Links – Guaranteed Politics Free

We’ve got film, TV, linguistics, writing and horror fiction in here, but guaranteed no politics:

The New York Times tells the fascinating story of Dolores Hart, a Hollywood starlet in the late 1950s and early 1960s who starred in several films with Elvis and then left Hollywood to become a nun. Dolores Hart will be returning to Hollywood for the Academy Awards, where she took part as a presenter in 1959, because a documentary about her life is nominated as Best Documentary.

Language Log wonders why the system of irregular verbs in the English language is so chaotic that even journalists and native speakers get fairly common words like sing, sang, sung wrong. My students will be relieved that even native speakers have problems with irregular verbs. And I must confess that I sometimes look up rarer verbs like “to moonlight” (Regular or does it follow the light, lit, lit convention?) or “to sneak”. Still, English is pretty harmless as opposed to the irrgular (and regular) verbs that other languages fling at their speakers.

At the Book View Café, Sherwood Smith has a great post about bad writing advice.

The Stoker Award nominations have been announced. I haven’t even heard of most of the nominated books and many of the nominated writers. But then, the horror side of SFF has never been my genre. I did write down the titles of two of the non-fiction nominees, though, because they might just come in useful for the PhD.

At Salon, Michal Lemberger explains why she is through with Downton Abbey. So even Americans are getting inpatient with the inexplicably popular dull as dishwater Edwardian/WWI soap now. Though the weird trend towards reheated 1970s TV about the not too distant past continues, because the BBC broadcasts a new series of Upstairs, Downstairs set just before World War II. “Why, for goodness’ sake?” is the big question here. Not that I am averse to Keeley Hawes in full 1930s get-up, but didn’t we watch all of that already in the 1970s?

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