Popcorn by The Colonel # 5.1

Sticks Nix Hick Pix, Occupy Hollywood

0 “Teddy Kennedy has all the charm of three hundred pounds of condemned veal.” --Gore Vidal. The Colonel probably just violated de mortuis nil nisi bonum twice.

1 Psychological disorder characterized by compulsive behavior and sexual confusion: OC-DC.

2 Just wondering: Is there an intellectually rigorous way in close cases to distinguish fiction from non-fiction? Is there a practical rule-of-thumb other than just looking to see which New York Times list the book is on?  

[Okay, this is not censorship; I just want to say that the ISBN -- International Standard Book Number -- assigned before publication of a book tells whether it's fiction or nonfiction.] 

3 In the same vein, is there an intellectually rigorous or even a practical way to distinguish prose from poetry? For example, which was Hamlet’s soliloquy? (The real purpose of this paragraph is to show that The Colonel can spell "soliloquy." God bless spell check, though it is truly mindless.) 

[Okay, not-censorship again: all of Shakespeare is poetry, even "Exit, chased by a bear." The only exception is his will, in which he left his wife his second-best bed. That wasn't poetry; it was just bogus. Don't get your dander up -- I didn't black out anything this time, not even the Gore Vidal thing, which to your small credit, you seem to realize is tasteless.]

4 “Colons: How the New Science of Punctuation Has Changed Our Book Titles” by James K. Lileks and Evan E. Science.

5 Some quantum mechanics concepts are so counterintuitive, so utterly foreign to everyday experience that they cannot be expressed in prose or even in poetry, but only in interpretive dance. No nudity, please, we’re prudish.

6 Credit where it’s due: thanks to a Hartford Courant story on The Middletown Eye's über-reporter and polypractiker Stephen Devoto, The Colonel found out why Stephen uses the “fishmuscle” moniker, without having to actually ask him. Short answer: fish are his thing, especially their muscles.

7 Never-to-be-forgotten facts: (a) The moon is much smaller than the earth but it is also much farther away. (b) Phurba Dorje, the Tibetan-born sherpa who led Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon in 1969, died peacefully in his Florida apartment on Monday, April 27, 2009.

8 If companies had sponsored novelists back in the day, the American canon might today include a book named “Absolut! Absolut!”

9 “Coke-Sponsored Expedition Finds Evidence of Dasani on Mars.” --The Onion, America's Finest News Source.