Sunday, February 06, 2011
Fifth Chapter Blues
It's been a busy couple of weeks here at Old Ivy. Like much of the country, we've been suffering from a particularly intense winter with large doses of snow, ice, and freezing rain making the roads downright miserable. While the first of these would not be quite as annoying, given the possibility of departmental snowball fights and, in at least one instance, the construction of snow dinosaurs straight out of Calvin and Hobbes, the latter two are downright depressing to someone living off-campus who finds that events are not being canceled despite the weather. Nothing like scraping the ice off your windshield early on Saturday morning to attend a day-long workshop on science in the 1970s, wouldn't you say?
Still, the workshop in question served as something of a distraction from the work I've been dreading these past few months: the composition of the fifth (and hopefully last) chapter of my dissertation. Now to a degree this sort of nervousness or worry is normal, or at least normal for me, prior to the beginning of a major research project. But this chapter is particularly nervewracking since I am supposed to be presenting it at a business history seminar in a few months, and I have written literally zero pages of it thus far. Moreover, it will be receiving comments and feedback from one of the most prominent historians of industrial research in the country, a professor I was thinking about recruiting to serve on my final dissertation committee. So there's a lot riding on this chapter being good, which makes it all the more frustrating that it also is the chapter about which I have the least substantive archival material.
Nevertheless, it needs to get written. My current plan is to spend the coming week printing out and organizing materials, taking notes on a few final sources, and then, assuming I can polish off the article I've been working on for the past few weeks, start work. The hope is to have a draft complete by mid-March, and to do so without falling into the same routine as my previous chapter, which involved waking up around 7:30 or 8, writing until 10 or 11 at night (with 1/2 hour breaks for lunch and dinner), seven days a week until the work was done. That routine proved effective, but it was also incredibly stressful and may very well have contributed to my illness around Thanksgiving. And if there's one thing worse than writing a dissertation chapter with minimal human contact, it's doing so while sick.
Hopefully, my New Year's resolution to take one day off a week will help avoid such dangers this time around. I'll keep you posted. In the meanwhile, here are the long overdue answers to the 2010 Movie Quote Contest. Assuming the Sleeper got everything right, he wins the Invisible Medal for his mantle. Thanks to all of you who submitted answers!
1. “This is my Eiffel Tower. This is my Rachmaninoff's Third. My Pieta. It's completely elegant, it's bafflingly beautiful, and it's capable of reducing the population of any standing structure to zero. I call it 'The Ex-Wife.'”
Iron Man 2
2. “You are D Squad. D for 'dirtbags.' When I say: ‘Hey, dirtbags!’ that means you! You people are going to hate my guts for the rest of your lives. I am going to make you sorry that you ever came here.”
Police Academy
3. “88 Keys the piano man set you up. Big Boy paid him to get you out of the way.”
Dick Tracy
4. “Well, sir, I ain't a for-real cowboy. But I am one helluva stud.”
Midnight Cowboy
5. “Oh Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars.”
Now, Voyager
6. “Is there an F-5? What would that be like?”
Twister
7. “You'll never find anyone as good for you as I am, to believe in you as much as I do or love you as much!”
"I know that."
“Well then, why?”
The Way We Were
8. “As head of security, it is my job to keep you alive. I will not succeed. Not with all of you. If you wish to survive, you need to cultivate a strong, mental attitude. You got to obey the rules. Pandora rules.”
Avatar
9. “LaBoeuf, if you get crosswise of me you'll think a ton of brick had fell on you! You'll wish you was back at the Alamo with Travis!”
True Grit
10. “I'll take that, thank you. Professor Marcus, this is another black mark against you. I shall certainly tell the police.”
The Ladykillers
11. “I wanted to do something outrageous, and it felt really good, to be needed, and to be trusted. It's just there's so much I want to do with this life and it feels that I haven't done any of it. You know, the sand is running out of the hourglass, so I want to look back and say, 'See, I did that, that was me, I was reckless and I was wild, and I fucking did it!'”
True Lies
12. “So you're worried, not because you'll be in a house full of vampires, but because you think they won't approve of you?”
Twilight
13. “We poured gasoline all over the place, then left a trail of it out the door. Then lit the whole thing up and watched it burn. But he's dead, Nancy. He can't get you because Mommy killed him. I even took his knives. So it's okay. You can sleep now.”
Nightmare on Elm Street
14. “You know who that is? That's Mr. Evil Knievel. He snuck in my back door, son, when I wasn't lookin'. You better flip-flop back here and gimme a hand, son, or we gonna be in a heap of trouble. Please roger that transmission!”
Smokey and the Bandit
15. “Neil Patrick Harris stole my car tonight.”
“Hey! NPH wouldn't do that, all right? Now let me see some I.D.”
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle
16. “By Grabthar's hammer, by the sons of Worvan, you shall be avenged.”
Galaxy Quest
17. “I don't expect you to understand, you're English, but I'm half Greek and Greek women like Elektra always avenge their loved ones!”
For Your Eyes Only
18. “I don't know what they've told you down at the USO, but you're going to be meeting a lot of strange men. Men in uniform. Boys a long way from home. Lonely. Desperate. They really have one thing on their minds. Show 'em a good time.”
1941
19. “Kelp, people just don't like teachers blowing up their kids!”
The Nutty Professor
20. “I was like one of the bad kids in your class. Somebody told me a lie and I believed it. One's as bad as the other.”
Blackboard Jungle
21. “We don't have none of this stuff in the boy's room! Wait a minute! We don't got none of this... we don't got doors on the stalls in the boy's room, we don't have, what is this? What's this? We don't have a candy machine in the boy's room!”
Pretty in Pink
22. “We are Sex Bob-Omb and we are here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff!”
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
23. “It's buried under a big W. Say, what is a big W?”
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
24. “So, I'm a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.”
Victor/Victoria
25. “I am the Nightrider. I'm a fuel injected suicide machine. I am the rocker, I am the roller, I am the out-of-controller!”
Mad Max
26. “Ogata, if the oxygen destroyer is used even once, politicians from around the world will see it. Of course, they'll want to use it as a weapon. Bombs versus bombs, missiles versus missiles, and now a new superweapon to throw upon us all! As a scientist...no, as a human being...I can't allow that to happen!”
Godzilla
27. “I want to be alone. I think I have never been so tired in my life.”
Grand Hotel
28. “In the past year, over 800,000 Americans have died. Despite millions of dollars of research, death continues to be our nation's number one killer.”
Kentucky Fried Movie
29. “Well versed in the natural sciences and mathematics. She speaks seven languages proficiently. Were she not a woman one would consider her to be an intellectual.”
Cleopatra
30. “Back home everyone said I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here but it sounds better in French.”
An American in Paris
31. “It was just my old disappearing pig trick!”
Willow
32. “We're not gonna get rid of anybody! We're gonna stick together, just like it used to be! When you side with a man, you stay with him! And if you can't do that, you're like some animal, you're finished! We're finished! All of us!”
The Wild Bunch
33. “You can have any kind of a home you want. You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco.”
The Cocoanuts
34. “Okay, you're used to the top talent. What are you wasting your time working *me* over for?”
“I like the way you swing a guitar.”
“Yeah, I guess I *did* get a lot of wrist action into it, didn't I?”
Jailhouse Rock
35. “Broken Sword said 'The people have suffered years of warfare. Only the King of Qin can stop the chaos by uniting all under Heaven.'”
Hero
36. “You'll find a slight squeeze on the hooter an excellent safety precaution, Miss Scrumptious.”
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
37. “You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don't know for sure. But it doesn't matter, because we'll be together.”
Inception
38. “Ma, I've got it! I've got the idea, the angle, the lead. I'll be Jewish! Why, all I've got to do is just say it!”
Gentleman's Agreement
39. “It has nothing to do with Satan, Mama. It's me. Me. If I concentrate hard enough, I can move things.”
Carrie
40. “We decided to make it female so it would be more docile and controllable.”
“More docile and controllable, eh? You guys don't get out much.”
Species
41. “Mr. Maryk, you may tell the crew for me that there are four ways of doing things aboard my ship: The right way, the wrong way, the Navy way, and my way. They do things my way, and we'll get along.”
The Caine Mutiny
42. “We're either in a café in Paris or a coffee shop in New Jersey. I'm pretty sure I just came back from the doctor with life-changing news.”
“We do a lot of improv here. Just stay loose, have fun. You'll be fine!”
Toy Story 3
43. “That ain't no Etch-A-Sketch. This is one doodle that can't be undid, Homeskillet.”
Juno
44. “This album is full of pictures of him. Bobby Wheelock and ninety-three other boys are exact genetic duplicates of him, bred entirely from his cells. He allowed me to take half a liter of his blood and a cutting of skin from his ribs.”
The Boys From Brazil
45. “Hide a stone among stones and a man among men.”
The Hidden Fortress
46. “There is no secret ingredient. It's just you.”
Kung Fu Panda
47. “I don't tip because society says I have to. All right, I tip when somebody really deserves a tip. If they put forth an effort, I'll give them something extra. But I mean, this tipping automatically, that's for the birds. As far as I'm concerned they're just doing their job.”
Reservoir Dogs
48. “Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, 'What were our parents thinking? Why didn't they wake up when they had a chance?' We have to hear that question from them, now.”
An Inconvenient Truth
49. “One more question. You're watching a stage play. A banquet is in progress. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog...”
Blade Runner
50. “Hold me closer, Ed, it's getting dark...Tell Auntie Em to let Old Yeller out...Tell Tiny Tim I won't be coming home this Christmas...Tell Scarlett I do give a damn...Pardon me...Thank you! You love me! You really love me!”
The Mask
It's been a busy couple of weeks here at Old Ivy. Like much of the country, we've been suffering from a particularly intense winter with large doses of snow, ice, and freezing rain making the roads downright miserable. While the first of these would not be quite as annoying, given the possibility of departmental snowball fights and, in at least one instance, the construction of snow dinosaurs straight out of Calvin and Hobbes, the latter two are downright depressing to someone living off-campus who finds that events are not being canceled despite the weather. Nothing like scraping the ice off your windshield early on Saturday morning to attend a day-long workshop on science in the 1970s, wouldn't you say?
Still, the workshop in question served as something of a distraction from the work I've been dreading these past few months: the composition of the fifth (and hopefully last) chapter of my dissertation. Now to a degree this sort of nervousness or worry is normal, or at least normal for me, prior to the beginning of a major research project. But this chapter is particularly nervewracking since I am supposed to be presenting it at a business history seminar in a few months, and I have written literally zero pages of it thus far. Moreover, it will be receiving comments and feedback from one of the most prominent historians of industrial research in the country, a professor I was thinking about recruiting to serve on my final dissertation committee. So there's a lot riding on this chapter being good, which makes it all the more frustrating that it also is the chapter about which I have the least substantive archival material.
Nevertheless, it needs to get written. My current plan is to spend the coming week printing out and organizing materials, taking notes on a few final sources, and then, assuming I can polish off the article I've been working on for the past few weeks, start work. The hope is to have a draft complete by mid-March, and to do so without falling into the same routine as my previous chapter, which involved waking up around 7:30 or 8, writing until 10 or 11 at night (with 1/2 hour breaks for lunch and dinner), seven days a week until the work was done. That routine proved effective, but it was also incredibly stressful and may very well have contributed to my illness around Thanksgiving. And if there's one thing worse than writing a dissertation chapter with minimal human contact, it's doing so while sick.
Hopefully, my New Year's resolution to take one day off a week will help avoid such dangers this time around. I'll keep you posted. In the meanwhile, here are the long overdue answers to the 2010 Movie Quote Contest. Assuming the Sleeper got everything right, he wins the Invisible Medal for his mantle. Thanks to all of you who submitted answers!
1. “This is my Eiffel Tower. This is my Rachmaninoff's Third. My Pieta. It's completely elegant, it's bafflingly beautiful, and it's capable of reducing the population of any standing structure to zero. I call it 'The Ex-Wife.'”
Iron Man 2
2. “You are D Squad. D for 'dirtbags.' When I say: ‘Hey, dirtbags!’ that means you! You people are going to hate my guts for the rest of your lives. I am going to make you sorry that you ever came here.”
Police Academy
3. “88 Keys the piano man set you up. Big Boy paid him to get you out of the way.”
Dick Tracy
4. “Well, sir, I ain't a for-real cowboy. But I am one helluva stud.”
Midnight Cowboy
5. “Oh Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars.”
Now, Voyager
6. “Is there an F-5? What would that be like?”
Twister
7. “You'll never find anyone as good for you as I am, to believe in you as much as I do or love you as much!”
"I know that."
“Well then, why?”
The Way We Were
8. “As head of security, it is my job to keep you alive. I will not succeed. Not with all of you. If you wish to survive, you need to cultivate a strong, mental attitude. You got to obey the rules. Pandora rules.”
Avatar
9. “LaBoeuf, if you get crosswise of me you'll think a ton of brick had fell on you! You'll wish you was back at the Alamo with Travis!”
True Grit
10. “I'll take that, thank you. Professor Marcus, this is another black mark against you. I shall certainly tell the police.”
The Ladykillers
11. “I wanted to do something outrageous, and it felt really good, to be needed, and to be trusted. It's just there's so much I want to do with this life and it feels that I haven't done any of it. You know, the sand is running out of the hourglass, so I want to look back and say, 'See, I did that, that was me, I was reckless and I was wild, and I fucking did it!'”
True Lies
12. “So you're worried, not because you'll be in a house full of vampires, but because you think they won't approve of you?”
Twilight
13. “We poured gasoline all over the place, then left a trail of it out the door. Then lit the whole thing up and watched it burn. But he's dead, Nancy. He can't get you because Mommy killed him. I even took his knives. So it's okay. You can sleep now.”
Nightmare on Elm Street
14. “You know who that is? That's Mr. Evil Knievel. He snuck in my back door, son, when I wasn't lookin'. You better flip-flop back here and gimme a hand, son, or we gonna be in a heap of trouble. Please roger that transmission!”
Smokey and the Bandit
15. “Neil Patrick Harris stole my car tonight.”
“Hey! NPH wouldn't do that, all right? Now let me see some I.D.”
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle
16. “By Grabthar's hammer, by the sons of Worvan, you shall be avenged.”
Galaxy Quest
17. “I don't expect you to understand, you're English, but I'm half Greek and Greek women like Elektra always avenge their loved ones!”
For Your Eyes Only
18. “I don't know what they've told you down at the USO, but you're going to be meeting a lot of strange men. Men in uniform. Boys a long way from home. Lonely. Desperate. They really have one thing on their minds. Show 'em a good time.”
1941
19. “Kelp, people just don't like teachers blowing up their kids!”
The Nutty Professor
20. “I was like one of the bad kids in your class. Somebody told me a lie and I believed it. One's as bad as the other.”
Blackboard Jungle
21. “We don't have none of this stuff in the boy's room! Wait a minute! We don't got none of this... we don't got doors on the stalls in the boy's room, we don't have, what is this? What's this? We don't have a candy machine in the boy's room!”
Pretty in Pink
22. “We are Sex Bob-Omb and we are here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff!”
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
23. “It's buried under a big W. Say, what is a big W?”
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
24. “So, I'm a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman.”
Victor/Victoria
25. “I am the Nightrider. I'm a fuel injected suicide machine. I am the rocker, I am the roller, I am the out-of-controller!”
Mad Max
26. “Ogata, if the oxygen destroyer is used even once, politicians from around the world will see it. Of course, they'll want to use it as a weapon. Bombs versus bombs, missiles versus missiles, and now a new superweapon to throw upon us all! As a scientist...no, as a human being...I can't allow that to happen!”
Godzilla
27. “I want to be alone. I think I have never been so tired in my life.”
Grand Hotel
28. “In the past year, over 800,000 Americans have died. Despite millions of dollars of research, death continues to be our nation's number one killer.”
Kentucky Fried Movie
29. “Well versed in the natural sciences and mathematics. She speaks seven languages proficiently. Were she not a woman one would consider her to be an intellectual.”
Cleopatra
30. “Back home everyone said I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here but it sounds better in French.”
An American in Paris
31. “It was just my old disappearing pig trick!”
Willow
32. “We're not gonna get rid of anybody! We're gonna stick together, just like it used to be! When you side with a man, you stay with him! And if you can't do that, you're like some animal, you're finished! We're finished! All of us!”
The Wild Bunch
33. “You can have any kind of a home you want. You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco.”
The Cocoanuts
34. “Okay, you're used to the top talent. What are you wasting your time working *me* over for?”
“I like the way you swing a guitar.”
“Yeah, I guess I *did* get a lot of wrist action into it, didn't I?”
Jailhouse Rock
35. “Broken Sword said 'The people have suffered years of warfare. Only the King of Qin can stop the chaos by uniting all under Heaven.'”
Hero
36. “You'll find a slight squeeze on the hooter an excellent safety precaution, Miss Scrumptious.”
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
37. “You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don't know for sure. But it doesn't matter, because we'll be together.”
Inception
38. “Ma, I've got it! I've got the idea, the angle, the lead. I'll be Jewish! Why, all I've got to do is just say it!”
Gentleman's Agreement
39. “It has nothing to do with Satan, Mama. It's me. Me. If I concentrate hard enough, I can move things.”
Carrie
40. “We decided to make it female so it would be more docile and controllable.”
“More docile and controllable, eh? You guys don't get out much.”
Species
41. “Mr. Maryk, you may tell the crew for me that there are four ways of doing things aboard my ship: The right way, the wrong way, the Navy way, and my way. They do things my way, and we'll get along.”
The Caine Mutiny
42. “We're either in a café in Paris or a coffee shop in New Jersey. I'm pretty sure I just came back from the doctor with life-changing news.”
“We do a lot of improv here. Just stay loose, have fun. You'll be fine!”
Toy Story 3
43. “That ain't no Etch-A-Sketch. This is one doodle that can't be undid, Homeskillet.”
Juno
44. “This album is full of pictures of him. Bobby Wheelock and ninety-three other boys are exact genetic duplicates of him, bred entirely from his cells. He allowed me to take half a liter of his blood and a cutting of skin from his ribs.”
The Boys From Brazil
45. “Hide a stone among stones and a man among men.”
The Hidden Fortress
46. “There is no secret ingredient. It's just you.”
Kung Fu Panda
47. “I don't tip because society says I have to. All right, I tip when somebody really deserves a tip. If they put forth an effort, I'll give them something extra. But I mean, this tipping automatically, that's for the birds. As far as I'm concerned they're just doing their job.”
Reservoir Dogs
48. “Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, 'What were our parents thinking? Why didn't they wake up when they had a chance?' We have to hear that question from them, now.”
An Inconvenient Truth
49. “One more question. You're watching a stage play. A banquet is in progress. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog...”
Blade Runner
50. “Hold me closer, Ed, it's getting dark...Tell Auntie Em to let Old Yeller out...Tell Tiny Tim I won't be coming home this Christmas...Tell Scarlett I do give a damn...Pardon me...Thank you! You love me! You really love me!”
The Mask
Comments:
Dude... you may want to revisit #40. That ain't from Serenity; it's from Species. Very different film.
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