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Sunday, 2006 January 1, 19:32 — cinema

my tastes are not always unshared

For Dad‘s birthday I sent him the first season of Northern Exposure and of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I am gratified to hear that both he and Mrs Dad are enjoying them; Ruth particularly raves about NX.

Saturday, 2005 December 17, 15:25 — prose

runes, mountains, scary monsters …

Roderick Long points out parallels between A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Hobbit.

Tuesday, 2005 December 13, 13:32 — cinema

that’s one big ad

words fail me. (cited here almost five months ago)

Thursday, 2005 December 1, 11:12 — arts, fandom

this website supports integration

The Answer Desimplified, on a t-shirt.

Ligatures for our times

Many translations of a conceivably useful phrase (possibly inspired by a similar project)

(all cited by the muted horn)

when grammarians go bad

Wednesday, 2005 November 30, 11:47 — cartoons, sciences

wacky microgravity tricks

Does this really work?

Sunday, 2005 November 27, 21:55 — cinema

flies on fire

It’s a fair bet that my readers include at least one Mutant Enemy fanatic. Got a couple of canon questions for ya.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, anyone seen smoking is either evil, under a spell or doomed. (There’s one exception: Mrs Epps in “Some Assembly Required”, who seems to spend her days watching her dead son’s football triumphs on tape.) I didn’t notice whether the second vampire to acquire a human soul then stopped smoking.

In Firefly episode “The Train Job”, the sheriff of Paradiso shares a cigarette with a prisoner. Is anyone else ever seen smoking in that universe? I can easily picture Jayne with a cigar, but that’s just stereotyping.

Thursday, 2005 November 24, 21:27 — cartoons, cinema

how do you tell racism from diversity?

I’m watching a collection of Tom and Jerry cartoons, made by Joseph Barbera and William Hanna, who were later known for the much cruder animation of The Flintstones.

I’m puzzled by the opening disclaimer in which Whoopi Goldberg explains that while the ethnic stereotypes that appear in some early cartoons are wicked it would be wrong to falsify history by cutting them out. The sin, apparently, is that Tom’s owner, a woman of color known as Mammy Two Shoes (though her name is never mentioned in the toons, nor is her face shown), speaks in nonstandard grammar; she has no other stereotyped qualities that I can detect.

Whoopi makes the same disclaimer in a Looney Tunes collection, and there it makes more sense; I’ve had occasion to cringe at some early ones, though I have not seen such moments in this collection (yet).

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