There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. -John Rogers
I haven’t read either of them, actually, although I plan on giving The Lord Of The Rings another shot in a few weeks.
Haven’t watched Game Of Thrones (read the books, gave up at the Red Wedding).
Haven’t seen many of the “classic” movies, although my friends and fiancee are working to correct that.
i think i had the advantage of already being pretty comfortable in the benefits of liberalism and good government based on leftist principles. this book only reinforced what i regarded as the moral superiority of using government in a empathetic and intelligent manner for the benefit of all society.
on a related note as a kind of performance art, in my early 30s, i recorded myself reading the john galt speech onto a reel to reel recorder (almost two hours) and then sped it up 4x and dubbed over that with occasional choruses of “there’s an objectivist rocking the boat” at random intervals chosen by rolling a die to see how many minutes to wait and then two dice to see how many repetitions at each instance. i think my mother has the finished cassette in one of my files in a filing cabinet.
Looking him up on WP, the only things I’ve seen of his are a few episodes of Grace Under Fire and Cybill. I’d forgotten completely about them, so I can’t say they were very memorable. I basically stopped watching sitcoms in the mid-90’s. I watched a fair number of episodes of Roseanne, which I recall having some funny dialogue, but it says he was just EP on those.
With the exception of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I find John Hughes films are all worth watching once or less. The Breakfast Club was okay, but I only watched it because it was about to disappear from Netflix and it seemed like something I should see. I won’t bother with it again. I think it would have been more entertaining to someone who had a more conventional high school experience, as opposed to someone who shipped his own ass off to a military boarding school after freshman year made me thankful for my years of homeschooling. For me, The Breakfast Club just kind of felt like I was stuck in Saturday detention with them, and I was glad when it was over and kind of wanted my two hours back (even though I spent them preparing brunch).
Goodfellas was a pretty good movie. But after I dated someone years ago who lost family members in the little mob war it was based on, I refuse to re-watch it.
I liked Fatal Instinct mainly because I hated Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, and enjoyed seeing them lampooned.
The only movie on your list that I’d highly recommend is Good Will Hunting.
I had a quick search and found The Comedy Of Terrors with Peter Lorre, Vincent Price and Boris Karloff. Now I’m 5 minutes in and wondering why I’ve never seen this before.
Godfather trilogy. (Someday, though) Star Trek anything. (No interest) Games of Thrones. (Ditto)
John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. (Unpopular opinion warning: I just don’t find him funny. Though I do appreciate his effort to spotlight important issues and get people talking about them.)
Never read anything by Terry Pratchett, William Gibson, or Neil Gaiman. Don’t really read much fiction in general, though. Also never read anything by Art Spiegelman or Alan Moore. Despite my visual primacy, my attention span for graphic narrative seems limited to comic strips, with the major exception of Peter Kuper (see below). I do intend on reading Joe Sacco’s Palestine, but that’s more because it’s non-fiction and Sacco is just incredible.
I own and have read Peter Kuper’s autobiographical works Stripped, Drawn to New York, Comics Trips, and Stop Forgetting to Remember. I recommend all of them.
A more conventional American high school experience. It was nothing like my experience of an English secondary school that felt like it hadn’t realised that it wasn’t a Grammar school anymore.
My school went on strike because the head teacher wanted to introduce Saturday detentions. Several hundred children on the school playing fields refusing to go to lessons.
Saturday detentions were rather rapidly dropped from the schools plans after that.
