O Tempora!...

[stoutfellow]

Currently, in my calculus class, I'm covering integration techniques. Now, there are techniques that are, so to speak, broad-spectrum, like substitution or integration by parts; they can be brought to bear in a wide variety of situations. But there are other techniques that are more restricted; some, in fact, that work in only one situation, or an extremely restricted set.

I was outlining one such technique today. (If you're curious, it's the one for integrating e^x sin x.) I pointed out that the trick used works only for the one situation. (Well, you can insert constant factors into various points, but it's really just the one.) Then I said, "You might say that it's a one-pony trick."

Pause.

Dead silence.

I turned around and gazed at them for a moment. "Have any of you ever heard the expression, 'one-trick pony'?"

Dead silence. Not one hand rose.

Ne-e-ever mind...

Comments

[hornedhopper.livejournal.com]

_see_ my reference earlier to blank looks given me upon putting the back of my hand to my forehead and asking, "What? Am I Carnack The Great Paralegal?"

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

You have my sincere sympathies. However, fourteen years working various public library reference desks leaves me completely unsurprised at this.

Kind of like the poor guy named Osric who came up to the desk a few weeks ago and was totally shocked when I asked him if his mother was a Shakespeare fan. *He* knew where his name had come from, obviously, but I was apparently the rirst person who'd ever made the connection to his face.

I never did get over the day I saw the Baz Luhrman film of Romeo and Juliet in a theater full of teenyboppers who all gasped when they died, either...

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

teenyboppers who all gasped when they died

Okay, you win.

[toraks.livejournal.com]

NO!?! Really!?!?! YIKES!!!

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Yup. Absolutely appalling.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Oh, was it a contest? My bad (g).

I think the real issue is middle age, actually...

Those young whippersnappers.

[hornedhopper.livejournal.com]

Part of it is, ahem, Early Middle Age; the other, I think, is the lack of a *common* culture currently. When I was a teenybopper (a hippie, actually (g)), I had already *read* Romeo and Juliet, and so did my peers. If your teenyboppers were making gasps of surprise, then we have a disconnect. If they were gasps covering *sobs,* maybe they knew the end was nigh.

I am quite disconcerted by the current trend to use focus groups to decide what the ending *should* be to a story. If the audience doesn't like it, the scriptwriters have to retool. I find this bizarre, actually. At what point does it change from *art* to slick martketing? [I do, of course, understand that movies are created to bring profit to the producers who are paying for it]. But if the products of the artists become changed by the Philistines to be marketable to the mass public...it only ends up reinforcing what we already know and not giving us food for reflection or growth.

We have started getting Blockbuster's version of netflix over the last few weeks and have enjoyed the movies we've gotten very much. The Teflon Spouse REALLY enjoys it, because he can now find the foreign films that he likes so much. We have watched many French and Spanish movies that I would otherwise not have watched. I recommend "Belle Epoque," a movies set in Spain during the Civil War in the 30s. With English subtitles it is very witty, but TS advises that it is even funnier in Spanish, because there are a lot of word plays.

Some of the ones I chose:

Breakfast at Tiffany's - I'd never seen it, looked forward to it, and thought that the characters were simply not people I could identify with at all. Boo. Wasn't what I expected.

The Moon Spinners - was a wonderful book and I recall adoring the movie in my early teens. Definitely dated. Alec really hated it. Will have to reread the book, which is never dated :)

Casino Royale - loved it as an early teen, looked forward to seeing it again. The TS was wary that it might be too dated. All three of us were guffawing. Alec enjoyed it most of all. "This movie ROCKS!"

The Birds - good, as always.

Lone Star - a fabulous John Sayles movie about a sheriff in Texas trying to live in the shadow of his famous father, the previous sheriff, and solving murders committed in the past that turn around and bite him. Good character study.

Still waiting for:

The Rear Window
Vertigo
Glass-Bottomed Boat (okay, you can beat me over the head for this one. I *hated* Doris Day when these movies were new. Watching them at a remove, however, I find there is great comedy in them.)

I tried to find the old Charlie Chan movies, but they are not available. Sad. I once spent a whole summer after freshman year in high school watching Charlie Chan every afternoon. To anyone who feels that this was a racist and bigoted series just hadn't watched it, AFAIC. The only bright guy in the bunch was Charlie Chan - never mind that there were Caucasians used to play him, can't have everything. *He* used his brains to solve mysteries that the other cops couldn't. As period pieces for costumage - very elegant - and for the locales (even if they were probably a backlot at Paramount) it was like going on a vacation.

Also - to those who thought No. 1 Son was a caricature and stupid, I say, "Bu." His role was the quintessential second-generation trying to be 100% American, while still having to fit in with first-generation family. When he bolts through the door, yelling, "Say, Pop!" That's not a stupid statement. Watch any movies of the time: the brash, young reporter always bounced through the doorway, planting himself on the editor's desk, saying, "Say, Chief!" It was *the* slang of the young at the time. Being made the *comic relief* does not equal bigotry.

This is long enough that I'm going to x-post to my own journal. See what other people think, too.

[filkferengi]

There's a lady we met when we first started going to cons, in the early 90s. She's a few years older than we are, & I thought she'd expire of shock when I not only knew the book[s] her name [Phronsie] came from, but was enthusiastic about them. [My spouse, being evil & all, promptly nicknamed her "The Phronz." Did I mention he's evil? ;)]

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Poor lady. Polly would have been a much better choice.

[rikkios.livejournal.com]

I know I'm going to regret this, but ...

I would not have raised my hand. It must be one of those phrases that never made it across the Michigan border. I found a reference to a movie by Paul Simon, but I assume the title came from the film and not vice versa.
So, where does it come from?

By the way, I asked my daughter about it (17 years old, born and raised in Germany) and she immediately responded: "It's a song by Nelly Furtado." Well, it was close - the song is "One-Trick Pony"

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, it originates in a joke about a performer - perhaps a vaudevillian? - whose act involved a marvellous trick-performing pony, which, as it turned out, could only do one trick. (It's related to the one about the guy with the talking dog: "What do you call the thing on top of a building?" "Roof!"