Thursday, March 12, 2015

to-do list

Just a reminder of where I am when it comes to keeping my promises:

2-DO LIST

1. A review of "Joe," starring Nicolas Cage.
2. A review of both "Tim's Vermeer" and "Jiro Dreams of Sushi."
3. A review of "Warrior," starring Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy, and Nick Nolte.
4. Photos of my students giving you the finger (gonna mosaic out the fingers).
5. A review of Stephen R. Donaldson's The Last Dark.
6. A review of Suki Kim's Without You, There Is No Us.
7. A review of Bobcat Goldthwait's "God Bless America."
8. A review of "127 Hours," starring James Franco.
9. A long, long-promised review of "Oldboy."
10. A survey of student comments from my previous job.
11. A stupid dialogue with one clueless student.
12. A post that dishes (nothing too terrible) on a friend of mine.
13. A mopping-up post that dumps all the rest of the Pohang photos from last year.
14. A review of "The Lunchbox," starring Irrfan Khan.

Expect all the above and more, including a rant about linguistic descriptivism versus prescriptivism prompted, once again, by arrant nonsense from the ever-frustrating Dr. Steven Pinker—genius scientist, evil Canuck, and hair model.



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3 comments:

Rory said...

What have you got against Steven Pinker?

I await this one eagerly, and request that it is bumped up the queue.

You're not going to try and defend the unsplit infinitive, are you?

Kevin Kim said...

No defending infinitives, split or otherwise; that battle has been lost since the 1960s. I'm not a fan of pedantic hypercorrection (e.g., the pious myths that "you can't end a sentence with a preposition" or "you can't begin a sentence with a coordinating conjunction"—blindly quoted by idiots who should know better), but I'm also not a fan of attempts at looking cool and trendy by saying, "Hey, 'between you and I' is perfectly legit!"—as Pinker has done. OK, granted, maybe Pinker isn't saying that to appear cool and trendy, but he's obviously trying to wave his descriptivist street cred in my face, and I call bullshit on Pinker's "between you and I" and other such locutions that he sees himself as rescuing from the evil clutches of the grammar pedants.

More soon.

John from Daejeon said...

I'd add the best "Dune" film adaptation you've never seen, yet have seen if you've watched "Alien," "Blade Runner," and a slew of other cutting edge films thanks to "Jodorowsky's Dune."