Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
Yesterday was a fine birthday. I got a card from my mom with a picture of a chicken in the middle of a road on the cover. "To someone," the preprinted material on the inside of the card reads, "who gets a lot of mileage out of old jokes!"
I burst out laughing when I read that, although I'm still not sure if I understand all of the reasons why this message is amusing.
One thing I noticed for the first time in my life yesterday was that I'm not sure how I should respond when someone wishes me "Happy Birthday." On New Years or Valentine's Day one can just respond with the same form salutation, but it doesn't make any sense to wish someone "Happy Birthday" when it isn't their birthday. So I decided to respond with, "Happy Micah's Birthday Day." Nobody I ran into seemed to get the joke.
Last night I watched The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, 1938) on Turner Classic Movies. Truly this is a fantastic movie and interesting as a work of art for a variety of reasons, two of which I will touch upon briefly. The film came out not too long after the birth of super hero comic books -in fact it came out the same year that Superman made his debut- and the film bears a great similarity to that genre both in terms of the colorful and larger than life costumes and the use of unrealistic witty remarks as a way of punctuating the climactic moments of action scenes. The Adventures of Robin Hood was also a product of the times in that it is easy to imagine audiences during the Great Depression identifying with the downtrodden and oppressed Merry Men and wishing that there was a way to right the wrongs of the day or perhaps identifying Robin Hood as the equivalent of FDR in terms of being for the downtrodden and yet still respecting legitimate authority. posted by micah holmquist at 4/05/2003 02:34:00 PM
