Oscars 2023
Rodger A. Payne's Blog
by Rodger A. Payne
2w ago
This is my annual post about the Academy Awards. I'm not predicting who will win, but instead ranking the nominations in my preferred order of finish. I'll only rank the films and performances I've seen and will update this list in the future once I see a film. Those changes will be noted in yellow highlights.  You can find my post about last year's Oscars here and work backward if you want.  Best picture “Killers of the Flower Moon” “Oppenheimer” “Past Lives” “The Holdovers” “American Fiction” “Maestro” “Barbie” Frankly I'd be OK if any of the top 4 win. They are all very goo ..read more
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Best films of 2023
Rodger A. Payne's Blog
by Rodger A. Payne
1M ago
The graphic below identifies the top 25 films from 2023 that critics ranked on their end-of-year "best of" lists. The full list goes to 100 and if you are interested in seeing it, I'm sourcing the list from a different website this year. The methodology for compilation is ostensibly the same. Here's the detail: Films are sorted by the percentage of lists they are included on.* This is typically the same as sorting by number of lists included, but can vary when films make lists across multiple years.  For example, if one film makes 10 lists in a year with 100 lists avai ..read more
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Books of 2023
Rodger A. Payne's Blog
by Rodger A. Payne
3M ago
This is my annual post listing books I read in the most recent year. It seems kind of hard to believe, but I have produced such a post since 2005. This is a link to the 2022 list if blog readers want to work backwards. Also, I posted short reviews of most of these books at Goodreads.  Non-Fiction Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable Samara Klar and Yanna Krupnikov, Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction David Maraniss, Clemente; The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero Satc ..read more
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Kissinger, Finally Dead
Rodger A. Payne's Blog
by Rodger A. Payne
4M ago
Over the years, I've collected a number of unusual images that I occasionally hang on my office walls. I am a student of political satire and ridicule and images sometimes convey complicated satirical ideas in a single frame. After all, a picture is worth a 1000 words, right? As an example, I long posted a fun picture of Cuban socialist leader Fidel Castro playing golf, the country club sport. I'm not sure this is the exact one, but it's similar: In the mid-to-late 1980s, I found a discarded paperback about Henry Kissinger that included many images of the Nobel Prize winner with numer ..read more
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Rochester (NY)
Rodger A. Payne's Blog
by Rodger A. Payne
4M ago
Last month for fall break, my spouse and I visited our oldest daughter in Rochester, NY. That picture above is actually from our 2022 trip, when we also went during my University's fall break. And we went back again for Thanksgiving when our youngest daughter could join us. This year, we took in a couple of tourist attractions that we had not seen on those prior trips, including the George Eastman house and the Museum of Play.  Eastman, of course, was the man behind Kodak. In other words, he was the business force behind the popularization of cameras and film. Here are some of the ca ..read more
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Passing notes
Rodger A. Payne's Blog
by Rodger A. Payne
5M ago
I previously blogged about a quote from Louis Masotti that I referenced many times when I was a college debater. My junior year affirmative case concerned police use of deadly force and my colleague and I noted that police shootings often spark riots. Masotti speculated about the dangers of mass riots in a 1969 book. We made use of his hyperbole.  I mention this because my spouse's fall 2023 Northwestern alumni magazine notes that Masotti, a retired faculty member, had died. His Chicago Tribune obituary is behind a paywall, but I found this brief bio.  Incidentally, that same alumn ..read more
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Natural disaster
Rodger A. Payne's Blog
by Rodger A. Payne
6M ago
On August 25 the huge oak tree in front of our house dropped a large branch during a microburst from a storm. Later that night, it rained and rained and rained.  The tree punctured our roof in multiple places, crashed through a bedroom window, and even managed to pierce the internal ceiling of two upstairs rooms. The rainwater eventually found its way to our lower floor, which we noticed by the multiple drips and small puddles from the living room ceiling. A few days later huge hunks of plaster fell in that space. An old crack in our basement foundation also seemed to expand and all ..read more
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Beach week and DC Stopover
Rodger A. Payne's Blog
by Rodger A. Payne
8M ago
My family returned to the Delaware beaches this summer for the first time since 2017. My spouse's sister and her family also came over from the UK and so the vacation was also a family reunion. Moreover, the two families stayed together in a big condo at a golf resort favored by some friends who long ago lived on the same street as my wife and her sister. When everyone got together, as we did for pizza one evening and in various combinations on the beach, with spouses or partners and their mostly young-adult "children," it was a sizeable assembly.  I'm not really a fan of the su ..read more
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20 Years Later: 3 Nights in August by Buzz Bissinger
Rodger A. Payne's Blog
by Rodger A. Payne
8M ago
This book has been on my radar for a long time. It was published to some acclaim in 2005 and concerns a three game baseball series that occurred August 26th to 28th, 2003, involving the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs. In that era, these were two of the best teams in the National League. It's been on my shelf for a good while after I eventually acquired a used paperback copy complete with an Afterward published in December 2005 that includes the framing of the book as a counter-take to Michael Lewis's terrific Moneyball, which I read soon after it originally appear ..read more
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Elly De La Cruz
Rodger A. Payne's Blog
by Rodger A. Payne
9M ago
A friend invited me to attend the major league baseball game between his beloved Los Angeles Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds on Tuesday, June 6. As it happened, this was the major league debut of Reds infielder Elly De La Cruz and signaled the beginning of a Cincy baseball summer 2023 revival featuring more winning and higher attendance.  In the game, De La Cruz hit a double that was that hardest hit ball by any Reds player this season. Tracking data from Statcast also revealed that his sprint from the batter's box to second base gave him the highest sprint speed of any Reds player this ..read more
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