Gens Una Sumus
So, I’ve been looking for a “solution” to my chess-blogging problem for a while, now. Originally, I was hoping to find a plugin for wordpress that would take a pgn file and generate a game. Instead, I present the following game that I just quickly played (and lost) to SigmaChess Lite. The applet is generated by ChessViewer. That said, here goes: (UPDATE: I’m putting the applet after the flip to make scrolling the front page easier). (more…)
Or at least that’s what I was told about DC’s non-voting representative Eleanor Holmes Norton by someone or other. More importantly, however, this segment (found through http://del.icio.us/popular) from The Colbert Report shines some needed light on the issue of DC’s undemocratic status in our political system. If you want to do something about it, check out DCVote.
Related post: http://blog.scottcaplan.com/2006/04/11/dcvote/
What follows is the “review” I recently typed into my Now Reading sidebar widget for Slaughterhouse Five. (NB: If you buy any of the books on my widget through their Amazon links, I supposedly get some sort of Amazon associates credit towards even more books, yay!). Since I didn’t quite like the formatting on my library page for the book, I decided to turn it into a full-fledged post. The review is primarily intended as a question for those who have read the book, and I point out that my rating of 8 out of 10 is only because I found it just a tad too big a chunk for me as a reader (the 8, therefore, is only relative to me, and is not a general statement about the book). The review follows on the flip… (more…)
So I caught a chunk of the movie Footloose on TBS the other night, and had a few comments on my reaction to it.
I don’t quite remember how I thought of the movie when I originally saw it (several years ago, I can’t be more precise than that, unforutnately), but I do know how I thought of it once it had been internalized (i.e., just prior to a few days ago). If somebody had asked me to summarize the movie, I would have given them something like this:
Ren, played by Kevin Bacon, is a teenager who moves to a smalltown in the midwest during his senior year in high school. He is a gymnast whose principal form of self-expression is dance, and is more enlightened than the rest of the town, who ignorantly insist on banning dancing because of an accident that happened several years ago when dancing and booze got out of hand and several youngsters, including the preacher’s son, died in a tragic car crash. Ren comes into town and makes the uptight town realize that dancing is not intrinsically bad; on the contrary, it is a healthy, natural, important part of a normal life. In the end, the town elders come to their senses, and somewhat reluctantly, albeit definitely, allow a senior prom. The plot thickens when a romance develops between Ren and the preacher’s daughter, who is also a senior in high school, and abandons her boyfriend for Ren. It is above all, a movie about the excesses of asceticism combined with a statement of the superiority of urban over rural and young over old.
However, now I would consider this a rather simplistic view of the film. (more…)