Platypus of Truth

About a month back, I wrote about a conversation I had with one of my students about the perfect video game.  That conversation sent me back to the old SNES and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Feeling it only fair to consider its equally monumental successor, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time , I've been working my way through that N64 classic over the past few months.  Since I'm busy and in no particular hurry to finish, progress remains slow.  Still, I think I've made it far enough to begin making some some preliminary comments. Ocarina of Time  is giant leap ahead of A Link to the Past  in graphics, game play, expansiveness of the world, and story.  The attention to beauty and creating a sense of wonder was noted by gamers almost immediately.  It was a big deal back then to be able watch a sunrise over an imagined world.  The technology was not quite up to snuff with the designers' artistic vision, however, and there a...

Do you remember being a child?  Do you remember making some new discovery and rushing with it to the nearest adult you could find?  You tried to make them see how absolutely astounding it was but the words wouldn't come.  Maybe they smiled at you.  Maybe you got a pat on the head.  Maybe you were just ignored.  It happens again as you get older.  Think of your teenage self: a whirlwind of confusion.  Expectations are everywhere; desires, longings.  Once again, you try to tell someone but the words won't come.  You're laughed at -ignored.  The moment passes.  The thing slips away and is lost.  Perhaps you experienced this in college.  You had a better command of words now, it was just a matter of finding the right ones and putting them into the right form.  Words slipped, caught, and broke, falling through your fingers and with them the thought, the discovery.  Then career came with the whirl of adult respons...

I've been reading The Hobbit since I was in fifth grade and it's the first book that really sparked my life-long interest in reading.  Along the way, I've also developed a love of Ancient Greek literature and I am currently in the middle of a book on Homer's Odyssey .  With the upcoming installment of  Peter Jackson's Hobbit on the horizon, I also decided to go back and read The Hobbit .  This brought about and interesting intersection of my two literary loves, Greece and Middle Earth, and I have started seeing The Hobbit with new eyes. Before Tolkien studied Anglo-Saxon, he was a Classics scholar.  The official change came about during his sophomore year of college.  Early influences are, however, hard to shake, and I believe that there may be quite a bit of to hellenon hiding out under the anglo-nordic surface of Tolkien's first great tale.  Let's take a brief look at some of the key scenes of The Hobbit and see how they match up with Greek my...

Do you remember this one?  It had Timothy Dalton and Jennifer Connelly -you know, the guy who used to play Bond in the '80s and that girl from Labyrinth ?  Disney released it in 1991 and it didn't do so well but a lot of people liked it.  So I went back and watched it... The Rocketeer was worth seeing again.  There was so much more going on there than I realized when I was a kid.  There's all the classic pulp material: clean-cut heroes, a Commander Cody rocket pack, Nazis, mobsters, G Men, air planes (and an air ship!) along with that wonderful, un-ironic spirit that soars above so much of today's pop entertainment.  Then there's the little historical tidbits: Howard Hughes, the Spruce Goose, Carey Grant, an Erol Flynn knock-off, and W.C. Fields (not to mention the Copeland-esque soundtrack).  Above all, it's an homage to the state of California and the free-wheeling, independent spirit that made it the fifth largest economy in the world in just a h...