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Don’t over-think this but I have a soft spot for two different kinds of movies. It’s inevitable if I am channel surfing that I will pause on any movie featuring either football or dance and watch the rest of it regardless of where we are in the plot. I have no idea why… of all the major sports, I know — or care — the least about football. It’s probably something deep and psychosis related.

But dance movies… well let’s just say in an alternate universe I was/will be a dancer. Even a small dance scene is such an expression of joy that I almost always get carried away in it. And this little compilation makes me smile and gives me a whole bunch of movies to look out for.

“Gotta dance…”

It seems these compilations are becoming a new meme but I appreciated this one a lot more than the “Women kicking butt” one I saw a few weeks ago.

Movies used:

0:04 Silver Linings Playbook
0:06 Reality Bites
0:08 Something Borrowed
0:12 Love Actually
0:15 Charlie’s Angels
0:17 Dirty Dancing
0:20 Big
0:23 Reservoir Dogs
0:25 American Beauty
0:27 Happy Feet 2
0:29 13 going on 30
0:31 Slumdog Millionaire
0:33 Save the Last Dance
0:37 Alice in Wonderland
0:40 Kick-Ass
0:42 Pulp Fiction
0:44 (500) Days of Summer
0:46 Flashdance
0:48 This Is the End
0:51 Grease
0:53 Intouchables (French movie)
0:57 Tangled
1:00 The Replacements
1:02 Pride (UK movie)
1:05 Blue Valentine
1:07 The Wolf of Wall Street
1:10 Grind
1:11 Ted
1:13 Beetlejuice
1:14 American Pie
1:16 Blast from the Past
1:17 King of New York
1:19 Clerks II
1:21 The Mask
1:23 Mamma Mia!
1:25 New Year’s Eve
1:27 The Proposal
1:29 American Pie: The Wedding
1:30 Footloose
1:32 Magic Mike
1:34 Get Smart
1:36 West Side Story
1:38 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
1:39 Scary Movie
1:41 The 40 Year Old Virgin
1:44 Hitch
1:47 Risky Business
1:49 The Breakfast Club
1:53 Penguins of Madagascar
1:55 Mermaids
1:57 Nothing to Lose
2:01 Billy Elliot
2:04 Shall We Dance
2:06 Hairspray
2:08 Napoleon Dynamite
2:10 Puss in Boots
2:12 She’s All That
2:14 The Heat
2:16 Rush Hour
2:19 West Side Story
2:21 A Night at the Roxbury
2:23 Burn after Reading
2:25 Step Up
2:27 Dirty Dancing
2:28 The Sound of Music
2:30 Silver Linings Playbook
2:32 The Ugly Truth
2:35 Scent of a Woman
2:38 Beauty and the Beast
2:40 Pretty in Pink
2:42 Grease
2:43 The Perks of Being a Wallflower
2:45 Along came Polly
2:47 White Nights
2:49 Cry Baby
2:51 Tropic Thunder
2:53 The Blues Brothers
2:55 Mary Poppins
2:57 Footloose (2011)
2:59 Friends with Benefits
3:00 The Sweetest Thing
3:02 Coyote Ugly
3:04 Saturday Night Fever
3:06 Center Stage
3:08 Rock of Ages
3:10 Little Miss Sunshine
3:12 Disaster Movie
3:14 Bring it on?

I have long been a lover of maps. They show relationships, history, demographics and where you are in relation to everyone else and myriad other things as well. Maps are cool.

I came across this awesome map the other day that combines the whimsicalness of old maps and our penchant for connectivity and online-ness. It struck my irony bone…

—www.sciencealert.com/beautiful-map-shows-the-mind-boggling-extent-of-our-underwater-internet-cables

“This year’s map pays tribute to the pioneering mapmakers of the Age of Discovery, incorporating elements of medieval and renaissance cartography,” the company states on its website. “In addition to serving as navigational aids, maps from this era were highly sought-after works of art, often adorned with fanciful illustrations of real and imagined dangers at sea. Such embellishments largely disappeared in the early 1600s, pushing modern map design into a purely functional direction.”

This is a company that takes a relatively boring profession of supplying cables and markets it to the masses by appealing to wonder and amazement. They truly are impressive engineering feats. and its good to use old technologies to try and illuminate where the world is now. I’s love to get one…

This one is interactive!

Ok, I’m behind… So here is a quick thought.

One of the things you will hear often if you hang out with editors is the question: Is such-and-such word open or closed? By this they mean is a word/phrase like ‘black face’ spelled out as two words (black face), hyphenated (black-face) or closed (blackface). The rule of thumb is usually how common has the word/phrase become. If it is relatively new or unused it remains open. If it is starting to enter the common language as a compound then hyphenate it. And if it is so super-common that people don’t bother to read it as two separate words that describe a concept then it becomes closed. Yes, yes, I know. I did say it was a rule-of-thumb (see what I did there?).

Anyway, by closing words, we can lose the original meaning and it can sometimes result in a duh moment. For example, a character in a novel I am reading stopped by his brother’s townhouse. I pictured a multi-story connected housing unit in the city. And for what its worth that was pretty close to what it was. But since the setting is Elizabethan London, where the character was going was actually his brother’s town house. You know, the smaller home that he maintains in the crowded city as opposed to his sprawling country house.

Since we still have homes in that style and have for hundreds of years, common usage has decided we close the compound: townhouse. And as a result the meaning has shifted form one of location, to one of construction. Since very, very few of us have country houses or even think in those terms, we don’t close that compound. In the case of the novel, the editor chose to close townhouse as we do in modern English, but I think that was a mistake. To them (the characters) it was simply the house in town or the house in the country.