Day: January 24, 2005

Trifecta

The three DVDs that just completed their visit to NewMexiKen from Netflix were Before Sunset, Maria Full of Grace and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I watched the latter for the second time today and it too rates five ristras on the NewMexiKen scale (five being best).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as introduced by Roger Ebert —

It’s one thing to wash that man right outta your hair, and another to erase him from your mind. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” imagines a scientific procedure that can obliterate whole fields of memory — so that, for example, Clementine can forget that she ever met Joel, let alone fell in love with him. “Is there any danger of brain damage?” the inventor of the process is asked. “Well,” he allows, in his most kindly voice, “technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage.”

The movie is a labyrinth created by the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, whose “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” were neorealism compared to this.

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslett are superb as the confused and confusing couple Joel and Clementine.

Interesting and good as the film was first time through, it is much better the second time when one knows what’s happening well enough to focus on the story, characters and dialogue. If you saw it once and liked it, see it again. If you haven’t seen it, see it twice.

A word that gets more useful with each day

Kakistocracy (from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000)

SYLLABICATION: kak·is·toc·ra·cy
PRONUNCIATION: kăkibreve-stŏk’rə-sē, käk’ibreve–
NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. kak·is·toc·ra·cies
Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.
ETYMOLOGY:
Greek kakistos, worst, superlative of kakos, bad; caco– + –cracy.
Oldest use: 1829.

* Reference link 1
* Reference link 2

PUTTING THE WORD TO USE:
“Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?” – 1876 OED

From Altercation correspondent Barry R.

Gold …

was discovered by James W. Marshall on the property of Johann Sutter near Coloma, California, on this date in 1848. By the end of the year the rush was on; nearly 100,000 people arrived in California in 1849.

But these days, as The Gatlin Brothers sang —

All the gold in California
Is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills
In somebody else’s name

Team mother

In case you wondered, that really is Donovan McNabb’s mother in the Campbell’s Soup commercials. From the The New York Times —

That was Wilma McNabb, the true mother of Donovan. But in 2001, her son’s first year as part of Chunky’s “mama’s boys” campaign, an actress portrayed her. It was at that commercial shoot that Wilma, a former nurse, had an epiphany.

“I said: ‘I can do that. I can do what she’s doing,’ ” she said by telephone yesterday. “I knew all the lines. I’d seen the script.” (And, she said, she had always served Campbell’s soup at home. “Was there any other?” she said.)