Standing desks? Standing…desks…? I don’t get it. It’s always been so clear to me that the best thing about a desk job--maybe the only good thing about a desk job--is that you can SIT DOWN!

So…standing desks. What the what? What’s going on here? What the hell is wrong with people? HEY! SIDDOWN!

Take a load off, fer cryin’ out loud. I’m gettin’ tired just looking at ya.

 

A quick follow-up to the last post in which I revealed how little notice I take of movie music...

I just read a comment elsewhere in which it was stated that OPPENHEIMER had a "wall-to-wall" music score, that it was a movie with barely a single unscored moment. I'm assuming that's true.

But I have to admit, I didn't notice any music at all. I did see OPPENHEIMER, in a theater, with speakers blaring. I didn't fall asleep, didn't take a bathroom break, was attentive and relatively entertained throughout.

But if you'd told me that OPPENHEIMER had NO music score whatever...I'd have believed you. I genuinely did not notice a single note of music in the movie.

I guess this is on me, but maybe Ludwig Goransson or Christopher Nolan should shoulder some of the responsibility too.

ME AND THE MUSIC OF THE MOVIES

Basically, it's wasted on me.

I'm not good with movie scores, to put it mildly. 90% of the time I don't even notice that the

movie has music at all. Occasionally, a brief segment will make aware of the score, but

usually these are negative moments. It's either, "wow, that music doesn't fit what's on screen,"

or, even worse, "good lord who wrote that lousy music and why does it exist?"

Occasionally, the music is so powerful that it's undeniable: PSYCHO, 2001: A SPACE

ODYSSEY, ROCKY, some others.

But most of the time, it just slides right past me as if it wasn't even there.

So, of course, I recently took a YouTube "Identify the Movie by Its Music" quiz. Of course

I did.

60 movies were included in the quiz and I had seen every one of them. I identified exactly

13 by the music sampled. That was actually better than I'd expected, but, truth be told, the

quiz included some particularly famous or memorable themes.

These are the titles I got: JAWS, JAMES BOND THEME, TITANIC, ROCKY, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, GHOSTBUSTERS, PSYCHO, EXORCIST, GODFATHER,

HALLOWEEN, BRAVEHEART, THE THIRD MAN, THE SEARCHERS.

Here, plucked from a long list, are a few I did NOT get:

     STAR WARS (after listening to about one second of music, I shouted, “SUPERMAN!”

Of course I quickly recognized my error, but too late. I got it wrong)

    THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY (knew it was a spaghetti western, guessed

the wrong one.)

    SHREK

    INCEPTION

    HARRY POTTER

    HUNGER GAMES

    LORD OF THE RINGS

    AVATAR

    UP

    and to my eternal shame, THE SHINING.

I also didn’t get DR. STRANGELOVE, but I don’t count it against myself because

it was a cheat. They played a rendition of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, a

song which is definitely integral to STRANGELOVE, but the version they played was

not from the movie and had a much different sound.

And, possibly worst of all, I half-heartedly guessed that the SCHINDLER’S LIST

music was actually from…YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.

So sue me.