Archive for February 2009
What if…
I recently had the pleasure of watching the documentary Stranded: I Have Come From a Plane That Crashed in the Mountains and it was really extraordinary. It tells the story of an Uruguay rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes, through the recollections of the survivors. 16 of the 45 passengers on the plane survived for three months in the freezing cold mountains. They had no food and were eventually forced to eat the bodies of their dead friends to survive. It’s heartbreaking, horrific and uplifting all at the same time. I recommend it highly – but stay away from the awful 1994 movie Alive based on the book of the same name that tells the same story unless you think that Ethan Hawke is a fine actor and perfectly cast as a Uruguayan rugby player. One highlight: Vincent Spano gets eaten.
About a week after seeing the documentary, I flopped down on the couch and watched The Remains of the Day starring the great Anthony Hopkins (and the ravishing Emma Thompson – but that’s for a different post.) Of course, it’s difficult to watch any Hopkins movie without thinking of his fine performance as Hannibal Lecter is The Silence of the Lambs. And that got me to thinking about a plot device that might have made the movie Alive at least tolerable…
To (sic) Sexy
After dropping off my daughter at school the other morning, I found myself driving down the street behind a truck with a license plate that read “TO SEXY.” I assume the driver was trying to get the message across that he or she had an amount of sexiness beyond the legal limit. But, unfortunately, “Too Sexy” and “2 Sexy” were taken, so he or she had to settle for “to sexy.” The problem is, of course, that “to sexy” is an infinitive, making “sexy” a verb. I mulled that over for quite a while and found myself trying to conjugate (so to speak) this new verb: I sexy, he sexies, they sexy, she is sexying. Then I tried working through the tenses: sexy, sexied, will sexy, have sexied, will be going to sexy. Then I tried to use it in a sentence, “John tried to sexy for Martha, but she had other plans.” It’s all very complicated and I’m still not sure what it means. The next time I see that truck, I think I’ll flag down the driver and ask what exactly it means to sexy. It’s probably something I should know about…
Electric Underpants 