Comic for Friday, January 29, 2010

Posted: 6:30 am, Friday, January 29

1000 essays. Two days. My eyes are bleeding. Some are legitimately good. Some are incomprehensible. One kid wrote about the Art of Seduction. My kids overall are doing quite well.

Today's strip may have made more sense had Pete been delivering Jen's lines, but I realized that there is no one Pete would ever bother to say hello to in the morning.

Drolett gave him props, Salinger finally found out where the ducks in Central Park go when it's winter. I actually do not dislike Catcher in the Rye, which I believe puts me in the minority of people my age. I would like to highly recommend King Dork - again - to anyone who hated Catcher in the Rye. And anyone who loved it. I guess if you were lukewarm, you can maybe give King Dork a skip, unless you like rock music and were kind of a big outcast in high school.

Why are the summer Olympics such a bigger draw than the winter? I *love* the winter Olympics. I don't give a shit about the summer. I like the lame sports in the summer Olympics. Like equestrian and rhythm gymnastics. Just weird shit. That's the best part about the summer Olympics. But everything about the winter Olympics are awesome. Hockey, luge, bobsled, skiing, the fucking biathlon. The biathlon! Cross-country skiing and fucking shooting things! And then more cross-country skiing! *Awesome.*

Has anybody a favorite between the Murders in the Rue Morgue and the Purloined Letter? I'm thinking of doing a few short stories in the nine days I have between testing and February break, during which I would start building up for the Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I'll probably reda them both over the weekend, and it may depend on which I actually have copies of in the book room, if either, but I just thought I'd ask.

My brain is a plate of scrambled eggs. Sorry. I got nothin'.

bullfrog

2.0 -- Friday, January 29 2010, 08:55 am

Scrambled eggs would have been nice this morning for breakfast.

I never really "got" catcher in the rye. read it and was just left wondering what's the big deal? Then again I wasn't an angry disillusioned adolescent male...

Vote for Purloined Letter but I've never been a big Poe fan. Cask of Amantiado (sp?) was always good too. The more I ponder on it why not have them read some of the Sherlock Holmes stories? As some of them probably saw the movie it might sucker them into reading the stories. The Speckled Band might be cause for some interest among the young folk. Just a thought.

I'm with y'all-- didn't really like Catcher. Holden bugged me. But I didn't read it in high school, sometime in college, so it may have lost most of the appeal.

Sherlock is the next week. I'm going with the origin of detective stories and then onto Christie.

I dunno, I liked Catcher OK. I don't like trying to teach it, though.

I'd vote for Murders in the Rue Morgue just because it involves a monkey.

Don't forget the skeleton and ski jumping in the winter olympics. Just two more awesome fucking reasons it kicks the summer olympics ass.

CURLING. Curling is awesome.

Did one of us work at KBR when this went down?

http://www.slate.com/id/2242792/

when i taught catcher at an all-girls school, the majority of my kids loved it. LOVED it. wanted to date holden. seriously?

must be an age thing. i read it when i was 21 and kept telling myself that it was going to get better, it HAD to get better, and then it never did. i actually cried when i heard that i had to teach it, but the girls' love of holden, though puzzling and sometimes nauseating, gave me kind of a new perspective.

did anyone hear the storycorps segment this morning on npr? it was from a wisconsin man who drove to NH to find salinger, and just basically knocked on his door and salinger invited him in because it was raining. he said that he wanted to ask salinger to see where he did his writing, but didn't want to be "one of those people." seriously? you just drove across the country to find this notoriously private man and crashed his house, and you're not "one of those people"?

Call me an old man, but the events that somewhat lose me are the freestyle skiing and the snowboard half pipe. They seem to belong more in the X-games than in the Olympics. I prefer the events with objectively measurable outcomes. (Figure skating also fails this litmus test, but definitely does not belong in the X-games.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Olympic_Games#Sports

I agree. Anything added after 1994 sucks.

I actually like figure skating, kind of. I love ice dancing. Tanith Belbin. Yowza. And who can forget the Torville and Dean performance to Bolero? Olympic history.

Why are you all looking at me like that? What?

Maybe "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"? It's not a mystery, but it would set them up for narrative uncertainty. "Cask of Amontillado" good for that too, I guess, and also "The Tell-Tale Heart."

I read CATCHER in high school and did not like it, but then I read it again after I moved to NYC and found it really sweet and sad. Part of this was that I understood what it meant now that this kid lived in the East 60s in Manhattan -- he was rich, and still so unhappy. Which maybe makes him more worthy of contempt, but also, again, sadder.

Catcher...I read it post college. Its redeeming quality is that it is short. I give it a one.

Changing the subject entirely, I am heartened by the news from an advance special screening of Scott Pilgrim v. the World.

http://www.collider.com/2010/01/20/mostly-positive-buzz-for-scott-pilgrim-vs-the-world-after-early-test-screening/

It is also nice to know that the final book is coming out before August.

I spoke of the brilliance of the Rape of Europa the other day, and I'm in the final days of the War now. Since it's not the book's focus, there's only been hints and murmurs at the death camps, which make me want to read more about WWII. Anyway, good op-ed from a Auschwitz survivor today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/opinion/29pisar.html

As someone who has always been thoroughly unpleasant, though never an adolescent male, I liked The Catcher in the Rye quite a bit which I never realized put me in the minority before. I like Salinger's other stuff better, was a bit obsessed with his short stories for a while, and read my copies of them occasionally. Which brings me to my psychic bookshelf of death. I went to find my copy of A People's History last night and I found my Zinn books shelved right next to my Salinger books. I hope I haven't inadvertently caused the young ZZ Packer any harm by filing her next to Salinger...

Joe B. - just saw your comment this afternoon. Believe me, I know that no one really goes to Columbia football games. Their average attendance at home is like 2k. They get about 5-7x that many on the road. My brother really made the decision because he liked the school and they place football players into absolutely absurd jobs.

It seemed to him like the students at Columbia are pretty nice kids too.

I second Ted's Head. Skeleton is awesome

There's a joke about how men's curling is very popular with the ladies. Because it's the only time they've ever seen guys sweep anything.

I'm looking forward to the Olympic Hockey.