• Languagehat has a post on funny Chinese curses which I found very amusing. Your mother's! There are also a great many interesting links on language a Heckler and Coch.

• I am reading the very fascinating Millenials Rising, about the "next great generation" -- the high school class of 2000 and their coevals. The authors make some surprising claims about this group: they say that Millenials are "protected, pressured and celebrates far more than Boomers of Gen Xers ever were"; that civic spirit and test scores are up, crime and risky behavior are down; that kids are held to higher standards than adults apply to themselves; that Millenials are "a lot less violent, vulgar and sexually charged than the teen culture older people are producing for them." This last part in particular surprised me, since the girls I see around with their midriffs showing and their thong underwear sticking out of their lowriders, and the boys spending all their time downloading mp3s and porn, don't seem to fit this description. But I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that many of these kids are 2nd generation, and are being raised by immigrants from more traditional cultures. I myself was raised very conservatively by a 1st generation Filipino mother, (and a 13th generation American father) and so relate a lot to this group as a whole. Far from having the typical Gen X "latchkey kid"childhood where children were left to themselves and seen as inhibiting their parents personal growth, my upbringing was Millenial: wall-to-wall French lessons, piano lessons, sailing lessons, great importance placed on my and my sister's educations, kids first.

• We saw Napoleon Dynamite, which was...OK. The dancing at the end was superb, but the rest of the movie so-so. I rented Rosemary's Baby and gained new respect for Mia Farrow, who I'd only seen in Woody Allen movies and in The Great Gatsby in which both she and Robert Redford were horribly miscast. The old Hollywood actors playing the coven were fantastic.

• I'm also reading the trashy CEO bio The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison : *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison -- I also scored a copy of Straight From the Gut, the biography of Jack Welch. My good friend Eric was reading this recently. He and I were in a sort of Marxist/Lacanian reading group circa 1996, reading a lot of Zizek. He reads as weird a collection of books as I do.

• I have rented one of the two Stanley Kubrick movies I haven't seen yet, Barry Lyndon. I'm really looking forward to it, but don't know if I can watch the whole thing before it's due tomorrow -- it's three hours long. The other one I haven't seen is Full Metal Jacket.

LINK | 11:47 PM | TB

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