Sentential Links #143

Weekly roundup commences...NOW!

:: There’s such a thing as professional courtesy. And gratitude. (Ken Levine on Katherine Heigl's public calling-out of the writers on Grey's Anatomy this season; check his follow-up post too. I'm a faithful Grey's watcher, although the show really needs some new blood, which I think might have been in the offing had the writer's strike not robbed them of half their season; there's only so much "Derek and Meredith, on-again, off-again" that we can stand, really. But in all the time I've watched Grey's, it's Heigl's character that I've hated the most. I've been chalking that up to the writing, but now, I'm wondering how much of Heigl herself is bleeding through. She's starting to seem like an ungrateful harridan.)

:: Amost one hundred years later and with just one survivor still living, to say that the Titanic story is irresistible is about as original as remarking that this Cary Grant fellow was really quite attractive. We've cycled through books and movies and musicals and miniseries and a hundred years from now they'll no doubt be adapting the story to whatever format our great-grandchildren have cooked up. (Terrific posts with some nifty insights into the James Cameron film along with two others, and not from the standpoint that the Cameron film is Teh Suck.)

:: My skirt was too short, my heels were too high, I was wearing fishnets for God's sake, and my lips were far too blacky-red for me to be riding on that particular L line that night. I was headed to a Christmas party in Rogers Park, in an iffy area, and the train had to go through even more iffy areas, and I realized, too late, what a risk I had taken. There was an edgy energy in the car, an on-the-make electric charge, too many people with nowhere to go, nowhere to be - you could sense it, the looking-for-something-to-happen expression on restless dead-eyed faces - it's an energy which is unmistakable to folks who live in urban environments, but was new to me at the time. (Salty language here, but it's a really compelling post.)

:: Few words are needed to describe the utter joy of hopping in a kayak on a bright sunny day, and paddling for miles from island to island in this never-ending archipelago of tree-strewn gems.

:: Someone should have told Johnston that sometimes explaining things makes it worse. (Yup, another complaint about For Better or For Worse. This week Lynn Johnston, the strip's creator, posted online in defense of Liz marrying Anthony, and she gave the stupidest and flimsiest of reasons for it. Ugh!)

:: This is the crisis that has been coming since the 70’s. It is strange that we don’t recognize it.

:: In some form, Doubleday Field deserves Major League baseball. (Wow, no more Hall-of-Fame games? I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. And for baseball players and owners, who are raking in millions, to halt the game because it's hard to do? Frankly: screw that. Make the game count in the standings, if you want -- or maybe even hold the All-Star Game there, since nobody bothers watching that, anyway. But doing away with it? Feh.)

:: Finally, I can say with no irony, no sense of fabrication, to a little black baby, "Someday, you may be president." (My only political link this week.)

More next week, as always.