The Ed Sullivan Show 17.19 photo © 1964 SOFA Entertainment.
I’m a little surprised at how emotional I got watching the Beatles tribute earlier tonight.
Yesterday and Today
The Ed Sullivan Show 17.19 photo © 1964 SOFA Entertainment.
I’m a little surprised at how emotional I got watching the Beatles tribute earlier tonight.
A Spoonful of Sucralose
Splenda has been challenged in court for saying that its artificial sweetener is — to quote the ad line — “made from sugar so it tastes like sugar”. At issue is the fact that key molecules have been changed in deriving sucralose from sucrose, with no actual sugar in the result, and that the majority of Splenda is filler supplementing the sucralose.
Photo: François Duhamel for Walt Disney Pictures © 2013.
Or something. You can go look it up if you want. My point is that Saving Mr.
Banks, Walt Disney Pictures’ current release about the difficult adaptation of P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins books into the eventual classic Disney movie, has roughly the same relationship to the truth as Splenda does to sugar.
His Story
Of all the striking details in March Book One — and there are more than a few —
what I keep coming back to is this: At the age of five, John Lewis began preaching to
his family’s chickens.
Lewis, an organizer of the March on Washington in 1963 and since 1987 the U.S. Representative for Georgia’s Fifth District, is a great storyteller. March is a great story. I’ve just left those sentences alone after too much time spent considering adjectives other than “great” due to how easy and vague the word is, but it’s apt.
Which Doctor?
Photo: Steve Brown / BBC © 2014.
The BBC released a promo shot of Peter Capaldi in the outfit he’ll be wearing as the
12th Doctor on Doctor Who last week, and… he reminds me of Doctor Strange.
Myth and Fingerprints
I was thinking recently about my school library in 3rd grade.
Not sure why. It could’ve been the recent news reports on libraries without books — without physical books, anyway; rather, they’re community spaces with computers where users can surf the Internet and check out E-books — that got me remembering how I’d settle down in the stacks in front of the encyclopedias and basically use the references in the article at hand like we use hyperlinks online today.
I have several fond memories, general and specific, of libraries. One suspects many readers do. Those I’ve shared on the blog before include — nestled in a post on TV’s Supernatural — memories of my favorite aisle in this particular library. What brought me to that aisle was books on Greek and Roman mythology, a subject I read about voraciously and to an almost literally exhausting degree. Based on periodic scans of various library and bookstore shelves, I may well have gone through every relevant volume in print. Some books were, from my youthful perspective at least, stuffier than others, a category in which I preferred Edith Hamilton’s Mythology to Bulfinch’s. There were plenty of slim paperbacks and large, illustrated tomes aimed more directly at my age, too, with D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths atop the heap of the latter.
