Around St. Blog's: March 2005 Archives

From Vita Brevis

The latest craze is to disclose the movie character with whom you most closely identify.

Joe Gillis from Sunset Boulevard--I'll leave the parallels to your imagination.

Either that or Henry Higgins, and I paraphrase here, " And I treat a duchess as if she was a flower girl. . . . The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another." (From the Play, not the film)

from an idea at Summa Minutiae

Here's a blogger challenge: describe yourself with three quotes - serious, ironic, humorous, whatever - from various literary sources, as I've done in the "About the author" section over in the right sidebar.

My quotations:

"H[is] changes change his changes constantly" Dante Inferno

"And such a want-wit sadness it makes of me,
I have much ado to know myself" Antonio Merchant of Venice

"Something appealing,
Something appalling,
Something for everyone
a comedy tonight" A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Okay, this was really, really hard, and I may have to change it, but this comes close.

Okay, I've resisted temptation up until now, but like Oscar, "I can resist anything but temptation." So my list of ten things most others might not have done:

1. Won first prize in an annual James Joyce writing competition for a poem composed in a composite language modeled on Finnegan's Wake

2. Named a species of fossil after my wife. (It was a compliment not any implication about the spouse.)

3. Had dinner and a knock-down drag-out fight with Stephen Jay Gould over the theory of contingency and whether it properly understood was science or not. (Okay, I admit it, that's an exaggeration. Let us say an animated and lengthy discussion complete with table napkin drawings and other paraphenalia.)

4. Went to a poetry reading (and read) in a State Penitentiary

5. Demonstrated origami for International Children's Days on the National Mall.

6. Assisted in digs on Mount Vernon Grounds and Williamsburg.

7. Helped excavate a mammoth, a dog-faced bear, and a peccary the size of a horse.

8. Went on a field trip to San Salvador, Bahamas to study modern carbonate depositional environments and joined the islanders in an iguana and conch feast.

9. Sat on Sophia Loren's lap in a helicopter shuttle for Kennedy Airport to La Guardia.

10. Presented a paper in a National Geological Convention on the periodicity of Mass extinctions and was congratulated and assisted by no less than David Raup and Jack Sepkoski themselves.

Welcome back to Gregg the Obscure--Vita Brevis

A Blogger's Examination of Conscience

....from Video Meliora and SummaMamas. List the first five movie quotes you can think of. They must be from different movies. Here are mine:

(1) "My she was yar" (Hepburn referring to "True Love" in The Philadelphia Story

(2) "While you wait you can read my column. It'll make minutes fly
like hours." (George Sanders in All About Eve) Close tie for my favorite line with "Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke. . ."

(3) "If I hold you any closer I'll be standing behind you." (Groucho Marx--don't recall which movie)

(4) "Klaatu, barada nikto," (Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still)

(5) " You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow." (Bacall to Bogart in From Here to Eternity

(6) " Alright Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up" closely rivaled by "We didn't need dialogue, we had faces." (Either case Gloria Swanson to the Police and Max or William Holden Sunset Boulevard

(7) And for my swan song, the one you have to have context for, but the greatest closing of any comedy, "Well, nobody's perfect." (Joey Brown to Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. You can listen to it here

(8) But, were I being truthful, the second quote I thought of was , "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore Toto."

And just as a bonus on this feature--the reason the first came to mind right away was because I just a moment ago was listening to Patsy Cline singing "True Love" which is the song in High Society where Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby are recalling the yacht they had--"True Love." (As though you cared, but that does explain the stream of consciousness--for the rest of this--I cannot say where they came from.)

Read about it here.