Thursday, April 15, 2004
Ten Little What?
Yikes! The original title of Agatha Christie’s classic “And Then They Were None” is, unfortunately, “Ten Little Niggers”…. Thank God that our culture has changed quite a bit since its 1939 debut! I just heard this book on tape in Norwegian as “Ten Small Negro Children” – Ugh. “Niggers,” by the way is actually a 1920s British dance hall song based on the US’s own mid-1800s song “Ten Little Indians,” which is also not very P.C.. It's a children’s song where each Little Indian dies a different way until they’re all gone. The Christie novel (later made into a play and several movie versions) summoned ten strangers to a remote island so that they could be stalked, one by one, and punished for earlier ‘crimes,’ while they try to figure out which one of them is the killer; the murders are executed according to the lyrics of the song. When Hollywood bought the script they were, thankfully, horrified at the title and changed it to the more eerie and poetic “And Then They Were None.”
In other news, I’m refinancing my mortgage on Friday! I locked in a great rate the week I got my job!
I recently saw two movies through Netflix. One is “Bottle Rocket,” the debut film by Wes Anderson of “Royal Tennebaums” fame, which introduces the brilliant Wilson Brothers in a quirky little story about bickering, bungling bandits. The other is the lightweight and forgettable “Sliding Doors,” in which Gwyneth Paltrow fakes a British accent and leads two parallel and very different lives based on whether she missed her subway train or just made it… Not quite as good as a Twilight Zone rerun. I hope you enjoyed this post! Peace and Love - Aaron
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