Sentential Links #141

Here we go:

:: What a small, strange world she lives in -- one in which even simple breakfast choices are fraught with peril. What are her lunch and dinner choices like? When she goes to a restaurant, does she peer into the waiters' station and wonder which servers are gays who wish to be married, peer into the kitchen and wonder which dishwashers are illegal aliens? When she makes her own meals, does she claw through the fridge and pantry like Harry Caul at the end of The Conversation, frantically searching the labels for signs of politically incorrect associations? (Yup, Michelle Malkin's on the prowl again, letting us know who needs boycotting now.)

:: Nothing says you are valued and appreciated for all you do like a lead based travel coffee mug. I can’t wait to use it.

:: Fundamental problem: Exercise and diet for its own sake is boring as hell. We geeks live in our minds and don't deal with boredom very well at all.

:: He had to be stopped, for all women were his playthings and all men his pawns. (Possibly not safe for work...but really, really funny.)

:: Seeing the fabled city in the distance, Eric muses that it would have been better for the place to have been destroyed and all its people killed than to have any contact with modernity. (Well, yeah. Prime Directive and all that!)

:: I feel that to be a teacher one has to be something of a masochist.

:: Jonah was basically a good guy who had some important work to do. But God knew that at a key moment he was likely to lose courage. So God prepared a fish.

:: They hear, in Bach's music, order, logic, control, a disciplined rightness that they associate with arithmetical sums and algebraic equations, but saying Bach's music is like arithmetic is like saying that a human being is nothing but five dollars worth of chemicals; add some water and stir. (There's a longer post in response to this somewhere in my head, but I'm having trouble teasing it out right now. I'll leave it at this: it may seem trite to point out the mathematical correctness of Bach's music, but to me it's entirely the contrary. It's the mathematical structure in Bach that allows his music to be supremely expressive of his deep spirituality. The universe at its most basic levels is mathematical, so in writing music where mathematical relationships hold sway so strongly over all other elements, it seems to me that Bach was expressing the sum of his being, and plumbing depths rarely seen by other composers as well.)

:: For me, this most cinematically intoxicated/intoxicating of the Indiana Jones pictures (the flawlessly put-together mining car roller-coaster ride adapts gags -- involving a railroad switch, a large piece of lumber, a water tank -- from Buster Keaton!) towers above the others in the series. Like the "Star Wars" trilogy (there's only one trilogy), the "Indiana Jones" films reached their pinnacle in the second installment. (No, there was another Star Wars trilogy, you goof! But I like seeing someone else who doesn't think that Temple of Doom is crap.)

By the way, I had no idea that there had been an Indiana Jones Blog-a-Thon! I always, without any exception, learn about Blog-a-thons that are on topics I'd be keen to write about afterward. Maybe one of these days I'll get in on the ground floor...but until then, a couple of links from that Blog-a-thon:

:: I'll freely admit that even to this day, it only takes a few bars of John Williams' iconic "Raiders March" to make me want to eat PB&J sandwiches and put playing cards in my bicycle spokes.

:: As an avid fan of the film and of John Williams I’ve listened to the score countless times over the past 27 years. But as a musical layman, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I noticed something clever that John Williams seemed to be doing with the Ark Theme. (Geez...I never realized that, either. Looks like an interesting blog...looks like this fellow had the same idea with that 75 things a man should be able to do thing that I did.)

:: It is no secret to anyone that Indiana Jones owes a great deal to James Bond.

:: Short Round allowed me to imagine that a kid could do more than go to school. In fact, there existed the possibility of me driving a car, jumping out of a plane, riding elephants, rescuing hundreds of fellow children and beating up some brat with a doll and a jewel hat. (I always liked Short Round.)

:: When I think of seeing Last Crusade for the first time in the summer of '89, I can't help but think of that damned girl. (Not part of the Indy Blog-a-thon, but there he is, anyway.)

And what did I think of Crystal Skull? I'll let you know when I see it.

More next week!