What about the squirrel people?? I once read that Stephen King was quite upset about how the movie turned out, but I can't understand that. It's brilliant in every way. They even cast Torrance's wife to make the audience sympathize , even if just a little bit, with Jack as he grows more and more annoyed with her whiny ass.
Yeah, he didn't like it at all. It had something about how the book is more of a ghost story than the movie version of a crazy dude going crazier. There were some ghosts though pushing him along though.
Someone made a cheesy movie of the week version of the book with That Guy From The Show Wings as Jack. It stunk, but Stephen King liked it.
They play a really creepy song at the end of the Kubrick version but I've never been able to find it. Not on the internet, not in stores, not in the liberry.
__________________ I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love." - John Steinbeck
Yeah, that's it. I've never been able to find a recorded version of that song. They didn't release a soundtrack for the movie.
In other, more hijacking news... that photo at the end -- they wanted to take a real photo of Nicholson surrounded by people "at the party" but weren't able to pull it off because people today (or in the 80's) just didn't look the same as the people in the 20's. That was real old-fashioned photoshop they did there, with an exacto knife and a light table and Jack's head on someone else's body.
Also, the kid who played Danny never acted again and became a school teacher. He never saw the movie as a kid and didn't even know it was a horror movie when he was in it, IIRC.
And back to our regularly scheduled programming. I'll stop talking about that movie now.
For our fifth round pick, in the Explorer category Team silent enim leges inter arma selects Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1490-1557/1558 /1559)
de Vaca was Spanish Treasure Seeker/Explorer that landed in Florida in 1528 and wandered around to Texas, Northern Mexico and maybe even as far New Mexico and Arizona.
He also had travels in South America and was the first European to see the Iguazu Falls.
I was considering taking Coronado for his explorations into what would become the American West, however I figured I would take the Eastern explorer as I assumed Coronado was more well known.
In the Humanitarian / Innovator category, Strange Things Afoot at the Circle K is proud to select Henry David Thoreau. This guy was completely ahead of his time. His Civil Disobedience was a massively influential work about resistance of government, which sprang out of his objections to the Spanish American war and his refusal to pay taxes as a result. He's been branded an anarchist by some and an impractical libertarian by others, but his ideas were influential to Ghandi and Martin Luther King, among others.
His next book, Walden was at least as influential, for completely different reasons. For two years, he lived in a cabin near Walden Pond, and wrote about his observations both of his environment and himself. This work forms some of the earliest and most important writings about ecology and environmental history, while at the same time spurring an interest in appreciation of nature (particularly through hiking and canoeing) as an important experience for one's spirit. Everything from the national parks movement in the US and Canada to modern lifestyle trends like Slow Food or the One Hundred Mile Diet are heavily influenced by Walden's work. He was arguably the original environmentalist, though it was never really a cause for him; he rarely talked about what society was obligated to do, but moreso about what one had the right and the self-interest to do.
Add to it that he was an outspoken abolitionist and one of the first American advocates of Darwin's theories of evolution, and he was clearly ahead of his time. His simple living ideas are a message that resonates more today than 160 years ago when he wrote it. Writers, artists, architects, politicians, social activists, scientists, and the general public have all been influenced thoreaughly by his work.
The Following User Says Thank You to octothorp For This Useful Post:
He's got 18 hours since the time DFF AK'd himself.
That hurt by the way. Takes way more flexibility than a guy like me could ever hope to have.
__________________ I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love." - John Steinbeck
In the Humanitarian / Innovator category, Strange Things Afoot at the Circle K is proud to select Henry David Thoreau. This guy was completely ahead of his time. His Civil Disobedience was a massively influential work about resistance of government, which sprang out of his objections to the Spanish American war and his refusal to pay taxes as a result.
Was he a free man on the land?
The Following User Says Thank You to troutman For This Useful Post:
In the Humanitarian / Innovator category, Strange Things Afoot at the Circle K is proud to select Henry David Thoreau. This guy was completely ahead of his time. His Civil Disobedience was a massively influential work about resistance of government, which sprang out of his objections to the Spanish American war and his refusal to pay taxes as a result. He's been branded an anarchist by some and an impractical libertarian by others, but his ideas were influential to Ghandi and Martin Luther King, among others.
His next book, Walden was at least as influential, for completely different reasons. For two years, he lived in a cabin near Walden Pond, and wrote about his observations both of his environment and himself. This work forms some of the earliest and most important writings about ecology and environmental history, while at the same time spurring an interest in appreciation of nature (particularly through hiking and canoeing) as an important experience for one's spirit. Everything from the national parks movement in the US and Canada to modern lifestyle trends like Slow Food or the One Hundred Mile Diet are heavily influenced by Walden's work. He was arguably the original environmentalist, though it was never really a cause for him; he rarely talked about what society was obligated to do, but moreso about what one had the right and the self-interest to do.
Add to it that he was an outspoken abolitionist and one of the first American advocates of Darwin's theories of evolution, and he was clearly ahead of his time. His simple living ideas are a message that resonates more today than 160 years ago when he wrote it. Writers, artists, architects, politicians, social activists, scientists, and the general public have all been influenced thoreaughly by his work.
I don't know how old he was when he wrote Walden, or when this picture was taken, but that is not the dude I pictured when I read that book. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of him before.
I gotta admit I found it a bit of a slog after a while, but yeah, he sure was ahead of his time. Good pick.
I don't know how old he was when he wrote Walden, or when this picture was taken, but that is not the dude I pictured when I read that book. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of him before.
I gotta admit I found it a bit of a slog after a while, but yeah, he sure was ahead of his time. Good pick.
Well there's also this photo. But I can't even begin to make sense of the facial hair. It's not even facial hair. It's just neck hair.
Okay, I'll admit that this is a corny observation of mine, but people really used to look "different". This is kind of connected to my blatherings about that picture of Nicholson at the end of The Shining. People in the 80's just didn't look like people did in 1929.
Why is that?
The internet tells me that Thoreau died when he was 44 years old. The pictures you provided of him make him look like an old man, even the picture of him as a young man. The first one especially -- with that beard and those sad, sunken eyes, if you told me it was taken on his 75th birthday I'd believe it.
I understand the advances in nutrition and lazy lifestyle and not cutting down trees with an axe all day and no more scurvy or whatever, but geez, he was a one wizened up old dude in his early 40's.
My grandpa was born just a few generations after Thoreau and Gramps still looked like Charles Atlas when he was 75 years old. Their lives weren't all that different (my grandpa worked his ass off all his life, and live in a house with sod walls when he was a kid) but he didn't look like a geezer until he was geezer. HDT looked like a senior citizen when he was in his 30's.
Okay, so I'm going to take a guy who, when you think about it, has caused the Americans fits for over a century and a half now...Karl Marx. He'll take up my philosophizing (holy crap I can't believe that's an actual word) spot.
Although he probably wouldn't consider himself a Marxist nowadays, he set into motion the entire communist system. I still think it's possible for a good communist system to work, but it'd take a tonne of retooling. If it worked as well in practice as it did in theory, it'd be a great, great system. Anyways, stuff on Marx:
Oh, one more thing...he had one of the greatest beards ever.
Marx distinguished historical eras in terms of distinct modes of production. For example, he observed that European societies had progressed from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production. Marx believed that under capitalism, the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production (for example, we develop a new technology, such as the Internet, and only later do we develop laws to regulate that technology). Marx regarded this mismatch between (economic) base and (social) superstructure as a major source of social disruption and conflict.
As a scientist and materialist, Marx did not understand classes as purely subjective (in other words, groups of people who consciously identified with one another). He sought to define classes in terms of objective criteria, such as their access to resources — that is, whether or not a group owns the means of production. For Marx:
Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) functions precisely as the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity—when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they do not sell the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor-power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor-power are "proletarians". The person who buys the labor power, generally someone who does own the land and technology to produce, is a "capitalist" or "bourgeois". The proletarians inevitably outnumber the capitalists.
The work of Marx and Engels covers a wide range of topics and presents a complex analysis of history and society in terms of class relations. Followers of Marx and Engels have drawn on this work to propose grand, cohesive theoretical outlooks dubbed "Marxism". Nevertheless, Marxists have frequently debated amongst themselves over how to interpret Marx's writings and how to apply his concepts to their contemporary events and conditions. Moreover, one should distinguish between "Marxism" and "what Marx believed"; for example, shortly before he died in 1883, Marx wrote a letter to the French workers' leader Jules Guesde, and to his own son-in-law Paul Lafargue, accusing them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of lack of faith in the working class. After the French party split into a reformist and revolutionary party, some accused Guesde (leader of the latter) of taking orders from Marx; Marx remarked to Lafargue, "if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist" (in a letter to Engels, Marx later accused Guesde of being a "Bakuninist").
__________________
Let's get drunk and do philosophy.
If you took a burger off the grill and slapped it on your face, I'm pretty sure it would burn you. - kermitology
In the fifth round, team Five-hole selects in the hotly competitive Explorer category, Pytheas.
Pytheas lived in the 4th century BC and was a Greek explorer from the city of Massilias (now Marseilles). He:
- was the first explorer to circumnavigate Great Britain
- possibly observed and documented Stonehenge
- travelled far enough northward to discover the "midnight sun"
- was the first to link the tides with the moon
- discovered an island in the far north which he called "Thule", which may have been Iceland
- discovered "drift ice" -- icebergs -- and was the first to document them
- was the first to locate the north pole in the sky
This guy was the old school kind of explorer, the kind of dude who expected to fall off the edge of the Earth or discover a magical land where be there dragons. Check out this quote from "Strabo", whose account of Pytheas' travels is one of our only records:
"Pytheas also speaks of the waters around Thule and of those places where land properly speaking no longer exists, nor sea nor air, but a mixture of these things, like a "marine lung", in which it is said that earth and water and all things are in suspension as if this something was a link between all these elements, on which one can neither walk nor sail."
Okay, so I'm going to take a guy who, when you think about it, has caused the Americans fits for over a century and a half now...Karl Marx. He'll take up my philosophizing (holy crap I can't believe that's an actual word) spot.
