James Fenimore Cooper

It is a long-standing joke between Ryan and I that long long ago- before we ever met each other- we each picked up a copy of The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper with the solid intention of reading a well-known classic. I'm sure anyone that has actually read Cooper will have to relate when I say that neither of us made it far before hitting a brick wall. In the decade+ that we have each owned a copy, Ryan made it to the second chapter while I only got about twenty pages further.

If you loved the movie you absolutely cannot base your opinion on that- the book is an entirely different bag of tricks. Oi with the pages upon pages of meaningless detail and backwoodsman lore! (And this is coming from two people who LOVE the outdoors, history, and one of which would love nothing more than to go back in time and become a real mountain man. I'll let you decide which of us that is. :)

Anyway, we sat reading Twain together the other night (yes, we're extremely intellectual like that) and happened upon an essay he'd written on this very subject. I'm sure our downstairs neighbors, hearing shrieks and guffaws at 11pm, wondered what in the world was going on but by the end of it we were positively weeping with laughter. If you've ever read Mohicans- even if you just made it a few pages in, or if you love good literature and wonder why some classics ever made the cut, you absolutely HAVE to read this article. It is one of the funniest reviews I've ever read!

Check it out @ www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_fenimore.html
(somehow the link's not working, so just go ahead and copy and paste this bad boy!)

Relax

To start off with, this is Ryan not Molly today, but I have a great story.

So, for those that do not know, I am a teaching assistant at for a history professor and as part of my job I have to grade term papers. For their most recent assignments these students were required to review the historical accuracy of some recent films that portrayed actual events from the twentieth century. To help them, and myself (quite honestly myself), I wrote specific instructions about what I wanted to see in these history papers. It was nothing extraordinary: use proper grammar, avoid using slang, and use at least two outside scholarly sources.

So I was grading these papers yesterday and I came across one that covered Jim Carey's film The Majestic. The paper read like it had been thirty minutes before the due date when he wrote it, and the sources he used were ridiculous. In a college paper, he cited the Ensign, a story he heard on his mission, and Harry Potter- what's worse is that when he cited Harry Potter he could not even cite the page! He said the part of the book he was using was "probably about 2/3 of the way through the book." Needless to say reading this paper nearly gave me an aneurysm for frustration and I was not real quiet about it.

As all this was going on Reese comes into the room, walks over to me and says "It's okay, relax daddy, relax." I started laughing so hard that I fell off my chair and was able to calm down a bit.

Nothing like a two-year old to relieve a tense situation.