Times Higher Education - All The Privileged must have Prizes - …”the sedulous banality of the rich degrades teaching into a service-class preoccupation whose chief duty is preparing clients for monied careers.”

good article in the nytimes re: socioeconomic integration in schools.

So, we saw WALL•E and now every other movie I’ve seen subsequently has paled in comparison. But not really. We’ve seen about 4 other movies in the meantime, and I can’t remember the last time I had this large of a list of movies I want to see, even in the summertime. Since WALL•E, we’ve also seen Full Battle Rattle, The Wackness and Hancock. I still need to see Hellboy 2, Dark Knight, and for some reason, I really want to see Journey to the Center of the Earth, but only if it’s in 3-D!

But where will I get all the time to do these things? We’re headed to Cooperstown to go see Dave Niehaus get inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, then we’ll be in Seattle a couple of weeks later. I’ve been trying to find the time and inclination to finish music projects that I’ve had, and B-Dogg and I have a couple of songs up our sleeve that we want to cover for the end of the year. End of the year, you say? Yeah, it’s already past the half-way point, and before you know it, I’ll be making a call for new songs in October/November for the year end IRCMT2008.

But really, the hard thing here is actually getting anything done in this room because it’s always blazing hot in the summer and you can’t well have the air conditioner AND fan running while you’re doing recording. It’s a dilemma.

I’ve gone ahead and updated the back-end for Wordpress around here, and was thinking about re-designing the front to get motivated to start posting again, but that’s obviously just another distraction to getting writing again. Jonas and I have plans to do just that, but I figured the easiest thing to do is to Just Write. So there you are.

I started keeping track earlier this year with the goal of seeing something around 100 movies. I’m pretty far off pace right now, seeing it’s past the halfway mark of the year and I’m only about a third of the way through. That’ll change soon, since there’s more than a good handful of movies that I haven’t seen yet that are out right now that I do want to see. I could quite possibly have missed a few as well, but I think it’s okay, since there are some very, very suspect films in this list that maybe shouldn’t even count as movies. I’m looking at you, AvP.

Some of my favorites so far? Ironman, Get Smart, Young@Heart are the most recent; from earlier in the year, I still love Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting in Charlie Wilson (though I think I may have enjoyed Sorkin’s Broadway writing of The Farnsworth Invention more). Be Kind Rewind was nice, but maybe not nice enough to have just mentioned. We’ll see WALL•E tomorrow, which I’m predicting will top the list. I’ll report back. Sorry for the absence. Work’s crazy, y’know?

The Savages
Charlie Wilson’s War
I’m Not There
Juno (again)
Air Bud
The Breakfast Club
The Bourne Identity
The Bourne Supremacy
Network | 2.8.08
Serendipity | 2.9.08
A League of Their Own | 2.9.08
Be Kind Rewind | 2.23.08
There Will Be Blood | 2.23.08
Semi-Pro | 2.29.08
The Bourne Ultimatum | 3.2.08
Air Force One | 3.8.08
Ocean’s 13 | 3.8.08
Paranoid Park | 3.17.08
Hairspray | 3.22.08
The Band’s Visit | 3.28.08
Horton Hears a Who | 4.5.08
Alien vs. Predator: Requiem | 4.13.08
Breathless | 5.3.08
National Treasure | 5.9.08
Son of Rambow | 5.9.08
Young @ Heart | 5.17.08
Raider of the Lost Ark | 5.24.08
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom | 5.24.08
Ironman | 6.09
Transformers | 5.31.08
You Don’t Mess with the Zohan | 6.14.08
Get Smart | 7.08