There are lots of things I want to talk about that don’t quite deserve their own post, but can’t be condensed into 140 characters. So here they are, together at last:
- Which is the most egregious omission in one’s literary background: Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” or Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? This is an ongoing argument between my husband and myself. I vote for Prufrock as the most egregious omission, because I actually get a “water, water everywhere” reference, while my husband once missed a “do I dare to eat a peach?” reference. (He also once missed a reference I made to the song, “Maria”, from West Side Story, but that is a different post entirely.)
Of course, despite having this argument for the past several months, neither of us has actually gotten around to reading our missing poem. Clearly neither of us has been convinced that we have the most egregious omission!
On a slightly related note, one of my husband’s selling points for the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is that it can be sung to the tune of Gilligan’s Island! And until I saw today’s xkcd, I hadn’t realized that ballads have a specific meter, or that the theme to Gilligan’s Island is a ballad! Now I’m going to spend the rest of the day singing, “. . . and immortaliTY!”
- A general house rule is that we don’t watch TV while our son is in the room, with the exception of sporting events. We thought that was reasonable, especially as he didn’t pay attention to the TV, even as recently as during the World Cup. But college football started last night, and he was actually paying attention to the TV for several minutes at a time! I would feel more guilty about this, except that every minute he is looking at the TV is a minute that he’s not attacking a laptop. (Right now he loves opening and closing things: doors, drawers, CD cases, laptops, you name it. If anyone has a recommendation for a toy that has, like, lots of little doors on it, that would be awesome.) Also, this is correlated with him having more of a reaction to the video when we’re skyping with distant family members. Overall, it’s a pretty cool cognitive development. We just have to make sure we’re not ignoring him during football games.
- If you’re in the US, yesterday was 9/02/10 — or 90210! — and the Fug Girls commemorated it appropriately.
- You probably don’t think NPR when it comes to pop culture, especially television. But their Monkey See blog is really good. One of the bloggers, Linda Holmes, recapped at Television Without Pity for many years as Miss Alli, and she always has a great, dry take on the more ridiculous elements of various reality shows.
Next up: three day weekend. Woo-hoo!