Every year, the American Film Institute releases it’s list of the top 100 something-related-to-movies of all time. This past year it was songs, with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” topping the list. For the upcoming year, they’ve announced that their list will be “100 years… 100 movie quotes,” and the 400 quotes on the ballot are listed here.
Not surprisingly, Casablanca, one of my favorite movies, has the most candidates with 7. But surprisingly (at least to me), “… maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life,” is not one of them. On the other hand, looking at the Casablanca quotes that are nominated, I’d only want to remove “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.'” While this is the direct quote from the movie, the line everyone remembers, which was never actually spoken, is “Play it again, Sam.”
Other highlights of the list that amused, surprised, or delighted me…

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In a class I took with Patrick Winston, one of our assignments was to write a press release on a topic I have since forgotten. The first rule, he said, was to put the most important information in the first paragraph, the next most important in the second, and so on, because various publications will chop the release at various lengths to make it fit their desired column inches. It made perfect sense, but I hadn’t seen a counter-example failing until today…
Yesterday, Amal sent out the following e-mail to putz both linking to a story and conveniently summarizing it:

From: Amal Dorai
To: putz
Subject: ironyx10
Summary: Marine has doctors cut off his finger to save his wedding ring. They do so, but end up losing his ring the commotion.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/12/12/marine.finger.ap/index.html

Today this same story appeared in the Metro, the free daily paper I read on the T every morning. Except there was something missing – the Metro, in its ongoing pursuit of journalistic excellence,
trimmed the story after the fourth paragraph. But the punchline doesn’t show up until the fifth paragraph. And suddenly I find myself grateful to Amal for sending out one of his stupid links because I knew why that story was tragically funny and the guy sitting next to me probably didn’t.

24 years ago today, my favorite member (sorry, Paul) of my favorite band was shot and killed by a lunatic. But thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, you can still talk to John Lennon. It’s not the most intelligent bot I’ve ever seen, but it is attempting to be John Lennon, so I took the time to play with it for awhile.
To enter the conversation, the site recreates Yoko Ono’s YES Painting, which John Lennon saw the day he met Yoko, so the story goes. I saw that piece when it was at The List Visual Arts Center at MIT. They no longer let you climb up the ladder, but I stepped on the first two rungs anyhow, just to be able to say that I climbed the same ladder John Lennon climbed. And then the curator told me to stop. I did a similar thing at the John Lennon exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland a few years ago. One of Lennon’s pianos was there behind a rope and I reached over and touched the low A. I briefly thought about playing it (the note, not the piano as a whole), but decided that I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.
“People say I’m crazy, doing what I’m doing…”

(Most of these taken from the History Channel’s This Day In History website.)
1823 — The Monroe Doctrine was declared. Surprisingly, this had nothing to do with jcbarret, jrandall, and johnston or even qmahoney. It was an isolationist foreign policy drawn up by US President James Monroe.
1859 — John Brown’s body was a-moulderin’ in his grave… actually, it was hanging in Charles Town, VA, by order of the US Marines.
1932 — Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, stars of the seven Road movies, appeared together on stage for the first time at the Paramount Theater. “We’re off on the road to Morocco…”
1942 — Enrico Fermi controlled the first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago. His laboratory was originally a squash court underneath Stagg Field.
1954 — Senator Joseph McCarthy was condemned by the US Senate for “conduct unbecoming a United States Senator.” You know, like calling everybody and his mother a communist and a spy.
1964 — Ringo Starr had his tonsils taken out and the Beatles temporarily replaced him with a guy named Jimmy Nichols.
1981 — My mother spent 18+ hours in labor while my father wondered why he didn’t bring a book. At 6:43 pm after much insistence that I stay where it was warm, I finally fell out of my mother’s uterus, attempting to hang myself on the umbilical cord.
… and don’t anyone say anything about Britney Spears.

Well, for the first time since last June, Ken Jennings is NOT the reigning Jeopardy champion.
While most people will say that he lost it on the final question answer: “Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year,” I say he really lost it on the two double jeopardies he missed in the second round. Had he bet zero on those two questions, he would have had over $20000 going into final Jeopardy, which would have been more than twice his competitor. But hindsight is 20/20.
I would feel bad for him, but he won $2,522,700 over 74 games (not including the loss). So I don’t.

Today I got a salad and soup and some chocolate milk from the MGH cafeteria. When the cashier rang me up, the total came to $6.66. She gasped and said “Oh no, I can’t believe I did that!” Then she made the sign of the cross and charged me an extra penny so that I didn’t owe 666. “You can’t have that karma following you around all day.”

If you still want to pretend that the election isn’t over, the Comedy Central website has a fun Electoral Showdown puzzle. It’s surprisingly difficult — I beat the easy mode quickly enough, but have yet to crack difficult mode.

It’s official. Kerry conceded. So much for the Washington Redskins. It’s probably better this way. Bush won flat out. There’s no recount, no popular vote dispute, no sitting around for months thinking that maybe the results will change. Ultimately, there is nothing to blame it on but the American people, of which I am a part.
This country has survived it’s share of idiotic presidents. We can survive four more years of this one… at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Today is election day. But according to my uncle the cheesehead, the race has already been decided. Since 1936, the outcome of the Washington Redskins most recent home game has accurately predicted the next president — if the Redskins win, the incumbent wins. Snopes.com confirms this. On Sunday, the Green Bay Packers beat the Redskins by a score of 28-14 at Washington. If you buy into the correlation, this means that George W. Bush will lose today.
I’m just glad I didn’t hear about this before the game, or I would have had to consider cheering for the Packers. Blech.
Of course, this is the year in which the Red Sox beat the Yankees and won the World Series. And I wasn’t even sitting in the lucky chair when they did, so clearly this is a year in which curses don’t mean anything. Thus, I’m not going rest easy until the votes are tallied. (You did vote, didn’t you?)

Back in April, I went down to DC for the March on Women’s Lives and must have given someone my e-mail address, because now I am on both the Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice mailing lists. To top it off, during the DNC I joined the Revolutionary Women of Boston with the sole purpose of being able to go to a rally and see Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Carol Moseley Braun, and a few others speak. (Incidently, I went to the wrong room and accidently crashed a $250 a plate Emily’s List luncheon, where I saw Ann Richards and Barbara Mikulski speak as well.) But the real point is, I also gave them my e-mail address.
As a result of all this, I get about five or six e-mails a day telling me to Get Out the Vote and give various groups money so they can campaign. They mostly say the same thing — this election is important for women, your vote makes a difference, not enough women voted in 2000, etc. But the most depressing statistic (which I haven’t been able to verify) came from a Planned Parenthood e-mail. According to them, more young women voted in the American Idol contest than in the 2000 election. They made a mildly entertaining flash animation to go along with it.
If this is true, than I am disturbed.