1. Inglourious Basterds: The Dirty Dozen meets Mission Impossible in the 7th Circle of Hell. This is not a negative review, unless it sounds like one to you.
2. My son is in out of town this week for a professional conference. It makes me feel impossibly old to type that–and, more importantly, I’m missing him a lot. Still, it’s pretty cool and I hope it goes well for him.
3. It was back to classes for me today. Things have gone pretty well so far: minimal-to-acceptable casualties.
1. That makes me want to see it even more.
I liked it, on balance–but it wasn’t as wholesome as “The Dirty Dozen”.
::Googles Circles of Hell to refresh fading memories of Dante::
Now I can’t help picturing that high concept pitch made literal as a plot for Dante fanfic. Tom Cruise is doing his hanging-from-wires trick off a tree in the Grove of the Suicides. Let’s make it Kurt Cobain’s tree, just for good measure.
Good thing I don’t write fanfic.
Ha! That might be pretty good. Back in the 70s Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle did a sort of Dante fanfic-before-there-was-fanfic, Inferno. In it, a science fiction writer dies and goes to Dante’s Hell, but he’s a rationalist and he can’t believe he’s really in Hell, so he keeps creating rationalizations and escape-plots based on them. It has some nice moments. (There was a sequel recently, but I sort of stopped following their work back in the Carter administration.)
2. I’m sorry to say, while reading this I was thinking that I didn’t realize you were old enough to have a son go to a professional conference. Sorry!!
3. I can’t afford to take classes this semester (I can take one for fun if I want), but I did take a day off work and sit in a few classes’ first days. See, I could follow their syllabi on my own and read the readings and look at the slides, but nothing replaces the professor’s enthusiasm and asides. It’s what keeps me going to back to classes again and again.
2. No–no apologies needed. I’m a little surprised myself. He is starting pretty young (20) but that’s getting more common these days, especially in his field (computers). On the other hand, I still tend to think of him as the grade-schooler whom I had to carry to bed every night. Time runs sneaky-fast sometimes.
3. This is why I can’t see online classes replacing on-campus ones, at least any time soon. Of course, some instructors don’t add a lot of value to their classes… But we can safely ignore them. Their students probably do.