Thursday miscellanea #43

I love Independence Day for all it symbolizes. That having a trunk full of explosives and beer is reasonable and customary rocks, too.
Sometimes when I go to Wikipedia, I find the page locked for edits. There’ll be a little padlock icon in the upper right corner, and frequently there is also a note. If you use Wikipedia, you’ve seen these too, I’m sure. It always gives me a chuckle that (at least) two competing factions of somebodies, somewhere, are all pissed off about Vietnamese cuisine or the War of the Roses.
To all offenders: please stop adding adjectives like critical and dire to emergency. Emergency is a splendid word and needs no intensifier. If you think it does, then perhaps you’re overusing it.
I thought Gran Torino was just okay. I enjoyed some of the performances, but Eastwood’s lunged toward hammy a time or two. Also, it was one of the more off-the-shelf plots I’ve seen in quite some time.
You know how on some gas station signs, the 3s and 8s are a bit stylized, such that the bottom half of the numeral is a little larger than the top half? Doesn’t it drive you nuts when someone sticks ’em in the sign wrong side out and upside down, such that the big half is on the top? Can’t they see that?
A Corner reader had an interesting exploration in the online Roget’s Thesaurus this week. Given “synonyms” for liberal include enlightened, humanitarian, intelligent, rational, unbiased, unprejudiced, and unbigoted. “Antonyms”? Try conservative and narrow-minded. Nice, eh? To be sure, the political spectrum is broadly populated with the insufficiently mentally engaged. But some of the most rigid, closed-minded, unthinking, unyielding, intolerant “thinkers” I know are raging leftists. This list of “synonyms” is absurd.
“We’re not gonna just give ya $750,000, Jerry.” RIP.

4 thoughts on “Thursday miscellanea #43”

TommyG

July 4, 2009 at 9:14 am

I like the Fargo quote…..
Scott

July 4, 2009 at 11:58 am

Gran Torino, while I thought was a decent movie, would make most high school lit teachers wet themselves with all the symbolism and foreshadowing. Of course there was way too many racist terms bandied about to be allowed into a high school lit class nowadays though.
Bo

July 5, 2009 at 10:35 am

Tommy: That line was actually spoken by Larry Brandenburg as Stan, Wade’s business manager–but I couldn’t think of a good, iconic quote for Presnell from Fargo.

Scott: Indeed. ‘Cause, you know, high school students never hear any of those terms on their own. 😉
nhfalcon

July 5, 2009 at 12:37 pm

Hell, if you wanted an iconic quote from Presnell, go to “Saving Private Ryan” and the scene where he reads the letter from Abraham Lincoln.

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4 thoughts on “Thursday miscellanea #43”

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