Last week, I posted a picture with 50 stills from 50 movies and asked if you could name them. The person who made this image has posted the solutions — click here to see the “50 movies” picture with their names.
I managed to identify only three movies. How’d you do?
(Pardon the street argot — I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on the PlayStation 2 that Wendy got me for Christmas.)
My thanks to the Halifax Herald for listing this blog as one of the notable Canadian ones. I’d also like to send a shout-out to my co-worker Bessy Nikolaou for telling me about it.
Rob MacDougall is a friend of mine from Crazy Go Nuts University. We worked together for years on Crazy Go Nuts University’s intentionally funny newspaper, Golden Words. He now has a Ph.D. in History from Harvard and is a post-doc research fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
(There are some starange parallels here: Rob’s at Harvard, where Wendy
works, and he’s married to an American Jewish girl, as I will be come
September. I met Wendy at a party I gate-crashed at Norton’s Woods in
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.)
You may have heard of Tucker Carlson, whom Jon Stewart correctly identified as a dick on Crossfire not so long ago. You may have also heard of Ann Coulter, foaming-at-the-mouth neocon pinup attack dog and poster child for bipolar personality disorder.
They recently had a field day with President Bush’s recent visit to
Canada, going on with lines like “better hope the United States doesn’t
roll over one night and crush
them. They are lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent”
[Coulter] and “Without the U.S., Canada is essentially Honduras, but
colder and much
less interesting The average Canadian is busy dogsledding.” [Carlson]
Apparently, for Coulter and Carlson, high school hasn’t quite ended.
What they’re doing, is the equivalent of the jocks harassing the chess
club with “hey, faggot” or “hey, [insert your favourite racist epithet
here]” taunts. Someone should remind them that those tables often turn
once high school is over and university and the real world beckon.
Donna Wentworth of the EFF by way of Wendy pointed me to this video of the Carlson and Coulter having their “Blame Canada” fest. I’d comment, but Rob has done a much better job already.
As with the US justices, I could name two-thirds of the judges in my country’s Supreme Court:
Stumped? Their names are listed here.
(For those who keep tabs on this sort of thing: 4 of our 9 Supreme
Court judges are women. The Americans have 9 justices, but only 2 are
women.)
[via MetaFilter] According to a recent survey of “a representative sample of 1000 adults nationwide [America]”, two-thirds couldn’t name any of the justices of the US Supreme Court.
I wonder how many of the same people surveyed can name any winners of the Survivor reality TV series.
(I’m not American, and I can name two-thirds of the Justices.)
Here’s a picture of 50 stills from 50 different movies. Can you name any of them?
(Wendy, I’m going to need your help with this one.)
11:00 a.m. Wendy (yup, she flew in on Friday!) and I show up at the hospital to help Dad check out.
12:30 p.m. Lunch at Mom and Dad’s. Me, Wendy, Mom, Dad, sister Eileen, brother-in-law Richard, nephews Aidan and Nico.
At lunch, Aidan says “We’re all together now!” to which Dad says with a smile, “That’s right!”
2:00 p.m. I take Wendy on her
very first Christmas shopping trip. We buy presents for my sister,
brother-in-law, and cousins, who’ll all be gathered at the deVilla
extended family Christmas party on Saturday.
Wendy’s shop-fu is very good.
5:00 p.m. On the expressway bound for home when my cell phone rings. It’s In the Hall of the Mountain King — the family ringtone. I can’t answer because the phone is in my pocket and I’m driving.
“I’ll get it as soon as I get a chance to pull over,” I tell Wendy.
A minute later, the phone rings again. Family ringtone again. This
time, we’re off the highway, so I manage to pick up. It’s Eileen,
telling me that Dad was sweaty, spaced out and weak and that an
ambulance was coming for him.
I swung the car around and made tracks for the hospital for the second time that day.
5:15 p.m. Since we were
close to the hospital, we beat the ambulance to the ER. Minutes after
we arrive, Mom, Dad and the paramedics arrive. Dad’s passed out on a
stretcher, looking very pale with an oxygen mask strapped to his face,
while Mom very calmly reports all the details to the attending
physicians and nurses. All I can do is stand there. Wendy takes my hand
and squeezes it.
Mom tells us to wait in the ER lobby.
6:45 p.m. It turns out that
Dad’s blood sugar dropped to a dangerously low level. An IV helps bring
it back to a normal level, and he’s conscious again.
He tells us that he has no recollection of being taken from his bedroom
or the ambulance trip. “I felt as though I was in space and someone was
performing strange procedures on me. The next thing I remember is being
here.”
“Dad, you sound like an alien abductee,” I say, which makes him smile.
“You should eat,” Mom says. “Can we get you something?”
“I want a roast beef sandwich,” replies Dad.
I take everyone’s orders and Wendy and I go to the nearby Quizno’s.
7:30 p.m. ER picnic! Mom,
Dad, Eileen, Wendy and I are eating in the ER. Quizno’s isn’t fine
dining and the atmosphere of the ER isn’t anything to write home about,
but the stress of the past couple of hours has made us all famished.
I’ve visited Dad in the ER a number of times — he’s sort of like the
Indiana Jones of diabetes — and they always have a knack for putting
him beside a guy who’s pipelining five gallons of phlegm in his lungs.
I really hate that sound.
“Poor Wendy,” jokes Dad, “she’s been in town only two days and she’s been to the hospital three times already.”
9:00 p.m. Dad’s been moved to
the Cardiac Care Unit — the place he left only that morning — for
overnight observation. Mom, Eileen, Wendy and I make sure Dad’s all
right and head home.
Dad left the hospital late Sunday afternoon and had dinner with the family.
