Five Paragraphs on Five things on Tuesday

Yesterday we read The Great Salvation of 1976's Korean War chapter and have come away impressed. The chapter flows and is well written and we saw few changes must needs be made. We were pleasantly surprised. We don't know why. After all we are among the best there is at what we do. By Adon's ban, we are encouraged.

What Will's Watching, Midnight Mass. We'd describe this as a gothic-Catholic horror series about faith and redemption.  Crockett Island is a small, insular fishing community some 30 miles off the coast. It's isolated and behind the times. Writer/director/producer Mike Flanagan gives us lots of mood and setting. The horror element is absolutely minimal at the beginning, but gradually grows to dominate the plot. Hamish Linklater is brilliant as Father Paul and deserves some kind of award.  But only3/4 stars because the climax's internal logic doesn't make sense and takes a few predictable turns. 

Forgive us a bit of nostalgia but yesterday we realized it's been a decade since the Giants won the Super Bowl. Actually, it was about this time in 2011 that they were falling apart, losing 4 in a row after starting off 6-2. We were at our highpoint as a college prof, teaching three sections of World Civ II, which was fun as all heck. We'd just come off a summer reading project, post-colonial Africa. After we spent a day on the subject in class, the homework was to write up two African psychopath dictators. 

Will Writes: Many times I'll look at a paragraph and think it doesn't look right on the page. This isn't about what's in the paragraph, but how it literally looks.  Said para could be taking up too little space, or too much. In the case of the a later, I'll cut the para in two and expand both. My goal is always for a para to look like a self-contained box of about five related sentences all about a certain thing. Looking at this post, para one seems a bit short and para two a bit long. 

Speaking of, or segway....Yesterday someone visited this blog's first ever post. This post is post 4740. We think we're serious when we say we'll stop blogging at post 5000. At one post per day that means we'll hit post 5000 sometime (someone want to do the math on that for us?) late-ish next year. We could do two or three posts per day to move things along. That's how this blog used to roll. Hmmm.....