In IT parlance Paul is, for lack of a better phrase, the sales guy.

Last edited by Dave (2012-05-18 19:54:05)

(W)odin's day is also nice.    Not to mention Fri(gga)day.

/covering my bases
/allergic to smiting

I never could get the hang of thursdays...

Thanks to DIF for affirming Thor is all over the place, I didn't see it in the theater, and wanted to see it before avengers, and everyone I knew said it was great.  I Get dvd, was totally confused by the way the movie jumped around and took me 45 minutes of the movie to realize that it doesn't play correctly, and it skips between chapters, try a second round with the dvd, same problem.  So I thought ok, maybe it makes sense if your DVD isn't messed up.  Finally watch it on Netflix and it still doesn't make sense.   I thought I was broken, so it was nice to realize it wasn't just me.

I initially thought Thor was pretty good. Well guess I was wrong. Am I wrong in thinking that it was at least entertaining? Yes it has a plethora of issues, but it's not like it dragged on or anything...

still a piece of trash structurally

As a new recruit, just wanted to bring this thread back from the dead to say that this is my favorite episode so far (out of the maybe the 25 or so that I've listened to).  First, it's got two of my all time favorite moments.  The first is when Teague intrduces Mike as "Michael 'Drunken' Scott" and he replies "Pow!".  Dunno what it is about that, but it just cracks me up.  The other is of course Mike's brilliant in vino veritas moment, which I think should be inscribed in letters of fire ten feet high on every government building in the United States.  You know the one I mean:

"As a grown American man, if I can't approve of getting wrecked by Captain America, what are we even fighting for?"

A wonderful, almost poetic summation of everything the US should be about:  e pluribus unum, the marketplace of ideas, all that kind of stuff. 

And, by the way, remind me not to get into a drinking contest with Mike.  I'm not sure I would have guessed that he was lit up like prohibition was coming back until literally the last couple of minutes, where it sounds like his speech starts to slur just a tiny bit.  (Though I don't know him personally, to be fair.)  Perfectly cogent points and interesting observations for 120+ minutes. 

But the thing I really love about the episode is the analysis.  I hope the guys won't mind, but I'm actually thinking of using it in one of my classes next year.  It could have just been one of those crazy associations of ideas, because I was marking essays around the time I first heard it, but I want to see if it'll help my students with their writing if they watch Thor and then listen to the commentary. 

The main point in the commentary (aside from Dutch angles) is the problem of not having a "through line", and it struck me that that's exactly one of the big problems my students have with writing an academic essay.  We tell them stuff like "Ok, you need to start with a research question", but they kind of don't see how that needs to then be the through line and how that's supposed to structure what they're doing.  It's exactly what Trey (or was it Teague?) says -- "This film [essay] thinks it's about how an arrogant man finds humility and then saves the day, but then doesn't actually ever do that." 

Since they don't have a lot of experience with academic writing, it's hard for them to 'stand outside' what they've written and see what's wrong with their own work, so I'm always looking for ways to do consciousness raising.  Plus they'll think I'm crazy if I say "Ok, next week, we're going to talk about essay writing.  For Monday, watch this three-year old superhero movie and then listen to this podcast about it."  And that's no bad thing really.  Keeps them on their toes.

Last edited by sellew (2013-07-29 10:07:02)