Sentential Links #150

This is the sesquicentennial edition of Sentential Links. Huzzah!! Let there be dancing in the streets! Let there be clicking of links!!!

:: This has been a test of the blogger ranting system. If this were a genuine rant, I would go through the trailer frame-by-frame and explain in exhausting detail why, how and precisely which details make the film look so mind-liquifyingly stupid. But to do that, I'd have to see the damn trailer again, and I'd rather watch Jar Jar Binks's reenactment of Birth of a Nation with a polka soundtrack. (Wow! And he's not ranting about the Star Trek trailer. What is he ranting about? If only there were a link you could click to find out....)

:: So. Happy birthday to a film that has done so much to shape how we think about ourselves. It has meant different things to different generations - and that's the definition of a good piece of art. If you watch a lot of the other WWII movies made at that time - they seem dated, overblown, propagandistic, and overly simplistic. Not this one. Not this one. (I have a post in the hopper about Casablanca myself. I love it so!)

:: I spent a long time lingering over the cereal selection in the cafeteria at work this morning. It reminded me of my childhood breakfasts where, in the little upper cabinets above the stove, there was always a wide selection of cereals to choose from. (I love me some cereal! Most days it's a whole grain cereal, usually sweetened - I need some sweetness, and will add a bit of sugar if I need to - with some blueberries on top. Once or twice a year I also succumb to my greatest cereal weakness: Golden Grahams. I can eat a box of those in two days. A big box. I love me some Golden Grahams. And one major reason why my weight went up in my freshman year of college was probably my standard breakfast that year: Froot Loops and Mountain Dew. Sometimes I wonder by what luck it is that I even have a pancreas anymore.)

:: It's a good time to declare victory anyway. Victory can be at least as much frame of mind as fact on the ground.

:: It is no coincidence that many musical audition processes choose to hear a bit of Mozart and another bit of Bach. I could claim that after hearing a few minutes of each I pretty well know how a person plays, or at least how musical the individual is.

:: To be white and living on one of the vast dry high-altitude reservations of the plains West was to step into almost a different dimension. It wasn't that people were different in the way that another country might be different, but that one's most basic assumptions about everything were challenged. Ordinary tribal society was a tissue of dreams, half-memories, secrets, superstition, and outright lies meant to baffle and deflect.

:: Avocado Green and Harvest Gold - the defining home décor colors of the decade. Anyone who lived in the '70s will remember these colors well.

:: I guess the vacation is finally over when you've used the last of the little soaps and shampoos you nicked from the hotel. (Wow, by that reasoning, I'm still at Disneyworld in 1998!)

:: Lets go build another 20 yrs. (Many happy returns!)

More next week, as always.