As long as I’m pointing out movie trailers, a new one for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is now available for viewing at starwars.com.

The first full-length Wallace & Gromit movie, Curse of the Wererabbit, is on its way to theaters. A three-minute featurette is available for viewing, and the movie will make its U.K. debut in October of this year. No word yet on when it will arrive in America.

The scrolling text from the beginning of Star Wars Episode III has been revealed. Here’s what it says:

Episode III
REVENGE OF THE SITH
War! The Republic is crumbling
under attacks by the ruthless
Sith Lord, Count Dooku.
There are heroes on both sides.
Evil is everywhere.
In a stunning move, the
fiendish droid leader, General
Grievous, has swept into the
Republic capital and kidnapped
Chancellor Palpatine, leader of
the Galactic Senate.
As the Separatist Droid Army
attempts to flee the besieged
capital with their valuable
hostage, two Jedi Knights lead a
desperate mission to rescue the
captive Chancellor….

The movie premieres on May 19.

Yesterday was Elvis Presley’s 70th birthday. If he had actually lived to be 70, what would he have looked like? Scientists at St. Andrew’s University (wherever that is) decided to find out and used computers to artificially age a photo of Elvis. Looking at the result, I have to say that I hope I look that good when I’m 70.

Merriam-Webster has announced its list of the top ten words of the year for 2004, and the number one word on that list is: blog.

These are the items from the list that I do remember:
Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water. You could find these in any convenience store when I was a kid. They seem pretty pointless to me in retrospect, but at the time I bought and consumed them like all the other kids.
Candy cigarettes. Of course! They still exist (Ben brought some home a couple of weeks ago), but to satisfy the demands of political correctness, they are labeled as “candy sticks.” The boxes still look exactly like cigarette packs, though, and everyone knows what they’re supposed to be.
Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles. I remember the machines that had a tall, skinny door behind which the tops of the bottles were visible. You could open the door at any time, but the bottles were firmly gripped by the machine — until you put your money in the slot, you couldn’t pull a bottle out.
Home milk delivery. I know that we had home delivery when I was a child, because I distinctly remember a milkman who came through our neighborhood on horseback. He gave me a ride once; I must have been six or seven years old. I don’t remember milk in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers, but it’s certainly possible that that’s what we were getting.
Party lines. Yes, we had one when I was a child. We shared a phone line with another household, and sometimes when I picked up the phone to make a call, I would hear the voices of strangers talking. I would have to hang up and wait until later to use the phone.
P.F. Flyers. Sneakers! Back in those days, we didn’t associate rubber-soled canvas shoes with sports. They were just the shoes you wore when it wasn’t Sunday. And they weren’t a big business with celebrity endorsements, because they were marketed to kids, not adults. I remember brands like P.F. Flyers and Keds that came with toy prizes inside the box, like breakfast cereals.
S&H Green Stamps. My mother used to have a kitchen drawer where she kept the strips of stamps that she got every time she went grocery shopping, and the books she pasted them into.You could trade filled-in books for merchandise at an S&H Green Stamps store. (The stamps don’t exist anymore, but the program has been revived as S&H Greenpoints.)
Metal ice trays with levers. These didn’t work very well. You had to pull up on the lever to pop the ice cubes out of the tray. I don’t miss them. Flexible plastic ice trays are better, but icemakers are best of all.
Blue flashbulbs. My first camera (a Polaroid Swinger, circa 1968) used these. You had to plug a fresh flashbulb into the socket before every shot (unless you were outside), so it was necessary to carry a box of them around with you.
Roller skate keys. Yeah, whatever happened to those roller skates that clamped onto the soles of your leather shoes? You had to have a skate key to tighten or loosen the clamps, if you lost your key, your skates were useless. That’s why we put them on chains and wore them around our necks. And you could buy replacements in toy stores, of course.
Cork popguns. Actually, I don’t remember the wooden guns that fired corks, although they must have been commonplace when I was a kid. What I remember was a red rubber gun that fired ping-pong balls. You jammed the ball into the muzzle of the gun and then squeezed the grip until the pressure forced the ball to shoot out with a POP! Much more fun.
So what’s my score? I remember eleven items out of 25 — just barely enough to put me into the “Don’t tell your age” bracket, but nowhere near the sixteen required for true Older Than Dirt status. Oh, well.

The following quiz is making the rounds, and it rang enough bells with me that I thought it would be fun to write about.

Older Than Dirt Quiz
How many of the following items can you remember? (From your own firsthand experience, that is. Things you remember being told about don’t count.)
1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
5. Coffee shops or diners with tableside juke boxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (Olive-6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 78 rpm records
15. S&H Green Stamps
16. Hi-fis
17. Metal ice trays with levers
18. Mimeograph paper
19. Blue flashbulb
20. Packards
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Washtub wringers
If you remembered 0-5 = You’re still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don’t tell your age,
If you remembered 16-25 = You’re older than dirt!

So what were my answers? Let’s start with a list of the things I don’t remember:
Blackjack chewing gum. I’ve never heard of this before.
Tableside jukeboxes. Except in TV shows and movies, and some of the new retro-by-design restaurants.
Newsreels. TV had killed these off by the time I was born.
Butch wax. Never heard of it.
Phone numbers with word prefixes. No, I can still remember the phone number of the house I lived in when I was six, and it was just a string of seven digits.
Peashooters. I’m not even sure what these are.
Howdy Doody. No, that show ended when I was a baby.
78 rpm records. When I was a kid, all the record players we had could be set to play at 78, but my family didn’t own any of those records.
Hi-fis. Those came before stereo sets, right?
Mimeograph paper. I almost said yes to this, because when I was a public-school student, the schools used what everyone called mimeograph machines to duplicate handouts and test papers. But I’ve since learned that these were actually spirit duplicators. Mimeograph was an even older technology that I’ve never encountered firsthand.
Packards and Studebakers. I’m sure I’ve seen them on the roads, but I don’t think I ever rode in either one. Packard stopped making cars before I was born; Studebaker did likewise when I was in first grade.
Washtub wringers. No, just clothes washers with spin-dry cycles. I don’t remember washboards either.
So what do I remember? That will have to wait for part 2.

Another book meme is circulating through the blogosphere. To participate, you post a copy of this list of 101 Great Books to your blog, and indicate which of them you have personally read. Okay, I’ll play. In the following list, the works that I have read are listed in bold.

Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
Beowulf
Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dante – Inferno
Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang – Faust
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph – Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick
Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
Morrison, Toni – Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George – Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles – Antigone
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire – Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard – Native Son

Not a very impressive showing, and it would be even less so if I indicated which works I read only because I was required to in school. But with a few exceptions (such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and Don Quixote), I’m not terribly embarrassed by the number of these books I haven’t read. This looks to me like a list compiled by professors of English and comparative literature, and it reflects what books they consider important. But it’s not clear to me why it’s imperative for non-professors to read The Mill on the Floss or Vanity Fair.
This leads to the part of this meme that quite a few bloggers are having fun with: critiquing the list, and suggesting what books they think should have been included. There’s some lively discussion of this in the comments at Damian Penny’s blog. In particular, I agree with Tony, who points out that this list completely ignores nonfiction works, and that any list of Great Books that excludes Euclid’s Elements and Newton’s Principia Mathematica cannot be taken seriously. Well, okay, it’s not reasonable to expect that everyone will actually read those books, but they should understand (a) what those books are about and (b) why they are important. In other words, we should all at least have a Cliff’s Notes familiarity with these books.
On that basis, and with the stipulation that I’m only attempting to address Western culture, I would also expect to see the following books on any sensible list:

The King James Bible
Plato – Republic and Dialogues
Herodotus – Histories
Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
Sun Tzu – The Complete Art of War
Macchiavelli, Niccolo – The Prince
The Declaration of Independence
The Federalist Papers
The Constitution of the United States of America
Smith, Adam – The Wealth of Nations
Darwin, Charles – The Origin of Species
Marx, Karl – The Communist Manifesto
Gibbon, Edward – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Bulfinch, Thomas – Mythology

That’s just a quick list off the top of my head, with only minimal Web-surfing to make sure I’m listing the titles and names correctly. I’m tempted to do some more research and expand this list, but I’m trying to keep my blogging habit under control, remember? So instead, I’ll ask you. What other works do you think are important enough to be include in this list? Post a comment, or write about it in your own blog.
Before I let go of this, I have one other complaint. Even if we limit the scope of a Great Books list to fiction, I cannot accept a list that contains none of the following titles:

Verne, Jules – Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Wells, H.G. – The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, or War of the Worlds (at least one!)
Heinlein, Robert – The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, or Stranger in a Strange Land
Asimov, Isaac – The Foundation Trilogy, The Caves of Steel, or I, Robot
Tolkien, J.R.R. – The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (yes, both!)
Clarke, Arthur C. – 2001: A Space Odyssey or Childhood’s End

Science fiction and fantasy are mainstream literature now. It’s time for the ivory-tower academics to take notice of this fact. If they continue to tell us with a straight face that Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth is more important than Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, that will just demonstrate how out of touch and irrelevant the professors are.

In my second post to this blog (written 3 October 2001), I tried to identify some of the astronauts who appear during the title sequence of Star Trek: Enterprise. Tonight I discovered that the Startrek.com website has a page that explains most of the images in the sequence. Does that mean I can now find out whether my guesses were correct? Well, not entirely. The Opening Credit Sequence Timeline doesn’t cover every single image in the credits, and some of the ones I tried to identify are among the missing ones. But let’s take another look at my list anyway. My guesses were as follows:

• A test pilot in front of his plane — maybe Gus Grissom, maybe Chuck Yeager. The timeline doesn’t mention this image, so the pilot’s identity remains a mystery for now.
• A close-up of Alan Shepard, suiting up for Apollo 14. Correct!
• An Apollo crew during launch, probably on Apollo 13. Wrong! This shot does show three astronauts experiencing a launch, but they’re in the mid-deck of a space shuttle.
• An Apollo crew walking down a corridor, possibly from Apollo 11. It’s an Apollo crew, but the timeline doesn’t say which one.

One right answer, one wrong answer, and two inconclusive ones. Rather unimpressive for a self-proclaimed Apollo buff. I guess I should hang onto my day job.

Bit by bit, I’m emerging from my Cinderella spider hole. Over the weekend, I started to chip away at my movie backlog by watching a couple of DVDs (I’m so far behind that some of the films in my backlog are already available in disc form). Ruth has been pestering me to watch Pirates of the Caribbean ever since that DVD came out, and she finally screened it for me on Christmas Day. I like swashbuckling adventure films, and this one definitely fits that description. I think the sword duel in the blacksmith’s shop may well end up on everyone’s lists of classic action scenes, along with the shootout at Marion’s tavern in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the gun battle on the riverboat in The Mummy.
The next day, my nephew Jason dumped a half dozen of his newest DVDs on the table in front of us and said we were welcome to watch anything we wanted. I immediately latched onto Finding Nemo, which I missed when it was on the big screen. There was no question that I would enjoy it; Pixar never disappoints. As Bob has pointed out, what most people notice about Pixar is the superb computer-generated graphics, but that’s not what makes all Pixar films huge successes. People of all ages love Pixar movies because of the quality of the writing. Nemo is no exception. I find the movie’s theme — the triumph of hope over fear — very moving. I would try to explain why, but Iain Murray has beaten me to it; his article on the subject was published today at National Review Online.
I still have a lot of movies to watch before I’m caught up. Some of them aren’t out on DVD yet, so I’ll have to go to one of those buildings with lots of seats and a great big screen on one wall. It’s been so long since I’ve been to one that I forget what they’re called. It’s a word something like “theatre,” but I know that’s not right; “theatre” is the place with dressing rooms and a stage where I spent the last two months of my life. Oh, well, it’ll come to me eventually.