to my high-school reunion and remember people's names, or something.
114: Anyone who went to college, from what I hear.
Yeah, me too for these nightmares. I have both the college one AND the PhD one where there's a piece of data missing that my commitee deems crucial and my first advisor (whose group I left on bad terms to start over with a second advisor) has to sign off, plus my second advisor's lab is being renovated, so I have to acquire the data in first advisor's lab. It is way, way worse than waking up thinking I'm going to fail math or history. I hope that in another decade or so I'll stop having this particular nightmare.
It's pretty amazing that thousands or millions of people may be having what is essentially the same highly specific recurring dream. What the hell?
114: the legend is that all academics have this dream.
My version seems to exclusively involve high school, never anything related to college or grad school.
I bet real engineers have much worse dreams, though. E.g., you're cleaning out the lab, and in one drawer you find a carefully labeled box, containing a pyrotechnic bolt, that you were supposed to install before the spacecraft shipped out to the launch pad...
On the plus side, they also have bumper stickers that say "my other vehicle is orbiting Mercury," so maybe it's all fair?
How do you know what a dying pterodactyl sounds like?
Exactly. You young people have an entirely different knowledge base from us old folks.
My version seems to exclusively involve high school, never anything related to college or grad school.
I spent more than 10 years as a union activist in a shop where they were continually trying to fire me - and in fact, they actually did fire me once, but it was so blatantly illegal that I got my job back after pursuing legal action.
So nowadays, all of my dreams of this sort involve getting caught committing some firing offense at this former employer. The unique thing about these dreams, though, is that every now and then I actually come out on top, and they are unable to fire me (which is what happened in real life).
119: This is sort of happening to me now, or at any rate is possible enough that I worry about it constantly. Oddly, I don't dream about it.
The PToday article says Argentinians don't have the exam dream, but doesn't say if they have a different stress dream.
125, the data thing or the advisor thing? The data thing didn't start being a subject of nightmares until I actually finished, but the advisor switcheroo has been nightmare fodder for longer than I'd care to admit.
My version of The Dream is almost always either HS Russian or math class. I used to have a generalized got-to-school-naked-somehow one, but that has been in abeyance for awhile, and it's mostly about having skipped Russian all trimester. Which, actually, I sorta did at the end of senior year, due to a complex chain of circumstances. So I just took an incomplete in real life, but graduated anyway, as it was an elective.
103: I'm pretty sure we've discussed this here before, but that "wanna have sex on the Moon" Darth Vader scene is a pretty horrific rape.
128: Even when I saw RotN at 11 or 12 and was not, shall we say, overly concerned with the plot, a number of the hijinks struck me as incredibly squickly misogynistic. Also, while I am okay with satire and everything, the depiction of the gay character was pretty problematic. But I don't remember ever discussing the film here.
Oh, man alive, the sexism in the 80s nerd movies. What was that one with Peter O'Toole being still irresistible despite being a creepy old man?
Probably "My Favorite Year". I hated that movie but I think it's mainly because the main male and female lead are acting like stage actors, meaning they A) are hamming it up all over the place B) are about 15 years older than their characters. Everyone is hamming it up all over the place, in fact. That and the over-sentimentality. I can't believe it wasn't based on a stage play.
But a lot of people like it. I don't think it was sexist, just convinced that the Peter O'Toole Errol Flynn character is irresistible to women. Which Errol Flynn apparently was when he was a creepy old man, so what's the problem?
112, 130: I think Creator was the movie that 112 had in mind.
I'm pretty sure I've never had an exam nightmare. I just have the same old, ultra-traditional librarian nightmare: The library is closing and I can't get the patrons to leave.
Every librarian I know has had this dream. I comfort myself by thinking it's like Stephen Colbert and his bear dreams. Just a standard thing your psyche throws out there to telegraph that you're worrying about something in real life.
129: I'm not a good judge of these things, but I thought that the depiction of Lamar Latrell wasn't that bad, if only because he doesn't stand out as an exagerated stereotype amongst the rest of the nerds. They're all pretty damn ridiculous. The rape scene and the hidden camera scenes, though, were awful. The nerds deserved to get beat down.
I'm pleased to learn that the unattended class nightmare is not unique to those of us who more or less experienced this repeatedly.
For years I had recurring dreams where I'm either back at Big Mormon U or have signed up for another mission, and I'm freaking out because I'm (as in real life) also a homosexual atheist. The dreams used to end badly, basically waking up in a panic. Later on, I started figuring out in the dream that I could just break whatever rules I wanted and it wouldn't matter. The dreams never got to the point of in-dream missionary-on-missionary action, sadly. The final stage was that I'd realize in the middle of one of these dreams that the whole scenario was ridiculous because I was a different person now and I'd never sign up for that. Then they stopped.
missionary-on-missionary action,
At that point, the position is obligatory, right?
I have extensive dreams about the layout of houses. One house per dream, but there's probably a repeating list of twenty recurring layouts. No people are in these dreams, generally, and barely myself.
137: Yes, I believe standard notation omits the position in such cases unless it varies from what is expected.
I'm happy to nearly always forget dreams by the time I'm even just halfway awake. I did have a stress dream the other night though: didn't go to court on the day some silly case came to trial. Which omission was way less silly than the case itself. [I can't remember what the case was about, but something like the client's failure to attend classes, or do something . . .]
Heh. I had a series of mild anxiety dreams a couple months back. In one, I wasn't well prepared for an entirely voluntary current community college class that had no pwer over me. In another, I was about to give a work presentation and I was underdressed (as I am to work every day, but I do try to dress nicer for public meetings) but not naked or anything. I may have also had one about a potluck and I was worried my dish wasn't gluten-free. All of the dreams followed the form, but none of them had real consequence even in the dream.
I never had the unattended class dream, but during undergrad I had a recurring dream that I had woken up and gone to class—except that was just a dream! And now I had actually slept through class! Then I'd wake up for real, in a panic, only to realize my morning alarm hadn't even gone off yet.
And I never once missed class due to sleeping in, so I don't know where all the anxiety came from.
I do have the unattended class dream. But I always mention the house dreams in hopes that someone will say ME TOO! and we can marvel together.
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I got one of those tiny quadcopters Spike recommended, and within ten minutes of flying time, crashed it into the baby. Her first drone strike, I guess.
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I just looked through my dream diary, but none of it was horribly stressful (plenty of fucked-up). I only remember having the forgot-a-class dream once.
Iberian Beauty and I were watching some a rock band composed of middle or early high-school-aged kids perform in front of the library yesterday, and--except for one Arctic Monkeys song--basically their entire set was stuff from before they were born. Pixies, Nirvana, etc.
|| Ashes falling from the sky. And now they've closed the highway I need to drive tomorrow afternoon for some depositions. (I can go around, I guess, but that makes the place on the way where I reserved a room way out of the way.) Be nice to have a little rain; no more lightning, though. |>
Yesterday, about 10 miles outside Missoula, Jammies' dad waited in traffic for three hours because a truck carrying hay caught on fire. I wonder if the fire spread.
148: sorry to hear that. Wildfires suck.
I drove down I-5 trailing a rainstorm & accordingly overlapped with a lot of fire crews resting a night before going home. It looked like a great night to be single in Ashland.
I got one of those tiny quadcopters Spike recommended, and within ten minutes of flying time, crashed it into the baby. Her first drone strike, I guess.
It's just the quadcopter expressing the robot's natural desire to kill all humans.
Or at least a terrific photograph.
144: I used to have recurring dreams about wandering through several different homes. I haven't had them in a long time, though, and my memory has faded enough that I can't decide how alike they are to your house dreams. I think occasionally sometimes they involved people, and at least once something scary.
149 -- Probably not: the smoke we're getting in town is from 2 fires southwest of town, up Lolo canyon. There were a couple of fires just a bit east of town we saw driving home from Bozeman last night: one started on Friday and looks to be mostly done, the other on Sunday. Wind's blowing that smoke away, though. (Which also means that it might not be too bad at my house, on the northwest fringe of the city).
I guess we all knew this would happen, what with the Easterners stealing all our rain in May and July.
If I hadn't been out of town trying not to think about fire, I'd have linked this story a couple weeks ago about dropping 16,000 flaming ping pong balls on a fire in Idaho.
145: Also, I don't remember that thread. Which quadcopter did Spike recommend? The Parrot one?
No no! The Walkera Ladybird V2. Much smaller and less painful than a Parrot.
Much, much cheaper too. Terminator instincts aside, how is it? I can't quite bring myself to spring for a Parrot, but goddamn if those UPenn quadrotors don't make me want one really bad.
It is really, really fun thus far.
I haven't used it outside yet.
I am almost certainly going to be tempted into springing for the one with the little camera that you can fly first person, because come on, right?
(And now the wind has clicked over just a couple of points, and the smoke is gone from downtown. But a solid wall billowing up to the southwest, and passing east just south of here. News story. Where are the drones carrying flaming ping pong balls?)
Tried the Walkera outside for the first time this weekend. It crashed but was at least retrievable this time. Definitely go for lots of indoor practice first.
Googling around, now I want the one with the built-in squirt gun.
Two things that I've been paralyzed about asking for all summer were responded to with, basically, Sure, we'll help! Can't figure out how to pay it back, but maybe I'll pay it forward.
And pantry-cleaner many-substitution cookies are superb.
Whoa. Is there one with a camera and a squirt gun?
Also, Mrs. K-sky thanks you for flying a drone into Zardoz. It makes her feel better about leaving φ in a (very new) sitting position during mommy-and-me yoga, from which she swiftly hit her noggin on the floor.
168: there is, although you can't record from the camera, which really limits potential uses.
Google Bleg
CAN I GET RID OF THE HORRIBLE POP UP COMPOSE BOX? Please tell me how.
Thnx
