the groundhog day project

Once upon a time there was a guy named Joe Who had a very lousy job... I worked office jobs in my 20s. The opening scene of Joe Versus the Volcano is amazing in its satire (and it's awesome that both Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack (who played it relatively straight in Airplane! are in this), workers all dressed in black, trudged through a muddy parking lot, turnstile doors, a zig zag walkway, all to enter a factory that makes medical devices and leaks exhaust into the air. The lighting inside makes everyone look sickly, the hat rack doesn't even work right. It's no wonder that Joe Banks (Tom Hanks) feels like he's always sick. Effectively, he is . His job drains away his life. Or as he tells DeDe (Meg Ryan) (regarding his shoe), "I'm losing my sole."           Strictly speaking, Joe Versus the Volcano is not a bad movie. But, I'm going to end this month of bad movies with it because 1) it was one of the first movies recommended when I asked...

In 7th grade--can't remember if it was fall semester or spring semester, but 7th grade was '87 to '88--I was rereading Joe Dever's Lone Wolf books. Particularly, I was reading The Caverns of Kalte (that's the second book) again during a lull in math class... I had probably already finished my math work--I was amazing at math, would get a couple years ahead by the end of high school. And the assistant teacher, whose name was Mr. Mentell or some spelling--we called him Mr. Mental--happened to look over my shoulder when I'm at an image of a big tentacled monster. This one, I think. He asks to see my book, and doesn't give it back after class. That night, we get a call. The next day, my mother is in the principal's office with me and the vice principal... And I can't remember if Mr. Mental was in the room. But, long story short--the religious private school that this atheist attended kindergarten through twelfth grade decided that those books (which,...

Benesh (2011) comes to a subsection of a subsection of chapter two on the Gestalt cycle of experience on page 45 of her dissertation. I'm only jumping ahead because she referenced it back on page 21 (where I left off). "The Cycle of Experience," Benesh explains, "presents a metaphor of 'metabolism' for taking in and expanding one's boundaries by exchanging boundaries with another entity" (p. 45). She explains further, "each point on the cycle is a microscopic reflection of the whole, like a fractal, and cycles of all sizes are presumed to be going on continually at interpsychic, interpersonal, group, and system levels. We can't attend to all of them at once" (p. 46). I'm reminded of Bacha (1998) who was once a mainstay of this blog. Bacha, at one point asks, "So, how does the mind work?" (p. 384). The answer is not a simple one. The immediate answer is this: A starting point might be to differentiate between three aspect...

(Before I get into today's topic, I would like to point out that Martin Manley's website (the one he put together leading up to his suicide which I've mentioned before here and here ) has apparently been taken down... at least the original version. On a memorial blog "set up to allow Martin's family and friends to share stories and memories of his life" it says: Yahoo has taken down MartinManleyLifeAndDeath.com. There are however several mirror sites working at this time. Here is a partial list ... http://eulopedia.com/home_page.html http://martinmanley.org/ http://www.ussolutions.net/martin/backup/index-2.html http://martinmanleylifeanddeath.com.nyud.net/home_page http://www.zeroshare.info/ The first one seems to be most complete. It includes the U.S. Financial link that the others missed. The martinmanley.org link was set up by Anonymous and has a timed intro message that you can read. To bypass that message go straight to http://martinmanley....

I intended to write a bit about marriage today, but I’ll save that for tomorrow maybe (even though it was a logical third part to the last two days on romance and love . Instead, I wanted to explore something else today because of something I just learned about on Facebook —this particular angle on this topic and where I think I might go with it seems like it will work better fresher, without too much thought or research. The title above will give away my topic, of course. Suicide. Which Phil Connors commits at least three times, and presumably more if he’s been in the repeating cycle for decades as some suggest. Keep in mind, Phil does say he’s “been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned.” We only see one of those on screen, when he drops the toaster into the bathtub at the bed and breakfast. The others must be suicides or accidents also, though, because the people of Punxsutawney don’t seem all that homicidal. I’ve written about Phil’s depression and sui...