UFC 132

Longtime readers of the blog will remember that I last attended a UFC show for UFC 121, headlined by Brock Lesnar losing his Heavyweight Championship to Cain Velasquez. My wife and I are taking a trip to Las Vegas to coincide with our fourth anniversary, and our big Vegas show that we will grace with our presence is UFC 132, her second and my sixth Ultimate Fighting Championship event.

This is a card that has a lot to offer in terms of star power despite a main event that will probably fail to resonate too much with mainstream viewers. While the undercard is stacked in terms of good fights, there are few big names or huge prospects fighting outside of Brian Bowles taking on Takeya Mizugaki and Melvin Guillard fighting Shane Roller. I expect the former of both fights to win, and Bowles should really be on the fast track to fighting the winner of the Faber/Cruz title fight on this show. Bowles spent a year on the shelf after breaking his hand and throwing in the towel in between the first and second round to current champ Dominick Cruz. He's won one fight since then and, as a former champ, deserves a shot to reclaim the gold.

Dennis Siver vs. Matt Wiman - This is a classic striker versus wrestler match up. Siver showed good takedown defense against George Sotiropoulos, but Sotiropoulos isn't known for his wrestling, while Wiman is a grinder who doesn't mind making fights ugly, ironic since his nickname is "Handsome." Matt Wiman should take this one by decision as long as his chin holds up and he avoids the spinning body kick that's become Siver's specialty.

Carlos Condit vs. Dong Hyun Kim - Speaking of grinding, this match presents two different types of fighters who specialize in it. The difference between them is that Condit rarely has a boring fight and Kim almost always has a boring fight. Suffice to say, regardless of who wins, I hope Condit's habit overrules Kim's. Condit has superior and exciting stand up, but Kim has the wrestling and grappling edge, which determines the direction of a fight more often than not. This doesn't look good for Condit unless he has a really solid game plan for Kim's skill set, and I don't suspect that even a Greg Jackson strategy will save him. This will go to a decision and Kim will take it.

Tito Ortiz vs. Ryan Bader - Darth Bader's sole loss in his career is to current Light Heavyweight Champion Jon Jones while Tito Ortiz hasn't won a fight since 2006. This goes a long way to show how valuable it is to be a star as opposed to a guy that just wins. Ortiz's last win came five years ago against a washed-up Ken Shamrock, a dude who headlined the very FIRST UFC back in 1993 (*).

(*) As an interesting sidenote/humblebrag, this will be the fifth Tito Ortiz fight I attend live. The first was against Ken Shamrock in 2002, then his first loss to Chuck Liddell, followed by his split decision win over Forrest Griffin, and the recent loss to Matt Hamill. 

Any other guy with this many losses in a row normally would have been released from his contract, but because Tito Ortiz is a star (albeit a falling one) and gets people to talk about him, he remains employed. Each one of his recent fights has been accompanied by rumors that it's his last in the UFC should he lose because he can no longer hang at the top level in the sport due to a litany of injuries and the game passing him by. His stand up has always been mediocre and his archaic game plan is to take a guy down and pound them out from their guard. Fighters are so well-rounded now that it's a strategy most can see through, and more and more people with better wrestling are taking up MMA. In fact, Ortiz has become the go-to guy for up and coming fighters to challenge because they figure it's an easy win, and the best way to become a star is to beat one. The privilege has fallen to Ryan Bader, a guy who is reminiscent of a young Tito Ortiz for how he incorporates wrestling but also has the knockout power that Ortiz has never possessed. This fight is the nail in the coffin of Tito Ortiz's long UFC career and Ryan Bader is the hammer. Bader will beat Ortiz by TKO in the second round, and hopefully Tito will announce his retirement because otherwise it'll just be sad. However, this is Tito Ortiz we're talking about, and smart decisions are not his strong suit.

Wanderlei Silva vs. Chris Leben - Think of every fighting cliche available and they will all be employed here. It's got "barroom brawl," "slugfest," "slobberknocker," "dream match," and "fight of the night" written all over it. Both of these guys throw wild, swing-for-the-fences punches looking for the knockout and have the ability to get knocked out cold. Either guy has the ability to win this fight, which is another really stupid and obvious cliche but also one that applies. Leben is coming off a devastating first round TKO loss by Brian Stann back in January, while Silva has taken a long time to recover from knee surgery and broken ribs, last fighting in February of 2010. Leben is best when he's fighting regularly because he tends to get into trouble when given time to himself, whereas Silva is well past his prime. Perhaps finally fixing his knee will be the missing component that has prevented Silva from stringing together more than two wins in a row, but I doubt it'll show in this fight due to the seventeen month layoff and subsequent ring rust that will accompany it. Leben will knockout Silva in the second round.

Urijah Faber vs. Dominick Cruz (c) for the UFC Bantamweight Championship - The story behind the animosity between Urijah Faber and Dominick Cruz is one of my favorite of the many rivalries that exist in MMA. Four years ago, on the second WEC card under the Zuffa umbrella, Dominick Cruz challenged Urijah Faber for the Featherweight Championship. Cruz felt slighted that the promotional poster only showcased Faber, as opposed to both fighters. As retribution, Cruz decided to sign any and all autographs for the show on said promo poster directly over Faber's face, thinking that it would totally show Urijah who was boss and not make Dominick look like a whiny little baby. Faber retaliated by choking Cruz out with a guillotine inside of two minutes into the first round. The two have continued to hate each other ever since (**).

(**) Of course, Urijah Faber's version of hating someone is a lot different than most people because he's the happiest, most upbeat fighter in MMA. For him, hating someone just means that he says he doesn't think the person in question is "cool."

That was in 2007. Today, circumstances have changed. Faber defended his title, lost his title, lost his attempts at winning the title back, and has moved down to bantamweight. Faber is the most marketable fighter out of the two new weight classes UFC introduced earlier this year, but this is realistically his last chance at a belt for a very long time. He's lost two attempts to reclaim the Featherweight Championship, and this is his third championship fight in two years. It's rare to get one championship fight in that span of time, let alone three, making this do or die for the challenger in terms of title contention and capitalizing on his marketability in making these lighter weight classes matter.

Meanwhile, Cruz moved down to 135 lbs. since their initial outing, employing a stick and move style that has become his trademark and went on a winning streak that involved earning the Bantamweight Championship. He has yet to finish a fight as a bantamweight, unless you count the aforementioned Brian Bowles breaking his hand and giving up the title, but that was more Bowles taking himself out of the equation than Cruz finishing him. The fact is that Dominick Cruz is a boring fighter, but one that is incredibly difficult to fight and beat. He's quick, constantly moving, and approaches his stand up from weird angles, making it tough to land a takedown or a counter. What he lacks in power, he makes up for in technique, so, while he may not knock someone out or even knock them down, he'll consistently land and make sure that his opponent doesn't.

Faber is everything Cruz isn't as a fighter: entertaining, uses flashy moves, isn't afraid to engage, and works towards a finish. As a bantamweight, Faber is finally fighting from the position of being the more powerful guy, something he's rarely been able to do in the past. His two previous fights at bantamweight show that he hasn't given up his speed in the weight cut, nor does it seem like he's lost any of his cardio. Faber has great grappling and submissions along with power in his hands that can knock out most folks.

Recently, Dominick Cruz wrote a blog for Sportsnet in Canada discussing how he finally understood that working towards being a star in the eyes of the public is as much a part of his job as training is for an upcoming fight. He then went on to complain yet again about the perceived slight he felt from four years ago, and what he fails to understand is how much he comes off like a jerkbag by constantly complaining about being left off a poster in lieu of the then champion FOUR YEARS AGO. In pro wrestling, the greatest heels (the bad guys) are always the dudes that feel like they're righteous in doing dastardly things. Dominick Cruz thinks he's right, and yet he's the biggest heel in the bantamweight division. In my heart, I want Urijah Faber to win and not just because my wife thinks he's cute. He's just more fun and, seemingly, just a better person by not being so boring. It is entirely possible that Cruz will win by a frustrating decision wherein he constantly avoids contact and sneaks in a punch here or there, I'm going with my heart on this one and calling it for Urijah Faber by guillotine in the first round. Because sometimes justice can be poetic.

TNS Update: Midsummer Night's Movie Reviews

Of the eight movies I discussed previously, I've now seen four of them. Let's discuss.

The Hangover Part II - I own the DVD of the original movie, which was a very funny, enjoyable and quotable film. Unfortunately, like I suspected, there was no difference between this film and the sequel. The plot hits all of the same beats as the original, goes for the same jokes and never once attempts a single thing that could be confused for original. Considering how surprisingly great I found The Hangover to be, and how fun Todd Phillips films usually are, this was a big disappointment. And poor Justin Bartha; would it kill them to include Doug in the festivities? Just once?

X-Men: First Class - While I still think that Thor has won the summer so far, in terms of superhero movies, this one is a close second. Seeing a Sixties era X-Men movie without mainstay characters like Wolverine or Cyclops would have sounded like crazy talk ten years ago. But now superhero movies are mainstream enough that this not only exists at all but is also neck and neck with X2: X-Men United for the honor of best of the X-Men films. Kevin Bacon oozes charm as Sebastian Shaw, Michael Fassbender plays Magneto like a cross between James Bond and Charles Bronson, and James Macavoy plays Professor X like the arrogant jerk he needs to be in order for him to be the benevolent and wise leader he'll later become. It's not a perfect film, mind you. January Jones proves that her range is solely that of Betty Draper from Mad Men, and, in a larger mythology that works as an allegory for both the Civil Rights Movement and LGBT equality, killing off one of the two minority characters and having the other one become a traitor in the first third of the film seems to show that someone misses the point. Still, this is a movie worth seeing and an argument can be made that it's the best of the X-Films.

Super 8 - My formative years were spent watching movies like E.T., The Goonies and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and JJ Abrams does a great job paying homage to those movies while never feeling derivative. The best part about the film is the chemistry between the group of friends, and that's something that's been missing from movies lately. Too many movies play adolescents off as either mindless stereotypes or mini-adults. The actors and Abrams find the balance of smart kids that don't sound like adults when they talk or interact with each other and still sound believable when having conversations with actual adults. It's a lost art that many movies I remember fondly from a long time ago got right, so I enjoyed that Super 8 nailed it in the midst of telling a simultaneously frightening and touching story about loss and hope. In short, this movie made my wife cry which is a category usually reserved for films like The Notebook.

Green Lantern - There's been more debate about this movie than any superhero flick I can recall. The two camps boil down to "It was completely terrible" or "It wasn't as terrible as people say." Either way, it fell way below my personal expectations. For me, many of the problems surrounded the fact that there felt like scenes were missing throughout the film. For instance, our supposed hero Hal Jordan and the bad guy Hector Hammond meet for the first time on screen at a big party more than half-way through the film, and it's a scene played as if the two know each other. There are also hints that Hammond has an unrequited crush on Carol Ferris, Jordan's love interest. However, none of this is ever spelled out or clarified. Not only does it make the bad guy come off as more sympathetic, but it doesn't give the viewer a reason to root for Hal Jordan. In fact, despite Ryan Reynolds doing a passable job and being a solid pick as Hal Jordan, the character comes off as a jerk who doesn't care about anyone or anything around him until the story gets to the point where he has to save Earth. Usually, this is known as a character arc, but his change of heart is completely false and arbitrary, meaning that Hal Jordan is a lousy hero in what is supposed to be a superhero movie. And it's not Reynolds' fault; this is clearly a writing or editing problem.

Nothing ever exists in a vacuum. On its own, Green Lantern as a summer popcorn movie has lots of explosions, some nifty special effects and really cool things that should be present in a movie about an intergalactic police force that gives every member a magical ring that can create anything the wearer wills. Unfortunately, Green Lantern exists in a world with Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Thor, The Incredibles, Kick Ass, the first two Spider-Man films, Hellboy, Hellboy II, and the aforementioned X-Men movies (the first, second and First Class). Granted, not everything can or should be The Dark Knight, but there's a lot of room for variation where storytelling makes sense. The last decade in superhero movies has shown that it's possible for a film to be both a special effects extravaganza AND tell a great story. When the two aren't mutually exclusive, it's fair to be disappointed when a film fails to have both. Instead, Green Lantern gives us redundant voice overs, thin characters with motivation lost on the cutting room floor, and a bad guy borrowed from the Fantastic Four sequel all in a very transparent and arrogant notion that it's setting up a sequel that may or may not happen due to relatively poor box office performance.

My favorite take on the film appears here, but know that the language may not be appropriate and that spoilers abound.

Book 23 of 2011

I finished this at the gym while using the stationary bike.

22) Point Omega by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo tells the story in his own roundabout way of an older man who helped orchestrate the Iraq war, his daughter, and the guy who wants to make a movie about him. All of this takes place in between book ended chapters where a man watches Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho slowed down to a 24 hour pace at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Book 22 of 2011

My Sunday afternoon was lazy, allowing me to finish this through my Kindle app. The second book, A Clash of Kings, is the only one left in my Kindle archive that I have yet to finish. So that's exciting.

22) A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire #1 by George R.R. Martin
The people in charge of marketing the Scott Pilgrim movie got it wrong because the first book in the A Song of Ice and Fire truly is an epic tale of epic epicness; this coming from a person who doesn't like using that word in such a flippant fashion. Also notable? Fantasy isn't my thing. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a great series of films, but I've never taken the time to read the books. Sure, I own two different editions, but the scope of most fantasy worlds (and some of the stigma surrounding them) have always put me off giving the genre a shot. That changes now.

Book 21 of 2011

This is the second of three works I'm annotating in preparation for taking over the frosh honors classes for the next school year. Of the three (Animal Farm and Othello being the other two), this is one I haven't read before.

21) Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury foretells a dystopic future where books are outlawed because they make people think too much, and thinking can lead to unhappiness. As for what amounts to happiness, people are both out of control (in the case of crazy teenagers running people over for the sake of something to do) and totally in the dark (as in the case of Montag's wife, Mildred, and her clueless friends). Without the influence of literature, people have lost the ability to ask why and with that all sense of meaning in life.

The story also comes across as muddled in parts, which I'm hoping can be a topic for discussion in class. For what's been described to me as a junior high book, I was surprised at how challenging it came across in the beginning. Too much of the world feels poorly realized in Bradbury's overly flowery diction. The book is at odds with itself: it at once attempts to be very pointedly describing a world without literature and showing the consequences of that idea in practice but also tries to capture the world using the influence of the same.

Those two ideas seem like they would go well together but it feels jarring. Seeing more of the home life of Montag prior to his awakening by Clarisse (GET IT!?) would have helped to make the setting more established. In fact, my edition contains an essay where Bradbury describes two scenes that he included in a play adaptation that would have gone a long way towards, if not fixing my problems, at least addressing them. Reading those last few pages felt like watching a few really great deleted scenes from a movie I sort of liked. He says that he had the chance to include them in a later, revised edition but chose not to because Bradbury felt like changing the book after people have read it betrays the message of the book. I'm not sure where I stand on that idea but I think I agree with him, as art no longer belongs to the artist once other people get their hands on it since it's open to interpretation and analysis. However, it should make for some interesting discussion come class time.

The Digital Domain (or Here is the cake I own. Now go away so I can eat it.)

Jim Lee's redesigned Justice League
includes lots of raised collars.

This week, DC Comics (1) announced that it will be restarting all of their series at issue #1, introducing costumes redesigned by Jim Lee in order to "to make characters more identifiable and accessible to comic fans new and old." The press release announcing this new initiative implies that the characters will be rebooted to some unknown extent since the company plans to tell stories that are "grounded in each characters' specific legend but also reflect today's real world themes and events" and also stated "[t]his was a chance to start, not at the beginning, but at a point where our characters are younger and the stories are being told for today's audience." The line will begin with a new Justice League drawn by Lee and written by DC golden boy and Chief Creative Officer, Geoff Johns. Finally, starting in September when DC launches all 52 "new" series, all titles will be available digitally on the same day as release, a stark contrast to both DC and Marvel's current digital stance.


(1) It always strikes me as odd whenever I call DC Comic by that name because DC stands for Detective Comics, it's old flagship title. When you say or type DC Comics, you're actually saying Detective Comics Comics. And I am a nerd.


So what does this mean? There are two things to consider here: the creative side and the business side. And the two overlap to a degree since I fall into the category of lapsed fan that DC would love to bring back to the fold, although that is actually up for debate.

From a creative standpoint, this appears, like many ideas brought about by Dan DiDio, the co-publisher of DC Comics, to be a quick fix plan that hasn't been thought out very well. If the plan were given much consideration beyond "let's blow everything up and start over but only sort of," then I'd imagine that the architects of the plan would have more concrete answers for their chief fan base about the kinds of things they care about, namely continuity and timelines that allow the readers to know what "counts." This is mostly because comic book fans are a bunch of negative, self-hating, twenty to fifty-something sticks in the mud who are overly concerned with making sure that the stories they read change the status quo but also keep everything exactly as it was when they first got into comics.

In gambling to bring in a new audience, the DC brass also risks losing the existing one. Providing such a short time before everything changes forever again doesn't allow for the excitement of the new line to take effect or for the fans of the current status quo to see their stories wrapped up. Plus, no one who follows trends in the comic industry honestly believes that the status quo will change. Between Crisis on the Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis, there have been four major events since 1985 that have reconfigured the timeline to make everything more reader friendly that has only caused things to be more confusing. There used to be a multiverse, but the first Crisis changed it all to one Earth. Zero Hour attempted to make sense of the timeline that resulted. Meanwhile Infinite Crisis brought the multiverse back because Superboy punched reality (2), and Final Crisis...well, I don't know what that did except make Batman a cave man and a pirate (3).


(2) Seriously.

(3) No, seriously.


See, all of these "fixes" tend to not fix anything when the goal should be to just tell decent stories that are exciting and out of this world and make them available to the largest audience possible. And starting from scratch could do that, but it makes the existing audience feel like a bunch of chumps for not being good enough for the company already since what they like will be abandoned to attempt to capture new customers. To placate them and prevent their departure, DC has stated that some of the existing continuity will still be around. DC wants to have its cake and eat it, too.

The comic industry needs a shot in the arm if it hopes to survive because they face an actual crisis similar to the one the music industry failed to confront ten years ago. They need to grow a new audience but are afraid to lose the one they have. However, the audience they have is old, getting older, and shrinking.  While their characters are more popular than ever thanks to the boom of superhero movies, toys and cartoons, the medium from which they originated isn't faring so well because it's often cost-prohibitive and daunting to become a new fan. Instead of embracing the new audience by catering to the different ways they take in content, they've shunned it and only focused on the direct market. The comic book industry has become the Ouroboros. Add to this the fact that the violent content in some comics isn't necessarily inviting to the kids that would otherwise might want to become fans, or at least it's not to their parents. The answer might be to embrace digital content and market it effectively, but DC, in going the with same day digital release, still isn't doing that because they (and Marvel, too, for that matter) haven't managed to figure out that digital content should be cheaper. Instead, they're charging the newsstand price for new issues and exorbitantly higher prices (in comparison to the original cover price) for older issues.

The numbering of a series and whether or not Superman wears a turtleneck ultimately doesn't matter. The first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man that I bought was in the high 200's; Action Comics and Detective Comics were both in the 400's when I started  wanting to read about Superman and Batman. The fact that the stories were accessible and good is what kept me coming back and the numbering didn't keep me from reading. Having convoluted stories that required me to read five other concurrent issues just to understand what was happening to the one character I cared about is what forced me to stop buying comics on a regular basis. Digital distribution does matter, but it has to be incorporated in such a way that it doesn't deter new customers from trying out the product. I originally bought an iPad over a Kindle because I wanted to be able to read comics on it and felt it would be more cost and space-effective compared to purchasing single issues at stores. This doesn't mean that comic book stores have to die in order for comic book companies to live, either. Just like books will always exist in a physical format of some kind, so will comics. But avoiding progress and the new audience that progress can bring only serves to make things worse for everyone involved who stand to make a living in the industry.

Book 20 of 2011

My wife and I decided to read while listening to last.fm, which allowed me to finish this on a very peaceful Memorial Day weekend.

20) Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story by Christopher Moore
Because meetings are often boring wastes of time, I usually try to take a book with me on the off-chance I might be able to get away with surreptitiously reading a few pages here or there.  A few coworkers gave me a People's Eyebrow when they saw the title of this book, assuming I somehow got roped into the recent young adult fiction craze that Stephenie Meyer has popularized so well. I immediately felt the need to defend myself with a short, "It was published in 1995!" While I only managed to will myself through about 80 pages of the first Twilight book before throwing it against the wall, it's clear that Christopher Moore's novel about a codependent woman thrust into the throes of vampirism and the arms of a naive young writer is not the standard Edward and Bella-style romance novel aimed at teen girls.

Top Numbered Somethings - UPCOMING SUMMER MOVIES! And shouting.

Summer time means that it's blockbuster season at the movies, where stories take a back seat to special effects, spinning cameras and explosions...so many explosions. I'm a big a fan of loud, stupid movies as anyone, so here's a list of movies I plan on definitely seeing, in order of their release date, along with how horrible I imagine they will be.

The Hangover: Part II - Let's be perfectly honest: this looks terrible. Everything about the trailers suggest that it is the exact same movie as the first one with an added layer of Asian racism since it takes place in Thailand as opposed to Las Vegas. I hope that my low expectations mean that it's better than my initial impression, but there's nothing I have other than hope to back that up. Alan will be weird, Stu will scream and Bradley Cooper will try to play it cool. Meanwhile, the characters should probably be dead or destitute, if any of these events actually happened.

X-Men: First Class - Here we have an X-Men film set in the 1960s with mutants in their original blue and yellow superhero outfits and a Magneto that uses his powers in a tremendously original and awesome way, judging by the trailer. For a comic fan like me, it's like the producers consulted me on how to approach the X-Men correctly. At first, it sounded so weird and out there that I couldn't help but predict doom and gloom for it because of the track record for the previous two films. Wolverine and X-Men: Last Stand were just so awful that another trip to the well, and a prequel at that, felt wrong. However, each trailer and clip released online look pretty cool and the reviews coming in have been positive, comparing the film to the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek. Overall, I'm tentatively excited for this one and think it might be the dark horse movie of the summer.

Super 8 - Speaking of J.J. Abrams, his latest film looks to be what would happen if the alien from E.T. was a monster and the dad from Friday Night Lights along with his kids have to fight it. Abrams channels Spielberg in terms of look and tone and possibly Cloverfield in terms of story. The secrecy surrounding the plot has made the hype for this one out of control, and I wonder if it can deliver. So it might be horrible. Or it might be awe-inspiring. 

Green Lantern - The first trailer made this movie about a guy that gets a power ring that can make anything he can imagine look way too much like Iron Man, and Ryan Reynolds, while a good actor who gets way too much heat from most people for being a 2011 Ben Affleck, is no Robert Downey Jr. Fortunately, every single piece of footage since that initial trailer has allayed all of my fears because this looks like one of the top two movies to beat. In fact, it feels like this one might be too faithful to the source material, and the big problem appears to be that it's stuffed to the gills with all of the weirdness that took the comic 45 years to accumulate. I'm hoping that it's an accessible movie for those not in the know about the history of the Green Lanterns, but even if it isn't, it'll still be enjoyable to me. And ultimately, I am the only person that matters.

Captain America: The First Avenger - Here's my number one because everything I love about America can be summed up in this character. Plus, Marvel Studios have done a great job so far of creating the kind of expanded film universe that people never thought they'd be able to see accomplished on screen. It's a Captain America movie that takes place in World War II! That is amazing. Go back in time and tell 16 year old me after having suffered through things like Steel and Batman & Robin that Marvel movies like this would exist but also be quality popcorn flicks and I would have been amazed that you used the ability to go back in time to tell me about trivial Hollywood news, but I also would not have believed you.

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon - And now we've come to the Michael Bay portion of the show. All indicators point to the fact that this will be the worst of the Transformers movies and they've all been awful. Michael Bay is good at two things: spinning the camera around and blowing stuff up. He's also good at disregarding anything that would make sense in a film and taking something that seems relatively simple (robots turn into cars and fight each other) and convoluting it with wacky human hijinks that involve Shia The Beef.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 - Considering all that's left in terms of the story of the final Harry Potter book is a gigantic battle at Hogwarts, I don't think this will be bad. The last film saw my wife and I fall asleep in the theatre, but it seemed to cover all of the parts of book seven that I hated anyway: namely, the 250 pages of pointless camping that JK Rowling insisted was so important to the development of the characters even though it was completely unnecessary. But I don't think of raucous battle scenes when I think of Harry Potter movies, so I'm tentative to think this will be great.

Cowboys & Aliens - Jon Favreau has earned enough credit from me as a director that I'll follow him into something new like this, and it's got a title that can't be beat. I hope that if sequels ever arrive that they just keep adding to the title with some new group: robots, astronauts, zombies, cavemen. It would be pretty tremendous and the cast is pretty awesome, too.


Frosh
The final week before, well, finals was focused mostly on you finishing your Score TKAM assignment. Monday and Wednesday were devoted to work days in your groups where you should have spent time justifying five of the ten song choices you matched with the scenes provided along with a justification for the cover your group created. I'm writing this now after having collected the assignment, and it seems that a few groups only heard what they wanted to hear based off some of the justification papers I see. That's too bad because you earn a majority of the points based off those justifications.

Tuesday, you took the final on To Kill a Mockingbird.

Thursday and Friday were spent watching the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Despite the numerous plot changes, its 50 year pedigree and being in black and white, it's a film that manages to stand up today compared to many other film adaptations of novels. In fact, I'm surprised that Harper Lee's novel hasn't received the remake treatment, but I think that's more of a testament to Gregory Peck's performance. There isn't an actor alive today that could pull off Atticus Finch in such a distinctive and convincing fashion. Perhaps George Clooney might be able to do it, but, knowing how Hollywood operates, it'd probably go to Matthew McConaughey or Sam Worthington.

And then you took your department final and turned in your Score TKAM project on your respective final day.

Seniors
On the last regular Monday of your high school career, you turned in your Table of Contents assignment and took your Cuckoo's Nest final.

Tuesday, you turned in all of your Cuckoo Final Project components. You also presented that day and on Wednesday. The presentations varied, but some of the originality the groups displayed really impressed me. From singing to sort-of puppet shows to metaphorical recreations of the ward to quarter hour long multimedia lectures, there was a width and breadth to the proceedings that I hadn't seen before. Good job, overall, and I look forward to using some of what you folks did as examples next year.

Thursday and Friday were the final days of class. We watched Milos Forman's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and signed some yearbooks.

And that's that with that. You're done. There will be an entry devoted to the idea of "done" later since I don't want it to get bogged down by including it with my usual account of the day-to-day happenings in class.

Randy "Macho Man" Savage

Picture courtesy of Rob Bricken

This morning, Randy "Macho Man" Savage died in a car accident. He's most well-known as a former WWF Champion (back when that used to mean something) and a huge wrestling star of the 1980's.

Wrestling, specifically the WWF, was a huge part of my formative years. I'm old enough to remember the The Main Event, the NBC special where Hulk Hogan lost the WWF Championship to Andre the Giant who subsequently gave the belt up when he tried to sell it to the "Million Dollar Man" Ted Dibiase. This vacated the belt, which was then up for grabs in a tournament at Wrestlemania IV. While I didn't get to see that on pay per view, there wasn't an Internet to speak of to find out the results, so I went out of my way to find out that Macho Man came out the winner.

It was during his first reign as WWF Champion that my life long relationship with pro wrestling came to fruition. A few months after he won, the Mega Powers exploded.

Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage were best friends so they formed a tag team called the Mega Powers. Most tag teams of convenience like this one are created just for the sole purpose of them breaking up and eventually feuding, but at 8 years old, I didn't know that. I still thought wrestling was real and it was awesome. Much like the comic books I was so enamored with, these guys in the squared circle were larger than life, real superheroes who settled their grievances with fisticuffs, sometimes fighting for the honor of the ladies they loved. When the Mega Powers teamed up to take on the Big Bossman and Akeem, collectively known as the Twin Towers, Randy Savage was thrown into his manager, the lovely Miss Elizabeth. Hulk Hogan tended to her by taking her to the back so she could get the proper medical attention, leaving Savage alone with the giant monsters. When Hogan returned, Savage slapped Hogan and left him to fend for himself

I've watched a lot of wrestling and nowadays it blends together each week because very few memorable things happen, but every moment of that Main Event special where Randy Savage stormed into the back to yell at Hulk Hogan for having abandoned him in the match is etched into my brain and probably will be for the rest of my life. The melee was tremendous because Randy Savage had established himself as a jealous, possessive borderline insane dude who didn't trust anybody, even his best friend, with Elizabeth, so it made sense why he got so angry. And Hulk Hogan was only doing what he thought was right, so it made sense why he tried to take care of his best friend's girl.

But at 8 years old, all I knew was that I would do anything to watch Wrestlemania V, subtitled "The Mega Powers EXPLODE!" When my uncle offered to get it in exchange for mowing his lawn for two months, I jumped at the opportunity.

And while I was a dyed in the wool Hulkamaniac at the time, it wasn't until years later that I realized how much of my dedication to that feud and to wrestling in general was due to the talents of Macho Man. He was the most three dimensional character in wrestling and the Mega Powers' destruction wasn't even his most crowning achievement. If I were to name my top ten favorite moments in wrestling, five of them would involve Randy Savage (and the rest would probably involve The Rock and a few others would have Stone Cold Steve Austin and one would have D'Lo Brown; there's more than ten moments in my top ten is what I'm saying).

In a business where it's hard to be a fan without feeling insulted or embarrassed and where it's hard to feel phased by yet another death in a long string of them, Randy Savage is a guy that can allow any fan, current or former, loudly proclaim that he was one of the best. Oh, yeah. You can dig it.

The Mighty...?

As you can see, I was Thor before being Thor was cool.
(Halloween, 2008)

As is my wont, I saw Thor last weekend and decided to write a little bit about it since I like comics and I like movies and so I expect way too much out of comic book movies despite being easily impressed with them whenever they don't feature extended jazz dance scenes. I'm looking at you, Spider-Man 3.


Thor is a great movie. There are no two ways around it.

So much of a high-concept popcorn flick like this really depends on quality performances and Chris Hemsworth stands head and shoulders above the rest. He’s tremendous in a way that will be hard for Chris Evans or Ryan Reynolds to top this summer. He’s so outrageously charming playing this brash, privileged, spoiled dude who’s just as talented as he thinks he is, but that also has to learn humility and sacrifice. This is also due in no small part to Natalie Portman, Stellan Skaarsgard and Kat Dennings treating Hemsworth like, well, a god, but Hemsworth’s performance is what makes it work. There’s so much complexity in what could be a role that many would play as one-note.

Tom Hiddleston’s turn as Loki should also be noted, and I think he’s going to get a lot of notice once people view the movie a second or third time if they’re unfamiliar with Loki’s character. It’s clear to see how he sets events in motion and works as a master manipulator.

Most of all, Kenneth Branaugh adds a grandeur and gravitas to Asgard that is on par with just about any other fantasy movie epic. He takes something that really shouldn’t work in the scope of what the Marvel Movie Universe has established and makes it fit without appearing hokey or out-of-place.

Really, the only complaint I had was that Volstagg should be way fatter.


Frosh
Monday, May 2, was Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's birthday, but it was also notable because we continued through the trial of Tom Robinson. This continued Tuesday and Wednesday, culminating in a quiz covering chapters 17-21 of To Kill a Mockingbird on Thursday. During the reading, you kept track of the facts presented by the four witnesses of the trial (Heck Tate, Bob Ewell, Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson) based on what Mr. Gilmer or Atticus asked them.

Thursday, you had a work day.

We read through chapter 25 on Friday and discussed the symbolism of both the roly-poly and mockingbirds. That symbolism will be important and can serve as the basis for a really great thesis statement.

Monday, you turned in your character chart and themes worksheets for chapters 12-21. We read through chapter 27, which set up Bob Ewell's half-hearted rampage through Maycomb County. The guy gets fired from the WPA (Works Progress Administration, a jobs program enacted during FDR's New Deal) for laziness and then he's too much of a coward to follow through on any of his threats. Not that following through on them would have made him a better person or a better character in the book, mind you, but it's still the principle of the thing.

On Tuesday, you received the guidelines for the Score TKAM assignment and determined your groups. Your group will receive one jewel case from me, but anything beyond that is your responsibility should that one become lost or damaged.

Yesterday and today we finished To Kill a Mockingbird in class. The final two chapters are easy to read and short, but I'm selfish in that I love reading them in class together because they're just so touching. Boo Radley is one of the most affecting and effective characters in literature, especially given how little time the reader gets to spend with the real character as opposed to the perception of him. After finishing the book today, the plan is to revise some of your thesis statements since that assignment is due Monday, May 16.

Seniors
Last Monday, May 2, we read the critical essay I affectionately call Cartoons & Cuckoos. This is an excellent example of analysis that takes one aspect of a story and thoroughly picks it apart to study its effectiveness. Plus, it's fun. I think we may lose sight of the fact that, ideally, reading is fun and discussing and writing about it shouldn't be a chore but should be an enjoyable thing to do. Your results may vary, of course, but there's no harm in enjoying the literature you read and possibly making connections between it and, say, the cartoons you enjoy, which is what Natsu did in his essay.

On Tuesday, May 3, you received the guidelines for what amounts to your semester final in the Cuckoo Final Project that is due Tuesday, May 17. The presentations begin that day, too, and I'm hoping that everyone gets really creative with how they decide to relay their work.

Wednesday and Thursday were spent working on the project in class. Wednesday, you signed up for presentation times, and Thursday you received the questions I collected yesterday for bonus.

Friday was devoted to taking the quiz dealing with chapters 15-25.

Monday and Tuesday of this week (along with this week's Thursday and Friday) were also work days for the project. Hopefully, everyone is taking full advantage of the class time they are receiving.

Yesterday was all about discussion of chapters 15 through 27, a large chunk of the book. Days like this are why I dig my job. The highlight of fifth period involved the class making analogies between baseball and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the benefit of one particular student. Unfortunately, said student hasn't been reading, but everyone else seemed to enjoy debating whether or not Nurse Ratched is the pitcher or the umpire in this scenario. Sixth period's discussion lead to the idea that normal doesn't exist. There's a societal perception of normal, but no one ever really fits into it given their own personal life story and history. Recognizing this as a theme for Kesey's book as well as universal truth for life is what makes teaching English enjoyable for me. I hope you get something out of it as well.

Remembrances of Comic Cons Past

Those weren't the droids I was
looking for.

Back in those woebegone days when I was a teenager, before the invention of sand when everything was in black and white, my family used to make an annual trip to San Diego for Comic Con. This was before it turned into a haven for Hollywood movies to whet the appetite of the viewing public and instead focused on the thing that was in the name: comics.

That's not a knock on what the San Diego Comic Con has become, mind you. Over the last five years, especially, the number of movie studios appearing in San Diego has grown by leaps and bounds, all hoping to get some buzz going for their movies that are often a year away from premiering. Accordingly, the number of attendees and vendors has also grown, but, in doing so, it's squeezed out many of the longtime comic book aficionados in favor of Twilight or other flavor of the month fans hoping to get a glimpse of Robert Pattinson sitting at a table on a stage a football field away from them. That growth, while seemingly good for the properties I have an affinity for (*), has made it difficult to take part in what was once a hallmark of my youth. 

(*) There's a Thor movie coming out this week. This is madness considering that the highest profile superhero movie from my teenage years, Batman & Robin, effectively killed and salted the earth of the genre for over half a decade. I can't understate enough how amazing it is that we're staring down the  barrel of a Green Lantern, Thor and Captain America summer.

From the ages of 11 to 17, I attended Comic Con in San Diego every year with my folks and brother for vacation. Then from 19 to 25, I made a point to travel down there for at least one of the four days, if not more. Since then, hotels have been harder to come by and days for the event have actually sold out. That never used to happen. Heck, my wife and I were going to make a point of actually planning our full-fledged vacation for a Comic Con trip this summer when every single ticket, one day passes and four day passes both, sold out inside of 15 minutes of the on-sale.

Comic Con in San Diego got away from the comics, which is one of those "get off my lawn" statements I never saw myself prone to making before. However, over the weekend, I decided to try out a smaller scale convention over in Orange County called the Anaheim Comic Con. This was the kind of event I remembered from that first time I attended San Diego and contained everything I like about it: people dressed in weird costumes, artists plying their trade at rows of picnic tables, and lots of great deals. The rising cost of life has prevented me from regularly buying single issues of comics, so I tend to catch up on things by purchasing larger collections, or trade paperbacks. At shows like this, they're usually priced more reasonably than one can find at Barnes & Noble or Amazon, so I wound up getting about nine of them, all for half-price. 

It was impossible, though, to escape the convention's need for some mainstream attention as there were some D-list celebrities in attendance, charging way too much for autographs, 8x10 head shots and "photo opportunities." This is the kind of thing my wife, who is not a comics fan, would normally enjoy. When I started walking down the tumbleweed lane that was the celebrity row, I sent her a text message that Steve Sanders from Beverly Hills 90210 was in attendance. "GET ME HIS AUTOGRAPH!," she replied. I responded, "It's $20 bucks for just his autograph."Her reply was succinct, "Ew...don't get me his autograph." While Ian Ziering wasn't the most obvious sore thumb in the pack of what usually amounted to a large grouping of genre related character actors, he was pretty close.

Ultimately, it was nice just to soak in the ambience a place like a comic convention provides. I wasn't made to feel weird spending an hour looking through 15 long boxes to find the right collection of Ultimate Spider-Man or stopping to snap a photo of a procession of Star Wars droids. And that's the way I like things to be.

Here's the part where I discuss what went on in class, but since I'm behind, I'm going to split the catch up portion into a few different posts.

Book 19 of 2011

After devoting a good portion to reading on Sunday, I finished this today during SSR.

19) Animal Farm by George Orwell

It's an old, allegorical story that many people know by now: animals rise up against their human oppressors with the goal of establishing equality for all except that things don't quite work out that way.

My goal in rereading this was to annotate a new copy. Ms. Windt and I will be taking over the Frosh Honors classes next year, which provided us with a great opportunity to change some of the curriculum around. Instead of having students read Lord of the Flies, we opted for Orwell's tale of revolution gone horribly wrong, which will dovetail nicely into our first semester reading of Fahrenheit 451. This is a book that I could finish in an afternoon, but I was laser focused on making sure to highlight the important lines and note the thematic elements throughout, so it took me three days instead. Also, if you're into that sort of annotating thing, this is a great edition for it. The margins are wide and the print is even spaced out well to allow for liberal handwriting and underlining.


The essay at the beginning of this edition stands out and makes some excellent points about Mollie, a character I tend to forget about when I get to the later chapters. As for the book itself, I'm torn as to how to properly discuss it here, since I plan to go over it with next year's freshman. To overly analyze it may unduly influence them into parroting my views as opposed to coming up with their own take. Also, that might just be my own arrogance coming into play. I'm torn, you see, since I've never taught an honors class before and my biggest goal is to not completely screw it all up.

I will say this, though: my biggest complaint is that the book is very on the nose. But don't we need some things to be on the nose? There's very little one can mistake about the book: the roles everyone plays are very clear and the allegory for the Russian Revolution even moreso if anyone has a bit of history under their belt. I'm looking forward to teaching this and I hope the students really take the time to give it a proper read because it's probably the easiest book they'll be assigned all year.

Book 18 of 2011

Holy crap, I finished this in two days after borrowing it from Ms. Beeley.

18) Bossypants by Tina Fey

It feels unfair to review this book, which is part memoir and part comedic essay collection, in any sort of real or logical way since I feel like I'm predisposed to loving everything Tina Fey does since I've had a crush on her (like most of young, white male America between the ages of 24 and 39 with English degrees who stay up late at home on Saturday nights and spend too much time on the Internet) since she started doing Weekend Update on SNL back when that was a thing she did because she's a brunette lady who wears glasses on television and there are so very few of those. Also, she's smart and funny. And 30 Rock is one of my favorite TV shows and Liz Lemon is my favorite female character of all time. Plus, I liked both Baby Mama and Date Night and saw them in the theater. I was not impartial going into this book is what I'm saying.

Putting aside all of those predispositions, this book is great. Fey has a distinctive voice because she's, admittedly, very one-dimensional as a performer, but this leads to a familiarity. It's very easy to hear each word in Fey's usual exasperated cadence. Much like she does on 30 Rock through Liz Lemon, Fey is unafraid of making herself look ridiculous or be brutally honest about herself because who is she trying to impress at this point? She's happily married with a daughter and another kid on the way, working at her dream job. People that find her attractive and charming do so as much because of her sense of humor and intelligence as they do because she wears dark-rimmed glasses. And if dudes stop finding her attractive because she talks about her flat feet or belly fat, then middle fingers in the air for everyone, right? Right.

The chapters alternate between short narratives about specific moments from her personal life and an overview of Fey's career, all of which are funny. The highlight is an essay on her dad that made me want to write a similar ode to my own father. The rest of her insights into her experience playing Sarah Palin and attempting to make a hit show that instead became a critical cult darling are fun to read. I'd put this slightly above Patton Oswalt's Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, and I hope that she doesn't stop writing books with just this one. Ms. Beeley's assessment put it best: "I want Tina Fey to be my best friend."

UFC 129

The majority of the undercard and all but two of the main card matches fall under the purview of USA vs. Canada, something UFC loves to do whenever they're north of the border or across the pond (and possibly in Brazil this August). I even expect most of the Canadians to win on the undercard. Nate Diaz and Jake Ellenberger will probably come out on top during the prelim fights on Spike, though. Also, this event is notable for two other reasons. First, this is the UFC's debut at 9pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific, mostly because it's been increasingly difficult to get east coast folks to commit to fights that start at 10pm. This is a great move on the UFC's part, since most of their main events have started at midnight EST and I am an old man that gets tired just thinking about staying up that late despite my crippling insomnia. I can't imagine actually living on the East Coast and having to deal with such late UFC start times. The second thing that makes this card notable is that it's the first event in Toronto, a hotbed for MMA for a very long time, and it's taking place at the Rogers Centre, formerly known as the SkyDome, which will hold a UFC and North American record of 55,000 plus fans. I really hope the production team makes this aspect of the card come across on TV because that's a gigantic number and something really special. They need to get some crowd shots and mic the place well, especially during the prelims on Spike, since this is so out of the ordinary for UFC events that it could actually get some on-the-fence types to lean towards purchasing. What I'm saying is that this show is a big deal.

Marc Bocek vs. Ben Henderson - Fresh off a destruction of Dustin Hazelett, Bocek faces former WEC Lightweight Champion and victim of the Showtime Kick, Ben Henderson. And while Bocek is a great BJJ grappler, Ben Henderson is Gumby. This guy can get stretched, twisted and pulled in ways that the human body should not be able to withstand and yet he continues to do so. Bocek for sure has the advantage on the ground, and he may be able to control Henderson if he gets the opportunity, but Henderson is just too well-rounded. Henderson has a durable chin and much better stand-up than Bocek could ever dream of having. I'm not only rooting for Henderson to win, I'm picking him to get a guillotine choke in the second round for the submission even though he'll probably wind up just taking the decision.

Randy Couture vs. Lyoto Machida - Despite the fact that Machida has somehow managed to get many people believing in the power of karate again, I learned a long time ago never to bet against Randy Couture. Win, lose or draw, Randy says that this is his last fight since he's going to be 48 in two months and he's making a lot of money outside of fighting just being Captain America and palling around with Sly Stallone. And, if by some chance he's able to have a good showing against Machida AND get the win, I think he might take another fight. These guys are a great stylistic match-up because both present aspects of their game that look to confound the other. A guy who works great in the clinch and can control distance between himself and his opponent is the perfect guy to take on Machida. Someone who is elusive, speedy and has tremendous knock out power is exactly the kind of guy that can take out Couture. Despite being on a three fight win streak, two of Couture's last opponents (Mark Coleman and James Toney) arguably had no business being in the octagon and he got a bit of a gift in the Vera fight with the decision win. And I honestly think that Machida will knock him out in the second, but I'm going with my heart here and picking Couture by unanimous decision.

Vladimir Matyushenko vs. Jason Brilz - Ugh...this fight is all sorts of lame and does not belong on this pay per view card when Nick Diaz is fighting in the one hour Spike TV prelims. In fact, this fight has gone through more changes than [insert timely awards show reference here]. Originally, UFC booked Matt Hamill to take on Phil Davis. Then Thiago Silva faked a drug test and Hamill was moved to UFC 130 to face Quinton Jackson. Mr. Wonderful's new opponent was Jason Brilz; not the most exciting fight, but at least Brilz had some momentum coming off a decision robbery against Noguiera. When Tito Ortiz pulled out of his fight in Seattle against Li'l Nog in late March, Davis replaced Ortiz, and Matyushenko moved in to face Brilz. This is all more interesting than this fight will actually turn out to be on pay per view. I plan to eat a piece of pizza and go to the bathroom and engage in lots of conversation about how boring this fight will inevitably be and generally be annoying during this fight out of frustration that is even on the main card. And Brilz will win by decision because Matyushenko is old and over the hill, kind of the opposite of Randy Couture in every way.

Mark Hominick vs. Jose Aldo (c) for the UFC Featherweight Championship - This is the debut of the featherweight championship under the UFC banner, and it's pretty auspicious since you have a guy who is thought to be an Anderson Silva level of athlete fighting a dude in front of 55,000 people in his home town. On paper, Hominick has a few impressive wins. He's also got crisp, technical stand-up and submission skills that few would scoff at. BUT HE'S FACING JOSE ALDO! This guy so thoroughly destroyed Urijah Faber that Faber left the division. He knocked out Cub Swanson with a double flying knee in eight seconds. His leg kicks are devastating. His knock out power is so great that he hasn't needed to use his Nogueira brothers black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. This is the most clear cut case of "anything you can do I can do better" on the part of Jose Aldo. And Aldo will win by knockout in the first round.

Jake Shields vs. Georges St. Pierre (c) for the UFC Welterweight Championship - Let's make things clear first: this is not the mismatch or blowout that everyone seems to think it is. Jake Shields is a dangerous ground fighter who has a fifteen fight win streak. He manages to win all of the time. Not all of the wins are impressive, mind you, as there are plenty of boring decisions in the mix. But the dude has a way of winning. And not in the gross and disgusting Charlie Sheen way of winning, but in the sense that he gets the job done.

Shields is a ground specialist so that means he'll manage to keep control of most opponents even if it means he doesn't get the submission. He also has a tremendous gas tank, despite his lackluster performance against Martin Kampmann back in October. While the winner of that fight easily could have gone either way, Kampmann is no joke and Shields fought him coming off a disastrous twenty pound weight cut that left him looking gaunt and listless. Taking that into account, Shields did a great job considering what a horrible job he actually did, if that makes any sense.

Shields' best chance of winning is in grabbing a guillotine choke should GSP go for a takedown. He has a knack for grabbing and holding that choke, especially if someone is foolish enough to leave an arm in, which GSP does on his takedowns on a consistent basis.

But who am I kidding? That isn't going to happen because GSP won't make a stupid mistake like that. Again, it's possible but possible in the sense that it's possible that I could one day, in a bout of weird Fringe-ian circumstances, start to sprout a third arm growing out of my back because anything is possible. Will a third arm grow out of my back any time in the near future? More than likely not. So will GSP go for a takedown against Jake Shields and leave himself open for a guillotine choke? More than likely not.

There is a strong chance that GSP could choose to attempt to beat Jake Shields at his own game, just like he did in the first Josh Koscheck fight or the second BJ Penn fight. However, that's just playing into Shields' hands and I doubt he wants to do that. Instead, I see St. Pierre finally attempting to finish a fight for the first time in three years. As great as Jake Shields is on the ground, his stand up is terrible. This is a guy that has been training and fighting MMA for ten years and yet his striking still looks slow and rudimentary every time he faces an opponent. Meanwhile, GSP utilized a jab for five rounds and managed to break Josh Koscheck's orbital bone in the first. Koscheck is still looking at another six months before he's able to fight again.

I am rooting and hoping and just plain WANT GSP to end this fight standing, preferably early. This is Georges St. Pierre we are talking about, though. GSP will retain his championship by decision.

Book 17 of 2011

This is a book I borrowed from McB that I finished shortly before the school's Friday morning meeting.

17) See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers by Roxanna Elden

Roxanna Elden has taught all over the place in all different disciplines, from elementary to college level courses. This book takes her experiences, and the experiences of many other teachers from all different experience levels, and attempts to give the real lowdown that other teacher books fail to dole out in lieu of idealized versions of what all teachers hope to be. 

YES! TO JOURNALISM!

Many of you may recognize the poster on the left from my classroom. Cleaning out a filing cabinet one year, Ms. Beeley happened upon this little treasure, which sends a great message but is, like just about anything given enough time, hopelessly dated. But, at the same time, it's charming because all of those kids are incredibly enthusiastic (except for the one in the middle row of the center who looks like she got hit in the head with a sandbag just prior to the photographer snapping the picture). When my journalism students mentioned that they wanted to recreate the picture at the beginning of the year, I laughed at the idea but quickly forgot. Besides lots of students will often say they want to do something in a whimsical flight of fancy and never follow through with it.

However, this is the class that met every deadline in order to see me do a backflip. These are the students that have impressed me as a group in ways that I can't even manage to put into words. These are the students that have made my job the easiest that it's ever been in my six years as adviser to the Brave Times. Should I have really been surprised that they followed through with their intentions? Of course not. I don't think I was prepared for how much it would make me laugh.

This poster is going to be a high water mark for any future class to live up to. Seriously, future Brave Times staff, this is what you will be measured against so the onus is on you to make a bigger impact than the "Say NO to drugs and YES to Journalism" folks.

Frosh
Last Thursday, due to the STAR testing schedule shortened period, you received a work day.

Friday, we began reading chapter 6 of To Kill a Mockingbird and you were assigned to read through chapter 8.

Monday, you took a quiz on chapters 6 through 8 and we then worked on creating a thesis statement for chapters 1 through 5.

Tuesday was another shortened day due to STAR testing, and we used the time to continue revising the thesis we started on Monday.

Wednesday, I was under the weather and you had a reading day to hopefully finish chapter 11.

Today, you had a work day to give you time to complete the Character Chart and Themes worksheet for chapters 1-11 along with ORU 7, all of which are due tomorrow.

Seniors
Last Thursday, you continued working on the questions from Tom Wolfe's chapter of The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test called "What Do You Think of My Buddha?" during the shortened period for STAR testing.

Friday, you finished working on the aforementioned chapter and started to work on questions for section two.

Monday, you finished the section two questions, and we discussed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest up to that point.

During our final shortened period on Tuesday, we viewed Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk on her experience having a stroke. I enjoy having you watch this short speech because it ties in to how Ken Kesey explains his experience in dealing with writing the first chapter of Cuckoo's Nest and gives us some insight into how Chief views the world. Living in the moment without context and then immediately seeing the world in full view using both sides of one's brain has much in common with how Chief views the world in such a figurative way. Chief feels the connections the world shares, much like Taylor describes, and he dislikes the way machinery attempts to make everyone the same. Her book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, is available in paperback. I plan to read it this summer so I'll be able to have a review up then.

I felt a little under the weather on Wednesday, so I stayed home and you had a reading day. The day allowed me to get caught up on some grading, so at least there's that.

Today, you took the quiz covering chapters 5 through 14. We only had time enough to grade the quiz and not do my planned activity, which we'll get to next week.

Book 16 of 2011

My wife watched old episodes of Real Housewives. I finished this book.

16) The Nimrod Flipout: Stories by Etgar Keret
This is a collection of short stories, some absurd, some pointless, some funny, some dull.

It's really hard to figure out how much I did or didn't like this book. The cover alone sold me on reading the book, and there are times when it almost reaches the heights of absurdity that a picture of a short man in a bunny suit who has just shotgunned a bunch of fat birds promises. With the exception of the story about the guy whose dog wakes him up in a peculiar way and one or two others, none of the stories really stand out as especially great or memorable. It's probably time for me to pick up a regular old novel.

As is most often the case, a conversation with McB did make me ponder something while reading this. Keret's work is translated from Hebrew and what if what I love most about the book is how the translator did their job of interpreting the words as opposed to the original author's? This book isn't a good example of that idea, obviously. But what if I only like The Stranger because Stuart Gilbert did a great job of translating it into English as opposed to how Camus actually wrote it?

Book 15 of 2011

Finishing this at 12:45am when I was in that in-between time of insomnia giving in to sleep was not the best idea, but that's what happened.

15) Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

A contributing reporter for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi explores the root causes of why the economy collapsed back in 2008, how it wasn't the first time that the "bubble" burst and how the origins of our delightfully corrupt government and even more corrupt banking and corporate systems became so intertwined. There are seven chapters, each one dedicated to a different factor of the depressed economy: the Tea Party's outrage, Alan Greenspan's idiocy and incompetence, the mortgage and commodities crisis, the outsourcing of our national resources, healthcare reform's terrible implementation, and how Goldman Sachs is filled with greedy jerks who don't realize that they're greedy jerks.

Break your crown already, Jack.

Adam Sandler as Jill

Sometimes I get emails for advanced movie screenings, probably because I've purchased tickets on Fandango or Movie Tickets in the past and didn't click on the right button when I created the account that would spare me from annoying spam. However, every once in awhile a gem might sneak through and maybe, just maybe, I'll get a chance to go to a sneak preview of a new Marvel or DC superhero movie or some comedy that might actually be funny. Most of the time, though, I get invitations to things like Fright Night 3D or Jack and Jill starring Adam Sandler.

No, really. This is something that exists:

Everything was going great in Jack's life, until the most annoying person in the world came to visit....His twin sister, Jill. Come see the comedy event of the season, as Adam Sandler plays both Jack and Jill.

A little bit of web-fu on my part revealed this HIGH-LARIOUS picture of Adam Sandler in drag, so it's not like this is some joke invite that serves as a set-up in order to get me on a reality show or something.

Additionally, Katie Holmes plays Sandler's love interest which continues a theory of mine I like to call the Sliding Sandler Sweetheart Scale...because alliteration is awesome. The theory states that for each year that Adam Sandler gets older, more out-of-shape and/or uglier, his love interests in his films get younger, fitter and more attractive. Now, granted, Katie Holmes throws this trend off just a little bit, but every other movie, culminating in the recent and abysmal Just Go With It neatly falls into this phenomenon. Someone with better Excel skills could create an impressive chart detailing this idea; sadly, that person isn't me. Also, the theory only applies to Adam Sandler comedies, not his dramatic work that usually ranges from passable (Spanglish) to quite good (Punch-Drunk Love).

Frosh
On Monday, you took a quiz on the first three chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird. Scout's first day of school is an even better introduction to the social politics of small town Maycomb than the exposition heavy first chapter. Remember Walter Cunningham and the details of the discussion between him and Atticus as those will come up later on in the story. We began reading through chapter four after that. By Thursday, you need to be finished with chapter five for a quiz that covers those two chapters.

Tuesday (and, as I look into the future for fourth period, Wednesday) was the first day of STAR testing. Make sure you get a good night's rest and a substantive breakfast before each testing day. It's good to do that each day, but studies have shown that those two things play a big part in your performance on these kinds of tests. Third period received the Themes Worksheet and the Thesis Assignment. Fourth period will get them tomorrow.

Seniors
You received time on Monday to work on your group discussion questions for section one of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. We then discussed section one at length. Let me reiterate that this first section of the book is, by far, the most difficult. The tedium of the fourth chapter in particular is difficult to finish, but it's there by design. Without it, there's no way to tell how much of an impact McMurphy makes on Chief and the ward as a whole.

After finishing the discussion on Tuesday (and, again, Wednesday for sixth period), you began reading chapter four of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test titled "What Do You Think of My Buddha?" which details Ken Kesey's introduction to the counterculture movement. There are eight questions at the end of the chapter which will be due on Thursday at the end of the (shortened) period.

Good news, everyone!

Professor Hubert Farnsworth
approves!

Shortly before we went on Spring Break, I interviewed for a position to teach honors next year. And, well, I got it!

Next year, instead of teaching frosh college prep, I'll be teaching the freshman honors class along with Mrs. Windt. I'm really excited to take on something that's completely new yet also a little familiar. It'll be an interesting challenge that will allow me to grow as an educator and as a person.

And now it's a ketchup time, in that we will catch up with all of the days I have neglected to blog about previously.

Frosh
On Thursday, March 31, you worked on deliberations in the case of the Choctaw Three and we discussed the results you determined. The lesson here is that despite years of progress, racism is by no means dead or done. It still exists, but hopefully that is something that all of us can combat in a meaningful way over the course of our lives.

Friday, April 1, you moved forward.

For Monday and Tuesday, you viewed the documentary titled Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, detailing the case of the nine black men accused of raping two white women. There will be an opportunity later on this quarter where you will write a compare and contrast essay, and one choice will be comparing the court case in To Kill a Mockingbird to the Scottsboro boys' case. If that is something that interests you, then make sure to hold onto those notes when I return them to you in the Graded Work tray.

Wednesday, we finished watching the documentary, picked up To Kill a Mockingbird and discussed the pre-interviews that you handed in.

You took the quiz on the "What Was Jim Crow?" packet on Thursday. Once that was done, we began reading the first chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird. By Monday, you should be finished with chapter three. That first chapter is challenging and somewhat long for the book but the story deals less with the history of the town and the Finch family after that point, so it should be less confusing. Keep with it and write down any questions you have so we can discuss your understanding after the weekend.

You moved forward on Friday for the final time this year.

Seniors

On Thursday, March 31, we listened to The Cure's "Killing an Arab" and Guns 'N Roses' "Civil War" in order to discuss the connections to both Cool Hand Luke and The Stranger. There were four questions dealing with each song, and your group chose which song to discuss the answers.

I told you a story on Friday, April 1, in the hopes that you would all make safe decisions on prom night. Hopefully, you did. We also attempted to watch a short film made by Mr. Rubel on the birth of the hippie movement, but my DVD player was uncooperative. 

Monday was a big day. You checked out One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest from the library and received both the reading itinerary and the Table of Contents assignment. We began reading chapter one. Keep in mind that Chief's perception changes throughout the novel, so the beginning is much more difficult to understand than the latter parts of the book. He views things from a metaphorical point of view, and it's up to you to determine, at least in the beginning, what is literally happening on the ward. 

On Tuesday, we finished reading chapter one and discussed the most important line in the book in terms of understanding Chief's perspective. We then focused on some terms that will aid your understanding of the novel.

Wednesday saw us finish the terms and read through the article "Tarnished Gallahad" by Matthew Rick. Ken Kesey lived a pretty fascinating life and writing this book was just a small part of his experience.

I gave you Thursday to read after you turned in your latest ORU. 

Friday, you took the quiz on section one, which consisted of the first four chapters of Cuckoo's Nest. You then received some questions that you began to answer in groups and will get the chance to complete on Monday. 

Book 14 of 2011

This sat on my shelf for quite awhile. I started it a few times but always got distracted by something else. This weekend, I finally took some time to not just read it but really soak in the entire story.

14) Superman: Birthright by Mark Waid and Leinil Francis Yu
Waid and Yu take on the not-so-enviable task of retelling Superman's origin for the millionth time while updating it for a modern audience. The story clicks so well because the common complaint most people make when Superman comes up is that he's not relatable, and here Waid and Yu make him so.

Book 13 of 2011

This was a hardcover edition my parents gave me as a gift for the holidays that I read during SSR.

13) The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch

To borrow a line from another blogger I enjoy, were both of us not already married, I'd like Diane Ravitch to be my girlfriend. Sure, there's a bit of a forty-some odd year age difference, but I like her grit and tenacity so much that it's something I'm sure our mutual affection could overcome. Ravitch has been a historian for education since the 1960's and served under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the Department of Education. Ravitch's central argument, if the subtitle doesn't already give it away, states that the so-called reform movement supporting charter schools at the expense of public ones and tying teacher pay to test scores is a move that will ultimately destroy the foundation of education much the same way that deregulation of Wall Street irrevocably damaged the economy.