Who Doesn't Love Waterworld?

I see one, two... oh, everyone hates it, that's probably a good thing. Have I spoken of my irrational love for the Kevin Costner bomb before? It is simply a bad movie - the acting is bad, the plot is full of holes, and they are smoking filtered cigarettes after any such means to make such things were long gone. Who knows, maybe there was a Phillip Morris ship around when the world flooded. I also wasn't aware that oil tankers came equipped with refineries.

But I’m a Mystery Science Theater fan and liked Kevin Costner when I was a kid. It wasn’t a crush, I was too young to be sexually attracted to anyone, much less some actor in his 30’s, but I enjoyed Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, and some of his other not-as-bad movies. I also really liked the premise of the movie, and the things that stuck with me were some of the metaphors that I identified. The biggest one was the presence of motorsports on the Exxon Valdeez. The smokers were the obvious metaphor for all the polluters and their love of motorsports just highlighted how stupid they were – using the one thing that kept them going for something completely unnecessary. It is the kind of metaphor that hits you like a brick and then keeps smacking you around.

That is why news like this, despite the layoffs, really makes me smile. Just one more sign that our cowboys in spaceship mentality is finally being smacked down a little bit. Could it be that civilization is leaving adolescence? Don’t get your hopes up too soon, you haven’t yet heard my Best Buy story.

Who Gets to Talk to the Imaginary Friend?

Everyone is pissed off about Rick Warren. Well, at least everyone with a basic understanding of discrimination, hate speech, and human rights. A guy on the Jim Lehrer News Hour compared Warren's appearance before the innaguration and a more liberal preacher giving the Benediction later with having an anti-semite in Warren's place and expecting to smooth it over by having a rabbi speak at the end.

But people HATE comparisons like that when talking about anything relating to gender and breaking outdated roles built for XX or XY people. Comparing gay people with Jews? How can you compare homophobia with the Holocaust? Oh... wait... homosexuals were rounded up then too...

Homosexual people and women who want to control when and how often they will or won't become pregnant are still expected to take this as "tolerance". When someone's politics don't directly affect my life, then I will tolerate them. However this guy wants to tell me how to live and interfere with my ability to be a productive and happy citizen, so sorry, no tolerance here.

8:30pm Update: As bad as this is, it is five minutes. The more we focus on this, the less we focus on the new regulation to make it more complicated and, in some places, impossible for people to get abortions, emergency contraception, normal birth control methods, or really make any decisions about one's own body without some doctor, pharmacist, nurse, assistant, or janitor slut-shaming and denying what could be a life-saving service. Even a month of that is enough to fuck up a lot of people. In my case, I get to spend my vacation grilling prospective pharmacies about whether or not they will fill my prescriptions, saying nothing about finding doctors. (my new and better insurance kicks in on January 1 - so long, Kaiser!) Hooray for stress that I don't need.

Ugh, Shut Up

Believe me, I know how annoying those ads for my company are. I also know that, while they are accurate, they paint a very rosy picture of what is a fairly typical corporation. I guess you could say that we're ahead of the curve, but we can't get as far ahead as maybe I would like to see us go. But every time that guy with the breathy voice comes on after the Jim Lehrer News Hour, I want to stab someone!

Stop the Presses!

The tagline under the top stroy on Yahoo right now is as follows

Tiger Woods' caddy makes an unflattering comment about golfer Phil Mickelson.

Source

That isn't news, that is gossip, and regardless of what the comment was (really, he could have issued a death threat or even something horribly misogynistic), who really cares? What a bunch of crap.

I Love His Reaction

"Let me talk about the guy throwing his shoe. It's one way to gain attention. It's like going to a political rally and having people yell at you. It's like driving down the street and having people not gesturing with all five fingers.

"It's a way for people to draw attention. I don't know what the guy's cause is. But one thing is for certain. He caused you to ask me a question about it. I didn't feel the least bit threatened by it.

Source

Blowing it off like this will make it hard to use this incident as evidence of danger to the rest of us. There isn't enough time to spin this into another stupid security measure that actually lasts. All this is evidence of is that there are people so frustrated in Iraq - educated, professional people just like us - at the irrationality of it all that they ran out of ways to describe it without throwing something. Someone got pushed "over the edge", and hopefully he won't be a political prisoner for long. My America shouldn't do that kind of thing to political protestors. It says so in our constitution.

Seven Years Ago

The week after Thanksgiving, on a Monday night, Minnesota and northern Wisconsin had a snow storm. Huge piles of snow dropped on the great white north, closing most schools on Tuesday. College classes weren't canceled until after everyone had already done their best to get to campus (about a third of the students at my college commuted to class from around town). It was also the second Tuesday that semester that classes were canceled after noon, the first one being on September 11.

I felt bad for any teachers - or students, for that matter - with Tuesday night classes, which met only once per week. Living in the dorms, the snow storm was nothing but fun for me. I woke up in my loft and decided to cancel my classes myself - screw what the administration said. I had just gotten a mattress pad for my bed and it was soooooooo comfy! Actually, I can't remember if I went to class or not, I'm pretty sure I didn't, but I was up and about that day. After all, the cafeteria was on the other side of campus, and I had to eat and catch up with friends.

That night, while hanging out in the dorm room we all hung out in, my friends and I decided that we were going to celebrate the storm and get drunk. Problem was that we had no booze, only one of us was 21, and the liquor store would be closing soon. So we created a shopping list. For some reason, two of us wanted wine coolers, another two wanted beer, and someone wanted some Boons. The 21-year-old and I set out with our backpacks. We weren't normally friends, him being an evangelical and me being an atheist, but we hung out and got along. He was also an Art Major and I was History. We decided that if we saw any of his Christian group friends, we would tell them that we were on the way to the library to study. If we were past the library, we were going to a classmate's apartment off-campus to study. What were we studying? Art History, of course. We could safely tell most of my friends the truth about out outing.

So onwards we trudged over the ice and through the little paths created in the foot deep snow. We finally made it to the Coburns liquor store with time to spare. My friend went in and bought the consumables - 22 glass bottles in all. When we were safely across the street, in the parking lot of some church or other, we packed the bottles in our backpacks, taking care to make sure we weren't seen. SCSU was a dry campus, after all. We ventured back slowly. Clinking bottles would be a dead give-away. My friend told me that if I fell on the ice and broke anything, he didn't know me. We made it back to the dorms, checked in with the night supes (it was past 10pm by now) and walked up the stairs to see the rest of our friends resting in heated comfort.

That night was a lot of fun. We peeled off our snowy clothes, drank, and danced all night long. Being only 20 years old, I wasn't smart enough to avoid a hang over yet, so the next day, I felt awful. I ended up canceling my own classes again and nursed myself while working on a paper for my Wednesday night class. On Thursday, I remember taking a good look at that snow with some co-workers at my admissions job. I remarked that it looked like it would be gone by Christmas. They thought I was crazy, but the snow was gone by finals that semester.