Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 29, 2008

I.
"Even more frustrating for the farm is that the 26 sons and daughters who have made it to the track this year have become terrific racehorses, capturing six stakes races and putting their reluctant father near the top of Japan’s leading sire list." —NYT

(Via Jenny D.)

II.
Dream: I had the brilliant idea to write a nonfiction book in which I would go through the 20th century year by year and give a curious fact for each. First up was 1901; my section focused on a tavern owner and an insane patron who kept revealing secrets of McKinley's assassination. I found all this information in a book of letters, and then realized that published correspondence was a great source for nuggets like that. Subsequently I lost myself in a volume of Arnold Palmer's letters, a facsimile edition. His letters were exuberant, funny, and often scrawled on scraps of legal paper. The one letter that I can remember involved winning a year's supply of dog food and being very happy about it. This was well before he had found any fame as a golfer.

III.
Cinema Talk: "The only major blog hand-coded in HTML"! David Rees has two succinct movie reviews up (Forbidden Kingdom and Forgetting Sarah Marshall)...TDM (Team Dizzies Member) Rob on 99 River Street (check out the tag line!)...Shadowplay: "The detective sergeant has no name. He works for a superior known only as The Voice....How The Dead Live is sensational and I immediately wanted to film it. One problem — I wanted to film it with Stanley (PERFORMANCE) Meadows in 1965, twenty years before it was written, two years before I was born."