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She was the grandmother in The Princess Diaries! I love Carol Burnett, and I've always loved reading about her friendship with Julie Andrews. Apparently Julie Andrews has a very "bawdy" sense of humor, and Carol Burnett is much more straight-laced. I love that their true personalities are the opposite of what you would expect, considering their on-screen personas. So yeah, I'd say Julie Andrews probably got a kick out of that one.

Mary Poppins was good, and I showed my mom the Lawrence Welk thing and she enjoyed that one a lot.

Jen Peel made this beautiful banner, which replaced the Via Chicago banner at the top of the page for the past week:

Probably a result of the Natopia interlude. When solace brought us back to normal, I'm guessing he went back to the standard skin, and didn't put the blue one back.

This is definitely true for me. If I'm listening and reading at the same time, either I'll be listening to the music and find after a few pages that I have to go back and re-read them, because I've got no idea what I just read; or else I'll stop at the end of a chapter and find that I have no idea what was coming out of my headphones for the past few songs.

It's a squeaker! Ooh, I like that suggestion! Remind me for the next round.

The David Foster Wallace option might be a good one, we could do something like one essay a week? Anyway, we'll see how the vote goes.

Go Lauren! Sturdy toenails vibes!

The kids at my nieces' middle school love Weird Al. I like that he's still doing what he does, and nearly 30 years after I was in middle school (Another One Rides the Bus era), kids that age are still loving it. Seems like a good life.

Are pogs even still a thing? More than likely, something sci-fi/fantasy. She's big into the Pendragon series, about kids who are descended from Greek gods and go to some kind of summer camp on Long Island specifically for Greek god-type activities. Or, something like that.

Just finished: in my continuing quest to read everything by Tobias Wolff. Just started:

Say it ain't so, Joe.

Jen, did I ever post this for you? Also, I forgot to mention, my cousin-in-law is a cameraman working at the games in Chicago. If anyone is going to a game and knows where you're sitting, let me know, he can try to get you on TV. Or, is it too late for that? I'm not really paying attention. Well, he'll be somewhere else next week, anyway. I'll keep you all posted!

You realize that if we were in a cheesy movie, your statement would be followed immediately by this scene, right?

This is part of the wikipedia plot summary for Disney's version of Pinocchio. Again, not saying it's a bad movie, but I've always been disturbed by the points I've highlighted here. Stomboli, and the boys turning into donkeys always really bothered me.

True enough. The original Grimm tales are absolutely horrifying. But that scene from Dumbo definitely doesn't fit in with what most parents are probably expecting when they take their little ones to see a Disney movie. I'm not saying it makes Dumbo a bad movie, I just think that scene is way too much for most kids.

Both of those are just way too creepy for kids. When they're taking Dumbo's mother away? Holy shit.

My niece is going to this with her school tomorrow morning. They will be seeing Ruby Jane and... MC Hammer. ( The website now says "Rain or Shine!", and rain is a distinct possibility.

Give me titles, folks! Either of those sound good to me (although at the moment, Oscar Wao is looking like a lock...). The other thread's not going to be closed or anything. Keep on discussing! And I'm definitely going to put off starting this next one for a while. I'm interested in both of those. They'll be in the poll.

edit to add poll: Please feel free to vote for more than one option. Poll will close Friday afternoon. Oh, and if Underworld/Pafko at the Wall or the David Foster Wallace option win, we'll decide then whether we want to go for the whole thing on Underworld or the more manageable opening section only; or for DFW, if we want to read both, one or the other, selections from each, etc. See below for discussions of the books included. OK, the first one went fairly well. I don't know if we'll find another book with as much appeal to a wide VC audience, but I think it'd be fun to do it again

I attended this during my lunch hour today, and it was great. I heard excerpts from Kaffir Boy (banned fairly recently in the public schools in Burlingame, a suburb of SF), The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Lady Chatterly's Lover, The Amber Spyglass (the Dark Materials trilogy), the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Coffee Will Make You Black (read by the author, April Sinclair; I haven't read any of her books, but she was very cool, so I will be checking her out). I thought Lady Chatterly's Lover was too racy to be read out in public like that, but April Sinclair just flat-out read her

Also, I think it's worth noting that the "line of questioning" only developed because she made a lame attempt to side-step a single question. It should have been a throw-away.

Yeah, but not all stupid answers end up getting played over and over on YouTube. She's got to develop some sense of how to deal more effectively with those stupid questions, or it's only going to get worse.

I think the answer is much more odd than the question. It seems like she's having some trouble thinking on her feet. Could she not have come up with a diplomatic non-answer that would have ended the line of questioning? Something about how she reads her local newspaper, she watches CNN and Fox (and CBS!) because she likes to get a range of perspectives, blah blah blah... Instead, she ends up in that "Alaska is not a foreign country" place. What? How did she get there? That's certainly not implied by the line of questioning, but she gets weird and defensive, instead of just putting some