Weekend Edition(s) of the Wall Street Journal

A Note to the Granddaughters

The weekend begins with the Friday edition and ends with the Saturday edition of the Wall Street Journal.

The Friday edition has five sections, one more than the usual four. Section 4, the "D" section is called "Arena" today. Maybe it is every Friday; if so, I've missed that. But I digress.

I haven't got past the second page, but it appears the section is chock full of movie and book reviews. This caught my attention: iconic photos of four landmark films: Sunrise (1927), M (1931), Psycho (1960), and The Truman Show (1998).

The only one I have not seen is Sunrise. My younger daughter introduced me to M. It is startling how "modern" it is.

Of course, everyone has seen Psycho. Having not seen Sunrise, I can't comment on it being among only four films selected from the hundreds that must have contended. It was nice to see something other than Citizen Kane, for once. (One more reason I enjoy the WSJ -- some originality, so often lacking elsewhere).

And then, The Truman Show. Wow, what a selection. I will wager that for every ten folks who have seen Psycho, one has seen The Truman Show. Two things: The Truman Show continued where The Prisoner left off. And it pre-dated "reality TV." Hmmm. The Truman Show was about television, where it was headed, just as much as David Lynch's Mulholland Drive was about the movie industry, where the industry had been (and probably still is).

The front page of section D is over-filled with a look at the 16,000+ books now written on Abraham Lincoln, and asks the question, "Why are we so smitten with Abe?" The subheading suggests our fascination  has gone in to "overdrive" with a Steven Spielberg movie and 20 new books. The first really "grown-up" book I read was Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln. I may have read other "adult" books before that one, but it's the one I remember. Along with the biography of Albert Schweitzer.

Page D4: perhaps the best casting -- Helen Hunt in The Sessions, coming to theaters this summer. Wow.

And it looks like there's a new "television" network -- actually a huge family of channels -- just under the radar, but soon to go mainstream: Google.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has been reorganized around ad-supported "channels" on everything from cooking to cars to women's drama series.

Best bet: Shut Up! Cartoons. [Not! These are not yet ready for prime-time.]

Google's reorganization around ad-supported "channels" suggests what separates Facebook from YouTube. Facebook gets more confusing to follow, and if it has any revenue strategy, it's gaming. We've seen how that has been working out. How much time do YOU spend on Facebook? How much time do YOU spend on YouTube? 'Nuf said.

And, wow, wow, wow -- live theater, $18, 3LD Art & Technology Center on Greenwich Street in New York City -- "back in New York after eight years on the road. It remains the scariest show in town, a shockingly compelling portrait of what happens in the cockpit of an airplane when everything starts to go wrong....Charlie Victor Romeo moves so fast that you'll feel as though you'd looked the wrong way and stepped into a mile-deep pothole....the seven members of the cast all give the uncanny impression of being real-life pilots, navigators and flight attendants." Live theater takes six midair crises and turns them into an evening of you-are-there playlets. Oh, that Charlie Victor Romeo title -- CVR -- cockpit voice recorder. Wow.

Lake Agassiz

I think every state requires students to study the history of their state somewhere in middle school or high school. For us, it was "eighth grade North Dakota," I believe. If my memory serves me, and if the spelling is correct, our eighth grade social studies teacher was Mr Hoaglund. He was probably my second or third favorite teacher in middle school. I only remember two or three middle school teachers. Interestingly enough, I do not remember middle school math or science. But I digress (as usual).

Through eighth grade social studies, I was introduced to Lake Agassiz. I don't think I understood it at the time, but I do remember being fascinated by the lake, named after a Swiss geologist who ultimately ended up at Harvard University. The boundaries of this lake changed many, many times, but probably formed in the Red River Valley, the easternmost boundary of North Dakota. The North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources has a great discussion of the lake.

I was reminded of Louis Agassiz while reading Dick Russell's Eye of the Whale. Whatever else the book is, it is also a biography of Charles Melville Scammon.