Mid-January Blah

     The first week of my final semester was survived. Too early to know what the rest of this semester will be like. Was brushed off by bureaucracy when I asked about doing more volunteer voicetracking at the radio station, which figures. The weather has been rainy and coldish all week, but not cold-cold, which contributes to a general feeling of blahness generally.

     Read through Daphne de Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca for school; she was a contemporary of Agatha Christie's, and Flavia's sister Daffy reads one of her books in Thrice the Brindled Cat Hath Mew'd. Also checked out Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow and Dodie Smith's The Hundred and One Dalmatians again from the campus library, because those are lighter. Sure, Rebecca was a well-written novel, but it's set in western England, which is so bleak....it was exhausting to read. The movie was probably more exhausting to watch, due to the pacing of movies in the 1940's. I discovered that I was the last person to check out The Hundred and One Dalmatians, two years ago. That's really sad, because without it, the world would have never known to count Cruella de Vil among the ranks of Worst Villains Ever.

     In football, Atlanta destroyed the Packers in the NFC championship game, so the Falcons will play in Super Bowl LI in two weeks. The only other time the Falcons made the Super Bowl was the 1998 season, losing to the John Elway-Terrell Davis Broncos by a 34-19 score on January 31, 1999. That was the second Super Bowl that I can remember watching; I was five, and we would move to Morris that summer. Atlanta will be playing New England, since the Patriots annihilated Pittsburgh, so that'll be, like, their eighty-seventh Super Bowl appearance in the last twenty years. (Actually their eighth, and their ninth overall.)

     Ashland told me about this article she'd read called "Body Ritual among the Nacirema," by Horace Miner, which was a sociological satire written in 1953. So I had to look it up, since she liked it so much. It's making fun of our tendencies to be obsessed with healthiness and cleanliness, and it was really funny. Satire usually is, though, if it's done well.
   
     Disagreed with most of Aziz Ansari's points in his Saturday Night Live monologue, but he expressed them well. And the Weekend Update jokes about Trump's inauguration were hilarious.