Archive for January, 2010

January 27, 2010 (“Way Better”)

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

January 26, 2010 (updated)

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

An early morning fire at Flip’s, according to press reports. First accounts say there is extensive fire, smoke and water damage, particularly to 2d floor. Minimum of 2 weeks before reopening. Gail, Betsy, et al, you are in my prayers. God Almighty, two or more weekends and Thursday night meat markets without Flip’s? Will OKC survive? Stay tuned.

Blogblah

January 25, 2010

Monday, January 25th, 2010

January 19, 2010

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Finally saw Avatar in IMAX 3D last night. I’m glad I did. If I’d watched it as a regular movie, I’d be so pissed right now I couldn’t type.

I L-O-V-E-D the technological achievements. I literally reached out my hand to see if I could affect the trendril that seemed to hang over my seat. The 3D achievement knocked me out.

As a movie, meh. In fact, if this were just a sci-fi movie, we’d all be laughing at it.

The stand-out acting performance? Eh, was there one?

Take the Sigorney Weaver character, for example. A biolabs chief from the future that still smokes filtered cigarets? IN THE LAB??? I think I call bullshit. What’s the throw weight of her cases of cartons of smokes?

shut up, he explained


This movie was definitely not about acting chops. In fact, I wish to God someone would grab Mel Gibson and Sigorney and sit them down in front of a screening of The Year of Living Dangerously and remind them that before they were C-List Hollywood celebs, they used to know how to act. What they didn’t know about acting in that movie, they could have learned from Linda Green, who won a Best Supporting Oscar for her role in that film.

Does anyone buy a plotpoint of a gung-ho fighter pilot who calls it quits because she doesn’t like shooting rockets at a big tree? I mean, after all, only her atmosphere, food, water and TRANSPORT BACK HOME is at stake.

I recently posted what I thought was a funny comment by Air America’s Anna Marie Cox about the movie that Dances With Wolves wanted its plot back. That gives this movie way too much credit, although there’s enough truth in it to keep it wryly humorous.

I just can’t let go of some of the more stupid things in the movie. The head bad guy in a future world in which American militarism and capitalism still rules the roost (uh, really?), tells us the motivating factor in all this is the mineral “Unobtainium”. OK, that’s enough right there to make me taste a little vomit in the back of my mouth. Was there ever in the history of fiction a worse name for an element? Then, it’s that this mineral is millions of dollars a kilo back home. Uh, in the future, how much money is that? Is it a whole lot? ‘Cause I can’t really tell.

And, how did a prissy Gen-Xer get to be in charge of such a large enterprise? That guy wouldn’t be allowed to bring in the coffee for grownups in such a large enterprise as the looting of an entire planet. He was an obvious goober.

Was there ever a more two-dimensional military bad guy as the character of the Colonel?

Don’t even get me started on the biology of a cat’s tail that mind melds. It does sort of amuse me to think that everybody on Pandora has most of their minds in their butts. That’s a pretty straight-on view of cats, as I often discuss with Sinatra.

Yeah, this Cameron guy is a really great director. I think there may have been a good reason why I remain the only man in western civilization who never saw Titanic. It’s the stoopid. It burns.

January 15, 2010

Friday, January 15th, 2010

The End Of The World?
Really, baby sis? Really?
The End of the World?

There was a time in the 19th Century when some American religious zealots thought they had calculated precisely the day of the Rapture, the “end of the world”. Hundreds of Americans devoutly gave away their worldly possessions and gathered on a particular hilltop. Eh, not so much. Eventually, they just drifted away after awhile.

cosmic hand of god

Think about most of the “end of the world” scenarios that become popular. The Mayan 2012, nuclear winter, the Rapture, massive asteroid smashes into the globe, for example. Actually, if you think about it, the WORLD doesn’t end; it’s just most of us and civilization AS WE KNOW IT that ends. Not the world.

Absent Trafalmagorians racing into their sun/star or Darth Vader’s Death Star, the world isn’t going to end for billions of years until old Sol gets feisty and swallows us. I’m thinking we won’t care half as much a billion years from now. We’ll just teleport to another solar system and get on with our lives.

And conspiracies? Puh-lease.
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