Learning... take off, eh

My years of university classes, and thousands of dollars spent on tuition, did not imbue me with a lasting knowledge of, say, what distinguishes a Manet from a Monet (other than how to pronounce each name correctly), even though I did take an art history class. A few months of repeated viewings of the movie Strange Brew (a spin-off from SCTV, featuring Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as their characters Bob and Doug McKenzie, and Max Von Sydow as the villainous brewery operator) during my high school years has left me with the ability to quote lines from it still to this day, despite not having seen it in over 20 years.

In fact, there was a time, before I even started college, when I could recite the entire movie, verbatim, from memory. My mind, thankfully, has not retained that level of recall, but it's certainly got more lingering in there from the many afternoons my friends and I watched that videocassette, over and over, than I gleaned from the periods I spent in that classroom on campus, looking at slides of famous paintings. I do recall that the sculptor who did The Thinker—name started with an R, I think—also was big on ballerinas.

I'm not a complete philistine.

If only the art history involved Canadian comedic actors perhaps I would have remembered more about it.