Media consumed this past (three-day MLK) weekend:
Theater: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, William Finn’s newest musical. (He wrote Falsettos.) I loved it, and if you’ve enjoyed watching the National Spelling Bee or “Spellbound,” you will, too.
(And I’ve now got a little crush on Jesse Tyler Ferguson, which Matt predicted would happen.)
Film: “The Aviator.” I really enjoyed this. I didn’t know much about the movie beforehand and was surprised to see both Alec Baldwin and Alan Alda in it, but only somewhat surprised to see John C. Reilly (since he was also in “Gangs of New York,” also by Martin Scorcese and also with Leonardo DiCaprio). I also didn’t realize that the movie only goes up to the late 1940s, so I was surprised when it ended. Despite the 165-minute running time, I wasn’t bored once.
TV: Matt and I have been making our way through reruns of “The West Wing” on Bravo. I’d never seen much of seasons 3 through 5, and he’d never watched the show before October, so we decided to start from the beginning. In the past two nights we’ve watched seven episodes, spanning the end of season 3 (the Qumari defense minister, the re-election campaign, C.J.’s bodyguard) to the beginning of season 4 (the two-part “20 Hours in America”).
Books: I’ve been dipping into Life Stories: Profiles from The New Yorker, a collection of 75 years of profiles from that magazine. So far I’ve read terrific profiles (some of which are also online) of magician Ricky Jay; the pi-obsessed Chudnovsky brothers (the piece is also a sort of profile of pi itself); and Johnny Carson (whose profile isn’t online, although it turns out there’s a database of every guest who appeared on “The Tonight Show” during Johnny’s 30-year reign).
Overall, not a bad weekend.
(By the way, I wonder if there are any standards for how to represent book, movie and show titles online: italics, quotation marks, or what? And do the rules change when the title is within a hyperlink?)
I’m pretty sure titles (books, movies, plays) should be in italics.
I agree with homer; I was always taught that titles for major/longer works were to be italicized when italics are available. Underline when not. But I have no idea if the rules changes in links; I’d think not though.
I use <cite> for books, movies and plays, and let the user’s browser determine how to mark it up (most browsers do use italics in that case); I aspire to using HTML as it was intended to denote semantic meaning rather than graphical presentation, where possible, though I’m not a strict purist in that regard. For short stories, tv shows, etc., I input quotation marks directly.