It’s official, I’m addicted to Quizup. What is it about iPad games that is so alluring? It’s probably just because I miss playing Trivial Abuse Pursuit with my family so much. I tried to get Karin to play with me and she promptly challenged me in World of Warcraft. *rolls eyes*
I forgot to mention that Martin was elected co-editor of the IB school newsletter. He’s been a staff writer this past term and then decided to apply for the editor job. It was 3 people, and he and one other girl got the job. He had to answer a bunch of essay questions that included things like “What is the best pizza?” and “As editor, what would you do if one of your writers didn’t turn their story in on time and the deadline is now?” They will co-edit for a year, so all of spring term this year and fall term next year before turning it over to the next crop of upcoming students. He said their first job is going to be hard: finding a new layout person since the current one is also having to leave. Anyway, he is very excited and I’m thrilled for him.
One of the school assignments that Martin is working on is an oral presentation, called Further Oral Assessment, which is a text analysis but they are allowed to dissect a film if they want because the cinematography counts as the movie’s text as well as the screenplay and he’s chosen to do his on the film Den Nya Människan (The New Man). They watched the film in Swedish class and he told me the whole plot and asked if I wanted to watch it with him as he needs to watch it through a couple of times. It didn’t sound like very uplifting subject matter, but he convinced me that it was a really well-done and interesting movie, so I agreed.
We watched it tonight via YouTube. It’s based on a true story, of a young woman who is taken by the government to a work institute in 1950’s Sweden, where many young people, especially girls, were incarcerated and forcibly sterilized as part of a government program to “clean up” the population. All of the young people had some sort of condition or “disorder” that made them less than ideal citizens in the eyes of the program. The story, despite its horrifying premise, had a feisty protagonist and a clear fight-back message, though the main character’s story doesn’t end very happily.
Most unbelievably, forced sterilization was carried out in Sweden until 1974 and only completely removed from the books TWO YEARS AGO. Sweden was by no means the only country that carried out such programs; even the US was guilty at various times. It was a very well-done movie, though Martin complained that all the male characters in it were both loathsome and one-dimensional, which was true. I don’t know if it’s available with English subtitles; the version we watched didn’t have them, but it was well worth seeing.
I can’t believe it’s already nearly bedtime on Sunday night. The weekends go MUCH too fast. *sigh*