Don, set up a blog and start publishing some every day. Do it in the order you want, and one of these days someone will approach you about putting it into a book. Happens fairly often now, from what I hear when I listen to radio interviews with people who got books out that way.

I'm about due to start rereading the LOTR one day soon. After I reread Moby Dick. I remember occasional mentions of food, and as has been pointed out, you don't need to spend all of your time taking a meal break. They don't mention a lot of general maintenance things. But for all of the times that they get wet and lost and separated from their stuff, this backpacker always wondered at the state of their possessions after each scrape. :)

My son is 16 now, and over the years I've had a very liberal view of watching movies with the kids. Sex and sophisticated ideas are in there with the comedy and drama. There are a couple of "beginnings" to our movie viewing. When they were about 10 and 13 I checked out a copy of Blazing Saddles from the library, and as it was running realized it was the uncut version. Not that I was looking for the other, but I had to explain a number of gags and references as we watched it. I realized this was a great opening to any number of things that I wanted them to know about. Also years ago, my first DVD player was on a computer I bought in about 1999. I picked up a copy of the animated film Chicken Run, and we watched it with the computer screen turned around to the living room. I realized it had a lot of references to other films so a couple of weeks later I taped Stalag 17 and had them sit down to watch it. They kind of fussed about it, until they saw how bad Peter Graves was. :) Anyway, that movie ended, and before they could think about leaving the room, I popped Chicken Run into the player, and they watched with new understanding the beginning of the movie as it panned over the chicken coops and landed on . . . number 17.

"Oh!" was the answer when they saw this. It clicked.

Dylan was about 12 when we were watching James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff and as it got to a scene with a view down on the street as he's alone waiting for the gang to come to town, Dylan commented "That's just like in High Noon." Of course it was! And he got it!

There's more to it than just recognizing intertextuality, though that is important (I think.) Understanding the significance of that shot of the man alone in the street is also important.

A few weeks ago I was flipping through the channel guide and Dylan commented "Look--Vertigo, and then Rear Window! Are you going to turn on Vertigo?"

I asked him "Do you want to watch the last 30 minutes of the movie? I've really created a Hitchcock addict!"

"I can stop any time I want," he said.

We read Frankenstein a couple of years ago, the last bedtime book with him (we read out loud around here for years, and I still kind of miss it). Every time the film comes on or is referred to in some way, I see his head pop up, recognizing the reference. This is good. I like cultivating cultural literacy in the kids--they're getting the modern stuff in spades, and I'll contribute a solid background.

SRS