Monday, February 08, 2010

Sentential Links #195

Linkage! Slightly delayed, but linkage nonetheless:

:: For the past two nights my characters have dominated my dreams. Well, two of them so far.

:: Thirdly, I have owned it for YEARS, so it's one of those "perpetually unread" books on my shelves that end up kind of haunting me, looking at me like, "So. You ever gonna deal with me or what?" (Wow...I'm the same way, with the exact same book. Well, that's ending. I love Helprin anyway, so why haven't I read Winter's Tale yet? I have no idea. As soon as I'm done with GGK, I'm reading Winter's Tale.)

:: About 10 years ago I was chaperon to the grade 12 travel club and we went to Japan. One night I heard a kid scream for me from his room across the hall from mine. I had taught him since grade 9 so he got a good four years worth of my conspiracy balloon juice. I ran to see what was wrong thinking he was hurt or something. You can imagine the moment when we both stood watching this series of commercials for PEPSIMAN.

:: Why our English teachers did this in reverse order remains a mystery, no? (I've wondered this forever. Assigning ninth graders to read Shakespeare is akin to throwing people who don't know how to swim in the deep end and saying, "You can get out of the pool over there." Sure, it may work to some degree, but it doesn't exactly make people love the water.)

:: This right here is seven panels of Superbowl Sunday inanity punctuated by one glorious moment of complete madness. (I read Blondie yesterday before I read Comics Curmudgeon, but as soon as I saw the panel in question, I knew it wouldn't escape comment on Curmudgeon. It's one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen in a newspaper comic strip.)

:: Listen to your dreams...... They have great wisdom....

More next week!

2 comments:

Cal's Canadian Cave of Coolness said...

Thanks for the shout out brother.

Anonymous said...

I've always thought (and in a minority of sorts) that Shakespeare's greatest works were the sonnets. What better tools to teach the language than great poems? As a bonus, children who learn poems and poetic language early will not be susceptible to thinking that every rhyme he or she hears is poetry.