Move over, NYT?

Bloggers (me included) are too quick to link to stories in the New York Times. I mean, it’s a good paper for what it is, but let’s give some local coverage a chance. For instance, how can you not love a headline (Madison Capital Times) that reads today: “Washington Wimps! Four-inch Snow Panics D.C.; Wisconsinites shrug.” [Though given our own paltry 2.2 inches yesterday and the enormous headaches it produced, I think we should reserve our shrug for another time.]

Sometimes, though, our paper gets a little carried away. Take Doug Moe’s column today: the gist of it is that we should just not follow all that advice from newspapers and magazines on how to live our lives. Never mind that if we followed his advice not to follow advice, we’d be caught up in a logical fallacy nightmare where no matter what path you take you wind up in hell.
But say you did decide to get in step behind Doug. Just read this:

“Hey, you. Yeah, you. Reading the newspaper. You are fat, drunk and lazy, and what are you going to do about it?”

What I want to do is go back to the NYT, but let me persevere [words in square brackets belong to me]:

“There has in recent years been a slow but relentless effort to get everyone to live life as if it were one long, and do I mean long, self-improvement course. Straighten up! Eat your vegetables! [I knew Kucinich the vegan didn’t have a chance.] Make sure your fourth-grader speaks three languages! [“the world wants to communicate with us? Let them speak American!”] Don’t smoke! [Watch it, Moe] Save the whales and the rainforest and when you’re done, the ozone layer! [Maybe we should slash and burn and have whale sushi for desert.] Who’s behind this effort? Regulators, bureaucrats [bureaucrats??], various do-gooder groups and individuals.”

Okay, I can’t go any further. I know Doug Moe is well-intentioned and humor is REALLY hard to churn out on a daily basis, but today, I think I’ll just put this aside and pick up the NYT. Oh no. NYT. Maureen Dowd (see post, January 25). Never mind.

There’s hope for late bloomers

Predictable that the Oscar nominations may be, they still bring about surprises, sometimes of a pleasant sort. For instance, I was ENORMOUSLY gratified to read that the Czech film “Zelary" received a nomination for Best Foreign Film. Not because it is filmed in one of the most beautiful regions of Europe – the Beskidy Mountains (these are actually POLISH mountains that sort of spill over into regions of the former Czechoslovakia). Not because it is a sad love story set during World War II. Not because it has the simplicity of a slow-moving film (at least in the first half) that meanders through the daily life of Eliska, the resistance nurse that hides from the Nazis by marrying a villager whose life she saved. Not because the name of the main character is sort of the same as my sister’s.

Why then? Why cheer for this film? Because it is based on a story written by Kveta Legatova.

Don’t know Kveta? No surprise. She was a school teacher, living and working in the Czech countryside. And then she decided to write fiction. At the age of 80 (she is now 84), she published her first book of short stories (the collection is called “Zelary”). The publishing house had such great faith in her that they ran a first print of a meager 400 copies. I did not know you could print such small numbers and still expect to recover costs!

Her book took off, she wrote another (the movie is based on the second one), and she is regarded now among the Czechs as a meteoric success. The film was nominated for the Oscar category by the Czech Republic, but I don’t know that anyone expected it to be picked up for the final cut. Kveta Legatova already received the State Literary Prize (the country’s highest honor) for her book. It would be cool to see “Zelary” land an Oscar.