What I'm Reading: John Donne and Zombies

"No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; 


if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; 


any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; 


And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. 


And, also, beware of zombies."


--John Donne, Meditation 17
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

What I'm Learning: New Words

I’m always on the hunt for new words. Not enough to use Word Of The Day Toilet Paper, but I’m definitely a word nerd. I even like that it rhymes.

So the other day I’m skimming through my Twitter feed, and I run across a word I’d never heard before. The word was “anisotropic.” Of course, I immediately determined to figure out what it meant and to drop it in the first conversation in which I could reasonably make it fit. It’s what I do. Go ahead, judge me.

What I'm Writing: my Super 8 review

I loved Super 8. So much. Here's why--or actually, here's why I can't explain it.

Super 8 Review on pretentiousfilmmaker.com

What I’m Watching: Kung-Fu Panda 2 and Sherlock Holmes

The BBC’s got a great new iteration of Sherlock Holmes in the form of an hour-and-a-half TV show. That’s 90 minutes WITHOUT commercials. Basically they’re making Sherlock movies, and they’re good. The creators are definitely fans of the famous detective—in three episodes they’ve drawn heavily on the original canon. It’s worth watching, and you can find it on Netflix.

 

One of my favorite bits of Sherlockian lore is Holmes’ infamous ignorance. He refuses to learn facts about life that he deems useless. Dr Watson discovers that Holmes doesn’t even know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and when enlightened, doesn't much care. “How can that information help me to solve crimes?” He demands of Watson. To him, it’s info not worth knowing. He determines to forget it.

In Kung Fu Panda 2, Po (Jack Black’s Panda character) finds himself in need of some information he’d previously thought of as irrelevant: where he came from.