If I didn't love the Sons of Maxwell before, I would now. Apparently United Airlines broke Dave Carroll's guitar a year ago and has refused to pay compensation. So like any decent musician would, he's written a hilarious country song about it:




Over a 1.3 million plays in four days... not bad!

Some musings on popular culture, spanning several centuries and using ridiculously sweeping generalizations. 

Lately I, and many other people, have been lamenting the state of popular entertainment.  Reality shows aside (because that would be a rant all in itself), most of the successful shows, movies, etc. are basically remakes of older ideas.  A book is made into a movie, which is then made into a televison show; an older movie is remade into a newer movie; comic books become movies and television shows become comics; books and films rely more on sequels and prequels than on new ideas.  What hit me today is that this is not a new phenomenon.  In fact, the medievalist in me should have embraced it long ago.  While the strategy of reworking old ideas has been common for centuries, it really hit its stride in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Europe did not generally prize originality.  Or rather, they didn't prize it in terms of content.  If you can present an old story in a new way, that's fantastic.  If you have a new story that you want to tell, you'd darn well better lie and say that you found it in some old book written by a guy with a Latin name.  It was almost always safer to have an "authority" (or "auctour") on which you based your work, or at least parts of it.  (This was obviously long before copyright laws.  But then, the longer your authority has been dead, the better, so the books would have been in the public domain for ages before it was worth stealing from them.)  Nearly everything Chaucer wrote is gleaned from other sources -- some of the Canterbury Tales are almost word-for-word translations -- and the genius is that Chaucer told the tales better than anyone else.  So really, taking an old story and adapting it is not limited to the present age.  The difference is that modern culture claims to value fresh ideas and daring concepts.  I think that's where the problem lies.  At least the Middle Ages were honest about appealing to the authority of older texts; we're just too afraid to try new concepts.

I'm still mourning the loss of one of the few new, original shows on TV (Pushing Daisies, I still love you!), but it's nice to know that a derivative culture can still produce something great.  Well, at least in theory.  Setting aside some decent retellings of old myths, I have yet to see Revenge of the Killer Asparagus IX laballed as the next Morte D'Arthur.

I think this year's Latin bootcamp is officially getting to me.  Case in point: last night I tried to spell "illustrious" as "illustrius."  And over the Christmas holidays I declined my cousins' names.  Two of them end with -a (first declension) and one with -er (second declension), so it was easy. ;) 

Oh, and I am in love with my Chaucer class. 

Right, back to studying.  There's a quiz today in -- you guessed it -- Latin.  I'll do a real update later, and I'll try to keep the medieval languages out of it.  I promise.

Dear ABC,

Apparently you've cancelled Pushing Daisies, one of the funniest, most original shows on the air.  Congratulations.  Now there is officially nothing on your network that I care about.  Feel free to fill that hour with generic, soul-killing reality shows and reruns; I certainly won't be watching.  Congratulations.

Sincerely,
Me.

So my computer died yesterday. I took it in to the repair place and was told that it's probably the hard drive. Fantastic. I'm hoping that they can fix it, or at least that they have new hard drives on sale...

Ergo, I'm computer-less for awhile and writing this at one of the campus computer labs. The point of this is: don't send me anything urgent via the Internet!

Apparently at Kalamazoo (where the university holds a huge annual medieval studies conference) there's a group that gives mock papers. One year they wrote and presented a paper examining the time when Dante went to Ireland. "Apparently" while he was there, he invented limericks! Hahahahaha.

Now I have a new goal in life: write one of those papers. Maybe I'll pretend to discover new documents proving that Chaucer's cat allergy was the inspiration for the Canterbury Tales. Oh, and he went to Ireland too. To see Dante.

ETA: For Lord of the Rings fans, especially people who've read the books as well as seen the movies, here is LOTR Breadbox, a parody of all three films.  Bwahaha, genius.

For any Harry Potter fans who have some time on their hands this summer, I present...


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Diffindo Elite is a Harry Potter hybrid sorting community. This means that, unlike other Harry Potter sorting communities, there are six houses, all mixtures of the four in canon: Gryffinpuff, Ravendor, Ravenpuff, Slytherclaw, Slytherdor, and Slytherpuff. Once you have been sorted into one of the houses, you have the opportunity to earn your house points by participating in various contests, Quidditch, and by opening a Shop! We all have a great time, and we would love for you to join today!

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We need new members! It's fun, in a nerdy sort of way. I know that some of you are familiar with this community or similar ones, but I'm putting it out there anyway. Come join! The people are lovely (if I do say so myself.) I'm a Ravenpuff (which means I'm a mix of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw). And when people vote on where to "sort" you, it's like free psychoanalysis. If you do join (dooo it!), write that I referred you.

This coming season will be the last one for Corner Gas.  This is tragic.  The series finale will be in spring 2009, according to my friends down at the Internet.

Apparently they want to end it while they're on a roll, rather than have it continue indefinitely until it's no longer funny.  I suppose I understand, but it's hard to accept the immanent end of one of the best shows out there (in my humble opinion).

Excuse me while I go mourn.