Category: Random

(816): holy shit our president is awesome

~E.L.S.

I just wanted to take a quick second here to lend a shout-out to a close friend of mine, Jenny Jalack, and her blog! It sortof embarrasses me to see her flowing, insightful prose crop up every few days on her blog, The Global Flapjack, when all I can do here is give you periodic tidbits of new music and political rantings.

The pictures really help, and its a blog worth reading for the style alone. That aside, the content for the next few months will be especially fascinating as Jenny acclimates to living in Moscow, Russia, of all places!

Check it out.
I highly recommend.

… Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.”
-Andrew Clark

Today, Ethan called me on the phone to let me know that John Hughes had died. I was taken aback, for a moment. It’s always a bit of a blow, hearing things like that, unprompted. Not that I’m going to lose it over a man I hardly knew, who died of more-or-less natural causes, somewhat towards the latter part of his life. But I did feel a little pang that caught me unawares.

John Hughes, for those not aware, is a celebrated American filmmaker whose run of teenage angst films in the 1980s came to define the time for kids living back then. Among his bigger movies were The Breakfast Club, Ferris Buller’s Day Off, and Sixteen Candles. Later in life, he penned, under a pseudonym, the first two Home Alone films.

It’s just funny, because even though those movies came out almost 25 years ago, I feel like they have just as much impact today. They’re no less relevant just because their soundtracks are composed of a fantastically retro spread of 80s pop artists, and in fact I’d say that only serves to ramp up the nostalgia factor. The themes dealt with are pretty universal for growing up in middle America though: peer pressure, isolation, popularity, love, parents, friends. And the films managed to do it in a pretty earnest fashion.

The Breakfast Club, I feel, was Hughes’ best work. It has the best blend of humor, emotion, dancing, and “fuck-you-mom-and-dad-and-teachers-and-world” of any of the movies. Buller was funnier, and Sixteen Candles more quirky, but TBC pulled it off better than any of them. I remember watching that movie countless times in high school, feeling more and more spoken to with each successive iteration. Not to mention that opening the film with a Bowie quote was essentially one of the coolest things I could possibly imagine for such a film.

I noticed a while ago that I haven’t watched, nor felt the need to watch, TBC in quite a while. This startled me, because I used to watch it at least once a month the first two years of high school, and a few times a year Junior and Senior years. It occurs to me that perhaps this has something to do with the fact that I don’t need it like I used to. Those awkward years when everyone’s looking for reassurance of their own self-worth, and where everyone has a different way of finding it, have gone by, I suppose.

That’s sad to think about, that I don’t need Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, and Judd Nelson like I used to. The memories persist though; one time Lydia Schneider put an anonymous question in the “ask Mr. Hashman” hat which we passed around in scripture class. Hashman pulled it out and read it aloud to the class:

Does Barry Manillow know you raid his wardrobe?

I believe that, to this day, both men remain in ignorance of that undoubted truth. As for me?
“I’ll be alone, dancing, you know it baby.”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[ mp3 ♫ ]

Not a whole lot to say about this, except it’s awesome, and you should watch it.

I feel like this is a good note upon which to end the most prolific month in blogging Schrödinger’s Blog has ever seen! Thanks for reading. I will do my utmost to keep it up!

[NOTE: I did check NBC's website for the official upload of this clip, but couldn't track it down! EDIT: After NBC sniped the YouTube video, I was able to track down the official one. Which does look better, to their credit.]

[DOUBLE NOTE: (9.10.10) I keep losing this video because NBC is kinda fickle on what videos can stay up, below is a clip of the Tonight Show on MSNBC, introed by Howard Dean, which I think makes up for the slight degradation in video quality!]

Not that this is much of a revelation, but apparently the NRA is not too hot on Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Sheesh.

They’re including a given senator’s vote on the Sotomayor confirmation in their ‘ratings’ of senators, and I guess that’s fair. I just kinda feel like that’s kinda cheap. You only decide to include it after you’ve found her to not love guns to the extent that your bloodlust is satisfied? NRA, you should have been on top of this a long time ago. It’s the supreme court, for crying out loud! That should be in your stupid little evaluation thing either way.

From my read on the situation, these ratings the NRA arbitrates seem to carry a good deal of clout in getting people elected. That stands to reason, given the funding and resources behind the gun lobby. I guess it just makes me sad. I’ll go on record saying that I don’t like guns too much, and I wish nobody had ‘em, and also:

Confession: This post was supposed to have more analysis, but I lost an hour and a half watching Eddie Izzard clips on YouTube after looking for that clip. Oops.