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Went to see the opening of the new Hulk film. Afterwards JZ and I ran to Best Buy and bought the game... we had read previews that said it was modeled on Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, which was a great destroy-everything and bound over the city romp that we had liked a lot on the Xbox.

The new game is decent, good graphics, well-balanced, not as polished as its predecessor. But mostly, seeing Ed Norton's sad sack version of Bruce Banner loving rendered in CGI is worth the price of admission by itself.

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Poem of the Moment

The green leaf opens and the leaf falls,

each breath is a flame
that gives in to fire;

and grief is the price
we pay for love,

and the death of love
the fee of all desire.

Woo. I like the subtle chemistry lesson, the tie-in of fire and the chemical oxidation process that is both crucial to our survival but leads to our ultimate decay.

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Article of the Moment
After the Garfield thing the other day I thought I'd link to some more traditional academics, a Slate piece on poems that can and can't be attributed to Shakespeare. It's funny, though, when it speaks of

"Funeral Elegy": some 600 lines of unbearably pious tedium whose clumsy witlessness, lack of irony, and paucity of poetic felicity raised questions in the mind of anyone who has an ear for Shakespeare.

It make me realize that I probably have absolutely zero ear for Shakespeare, and the "otherness" of anything that was written around the same time, or even a tribute or parody in a similar style, would overwhelm my attempts to discern if it was the real deal or not.

Shameful(ish) confession: In high school senior year I got about two near-A pluses, English class and History class, for my paper "Discard the Bard?" by essentially cribbing a set of articles in the Atlantic on the authorship of Shakespeare and writing my paper in the form of a dramatic dialog. It was especially easy because the articles were written by two Academics, and then each author got the chance to reply to the other article.

I should feel guilty about my intellectual dishonesty, but I think the teachers just appreciated the daring and freshness in the format of the result, relative to all the boring papers they must have had to slog through.

Somehow I managed to avoid ever writing a significant thesis paper or doing a thesis project; that dodge in high school and then keeping my head down with both the English and Computer Science department at Tufts.

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Least favorite movie trailer cliche: anything "beyond imagination". so how the hell did they come up with it?

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Why does beer seem better from a tap, but soda seem worse from a soda fountain?