Sunday Review: The World's End

With both a bang and a whimper

By Jonathan Price

The World’s End (2013, directed by Edgar Wright) is really two films, a kind of British version of The Hangover (2009, with sequels in 2011 and 2013), and a remake of the already once-remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, remade in 1978). Put thus baldly, it hardly seems that those two combined could make a single film, but the film manages to hold it all together by having a single plot narrative that takes five aging British males back to their hometown to recreate the Golden Mile, a pub crawl (12 pubs, 12 pints) they never quite finished at the end of high school. The first part of the film, with its reconsideration of adulthood growth and loss, is the funnier and more interesting. Nevertheless, the filmmaker’s original idea incorporated the second strand—that of returning home to the strangeness of homogenized village England, where all the pubs are nearly identical—which became the template for the science fiction part of the film.

Fourth Saturday's Loneliest Liberal

In imaginary circumstance

By James Knudsen

act-ing. noun—behaving/doing truthfully in the imaginary circumstance. –Sanford Meisner

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to NPR’s Radiolab. The topic was AI, Artificial Intelligence. Various forms were examined: Cleverbot, online dating programs, the Loebner Prize, Furby...yes, Furby, the furry, talking toy from the late ‘90’s. Cleverbot I found particularly interesting. It is a program that remembers every conversation it’s ever had. And when it begins a new conversation it pours over all of the stored data or “responses” and then calculates (I guess that’s what computers do) the best response for the current conversation it’s having. It does a pretty good job of holding up its end of a conversation. But it does have its limits. During the course of the show the host, with aid of a guest, tested Cleverbot. It went something like this:

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

I am sitting here enjoying a beautiful rain and reflecting on Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina," which I pull out every September on a rainy day. I was hoping it would rain this week, both for the cooling effect it brings, and so that I could experience reading the poem near the Equinox hearing the rain.
    I imagine this cold front will eventually make it to the Piedmont. Knowing how this was the sestina that partially inspired you to produce many sestinas of your own, I suggest you also read it anew on a rainy equinoctial day!

Thor's Day: Prejudicial labels

Beware of one-issue religions

By Morris Dean

A recent post on the blog Functional Human Being resonated with something that has been on my mind lately: how extreme focus on a single issue can derange people and throw them out of balance.

Ask Wednesday: Ask Susan

About a neighbor who leaves her garbage bin out overlong

By Susan C. Price

[Questions are followed by answers and then, inevitably by ADVICE...you DID expect that...didn’t you?]

We live in a neighborhood where people are supposed to put their garbage bins back out of sight after collection, but the neighbor across the street sometimes leaves her bin out for two or three days. What should I do? Rolling her bin back up to beside her house hasn't worked. SHE JUST DOESN'T GET IT.
    The other morning early someone laid her garbage bin DOWN right behind her SUV, I suppose hoping that she would back into it and THAT would wake her up. But that seemed like playing dirty to me, so I stood it up and moved it to one side of the SUV. –Take the Fifth

Dear Take: Seriously? I know, I'm the one who whined about the disabled parking space created on my block...And I chose to do nothing but whine.

Tuesday Voice: Moral Monday

It's a movement

By Madison Kimrey

I’d heard about Moral Monday in the North Carolina news and on social media. A few Mondays passed before I had a chance to go. When I got there and rounded the corner by the legislative building in Raleigh, I was shocked. There were thousands of people there. The theme of that Monday was women’s rights, but there were people there for all kinds of reasons. It was like a rock concert for ideas.

Fourth Monday Susan Speaks: Heart of the city

Heart of the City, July 2013

Heart...better

By Susan C. Price

This painting started out as a simple translation of the view at night from the Jazz at Lincoln Center Room with the view of Columbus Circle. But it wasn't working, so i super-imposed an outline of a nude from a class some weeks later.

Sunday Review: The Butler

A docudrama of the American 60's

By William Silveira

While the movie The Butler has been criticized for attempting to meld history with biography, I disagree with that criticism. I believe the director, Lee Daniels, chose to portray the life of Cecil Gaines (played by Forest Whitaker) against the very realistic backdrop of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, because Gaines' s life and the very real challenges he faced were so much a part of that time and the period preceding it.

Third Saturday Fiction

Chapter 10, The Culpeppers, from the novel The Return to Boystown

By Ed Rodgers

The view from the large plate glass window overlooked a valley of green rolling meadows. In the distance, the steeple of the First Baptist Church of Culpepper, Alabama rose out of the tree-lined hamlet. Here and there a stream of smoke rose in a lazy, curving motion, marking the coming of fall. In the sky, geese were already on the move South—sign of a cold winter ahead. The coal mines were closed and the jobs gone, but the Culpepper family held on. “Never quit and never say die.” The quote was on a brass plate below a portrait of Louis Culpepper that hung in the hall of the 4,000-square-foot lodge his son had built on the mountain side and called a gentlemen’s club.

Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

[1] These ducks were rescued from a hoarder's home; they had never seen a water pond:

Thor's Day: Perceiving beauty

The little shadow in the shadow

By Morris Dean

I believe that we need not, like Hugues de Montalembert, become blind in order to "see those things that light makes invisible."
    However, we need to empty ourselves of preconceived notions and open ourselves up to the nature of things.

Ask Wednesday: Madison Kimrey on being politically active (and other things)

Child of the Movement

Edited by Morris Dean

Madison Kimrey entered the news with a splash when her petition to meet with North Carolina Governor McCrory got so many signatures it couldn't be ignored. On August 31, she was even interviewed by Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC ("Meet Madison Kimrey, 12-year-old voting rights activist"). And most recently she has been invited to create a video for the United Nations’ International Day of the Girl. Home-schooled Madison also writes a blog, Functional Human Being.
    Moristotle & Co. is honored to be able to publish this interview with Madison. [Our questions are in italics.]

Tuesday Voice: Little Bit

A little dog from France

By Ed Rogers

It seems so long ago now, that a little dog came all the way from France to Aberdeen, Mississippi and touched so many lives. It all started in a place called Chateauroux, France, in 1963.
    I was over there with my mother, sister, stepfather, and stepbrother and stepsister. My stepfather was stationed at Chateauroux Air Force Base, and I had a job working with Special Services, taking care of the ball fields and other sporting venues. The pay was not great, but the people I worked for made up for that shortcoming. There were not many jobs for Americans in France.

Third Monday Random

When is enough?

By motomynd

When is the time to stop learning, and instead start sharing the knowledge of a lifetime, no matter if lived well or not? At some point, cramming more information into a fading brain so you can take it to the great beyond, makes as little sense as buying countless diamonds so you can have them sprinkled in your casket and buried with you.

Sunday Review: Who was Lyndon Johnson?—Part 2 (book review)

Master of the Senate

By Jonathan Price

[Sequel to The Passage to Power]

The events of The Passage to Power actually were momentous and compelling, and the legislation Johnson passed as President was momentous. But Master of the Senate, the preceding volume, is perhaps even more surprising and effective in what it reveals and in its techniques. After all, the major substance of this tome involves parliamentary strategy, the counting of votes, and recondite legislative maneuvers. The average reader or, e.g., high school student would consider this extremely boring. It’s the inside-baseball version of how a bill becomes law, although here it’s often about how it never gets to become law, especially in the case of Civil Rights legislation. Yet it’s the attention to this kind of detail that eventually made Johnson not only majority leader of the U.S. Senate, but ultimately President of the United States (with the caveat of the Kennedy assassination providing the most effective transition for a Southern Democrat).