I am the man who will fight for your honour

At the beginning of the year, I gave my students a questionnaire so I could better understand what they had studied in previous years. I also included some question that were intended to make it seem like I actually give a crap about their boring lives. One of those questions was, "What was the best movie you saw this summer?" The most common answer was The Dark Knight. Unfortunately for my students, this was an incorrect answer. The correct answer was Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog. (I don't buy into the idea thatDr. Horrible is a TV series with three episodes. I consider it a short film that was split for distribution.) It turns out that none of my students had even bothered to watch Dr. Horrible. I do not tolerate this kind of pop culture ignorance, but I could never find a legitimate use for Dr. Horrible in the classroom. Until now.

Talking about books is different than talking about movies. When people ask me about movies, I can say, "I watched The Dark Knight" and they'll usually know what I'm talking about. Or even if I'm talking about an Indie or foreign film, I can say, "I watched an indie or foreign film" and they'll realize that I'm a pretentious asshole. I can't do that with books. There's not really and indie or foreign book scene that has an identifiable presence for most people. So when talking about books, I usually have to give a quick blurb or plot summary to explain what I'm reading. I've generally found that the better the blurb, the better the book.

So Long, Clyde... More great news on the monkey eradication front.  It seems that the orangutan population is much smaller than originally estimated, meaning that wild orangutan population is declining even faster than the pro-monkey alarmists has originally estimated.  This is fantastic.

Orangutans are the most deceptively charismatic of all the dastardly monkey breeds.  Their silly raspberries, sloppy kisses, and wanton destruction of posh hotels have entertained millions of dimwitted monkey sympathizers.  With the orangs out of the picture, the monkey revolution will lose its most photogenic weapon.

Tonight's Arizona Diamondbacks game is being presented as a tribute to the men and women serving in the Armed Forces.  They have a live, if somewhat shaky, link to a medical unit in Iraq and they are also letting local family members talk to their relatives and spouses serving in Iraq.  That's all well and good--a fitting tribute for the Fourth of July (I believe they also did something like this on Memorial Day)--but I've got two problems.

Much has been said and written about Netflix's "Watch Now" or "Watch Instantly" feature.  Most things I've read but am too lazy to look up again and link to seem to agree that the selection could use some improvement.  I do know that some dude from Slate wrote: 

I found the offerings impressively bad, as though some schlock curator from an Ivy League cinema studies department was called upon to select the dreckiest soft-porn screwball comedies ever made

I've never studied film at an Ivy League school, but I did take film classes at a school just up the road from one, and I take offense at the suggestion that soft-porn screwball comedies are somehow an anathema to the cinema.  A world without Jewel Shepard is a world I don't want to be a part of.