| Toady's tidbits for today / Don't skip breakfast! Start the day with some food for thought. | ||||
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Words to keep
"Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character." —James Russell Lowell (Dryden) |
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| Pop culture eternal You've probably noticed that in old movies the picture is horizontally shorter than in most of today's movies. Artists have found that the short rectangle is the ideal shape for composing images. Hollywood's adoption of the wide screen in the early 1950s was not an artistic choice or a technological breakthrough, but a business strategy. At that time, the film industry was struggling to compete with a very popular new medium of entertainment: television. Movie producers wanted to offer the public a kind of visual experience that wasn't available on television, so they made the movie screen wider. Now TV sets have wide screens to fit the wide movie format. However, the great director Fritz Lang called it "a formula for a funeral, or for snakes, but not for human beings". |
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| Toady's teaser for today / Look tomorrow! | ||||
| Q: Where did the English alphabet originate? | ||||
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Yesterday's teaser
Q: What are the four "fearful things" in Japanese tradition? A: Lightning, earthquakes, fires, and fathers. In Japanese, the last two items rhyme: kaminari, jishin, kaji, oyaji. |
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Toady's triathlon for today /
Here are three quick exercises to get you going! [Note: The exercises may not work in all browsers.] |
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New challenge (29 July) |
Review (One day old) |
Last chance! (Two days old) |
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