Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
Here is the Ypsi Township native singing “Ray of Light:”
I think that MTV or VH1 is going to broadcast the show next weekend or something, but as the YouTube site tells it, Madonna apparently wanted Iggy and the Stooges to perform her songs instead of singing them herself, maybe because she thinks that Iggy and company have been snubbed by the Hall of Fame for too long, maybe she just wanted to do something different. The audience seems a little confused.
This one goes out to all the Harry Potter fans:
It’s a trailer for a documentary about HP fandom to come out (apparently, it premiered at the SXSW fest down in Austin a couple weeks ago) called We Are Wizards. It looks quite promising.
Via my friend Chris and via boing-boing comes this “Sweded” version of Star Wars:
Oh, where to begin?
First off, this is why I want to very much see the here and gone almost immediately movie, Be Kind Rewind. As the wikipedia entry suggests, the plot of the movie involves the characters remaking the videos in a rental store, and, when customers complain about the remakes, which are like the one above, the excuse offered is that the videos are from Sweden. Or something like that– I have yet to see the movie.
Second, I think this would be a fun way to spend the afternoon with Will and some of his friends. Not this particular afternoon, but I can see the film maker in me yet….
And third, I actually think this might be a kind of cool assignment for some of the writing classes I teach, particularly English 328. I am imagining something like asking students, working in small groups, to make a 2 minute or less “sweded” version of something. It could be a pop movie, or, if I wanted it to fit more in the theme of the class, maybe it could be of a style and/or grammar rule, maybe a writing “tip” of some sort. We have the cheap cameras and (I think?) things like iMovie to make this work. Then students would have to write about the experience in terms of the process, what this different kind of “writing” says about more conventional “words in a row” writing, etc.
I don’t know, I think this is just crazy enough to work.
Tip o’ the hat to my friend Chris for this, though I would have come across it sooner than later since I have an RSS Feed set up to the fantastic site Improv Everywhere. Here’s video (and a link) to their latest, Food Court Musical:
The entry on the blog about this is interesting because it talks about some of the unusual steps they had to take to make this stunt happen. Funny stuff; reminded me of everyone’s favorite Buffy episode….
This is the last one of these sorts of things at Estabrook since Will is one of the big kids now. I think my favorite is still when Will was one of the narrators– either the second or third grade– but this is best movie of one of these I’ve made.
If science had been this cool when I was in high school, I wouldn’t have gotten that D in chemistry.
Some of the other English teachers in the crowd out there may have seen this one before; I had not, and it game me a chuckle in a good kinda way:
From my long-time/college friend Chris comes this video that explains the “Monty Hall Problem:”
Now, just to give you an idea about what kind of geek, arguer, and non-science/non-math kind of guy I was: I recall having long and even heated arguments about this topic among the seven other similarly inspired geeky folks I lived with on Davenport in Iowa City as an undergrad. And I even remember this carrying on into my MFA program. One night, a friend of mine and I tried to test this theory in the only way a couple English/creative writing types could have managed: we acted it in little table-top game of “Let’s Make a Deal,” playing it out 100 times. And damned if switching didn’t win 66 times.
Ah, memories.
While surfing about this morning, I came across a promo for a film called “The Last Calligraphers,” which is coming out this summer and which is a documentary about the only newspaper in Asia (maybe the world, I don’t know) written by hand. It’s been running since 1927. They do ultimately convert what they write into plates and print it, but the way that they “get it down” is kind of cool.