His parents probably didn’t teach him, but even John Lennon knew when a thank you note was required. His was brief—a quick appeal to actress Pam Grier after a confrontation at the Troubador. Here are a few more, from the likes of Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe, Neil Armstrong, and other famous correspondents.
Brunswick ME May 18, 2012, 4:41 am  38°F wind speed: 0 mph N |
A Goucher College senior knew what she was doing when she said, “I’ll take ‘The Writer’s College’ for $2,000, Alex,” during the game show’s 2012 College Championship Quarterfinal last Friday. In response to an answer referencing the alma mater of Nathanial Hawthorne (a member of the Class of 1825), the student correctly responded, “What is Bowdoin College?” The $2,000 earned in that instant is said to be more than Hawthorne ever made from writing The Scarlet Letter, disregarding more than 160 years of inflation, of course. Social media has changed the way advertisers roll out their most expensive, and hopefully most talked about, ads of the year. No longer banking on the element of surprise, companies are pre-screening their game day ads, aiming to build early buzz, like Honda with their Ferris Bueller spoof, “Mathew’s Day Off,” below.
For instance, last fall, Miller introduced an audience at the New York Academy of Science to “Sinfonia Antartica” — a presentation of classical, electronic and go-go musical interpretations of physicist Brian Greene’s research. His 2011 book, The Book of Ice, presents charts, graphs, and alarming images of the effects of human-caused climate change that Miller noted on his 2008 expedition to Antarctica.  Brad Pitt in "The Tree of Life." Photo: Merie Wallace and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Steve ’70 and Paula Mae Schwartz were co-executive producers of last year’s The Tree of Life from director Terrence Malick and starring Brad Pitt, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and was announced yesterday as a nominee for a Best Picture Academy Award. Additional big news for the Schwartzes and their production company Chockstone Pictures came last week when it was announced that Chockstone and Nick Wechsler Productions purchased the rights to acclaimed author Cormac McCarthy’s first-ever spec script, The Counselor. In 2009, Steve, Paula Mae, and colleague Nick Wechsler produced the film adaptation of McCarthy’s novel The Road, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other recent projects from the Schwartzes and Chockstone include the upcoming Cogan’s Trade, also starring Pitt.
You can’t tune into a media outlet lately and not run smack into Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, who has equally mesmerized and rankled fans and opponents this football season with his fourth quarter heroics and endzone prayers. Tebow’s improbable run through the NFL playoffs ended against the New England Patriots last weekend, but in the week leading up to that game, Owen Strachan ’03, a professor of theology and history at Boyce College in Louisville, Kentucky, wondered in an essay for The Atlantic “Does God Care Whether Tim Tebow Wins on Saturday?” Strachan’s piece covers “a theology of providence, suffering, and sports,” and made an impact with scholars and face-painters. For several days it was one of the most-read pieces on The Atlantic‘s site, it was featured in the “Nota Bene” section of The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Arts & Letters Daily website, and it drew thousands of Facebook “likes” and hundreds of comments.  Abelardo Morell '71 In a new book, Penelope’s Hungry Eyes: Portraits of Photographers, photographer Abe Frajndlich focuses his lens on fellow celebrated photographers, including renowned camera obscura artist Abelardo Morell ’71 (image #10 of the slideshow). The Bowdoin College Museum of Art will feature an exhibition this summer by another of the distinguished subjects from Frajndlich’s book, part-time Maine resident William Wegman (slide #15). Singer-songwriter Sarah Ramey ’03, who goes by the stage name Wolf Larsen, recently debuted a new album, Quiet at the Kitchen Door, “and it is not your normal record release,” she says. Sarah paired up with the social microloan site Kiva and The Girl Effect, a non-profit that seeks to abolish poverty for adolescent girls, to release the album “as an Idea, rather than as a record.” The idea—when you invest in a girl’s education, the entire community improves—takes shape through a video explaining The Girl Effect. “Not my idea,” Sarah admits, “UNESCO and The World Health Organization are the biggest proponents.” Sarah is donating one-third of all proceeds from Quiet at the Kitchen Door to these two organizations that invest in education for girls, as well as microloans for women entrepreneurs through Kiva’s www.joinfite.org program.
 Otter Cliff in Maine's Acadia National Park.
In honor of Martin Luther King Day, all 397 National Parks are offering free admission this holiday weekend.
English can be a difficult language to learn, with seemingly no rhyme nor reason to myriad pronunciations. The British website The Poke offers a poem that rivals the tongue twisters of America’s Dr. Seuss with the challenge, “If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90 percent of the native English speakers in the world.” The State Department’s Foreign Service Institute compiles approximate learning expectations for its professional staff. Of the 63 languages analyzed, finds the five most difficult to learn to be Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. |  | ||
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