Good word

"Tom Carson got [Gina] Arnold's goat when he pointed out, in the wake of 1986's putatively progressive Lifes Rich Pageant, what seems undeniable -- that R.E.M.'s 'tendentious appeals to a cloudily glorious past' and 'wishful confusion of cultural might-have-beens with historical truth' were 'the emotional syntax of Reaganism, pure and simple.' Not that R.E.M. were Reaganites, of course (you knew that, right?) -- just that they didn't escape Reaganism's cultural climate. Fans of both band and pol shared the habit of closing their rapidly moving eyes and wishing stuff would go away, not to mention a disdain for the moral weaklings on the other side of the fence."

-- Robert Christgau

Pensée

Something struck me last night as I watched Hannah Montana: The Movie, a Walt Disney Pictures picture. There are two scenes involving carnival rides. On the one hand that seems very Disney, since Disney is all about rides. On the other hand, Walt Disney conceived his theme parks as an orderly, controlled alternative to old-style amusement parks and their carnival rides.

Those are still the days

I gave up, wiped the hard drive and installed Windows XP. Now Office 97 will run like a champ. Microsoft plans to stop supporting Windows XP on April 8, 2014. See you in '14, Bill Gates!

Those were the days

I have a new computer. The operating system it runs is Windows 7 Home Premium. So far, so good, except that I'm an old Windows XP hand, and I've long used certain applications that don't seem to work so well in 7. For example: Office 97. Yes, my copy of the productivity suite is several versions out of date, these days, but I like it well enough and haven't had a good reason to upgrade. Until now.

Much has changed since '97, I suppose. On the other hand, much has not.

Ahoy

Good word

"Happiness is a warmed-over event, happiness is half a million friends in a sandbox with no fighting, happiness is 'Woodstock,' and 'Woodstock' isn't peanuts, for the movie is going to make a mint because of the balm it hands out at a bad time. I must say that I found seeing it a bit like going to a Busby Berkeley film in the Depression and then whistling the tunes while sheltering from a hail of falling suicides."

-- Penelope Gilliat, The New Yorker, April 11, 1970

Good word

"Whereas most cartoonists, lacking the economic resources of a Nero, a William Randolph Hearst, or a sir George Reresby Sitwell, are unable to amplify their fantasies into anything so ambitious as a Golden House, a San Simeon, or a Renishaw, I reflected that Disney (whose brother and chief business associate, Roy, has a sound understanding of banking principles) has since 1928 managed to arm his assault on the impersonal universe with ever more expensively contrived choreography, color, stereo, and wide-screen gimmickry -- these efforts reaching their climax, I now perceived, in Disneyland, where, in this most elaborate of the Master's animated productions, his live public has been fitted into the cartoon frame to play an aesthetic as well as an economic role."

-- Kevin Wallace, The New Yorker, Sept. 7, 1963