Point Break, Best and Worst in a Genre:

If Big Wednesday is the most serious surf film ever made, Katherine Bigelow's Point Break (1991) is surf cinema's biggest missed opportunity. Roughly based on Tapping the Source, Kem Nunn's acclaimed "surf-noir" novel, Point Break—with a studio budget and an able director—could have nailed the visual splendor of surf and surfing in the same way it nails its sky diving sequences. (Point Break, weirdly, is the best sky diving movie ever.)

From Slate

How To Read the NYT Fast
The Jack Shafer method, from Slate:

When time allows only a quick lap of the news, I navigate my broadsheets thusly: I read the hed, the lede, and the first couple of paragraphs of every story that appeals to me with the same care the reporters and editors assembled them, which is to say with high concentration. I then read the piece through to the first quoted source and scan the rest until I encounter a paragraph whose topic sentence promises additional novel information. The longer the article, the more likely I am to shorten the scanning process by jumping to the three-quarters mark, where I often find something close to the beginning of a brand-new—but related—story. Then I speed-read to the finish.

Catholic Films:

This Cornell Society for a Good Time post inspires me to post about another excellent movie with Catholic elements in the theaters, at least here in New York.

"Strike" or "Strajk" or "Die Heldin von Danzig" is a film about the founding of Solidarity in Poland.

The film, in Polish with English subtitles, is a German and Polish co-production.

It's a fictionalized version of the story of Anna Walentynowicz whose firing sparked a Lenin Shipyard strike that led to the founding of the Solidarity movement.

It makes much of the inspirational power of His Holiness John Paul II for Polish Catholics.

A review is here.

Our Pastor's New Book:
I haven't read it yet, but I really liked one of his earlier books, The Cure D'Ars Today: St John Vianney.

(And of course I go to Our Saviour most Sundays and often during the week to hear his sermons and participate in the Mass he celebrates.)

From The Brothers Karamazov:
"Some will say, perhaps, that Alyosha was slow, undeveloped, had not finished his studies and so on. That he had not finished his studies is true, but to say that he was slow or stupid would be a great injustice. I will simply repeat what I have already said above: he set out upon this path only because at the time it alone struck him and presented him all at once with the whole ideal way out for his soul struggling from darkness to light. Add to this that he was partly a young man of our time--that is, honest by nature demanding the truth seeking it and believing in it, and in that belief demanding immediate deed, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything for this deed, even life. Although unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold our strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish--such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them."
pg. 26, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Rhode Island Bishop slams Rudy
The article is politically and theologically informed and also well written.

Is there anything Google can't buy?

Google buys Feedburner.