Two hundred movie theaters showed '1984' last week as a protest to the government.

According to the website United State of Cinema, two hundred art house cinemas showed the dystopian movie 1984 last week, which is based on George Orwell's novel of the same name.

Over 184 cities and 44 states had a showing, while locations outside the country--five in Canada, and one each in England, Sweden, Holland, New Zealand, and Croatia--also joined in.

The collected group of theaters decided the week of April 4th was timely, as the protagonist in the book and movie begins his diary on that day.

The theaters' goal?


"The endeavor encourages theaters to take a stand for our most basic values: freedom of speech, respect for our fellow human beings, and the simple truth that there are no such things as 'alternative facts.'"


Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming--all states with their fingers on the pulse of the excitement--were the six states that didn't have a single cinema in their entire state show the film. By comparison, California had 28 locations. Even Alaska and Alabama had a single location feature the film.

Delaware has a history of never involving itself in anything. It's like the agoraphobic of American states, the geographic and political equivalent of a pasty man with no calf muscle definition who enjoys white rice, low sodium saltines, and the smooth, smooth taste of filtered water.

What I'm trying to say is that it's a bad sign when even Alabama outdoes you.

After five months, Bob Dylan will finally get around to accepting his Nobel Prize.

Not like it's one of the biggest awards a human being can be bestowed with in life--no rush--but five months after being announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob Dylan will finally get around to accepting his award.

Not to go out of his way, Dylan will be in Stockholm, Sweden, playing two concerts, and figures then will be as good as any to grab the award.

To receive his prize money, though, Dylan must give a lecture--which is not expected to be done in person. Instead, Dylan is expected--if at all--to give a lecture via recording at a later date.

And the reason they couldn't just give this to Paul Simon instead was...?

Bob Dylan didn't show up to accept his Nobel Prize in Literature because--I don't know--he's a busy man?

He didn't show up because Bob Dylan has been, is, and always will be about creating a fictionalized mystique around himself.

When Dylan was announced as the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Literature, he refused for two weeks to respond to the Swedish Academy's attempts at contacting him. His reasoning? "I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it."

A few? Apparently it took Dylan 20,160 minutes to process it--the amount in two weeks--before the synapses in his brain could wrap around the idea that a plagiarist could become a Nobel winner.

Fast forward to the award ceremony, and Dylan was a no show. In his stead, fellow folk singer Patti Smith sang Dylan's "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," and the American ambassador to Sweden read Dylan's prepared speech.

The Atlantic nearly fainted in excitement in their coverage of Dylan's speech, calling it--among many things--"subversively humble." But the real pearl from The Atlantic might be this nugget:

"It’s not that he doesn’t want to question whether his songs are literature, it’s that he hasn’t had the time."

It seems Bob Dylan is burning the candle at both ends 24/7/365, so much so that the poor man truly can't even think. Why aren't we staging an intervention to save this brave man's life from self-destruction? HE CAN'T EVEN PROCESS THOUGHT.

The Atlantic continues, writing about Patti Smith's singing at the banquet:

"She delivered an aching rendition of his song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” during which she forgot the words to the second verse and had to start again—a mistake that only heightened the lyrics’ mystery and power."

The song is so powerful, even Dylan's great friend couldn't remember the lyrics. Do you want to take a crack at singing this life-altering, classic, American song off the top of your head? Go ahead. I'll wait. [[[[[waits an hour]]]]] You don't know the powerful lyrics, do you? They might be so powerful, they make it impossible to think. Bob Dylan can alter space and time.

If you're a masochist and want to read the text to Dylan's speech, you can find it elsewhere, but not here.

Odds are in a few years we'll find out he cribbed half the speech from a Zimbabwean children's book and the musings of a politician in ancient Estonia. That's the true Bob Dylan way.

Napoleonic war diary found in secondhand bookstore in Tasmania.

That's how humans used to write.

Royal Engineer John Squire was a noted soldier for the king's military, a learned man of good standing with a penchant for fine handwriting. This led to a diary detailing his stops in battle during the crown's fight with Napoleon's war across the continent. Any sort of diary two centuries old is valuable, never mind one of an officer from the Napoleonic War.

Fast forward 200-years, and Squire's diary was discovered in a cupboard--stacked amongst old, dusty books--in the back room of  bookstore in Tasmania of all places. And no one knows exactly how it ended up there.

According to the BBC, the bookstore owner believes "the journal could have been in the shop for 20 years, but no-one [know's] how it arrived. A working theory is that it arrived with the colonists who established Van Diemen's Land." Van Diemen's Land was the former name of Tasmania shortly after it became known to Europeans in 1642.

Squire was no slouch, with a military resume that saw him at British campaigns in Egypt, including being present when the Rosetta Stone was handed over to the crown. He later spent time in South America, Sweden, and Portugal, where he eventually died of a fever.

Yet, strangely enough, his long lost diary might have been a better traveler than he ever was--however it was that it traveled.



FUN FACT!: After being discovered in 1642, Tasmania was thought to be part of mainland Australia. Somehow, despite a settlement long established on the southeastern tip, it took until 1798 for an explorer to circumnavigate the island and realize, you know, duh.


Photo:  abc.net.au

The Nobel committee really is secretive about the dinner menu.

Every year the Nobel Prize Banquet is held in Stockholm, Sweden, where the Swedish monarchy slums it with the plebeian masses while some hardware is handed out to the newest Nobel laureates. (Except the Peace Prize, which is given out in Oslo, Norway. Don't ask. I think we all know Sweden and Norway are just the same place if we're being honest with ourselves.)

As the name implies, it's a banquet, with actual food for 1,300 guests. So what are they serving for this year's gathering to be held this coming Thursday?

If you're wondering, that's their website from today, which refuses to say what they're feeding anyone until the actual banquet starts. They're more secretive than Colonel Sanders and Coca-Cola are with their recipes.

There are no hard and fast rules what must be served, except something should be Scandinavian-inspired. If your taste buds didn't just come to life when you read "Scandinavian-inspired," hold onto your tongue, because this was 2014's menu:


Cream of cauliflower soup, 
mosaic of red king crab, peas and lemon pickled cauliflower florets

Spiced loin of red deer, carrot terrine, salt-baked golden beets, 
smoked pearl onions, potato purée and game jus

Mousse and sorbet of wild dewberries from Gotland,
saffron panna cotta and brown butter sponge cake


They had me at cream of cauliflower soup, but the night was won with mentions of dewberries.

My grandmother used to make pearl onions for meals, and she was no culinary wiz. She also used to make spaghetti with Campbell's tomato soup--a culinary concoction that still haunts my dreams. Maybe she was secretly Swedish?

All I know is some year the Nobel folks really should just serve everyone a KFC bucket of chicken, with a side of lingonberries. Everyone would be happy.

Know Your Obscure Halloween Candy: Skor

With Halloween coming soon, that means only one thing really: candy.

Anyone who trick-or-treated as a child knows that there's always one or two houses that dish out some obscure candy. So, between now and October 31st, we'll take quick looks at obscure candies (and some popular ones as well), just so you know what exactly you're getting yourself into.

Today: Skor

What it's made of:  Butter toffee covered in milk chocolate

Who owns it:  The Hershey Company

Background:  If your first reaction is, "What the hell's a 'Skor'?"--you're not alone

By candy standards, Skor is a baby. It was developed by the Hershey Company and released to American consumers in 1981. It was brought to Canada in 1983 under the equally odd name 'Rutnam.' Skor, though, is meant to have a Swedish vibe, for reasons no one quite understands. The word skor in Swedish means 'shoes.' Because nothing evokes the taste of sweetness quite like the delicate deliciousness of shoes.

Likewise, the small crown on the wrapper is nearly identical to the Swedish national emblem of The Three Crowns, which the Swedes plaster everywhere, from the monarchy to the men's national hockey team...from the Swedish Police Authority to the Swedish Air Force.

What it tastes like:  Confusion mixed with Nordic pride.

Halloween Trick-or-Treat Candy Grade:  C-

Butter toffee? What am I, 95 years old?

In case you're wondering what a Nobel Prize in Literature official announcement looks like...

It involves a hoard of media standing around a door like a poor man's paparazzi, until the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy comes out and speaks for roughly sixty seconds. At some point the crowd cheers like degenerate gamblers with a stash of cash riding on the announcement.

Fast-forward to the 7:30 mark for an (English) interview with Peter Englund, the permanent secretary who announced the victor.

Best part? The interviewer describes having read Alice Munro "now and then over the years," and that she writes about "Canadia," a "small world...of backwater towns."

Canada--the Alabama of the north.

Icelandic court says teenager can keep her name.

Iceland is quirky. See: Bjork, fermented fish, little actual ice comparative to name.

Icelandic law requires names for new babies adhere to Icelandic grammar and punctuation rules, including gender basics. These baby name rules also apply to the Icelandic alphabet, which doesn't include the letter C found commonly in many western languages. Want to name your baby girl Christina? Ain't happening.

What about Blaer for a newborn girl? Seems vowel-centric enough for Iceland, as if it's missing a consonant somewhere in the middle. Should be great! But, nooo. Icelandic law says the name Blaer is against the law, as it takes on the masculine grammatical form in the Icelandic language.

It became a banned name for baby girls.

This was all a headache for Bjork Eidstottir (less musically screamy than the Bjork you're thinking of), a renegade mother in Iceland who has no appreciation for laws or grammatical rules. She named her daughter Blaer fifteen years ago--back when Bill Clinton was president, yo!--but Icelandic officials said the name Blaer wasn't on the rolls of officially approved monnikers. So Bjork Eidstottir sued the Icelandic government to name her daughter what she wants.

After years and years and years of haggling--a time during which Blaer officially went by the name 'Girl' on Icelandic governmental forms--Bjork Eidstottir won. She's now allowed to name her daughter a word not officially on Icelandic naming rolls.

Girl is now Blaer.

Cue the musical capping to this whole shenanigan:

photo: AP