Tuesday, March 09, 2004

Why kids should read From a recent decision of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal on a copyright dispute involving characters in the Spawn comic franchise (via The Trademark Blog):     "The description of a character in prose leaves much to the imagination, even when the description is detailed -- as in Dashiel Hammett’s description of Sam Spade’s physical appearance in the first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon: 'Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down -- from high flat temples -- in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.' Even after all this, one hardly knows what Sam Spade looked like. But everyone knows what Humphrey Bogart looked like. A reader of unillustrated fiction completes the work in his mind; the reader of a comic book or the viewer of a movie is passive. That is why kids lose a lot when they don’t read fiction, even when the movies and television that they watch are aesthetically superior." 11:50:10 PM    comment []

Two stories First, you have the head of the CIA telling a Senate committee that on some number of occasions over the last couple of years -- he named three and hinted there might be others -- he has contacted the president and vice president and corrected them when they were misrepresenting intelligence about Iraq, terrorism or both. Still, the CIA chief says that, despite the utter lack of evidence to back up Bush and company's insistence that taking out Saddam was a vital U.S. interest and not just a family whim, he doesn't believe the administration stretched the truth to justify the war. And then you have this story: A Wisconsin kid named Jason Frey answered the phone one day in 1976, when he was four years old, and won a big radio-station giveaway: A donut a day for life from a local bakery. And 27-plus years later, he's still collecting. As told, kind of poignantly, in the Fond du Lac Reporter: "Frey was awarded an official certificate stating that he had won a doughnut a day for the rest of his life at Everix. He also got to tour the bakery with Dick Everix Jr. himself and learn how the doughnuts were made. From then on, Frey made sure he got the most out of his prize. A frequent visitor of the YMCA throughout his childhood, Frey would almost always stop by Everix on his bicycle before or after a basketball game to pick up his doughnut for the day. "If he came later in the afternoon and there were no doughnuts left, the clerks would give him a cookie instead, he said. " 'They used to serve me right away,' Frey said. 'I didn’t ever even have to take a number.' " What do those stories have in common? Nothing. 10:26:11 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dan Brekke.