Homecoming

Franciscan's Homecoming/St. Francis Festival/Alumi Weekend/Parents weekend is next weekend....

So, just in case any of you out there who are related to me where looking for something to do next weekend that included hanging out with and having a good time with your little sister, you've got a great reason to come out to Steubenville and see me.

Also Scythian is playing on Sat night that weekend, so if you know anyone in that band you get to see them AND me....its a win/win.

Unfortunately I can't let any of you stay in my room, or at least on my futon since there's already someone sleeping on that, but you can have the floor if you want it!

Plus I know that Aunt Zita would love to see you, if she's home.....

Do it! You know you want to.

Cinema Studies

I've decided that the theme of this year is going to revolve around my cinema studies class. We're going through all the major periods of movie making starting with silent movies and ending with The Passion. I figured that since we're all movie freaks that this would be something to interest everyone.

The first week we watched a 3 and 1/2 hour silent movie called Intolerance by D.W. Griffith. It was made in something like 1914 and its pretty crazy. He made the movie in response to the negative response he got from his other big movie Birth of A Nation. The movie is four different stories all put together to show intolerance over the years.

It wasn't really what I expected a silent film to be, I was thinking more along the lines of something out the Singin in the Rain where the character says something, then the words with what they just said are shown. There wasn't a lot of telling the audience what the characters were saying, but something more like chapter titles that supposedly explained the action that was going to follow. It was one of the first movies full length movies that was ever made, and it had a huge impact on movie makers after it. I would say that if you're going to become a silent movie freak that you should watch a couple of newer silent movies first, then go back and take a look at Intolerance.

Some fun facts about this movie brought to you by IMDB:
The massive life-size set of the Great Wall of Babylon, seen in the fourth story, was placed at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard (in Hollywood, California) when the movie was completed. It became a notable landmark for many years during Hollywood's golden era. It actually stood on the lot of the studio on Prospect Avenue near the Sunset & Hollywood Boulevard junctions in the eastern end of the city. It was the first such exterior set ever built in Hollywood. Falling into disrepair, it was eventually torn down. Years later, this same Babylon set was replicated as the central courtyard design for the new Hollywood & Highland complex in Hollywood, which opened in 2001.

On 9 November 2001, the newly-built Kodak Theatre Complex at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland (in Hollywood) had its grand opening (it is the new permanent home for the Annual Academy Awards event and began with the 74th Annual Academy Awards on 24 March 2002). The tall archway standing in the Babylon Court of the complex is copied from designs from this film, as are the elephant statues, each of which weighs 33,500 pounds.

In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #49 Greatest Movie of All Time.

Fashion sense

I have come to realize while being here in Ohioland and seeing masses of people every day that there are two fashions of today and I think are ridiculous and I wish they would stop.

The first of these is when a girl has a tank top that she thinks might be too scandalous, and instead of either just not buying the tank top, or wearing another tank top underneath, she wears a t-shirt. I think this is hideous, especially when the t-shirt and the tank top don't match. I don't understand why they just can't wear the t-shirt, and what makes it worse is that they make the argument that they really like the tank top and want to wear it. I find the flaw in their argument to be that when they put a t-shirt under the tank top, the tank top loses its purpose and becomes merely a colored covering for the t-shirt, and who in their right mind wears colored coverings for their t-shirts? It leads me to believe that there is something wrong with their t-shirt. Maybe they spilled some kind of sauce all over the front and want to cover that up. I don't know.

I also get incredibly irritated when catholic companies making t-shirt take the slogans of other companies and change the wording just a little bit to make it catholic. I think it is incredibly stupid and I wish that we could come up with our own slogans instead of "catholicing" secular graphic t-shirts. The worse offenders of this that I have seen lately have been "Spirit" instead of "Sprite" and "Mass - billions fed" with the McDonald's "M" Seriously? Has it come to this? Are we so incapable of being original that we have to use what other people have already thought of? Do they think that's funny? Do they think that evangelizes? Obviously some people like it because I've seen people wearing them, but still I wish they would think of something clever that no one else has ever thought of.

I also don't like ornamental belts, but I don't feel as strongly about those, so they don't get put into the fashions I can't stand category.