5 Musical Movies for Fourteen Going on Forty

Hey, Red1. You’re fourteen now.

When you’re a young adult, you start putting things together. You start making your own sense of the world. As a dad, I want to give you a few head starts. Hand you a few nuggets of wisdom and wonder. We’ve been trading films and TV shows to fill in some blanks.

You’re already a They Might Be Giants, Star Wars, Tim Burton, Queen and David Bowie fan–very cool.

We’ve had conversations about jokes in TV shows and movies that you didn’t get, so I thought it was up to me to ‘buy you a clue’. We’ve been calling it a guide to modern cultural references. It’s more than just a course in pop culture, but a course in understanding how modern culture is shaped and what the core pieces are.

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University game break.

The Sims 3 Collection
The Sims 3 Collection (Photo credit: origami_potato)

Not everything is entirely educational and good for you. Sometimes a game is just a game. I haven’t figured out how to properly spoil the fun of the University expansion for the The Sims3, so the girls are still enjoying it. Perhaps they’re goal-setting in a way. Thinking about life after high school.
{Perhaps I could just tell myself that.}

Hope real life isn’t much like this game for them. I didn’t have the traditional university/Greek experience, so that’s literally all Greek to me.

We did try to do some experiments with the Sims3 game play. Red2 tried to make juice with ingredients of different quality ratings. They score the produce you grow with a simple system: good, great, excellent, etc. She found clearly that you could sell the sqeezings that were made with finer ingredients for more money. The extra sim work was worth the extra ‘simoleons.’

Indiana Jones movies map
Indiana Jones movies map (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thought the traveling expansion would be a tad bit useful. We had some conversations about China, Egypt, and France, but in the end, they were just game play. Brushing up against geography a bit.

Maybe some good geography lessons would be to do an Indiana Jones-style map of all the locations in James Bond movies or all the places on the globe that Jennifer Garner went in Alias. They’re a bit young for Alias still, but I bet there are some good ‘sight-seeing’ value to these movies. Did they actually film in all the locations or was it just movie magic? That would be a good research project.

Have any subversively devious and fun ways to talk about geography?

X – as consensus and defining your destination #atozchallenge

Capital Letter X on Glass (Silver Spring, MD)
Image by takomabibelot via Flickr

The X is not just two lines crossing in the middle
or two angles touching at the point.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Imagine four beaks, lines or ideas that meet at the same point in space,
in agreement.

The shape of the letter is the idea. The Intersection is the agreement of location or concept. Yes, X marks the spot.

Imagine four people coming to a consensus on one point in conversation. If you work in an office and see this often, I’m a little jealous. “This project has many flaws. How do we solve the problems our users face every day?” There are too many possible solutions. No one meeting point or consensus, but an endless mess of points like a storage room full of tribbles. (There they are, Alex!)

A conversation at the dinner table rarely focuses on one single point in space, but if the four of us sit around the table like we occasionally do, we all meet in one spot in time and space.

If we can’t agree on the idea or topic, that’s okay. It’s more interesting and diplomatic.

Falling into hyperspace
Image by stuant63 via Flickr

Where are we going with this? Lines and points.

It’s a little lesson in charting. Plotting your goal or destination.

If you find yourself in a fictional space ship, you may enter a destination into your Navigation Computer. The system establishes a route to avoid galactic obstacles like planets, other ships and asteroids. When you hit ‘go’ in Star Wars, all the pinpoint stars streak past you like lines as you are whisked away to your desired point in space. Not an X, but a burst of points around you, like they are ideas getting out of your way.

Hopefully, the destination is still at the same address and no giant space stations have blown up your vacation destination. I bet your travel insurance doesn’t cover Imperial entanglements. Mars in 90 days? Sabbatical anyone?