A. 新たなる希望　B. 暗闇の騎士　C. 七人の侍　D. 帝国の逆襲

E. 殴り合い会　F. 良い者と悪い者と醜い者

Well, shame on me.  One would expect Spring Break to be responsible for causing me to miss one, maybe two posts, but three?  Oh, the shame!  The extreme shame!  Don’t worry, I’ll make it up to you: this week I will post two KYPC challenges instead of one.

Wait . . . that’s actually more of a punishment, really, since it means more work for all of you.  Better stick to the usual way.

The challenge from three weeks ago was about . . . uh . . . uh . . . well, it must have something to do with movies, since A Fan felt the need to post three separate times.  Ah, yes, that’s right: IMDB’s Best Non-Best Picture Nominees.

A Fan’s right: Theoman should have either looked up or recalled the fact that, while Inception probably wouldn’t have been nominated under the old system, it had the good fortune to have been made in 2010, a year after the Academy decided it was safer to simply nominate every single movie.  Other than that, however, his picks were pretty good, and he even got half of them to land on the right letters, utilizing his knowledge of numbers–C, The Seven Samurai–conjunctions–F, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly–and, uh, geography I guess?–D, The Empire Strikes Back.

A Fan, on the other hand, knew precisely which were the top six highest rated IMDB films to never receive a nomination for Best Picture.  In fact, he knew them better than I did (as if I didn’t have enough to be apologizing for already this week).  #6 on the list is City of God, not Star Wars: A New Hope because Star Wars: A New Hope was actually nominated for Best Picture.  In my defense, how could they possibly have nominated that one and not Empire?  Don’t tell me the competition was stiffer in 1980.  Ordinary People?  Come on.

So I guess I have to give everyone honorary credit for A, which is A New Hope.  A Fan also secured the same three correctly placed answers as Theoman, which I guess makes this week’s KYPC champion’s race a draw?  We could give the edge to the one who got closer to A, but it’s too close to call; Theoman’s pick of The Dark Knight is an obvious Vader reference, but he’s really bigger in the next movie, and A Fan’s guess has the same problem (City of God=Cloud City?).  We’ll declare A Fan the winner this time round because he taught us all a lesson about how to correctly read lists.

Shirley, on the other hand, decided to eschew the upper echelons of the IMDB list and concentrate on giving recognition to the lower ranks, while at the same time giving us a few lessons in comparative theater.  For is not “The dude abides” basically the same as “Use the Force” (A)? (The Big Lebowski, #129).  Did the chase-scene antics of Batman and the Joker (B) not hearken back to the work of Buster Keaton, even if Bale and Ledger didn’t do their own stunts? (The General, #118).  Doesn’t Luke (D) kind of remind us of Monty Python’s Brian, especially in some of his whinier scenes (“That’s not true!  That’s impossible!“)?  (Life of Brian, #166).  And I suppose that if Alec Guiness had to play eight parts, then he must have been good, bad, and ugly (F) all rolled into one.  (Kind Hearts and Coronets, #217).

Apparently people have been obeying the first rule of Fight Club, because nobody identified it correctly: it’s E.

But now I actually have to go to work again.  Let’s do geography.  You all like geography, right?  You know what else you like?  That’s right, kanji characters (otherwise you wouldn’t be here).  So we’re going to go to the birthplace of kanji: Poland.  Just kidding.  I mean China.  China’s a big place, and they have a lot of big cities.  Let’s look at a few of them.  Shanghai must be pretty important, because my grandfather has been there and because it’s not every Chinese city that you can use as a verb in English (coming soon to the OED: “to chongqing”–what could it possibly mean?).  Beijing’s kind of a big deal, because it’s the capital and because they named a duck after it.  Hong Kong’s name means “fragrant harbor” in Chinese, which basically tells you everything you need to know about Hong Kong.  Tianjin is home to the Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area, so you know it must be exciting.  Plus it’s the sixth-largest city in China, which is much more impressive than, say, being the sixth-largest city in Ohio (Dayton).  Guangzhou appears in my Chinese textbook, used to be called Canton (no, I’m not talking about Ohio again), and is a Beta World City, ranking it with such major metropolises as Budapest, Ho Chi Minh City, Minneapolis, and Oslo.  And Shenzhen has ten million people but may just end up being part of Hong Kong someday, so you’d better learn it now while you have the chance.

So, to review, your choices are: Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.  I’m making it clear here so you don’t go to Wikipedia, which tends to flash characters about, thus spoiling the quiz.

A. 北京　B. 广州　C. 香港　D. 上海　E. 深圳　F. 天津