Fucking Elves

Now I might just have to watch Thor and Captain America--I'm liking the looks of this Avengers movie. Good choice using Nine Inch Nails' "We're In This Together". I think someone remembered that when people think of the movie version of 300, they still think of "Just Like You Imagined", another track from The Fragile, used in the 300 trailer.

Typing my periods and commas outside quotation marks just now, I was reminded of my current English teacher recently telling the class that periods are always supposed to go inside the quotation marks unless there's a citation. Wondering how true this is (particularly since this is a rule I don't follow), I googled it just now and came across this site where I learned the commas and periods in certain instances appearing outside the quotations is British English. I don't even remember anymore how I picked these things up.

The teacher who wrote the article says in it she allows her international students to continue putting periods and commas outside quotations but concludes by saying;

My American students, though, don't get to choose. They have to do it the American way, just as they have to drive on the right side of the street, even though the British drive on the left side.

I could be wrong, but I think using British punctuation rules is decidedly less likely to cause head on collisions. She says this even after having just explained why the British rule makes more sense. She says it's more important to be conventional.

Fuck that. Fuck that. I think I'll choose not to be controlled by the prevailing dogma, just as Steve Jobs recommended. By the way, I had to watch that Stanford commencement speech again at the beginning of my Interpersonal Communication class last night when the teacher decided to show it to the class. I'm posting it here again in case any of you need to refresh your memory;



I hope I got the embed code right.



I found myself watching Citizen Kane again last night. I really do feel there's something to what Jobs says about following your heart. But isn't that what Kane did, or at least thought he was doing? He didn't have the psychological tools to know how to get to the honest place he hadn't been to since he was a little kid with a sled he loved. Kane believed the message created reality and that was all that mattered. Love on his own terms, "Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own," Kane said.

The problem that Kane never solved is how and when to let other people in. I think that's a question everyone probably ought to struggle with all their lives. In any case, I think Citizen Kane demonstrates brilliantly the capitalist fallacy of every man for himself.