Irrational thought

So hurricane Isaac may hit New Orleans on Wednesday, the seventh anniversary of hurricane Katrina hitting the city.

I heard that and thought about something like that – the hurricane not the level of disaster – happening again on the same date and part of my brain thought that I could get critically ill again at the same time.

Of course that’s irrational.  I mean, I was in the ICU during Katrina but I got sick in July.

Silly me.

The gold standard

Really?  Did they really put that in the platform?  Did they, I haven’t seen confirmation but they were considering it.

I can’t wait for the new wars of colonization (I’m sure they’ll be called something else) when nations try to secure gold production so they can protect their currency from international manipulation.

There are no valid excuses

If you are doing things to limit voting and not to expand it to every possible eligible voter than what you are doing is wrong and you are wrong.

Indiana Jones and your favorite movie

I read a blog post, over on tor.com, about which is the best Indiana Jones movie.

I’m not going to get into that here because I know which one is the best so I don’t really need to discuss it.  What I want to talk about is “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”.  I know that a lot of people don’t want to talk about that movie, but that’s the point.

There are many complaints about that movie but not all of them are deserved.  It’s not a perfect movie; it certainly has its flaws.  But I think a lot of people missed some things about that movie.

Let’s take one complaint that I have seen several times: the refrigerator scene.  I’m not going to worry about spoilers since the movie has been out for years.  In this scene Indy survives a nuclear explosion by taking refuge inside a lead-lined refrigerator.  Yes, it’s silly.  It’s supposed to be.

The movie was deliberately set the same number of movie years after the last movie as had elapsed in real life.  You can see that it’s made to look like a movie from that time period.  “Raiders of the Lost Ark” is largely in the style of adventure movies of the ‘30s – not a perfect replica, but inspired by them.  In the same way Crystal Skull is made in the style of movies from the ‘50s.

So, yeah, the bad guys are Russian and there are aliens and psychic powers and even a lead-lined refrigerator.  Not everything was serious.  You did notice them drive by the Atomic Café in the beginning, right?  It was 1950s atom bomb levity, just like Mickey Rooney surviving by eating the right peanut butter.

We also got a reintroduction to an older Indiana Jones with some more history, a near miss at being reunited with the Ark of the Covenant and the actual return of Marion.  I’m not up on the series but I think there was also a nod to the Young Indiana Jones TV series in there.  It had been a long time since the last story and they did a decent job of getting things back up to speed and also giving us some idea of what had happened in those intervening years. 

Now they just need to do it again and go out on a high note.

Yes, I want another Indiana Jones movie.  I have no idea what he should be going after this time.  What sort of adventure movie was popular in the early ‘60s?

Going it alone

So Romney has a different approach to energy and the economy and his perspective about “…the power of individuals as opposed to government, individuals pursuing their interests and dreams.”.

Like those individuals who built the highways and bailed out the banks and fought WWII and sent men to the Moon and, well, you get the idea.

It’s kind of like when he said that honor students did it on their own, that it wasn’t the bus driver who did it.

I think honor students should be proud of and celebrated for their achievements, but the bus driver did get them to school, on public roads, where there were teachers who taught them and I imagine a good number of those kids had support from their parents and maybe did research at public libraries or used the Internet which, no matter what you may have heard, was developed by the Federal Government.

Sure there are people who are individually creative and get things done, but even they do it within the structure that our society built.

Of course there were also those rugged individuals who steered the banking industry, and along with it essentially the world economy, off a cliff.  But at least they did it on their own.

Gah.  It’s never as simple as the pseudo-individualists try to make it out to be. 

The whole we-built-this convention is going to be held in a convention center mostly paid for by tax dollars.

That man bugs me.

Olympic holdover post

They’ve been over for a while now, but I had this hanging around and it can apply to any sporting event.  A commentator on NBC said that the reason for the tension on the athlete’s face was because there were four women competing for three medals.  That time it was women’s pole vault but the same sort of thing was said more than once.

Can anyone tell me if there has ever been an event where there weren’t more people competing than there were medals?  Isn’t this always the case?  These people are trying to win – or at least do their best if they know they can’t win.  It’s the freaking Olympics in a gigantic stadium full of people from all over the world and so many cameras you practically trip over them and there are ten things happening at once.  Don’t you think that might be a reason why people are tense?

I mean really, have there ever been track events with only three people competing?

Except for that time Bill Cosby did the hammer throw.  So, besides that time.

You were warned

I did say it was going to be a torrent.  There's still more to come in no particular order.  I may slip some new posts in there as well.