Dodgeball
It is so horrible that it's painful to watch ... which makes me cry!
Wild_Thing
JoinedPosts by Wild_Thing
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54
What movie makes you cry?
by MsMcDucket ineverytime, i watch the movie "a time to kill", i cry.
that movie gives me chill bumps!
that's one of the reasons why i love *************(dang!
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43
The New "Invite" - How Stupid Can They Be?
by metatron inwhile traveling down thru new england, i happened across one of the new district convention "invites".. how dumb can the watchtower society get?
for the moment, let's ignore the fact that they expect people to drop everything.
within a radius of one, two or even three hundred miles and attend an inner city convention over a weekend.
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Wild_Thing
Also, they don't have labels on them because the local congregations are supposed to put them on there. I saw one that had a label. It had the date, location, and address. Sorta like the labels that Avon ladies put on the back of their books!
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The New "Invite" - How Stupid Can They Be?
by metatron inwhile traveling down thru new england, i happened across one of the new district convention "invites".. how dumb can the watchtower society get?
for the moment, let's ignore the fact that they expect people to drop everything.
within a radius of one, two or even three hundred miles and attend an inner city convention over a weekend.
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Wild_Thing
I saw these over at my sister's house and swiped one. I thought they were ridiculous! And I don't remember JWs ever having invitations to the conventions when I was growing up in the org. Is this something new? Or something old that they abandoned for a while and then brought back?
Here it is for your viewing pleasure!
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7
Da Vinci Code reviews
by aniron inhere are some reviews i came across about the dvc film.. "the greatest turkey ever told".
"an awful book ..... by great acheivement turned into an even worse film".
"after all the hype, controversy and theological arguments, ron howard's adaptation of dan brown's all-conquering novel is finally with us but unfortunately it's a bit of a damp squib.".
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Wild_Thing
I loved the book. I read it in one weekend. It was definitely a page turner. I plan on seeing despite what the critics say ... I usually disagree with them anyway.
I need only give away one secret -- that the movie follows the book religiously. While the book is a potboiler written with little grace and style, it does supply an intriguing plot. Luckily, Ron Howard is a better filmmaker than Dan Brown is a novelist; he follows Brown's formula (exotic location, startling revelation, desperate chase scene, repeat as needed) and elevates it into a superior entertainment, with Tom Hanks as a theo-intellectual Indiana Jones. -- Robert Ebert
Evidently, Ebert didn't like the book either. <shrug> -
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Da Vinci Code reviews
by aniron inhere are some reviews i came across about the dvc film.. "the greatest turkey ever told".
"an awful book ..... by great acheivement turned into an even worse film".
"after all the hype, controversy and theological arguments, ron howard's adaptation of dan brown's all-conquering novel is finally with us but unfortunately it's a bit of a damp squib.".
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Wild_Thing
Actually, the book got the same kind of reviews, and it is wildly popular. I think if you liked the book, you will like the movie, which is pretty much what I read in some reviews. Here is a pretty interesting article from the Chicago Sun. He pretty much says that the book should have been a failure based on all the reviews, but just the opposite happened. I foresee the same for the movie. And the religious zealots opposed to the film are just helping to drive up ticket sales.
'The Da Vinci Code': Is it worthy?
May 15, 2006
BY KEVIN NANCE Arts Critic
Greater than any mystery contained in The Da Vinci Code, the Dan Brown thriller whose film version opens on Friday, is the riddle of the book's mindboggling popularity. Publishers and would-be best-selling authors are racking their brains to discover (and reproduce) the recipe for one of the greatest publishing phenomena of all time, which has sold more than 40 million copies in hardcover and has now settled in for what's expected to be a reign of Victorian proportions at No. 1 in paperback.
Is it Brown's canny combination of religious conspiracy theories, secret societies, code-cracking and art-historical mumbo-jumbo? Has it tapped into a wave of anti-Catholicism following a rash of sex-abuse scandals in the church? Does it satisfy an emerging hunger for feminist theologies? Is it the novel's choppy but breathless pace, with nearly every one of its 105 brief chapters punctuated by a cliffhanger? Or is it, by now, chiefly a case of snowballing fame, with many readers buying the book just to see what all the fuss is about?
Experts can't figure out how Dan Brown's so-so writing has produced such a blockbuster. Call it a miracle. (TIM BOYD/AP)
'DA VINCI CODE' WEEK STORIES
• Leo's timeless images crop up everywhere
• 'Da Vinci' Cod pays homage to best seller
• Churches take crack at 'Code'
• Experts set record straight on 'Code' claims
• Why is this book a blockbuster?
• Chicago's own art mystery
• Evangelical passion for 'Da Vinci'
• Europe: Decoded
• Bettany: 'Da Vinci' is 'just a fun thriller'It's a puzzle that might stump even Brown's Harvard sleuth, Robert Langdon, but one thing is certain: Whatever the secret of The Da Vinci Code's success, it's not the book's literary qualities.
With its flat prose, stick-figure characters, wooden dialogue, perfunctory scene-setting and an unfortunate tendency to interrupt the action with momentum-killing lectures, the novel is in some ways the unlikeliest of best sellers. Many Chicago writers, critics, scholars and book-industry insiders are flummoxed by the book's success.
"I read 50 pages and put it down," says Bill Young, president of Midwest Media and a frequent escort of authors who come to Chicago for book-signings and other appearances. "I had Dan Brown in town and liked him, but I was just amazed that his book took off to the extent that it did."
Author James McManus, who teaches creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and writes about poker for the New York Times, had a similar experience with The Da Vinci Code. "It's painful to read stuff like that," he says. "Give me some Novocain."
Deborah Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, agrees. "His dialogue's pretty clumsy, his sentence structure is monotonous, and even the pace of the novel, which is a big part of its appeal, I found sort of wearing. It's relentless -- every two and a half pages there's a cliffhanger. It actually got to be tedious, because every other page or so, I knew somebody was going to have a gun in their face."
Then there are those endless digressions, often on arcane (and sometimes inaccurately summarized) topics such as obscure corners of art history and religion.
"It seems to be written like this: Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-stop. Lecture. Resume bams," says Patricia Monaghan, a book critic, scholar, poet and professor at DePaul University. "It does have a narrative push, but I also felt there was some sort of weird grafting of a nonfiction book onto a thriller, as if it were written by two authors. If I were that person's writing teacher, I'd say, 'Let's have some transitions between the action and the lectures, OK?' "
Everything's 'astonishing'
The list of Brown's literary crimes and misdemeanors ranges from the merely irritating, such as his overuse and occasional misuse of ellipses, to the downright maddening, such as his tendency to over-hype his story even as he's telling it. In something like the manner of Rachael Ray, the chirpy Food Network chef who keeps insisting that her recipes are "awesome," Brown continually assures his readers that his ideas and plot developments are "astonishing."
"He's telling you the story and then telling you what to think about the story," says Donna Seaman, associate editor of Booklist, a review journal published by the American Library Association. "He's always preaching."
And unlike the best of his mystery-writing colleagues, who understand a reader's desire to do his or her own mental detective work as the story unfolds, Brown leaves precious little to the imagination.
"One of the most irritating parts of the book is the fact that it has to keep telling you how intricate it is, even though he's explaining every single clue as it comes your way," Nelson says. "A good author of this type of book assumes that his reader is intelligent enough to catch some of the innuendo or parse some of the clues. Brown doesn't have that faith."
Then there are his lapses of characterization, including a lack of psychological depth and what some regard as an insensitive tendency to correlate the characters' personal qualities to their physical descriptions.
"There's no interest in psychological complexity, depth, growth, development," says Barbara Newman, a professor of English, religion and classics at Northwestern University. "And I want to say this also: The two villains in the book turn out to be an albino and a cripple, which I think is regressive and prejudicial in a very nasty, stereotypical kind of way. The beautiful people are good; the people who have distorted bodies also have distorted souls. A book that prides itself on being so progressive should have a more enlightened consciousness about disability."
'Not the worst, not the best'
It would be misleading and unfair, of course, to compare Brown's work to that of literature's greats, since literary and popular fiction have different goals and standards. But within the spectrum of popular fiction, many experts say, The Da Vinci Code fails torise above the level of mediocrity; in the thriller genre, it's fair to say, Brown is no John le Carre or Graham Greene, or even a Robert Ludlum.
"Is this person a Thomas Pynchon or Toni Morrison or Philip Roth? That's the wrong question," Nelson says. "But I'm quite open to a lot of different kinds of writing, including a lot of genre fiction, which can be brilliantly written and often is. But Dan Brown is a mediocre practitioner of his genre -- not the worst, but certainly not the best."
Seaman, of Booklist, ranks Brown just below Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook) in the pantheon of best-sellerdom. "He's blander than Sparks, but that's about where he hits, I think," she says. "If he hadn't picked such an attractive subject, nobody would be reading him, because he's just not good enough."
Not that Brown is guilty of any felonies against literature. "It's basically competent writing," says Ann Hemenway, a professor of fiction writing at Columbia College Chicago. "It doesn't offer much in terms of language or character development or deeper psychological issues, but it gets you where you're going, keeps you turning the pages. Certainly in terms of commercial fiction, The Da Vinci Code isn't the worst thing I've ever read -- it's not a Harlequin romance, after all. No one can say that Dan Brown has done terrible things to the world of letters."
But McManus, for one, argues that the Da Vinci Code phenomenon isn't good for the cause of literature in a broader sense.
"As a person who knows a lot of talented people who write wonderful books and can't get them published, as well as published writers with only a tiny audience, I regret the herd mentality in which everyone needs to read one particular book, leaving so much strong work unread," he says. "It's an unfortunate aspect of human nature that there's so little independence of mind about choosing one's reading material. People are such lemmings, and it's pathetic."
And the Da Vinci Code craze may have hastened another disheartening publishing trend: the inability of "midlist" (read: non-best-seller) authors to get into print and stay there.
"It used to be that the Stephen Kings of the world helped literary writers by subsidizing the midlist, but apparently that's happening less and less," Hemenway says. "Now publishers aren't looking for good literary writers they can develop over time. They're looking for more Dan Browns."
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As Ex JWs are we "All or Nothing"?
by Sirona inas ex jehovahs witnesses, do you think we apply the "all or nothing" rule to non-jw things?
do you remember the scriptures cited in revelation regarding being "luke-warm" and being "spewed out of"..jehovahs mouth?
i realised recently that i do actually view things as "all or nothing".
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Wild_Thing
I see a lot of ex-JWs struggle with this, including me. Honestly, I think it is conditioning learned from the witneses. To them, everything is either black or white ... there is no grey area. It is hard to find that balance in things. I think there is a place for the idea of working at something whole souled, but not all the time.
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1975 Article: The Mental Health of Jehovah's Witnesses
by Wild_Thing intaken from http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/126/6/556
the british journal of psychiatry 126: 556-559 (1975).
1975 the royal college of psychiatrists the mental health of jehovah's witnesses
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Wild_Thing
Yeah, the witnesses encourage everything to counteract healthy ways of thinking and dealing with things. Instead of really dealing with the problem, you are told to "pray more" and/or "wait on Jehovah"! And to really make someone crazy, they tell them it is them ...and they are not doing enough to trust in Jehovah.
I also think they exasterbate more serious mental problems with their persecutorial complex. "Everyone is after us! Trust no one that challenges Jehovah's borganization"! What a perfect place for a paranoid schizophrenic!
I tend to lean toward the thinking that if you weren't crazy when you joined the witnesses, you soon became crazy afterwards!
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Boycott Tom Cruise and his Mission Impossible 3 movie!
by Elsewhere inthe church of scientology is trying to censor comedy central because of the scientology south park episode!
please write to comedy central about the scientology episode!.
please express support for south park and denounce the way tom cruise is trying to censor south park!
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Wild_Thing
The only reason people were going to see it anyhow is to watch a 'car wreck' on screen.
I agree! But... Tom Cruise is like watching a train wreck. He horrible to watch, but you just can't look away! I am referring more to his "off screen" perfomances that his on screen ones, though!
I think we just all need to pray to Lord Xenu to kick his ass!
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Do you think the Greenhouse affect is man-made or a natural cycle?
by free2beme ini hear a lot about the greenhouse affect, in the news and in environmental movements.
i also studied this topic when i was in college and remember seeing a lot of information on how many of these weather changes that are attributed to the greenhouse affect, have repeated themselves many times throughout history and are expected to do so again.
so when i read these topics in the news and see how much greenpeace and other ultra enviro-terror groups ignore the other side of the story.
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Wild_Thing
The "greenhouse effect" is naturally occuring. We would actually die if we didn't have it. What it means is that the gases in our atmosphere trap some of the heat from the Sun and the rest escapes back into space. If this didn't happen, we would be warm during the day, and freeze to death at night because all of the heat would have escaped.
I do think humans have altered the greenhouse effect to function in a way that is not natural. Because we are unnaturally putting large amounts of gases into the atmosphere (like CO2), it in increasing the amount of heat that is being trapped. That is what is causing global warming, and it is definitely a man-made problem. Are there other natural factors that might contribute? Of course! But, it is us that is altering the ratio of gases in the atmosphere and causing most of the problem.
And that is your science lessong for today!
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Thw Watchtower Dream
by carlitos inin watching the recent protests in this country in regards to the issue of illegal/legal immigration, one gets to read the many stories of success from many of these immigrants that came over from south of the border.
keeping politics aside, one can't but be astounded by the will and desire that many of them have to "make it" here in the usa.
many of them have realized the "american dream".
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Wild_Thing
Watchtower is famous for doing this to everybody. They prey on the poor, the needy, the weak, and the mentally ill. In other words, they search out people who got a bum rap in life, and of course want more. They disguise their "kindness" by saying that they gave them hope. In reality, they are making them dependent on their religious corporation (I like that word), and actually taking away hope of them succeeding on their own in life. Sad.
