Month: November 2005

SAGUENAY, Quebec – A 15-year-old girl with a peanut allergy died after kissing her boyfriend, who had just eaten a peanut butter snack, hospital officials said Monday.

1. How and when did you first encounter Monty Python, and what was it that “clicked” with you?
   I actually answered this back in 2003 in an issue of Completely Different (PDF), the Penn State Monty Python Society newsletter. It was around that time that I first discovered this here meme. What I wrote was:
   

   The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excali—oh, sorry, wrong story. Well, like a lot of people, I discovered Monty Python in the strangest of places — junior high school. I had friends who quoted this movie of which I’d never heard, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I listened, I investigated, and, lo and behold, it turned out to actually be funny! So I rented the movies, and I bought the albums, I read some of the books, but it wasn’t until I came to Penn State that I actually saw an episode of the TV show. I discovered the Python Society quite by accident at the Fall Involvement Fair. The table was empty, but there was a sign-up sheet and a weird poster informing passersby that this was the organization the University was afraid to let you join. (Or something like that.) Naturally, I signed up. The rest, as they say, is history. Not very interesting history, but there you have that all the same.

   Which still seems about right.

2. What is your favorite geeky activity?
   While writing and reading can both qualify as geeky, especially when you toss in my penchant for science-fiction stories, people don’t exactly look at you weirdly when you try to describe them. Capping on the other hand… I’ve probably been capping for just shy of a decade now, and it shows no sign of getting old. (Even if the jokes themselves do.)
3. What are the best and worst things about working in the publishing field?
   This is my first official job in the field, and the first job I got after living in Pennsylvania on my own for five years. So I doubt I have enough perspective to accurately answer that one. The things that sometimes annoy me about this job don’t really bear repeating, and I don’t know that they’d apply across the board in other publishing jobs. I like books, though. And I like being in a job that gets me around them.
4. If you had the choice of being remembered as a novelist, a poet, or a critic (but only one of those), which would it be and why?
   I’m not a very good critic — as my almost-never-updated book log and now-almost-half-a-year-out-of-date film review list can attest. And while I’ve written some poems I’ve enjoyed, I don’t think I’ll ever think of myself as a poet. Can I be remembered as a novelist without actually writing a novel? I’d like to be remembered as, among other things, a writer.
5. Coleman Francis, Ed Wood and Ray Dennis Steckler: Compare, contrast, or vilify.
   There’s a PUMAT cap in there, I just know it! I’d actually never heard of Steckler before (although I have seen The Incredibly Strange Creatures…). Of the two that I know, I’d much rather watch Ed Wood’s films. They’re just as awful, but they’re enthusiastically awful. Francis’ films, on the other hand, are just a wee bit depressing. Although he did inspire a toe-tapping musical…

1. Pick fifteen(!) films you love/thoroughly enjoyed.
2. Find screen captures (stills) for each film, preferably from scenes you like. If you can’t find a still, pick a new movie.
3. Post the pictures with the rules; let your readers guess which still is from which movie. (Readers, no cheating. No Google.)
4. Post the answers. [If the pictures have links attached, they’ve been correctly guessed. See the comments below for credit.]

Here, then, are the pictures:

That’d make for one weird double-feature.

Playing around with the feature, I’m noticing that, often, people seem to be more interested in movies about what they supposedly already know. “Local favorites” often translates to favorite movies about the locale.

For instance, four of the top five films in Washington, D.C., are about Washington, D.C. Ditto for Baltimore, MD. Seattle, WA, only manages three out of four, but still, the principle’s pretty much the same. And Miami, FL, skews unsurprisingly toward Spanish-language features and films about nearby Cuba.

The number one rental in Las Vegas is season one of Las Vegas. In Chicago, it’s Eight Men Out about the Chicago White Sox. In Bangor, ME, a Stephen King miniseries wins out. While in Austin, TX, the top rental is Slacker, filmed in town by local Richard Linklater.

It doesn’t always work like this. There’s no sign of anything like Northern Exposure in the top 25 for Anchorage, Fairbanks or Juneau, for instance — just as there’s no sign of Beverly Hills 90210 discs in the rentals for Beverly Hills. New York City’s top 10 are all foreign-language films (the lone exception being 1966’s Blowup, director Michelangelo Antonioni first English-language feature). Often, there are films that, if they do have any local significance, it’s difficult to figure out how.