The Husband's Blog

Phil 101

I'm marking another bunch of Phil 101 exams.  They're awful.  I don't really expect (unlike the teacher of this course) these students to understand the Naturalistic Fallacy, but I also don't really expect to have to read "philosipher" and *definitely* not "strateforward".

What are the high school dropouts like?  Can they even spell their own name?!

The same

Evil Ernie

Michael Jackson

It's the same person!

Shit day

I was sick last night, so I didn't go into school today.  I emailed the professors to let them know (before classes).  That tosser at philosophy of religion says they had a quiz and I can't make it up.  This will drop me to a B.  Heaven forbid that grades should be based on actual achievement - oh no, they should be based on when you happen to get sick.  If he doesn't bend on this I really think I will tell him exactly what I think of his shit class and his shit policy.  I've had enough.

Then I hit the wall.  Literally.  You know those incidents I'm talking about, when for some reason you aren't quite aware of the spatial dimensions of your body, and you end hurting yourself against a wall.  I fucked up one of my toes and got blood on the carpet.  And now it really hurts and I can barely walk.

It's been a good day.

Craptacular!

(minor spoilers)

Recently Jamie and I went to see Flags of Our Fathers and The Prestige.  Both were disappointing.

Flags of Our Fathers is didactic shit.  I hate being told what to think, especially from a brainless movie that doesn't actually have anything to say.

The Prestige wasn't bad, just disappointing given the people involved.  I had four basic problems with it:

1) The Obvious.  The twists were too obvious.  When Batman asked 'Fallon' to do what he could to smooth things over with his wife, I figured out what was going on there.  When we saw how Tesla's machine worked, I got what was going on with the 'death' of Wolverine.  I foolishly sat there working through possible further twists in my mind, naively believing those were only the beginning of some bigger twist.  And then the end of the movie came, and I was left there thinking "what, that's it?"  It's not like I'm some kind of twist guessing machine.  Both Fight Club and Sixth Sense got me.

2) The Pointless.  Without surprise twists, all you're left with is a movie about 2 arseholes being arseholes to each other.

3) The Contrived.  Let's get this straight.  Batman has a phony machine looking prop.  It does nothing, just looks cool.  Wolverine nicks the design and goes to Tesla who builds it.  And it just so happens that when he builds it this former prop in fact turns out to be a machine which can do something which is hundreds of years beyond our technology and quite possibly breaks the laws of nature, AND just so happens to let Wolverine complete the magic trick, albeit in a different way.  Talk about a fucking coincidence.

4) The Stupid.  So in the beginning there's that tragic scene.  Now forgive me if I'm missing something here, but the point of the trick is that the subject slips their hands out of the knot, reaches through a phony panel, and removes a phony lock to get out, right?  Now this subject can't get her hands out of the knot, so Michael Caine goes in there, axing away at the glass, but can't smash it in time.  Hey Michael, JUST REMOVE THE PHONY LOCK AND PULL HER OUT YOU IDIOT.  The thing that gets me about this is that in the scene where 'Wolverine' is 'drowning', Batman indeed goes to remove the lock.  So obviously the film is aware on some level that that's the way to get someone out of there.  They just ignore it so they can have their tragic scene.

...and then I cut his throat!

We had to listen to a Tracy Chapman song, with our eyes closed no less, in my philosophy of religion class today.  Tomorrow I'm meeting with the atheist professor who was originally going to teach that class.  I look forward to regaling him with such stories.

I guess, as a bibliophile, this is blasphemy, but for "I, Claudius" I prefer the tv show to the book.  The show just had more immediacy.