What did I say about researchers? Kevin Holtsberry points to an amazingly unqualified study by National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute and AARP that we should drink coffee. “We think our study provides some reassurance that (drinking coffee) may not increase their risk of death,” says one researcher. Of course, he meant death from various specific diseases within a certain timeframe. But, you know, details.
All posts by Phil
Study Says Novels Influence Readers
I know scientists of all stripes choose to study things that may seem obvious to us in order to thoroughly understand why they happen, but somehow this one seems like a high school science fair project. A researcher “suspects novels can sometimes be life-changing.” Yes. Yes, they can be.
In other research news, people will judge a body by his facial hair. An online poll shows the soul patch and chinstrap beard are the most offensive.
There Is No God, But… Cool!
M. Leary has an interesting article (probably more interesting if you have already seen the movie, which I have not) on the few references to gods and deity in Marvel’s The Avengers.
Not one to sit on his duff when justice can be served, Captain America begins preparing to do his thing. “Wait,” Black Widow says. “You might wanna sit this one out, Cap. These guys are basically gods.” To which, the Captain replies, “There’s only one God, ma’am. And I don’t think he dresses like that.” And out of the plane Captain leaps, his fall to earth surely cushioned by his ideological purity.
Leary makes the valid point that whenever you pull God into the conversation, you can’t just side-step him. Somehow, a simple reference draws in a world of meaning.
Create Culture, Christian Filmmaker
Mike Cosper talks about telling great stories and making films to the best of your ability.
They say that anything worth doing is worth doing badly. This is as true of filmmaking as it is of anything, and it’s the final thing that I’d say to a Christian who wants to be the next Spielberg or Soderberg. If you want to make films, then make films. Make them badly. Make them with iPhones and flip cameras, edit them on a laptop or in a computer lab at your middle school. Make lots of them and don’t worry about whether or not they’re good until you’ve made 10 or 20. Even then, don’t worry when they’re bad. Look for the things you’ve done well and figure out how to apply those lessons to the entire next project.
How to Survive a Robot Uprising
In the Spirit of Free Thinking, We Will Fire the Critic
Naomi Riley blogging (on a team of bloggers) for The Chronicle on Higher Education has criticized dissertations written by students in the Black Studies department. She argued in bold words that the ideas kicked around in Black Studies dissertations were vapid, hunting for racism in every tiny microcosm of America culture. Many Chronicle readers were outraged. Riley responded in part by writing:
I find the idea that there is something particularly heinous in criticizing graduate students or dissertations to be laughable at best. Just because they are still called students doesn’t mean they’re not grown-ups. When someone in their 30s (me) criticizes the dissertation topic of someone in their 20s, that’s “bullying“?
Feel free to entertain yourself by reading the posts and comments, but to cut to the chase, Alan Jacobs lays it all out. In short, he explains how hard it must be for the Chronicle to hire a blogger for the sake of diverse, atypical thinking, and then have to fire her for diverse, atypical thinking. Gotta hate it.
Maurice Sendak on His Father’s Stories
Author and artist Maurice Sendak, who narrates his own book in the video below, died today at age 83. In this interview from 2006, he recalls his father telling stories.
[Sendak] says he was greatly influenced by his father, who told the sickly child stories when he was bedridden. They weren’t pretty stories — they were real-life and vividly imagined tales from his father’s life as a boy living in a little Jewish shtetl in Poland. “What I liked about his stories … they were real and true, and he could tell us them without cleaning them up.”
Sendak says he closely identified with children who died in the holocaust, because if his parents hadn’t immigrated to the United States from Poland, he would have been one of those children. “‘I always felt it was a total miracle that I had been born here.” All of his father’s relatives were killed in the Holocaust, Sendak says, and many cousins his own age did not survive,” writes Frank Rizzo of The Courant.
“Most of my important books are threaded with the Holocaust. I try not to make it obvious and bang the drum, but it’s there. My whole life was the Holocaust, unfortunately. And Brundibar
seems to be maybe the place where I can stop and bring peace to myself and the subject. It’s the perfect subject: of children who lived through the worst things, who were tough, who sang and then were sent to Auschwitz to die.”
Like a Sparrow’s Swift Flight
It seems to me this present life, oh king,
compared to all the time we cannot see
is like a sparrow’s swift flight through a hall
where you are seated, feasting with your men
around a fire of a winter’s night:
the wind roars, snow and rain come down outside.
Flying in one door then out another
the sparrow will be safe from the foul weather
for the brief interval it is inside
but in an instant it is gone from sight
into the snow and darkness once again.
The longest human life is brief withal.
As to what comes before or after, we
cannot, with certitude, know anything.
Taken from “Exercises,” a poem by Bill Coyle
Why Do Some Stories Work?
Pete Peterson writes about the shape of good stories. “So what makes a story work? … Transformers—didn’t work. District 9—did work. Star Wars—worked. Battle Beyond the Stars—didn’t work. Interview with a Vampire—worked. Twilight—well…I say it didn’t work. It’s harder to play this game with books because books that don’t work quickly fade into obscurity and we never even hear of them, but trust me, for every Gilead there’s another diary-based memoir out there that’s an interminable bore.”
I wasted a couple hours of my life watching Battle Beyond the Stars. I’m sure I saw an edited for TV version, because looking back on it, it looks much worse than the slock I remember. On the other side of the spectrum, I stopped reading Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, because the pacing is just too slow. Don’t look at me that way. I know I’m losing my English major street cred. I’m not happy about it.
Star Wars Summaries in Lego
Star Wars may not be the greatest sci-fi story ever told, but it is a very loud voice in the room. And Legos may not be the best toy ever made–that’s just silly. They are the best toy ever made. And now we have,
“The Fastest and Funniest LEGO Star Wars Story Ever Told”
Today is Star Wars day. May the Fourth be with you.