Ghosts of Christmas Past

The boys enjoyed their Christmas; it was pretty casual, but the gifts were well-received -- B1 absolutely loved the telescope I got him, and we promptly used it to scope Venus last night. He was really tickled about that, kept saying how Venus was the first planet we'd seen with his telescope. The Moon was just a crescent, but when it's full, he's going to love seeing it. I could tell he was enjoying it, just how he kept revisiting it, and talking about it.

B2 enjoyed the Lego Garbage Truck and the General Grievous Starfighter I got him, among other things. He's all about General Grievous these days, so he dug that. He also enjoyed some other knick-knacks I got for him.

Exene is going to have the boys with her for the next few days, as she travels to Ohio with them. I'm a little anxious about that, since they're taking the bus. I just hope it goes smoothly, without incident, and the boys make it back home safe and sound. Exene won't drive, so she tends to opt for the bus (back in the day, any time there was any traveling to be done, I would invariably be the driver). I almost wish she'd opted for a plane trip for the boys and her, since it would probably have cost as much as the bus, and be far faster, but she'll do what she'll do. The bus station is the Mos Eisley of Chicago -- never will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. I told the boys (without wanting them to be nervous) to stay together and stick by their mom when they're there. Having caught buses there a few times in the 90s, I know it used to really suck. Hopefully they renovated it and made it better, but I doubt it. Anyway, I am seeing the boys off this morning, will miss their sweet selves.

Gonna take advantage of the boys' absence to clean the hell out of the apartment, so when they return, it'll be all clean and pristine, ready for them to mess it up again. Haha!

The ghost I don't believe in rang jingle bells outside our windows yesterday morning. B2 had gotten up, was rifling through his presents, and while we were sitting there, we heard these bells outside our window. B2 looked at me in wonder and surprise, like "Did you hear that, Daddy?" and I said "Yep. Uh, must be Santa and his sleigh." and then the bells sounded again, and B2 ran into the boys' room, told B1 about it. Meanwhile, I'm thinking "Uh, okay, so the kid heard those, too, so it wasn't just me." and B1 said he heard them, too, only that they sounded like they were in the room with him! So, I just rolled with it, said "Yeah, Santa's just doing a fly-by before heading back to the North Pole." It was surreal, though -- the Ghost of Christmas Past!

Happy Holidays!

Another "Curb Your Enthusiasm" bit...

Larry Eats Jesus

*snicker*

"Ass Fetish"

Bahahah!

And one more...

The Flamboyant Kid

BAHAHA!

Chat & Cut

Bahahah...

"Chat & Cut" from "Curb Your Enthusiasm"

This reminds me so much of my stepdad, it cracks me up. Larry David doesn't look like my stepdad, but his pet peeves and what-not are totally like him. Bahaha! That said, I hate waiting in lines nearly as much as I loathe line cutters!

Bandolier?

So, since I'm busy quibbling about continuity in movies, something came to me while watching "The Empire Strikes Back" after seeing it for the umpteenth time -- in the torture scene(s), when Chewbacca is in the cell, being subject to sonic torture, did you notice that he's wearing his ammo bandolier?

Now, these are, we are to believe, power packs for his famed "laser crossbow," whatever that is, exactly. Some kind of glorified blaster. At any rate, it's an effective weapon he'd put to good use a time or two.

But the Imperials just chucked Chewie into the torture room with his bandolier. Huh. Given the Wookie's propensity for tech prowess, I have to wonder what they were thinking with that. Now, maybe it was a part of the costume and Lucas didn't want to have to redesign it or whatever. But, strictly speaking, from a continuity perspective, the presence of that bandolier is troubling -- there are likely any number of things a knowledgeable soul could do with blaster ammo clips/power packs, yes? We see him put C-3P0 together without much more than a hydrospanner, so surely he could do a lot of damage with a bandolier full of power packs.

Continuity. Are we to believe the Imperials are so contemptuous of the Wookie that they'd let him go into a jail cell packing his ammo like that? Especially when they are careful to cuff Chewie later, showing that they are clearly aware of the Wookie danger.

Just something I noticed. Maybe not as egregious as Leia rolling over for Jabba, but still a troubling bit of discontinuity in the movie. Lucas obviously didn't think of anything like that for Chewie, since he was only a secondary character, and wasn't going to have the enterprising Wookie bust himself out of dodge with some adroit use of the ammo clips he was packing; still, it would have been nice for Lucas to have given Chewie the benefit of a doubt and showed him without his bandolier, just to reflect the thoroughness of the Empire's detention policies.

Side note: It's kind of ironic, isn't it, those torture scenes? I mean, when that movie came out, what was it, in 1980? Torture was seen as synonymous with Imperial evil (which, of course, it is, yes?) But now, watching even those sanitized, PG-rated torture scenes, it's sort of creepy to think that torture is now officially part of American policy (as is indefinite detention and rendition of prisoners, including Americans). What used to be a cartoonish stand-in for the villainy of the Empire (Leia getting interrogated in "Star Wars" by the creepy Imperial Torture Droid; Han, Chewie and Leia getting tortured on Bespin) is now our government's policy. How times have changed! The outrages of 1980 are the official policies of 2011.

*cue "The Imperial March" as new national anthem*

Huh

While watching "Captain America: The First Avenger" on DVD, I was bemused to see during the credits, when they did their medley of WWII-era propaganda posters, that they had doctored a rather famous one...

They'd replaced the USSR flag with the Russian Federation flag, which I thought was a rather curious historical revision. I mean, obviously, the movie's ersatz 40s vibe is fictional, and, I imagine, most Americans don't dwell much on paltry issues like history, but the Russian Federation didn't fight the Nazis in WWII, and didn't exist in the 40s; but the USSR did both. The Russians lost something like >20 million of their people in WWII (and, I'm sure, much of the blame can be leveled at the feet of Stalin and the Bolsheviks, who were woefully unprepared for what the Germans hurled at them -- at least at first). But if it hadn't been for the Nazis invading Russia, and for the quagmire of the Eastern Front sapping the German war machine of lives and men -- in other words, if not for the sacrifice of those 20 million Russians--the Nazis might have won WWII.

So, to have the USSR's role in WWII excised like that, even in a fleeting credit, is a weird kind of thing. The Soviet Union was not a nice place, and did plenty of bad things--but they did fight in WWII, and they were instrumental in the defeat of the Axis. Omitting them is a curiously graceless thing on the part of the moviemakers. And why did they do this, exactly? Who were they worried about offending by showing the poster as it actually was, versus the doctored one? And as they were making the rounds of propaganda posters, were they realizing that doctoring a propaganda poster was, itself, a bow to propaganda? Or did the Hollywood blacklist so thoroughly sterilize and scour the movie industry that it couldn't even allow a teensy little hammer and sickle appear onscreen for two seconds?

I just find it curious, one of those glimpses behind the mask our society wears. A small thing, yes, but a revealing one, all the same. And, yes, the movie's a fictional tale about a superhero fighting a make-believe Nazi menace--but just the same, if they are wanting to trot out the propaganda posters of the era as a kind of tip of the hat to the era, don't doctor them for whatever weird ideological needs of the moment. As I said: over 20 million Russians died fighting in that war; give them their due, don't be so chickenshit (and, weirdly, Stalinist) to rewrite history...

You can see the doctored shot at 1:40.

Leia

Ah, Princess Leia. But for her "slave girl" costume, nerd girls throughout the universe would not have their go-to costume of choice. Something came to me, however, as I thought about it, having watched "Return of the Jedi" after not having watched it for a very long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

1) Leia is the biggest bitch in the cosmos, yes? I mean, that's not even a controversial point. She's a bitch's bitch. Grand Moff Tarkin understood this, which was why he tartly signed her death warrant.

2) So, granted that Leia is a supreme bitch, I ask you this: How'd Jabba get her in that slave girl costume? I mean, they do a screen wipe from the point when Jabba captures her to later, when we see her in the classic slave girl costume, chained to Jabba's throne/sedan chair.

I mean, we know why Jabba did this -- he was basically saying "You may be a bitch, but you're MY bitch, Bitch." (said in Huttese, naturally)

But what I want to know is how Jabba's minions managed to actually get Leia to wear that slave girl outfit, let alone a chain around her neck. Because if there was anybody in the galaxy who could not be made to do something she didn't want to do, it was Leia.

And yet, there she was, sporting that slave girl costume (not that I'm complaining, mind you -- that was one of the formative experiences of my burgeoning adolescent sexuality, Leia in that getup).

All the same, I only wonder how they got her to wear it. I mean, we know why Carrie Fisher wore it -- George Lucas was like "Wear this, we need to show a little skin, maybe, just to show what a dick Jabba is." But, as a character, it's hard to fathom how they got Leia to wear it.

I mean, even if Jabba's henchmen knocked Leia out and dressed her in that, she'd likely have gotten out of that getup the first chance she got, right? But Leia doesn't look roughed up -- rather, she's just lounging on Jabba's sedan chair, biding her time.

We know that Leia doesn't want to be Jabba's slave girl, obviously. But, how did Jabba manage to convince her? I mean, was Jabba a bigger asshole than Leia was a bitch? How'd he pull off the hat trick of getting Leia to be a slave girl? And in no time flat, mind you -- it's not like she'd been his prisoner for a long time; rather, Leia rolls for Jabba in no time.

Clearly, and this comes as no surprise, Jabba is a pimp. And not just any pimp -- Jabba is the greatest pimp in the history of pimpdom. He didn't even have to rough Leia up; we don't see how he did it, but, somehow, Jabba got Leia to don a slave girl costume and a leash, and, apparently, it didn't take much persuading to do so. Not just that, but the habitually mouthy Leia is silent when she's Jabba's bitch. I can't remember her actually saying anything when she's hanging out with Jabba. She just sits there, the shrew apparently tamed by Jabba's pimptacular skills.

Now, maybe Jabba told her to wear it or he'd kill Han. But, that's not very convincing, since Jabba was clearly intending to kill Han regardless of what Leia did. I don't know. It's one of those mysteries of "Star Wars" that one may never solve.

I mean, we're talking about Leia, here -- this is a woman who, rather than give up the Rebellion to Grand Moff Tarkin, risked (and lost) her entire homeworld, killing billions of people -- she's one seriously tough cookie. But Jabba rolls her in no time flat. How? Clearly, the Hutt race have some kind of Master Pimping power that rivals the Force in its awesomeness. It must be something like that. How else to explain it?

"Soon you will learn to appreciate me." 
~Jabba the Hutt, to Leia Organa

Bahahahah

Kirk finds himself in a very Aries guy kind of situation, here. Amusingly enough, both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy are Aries! Btw, Yvonne Craig? Taurus -- that's no bull!

December Rain

It's raining outside. One of those dismal December rains that really would prefer to be snow, but it's just not cold enough for that, anymore, which sucks, right? I mean, we're nearly mid-December, and have only had one day where there was even a whisker of snow. Not to say that things won't get rolling in deep winter, say January or February, but still, sheesh. My boys look forward to sledding, and right now, that's nowhere on the radar. I remember when we would get actual winters in Chicago.

Finito!

So, I wrapped the last of the boys' presents, have them tucked away. B1 actually discovered one of his presents in the closet -- I know because the shirt I'd covered it with had been replaced with a different one. I had the thing wrapped, thankfully. I let him shake it once his brother was asleep (had to do that, because if B2 knew there were presents in the apartment, he'd be combing the place top to bottom). Anyway, B1 was stoked at the present (which is in a big box). He has no idea what it is, but he's going to love it! It's something he's asked for in previous years, so I made a point to get it for him this go'round. He'll be so excited to open it!

I was tickled that B1 successfully described the lunar eclipse the other day -- he knew it for what it was. Go, B1! Woo hoo! I told him about the theoretical possibility of diamond planets, too, and he was totally intrigued by that. I've said it before, but B1 is going to absolutely love physics. I can see that so clearly. I'm doing what I can to help him rock the mathematics so he can dive right into that, because he so clearly has a math-oriented mind.

Apparently Exene is going to take the boys to see her family after Christmas (like the day after, for a few days). That kinda bugs me -- even though I get Christmas Eve/Day with the boys this year, with that trip of hers looming behind the holiday that way, it feels kind of like the bum's rush a bit.

I need to bake some biscotti for the season. I love biscotti, especially around the holidays. No frickin' pizzelles or sesame cookies for me, Paisan -- gimme some frickin' biscotti! Which, in truth, I'll make myself, if you don't frickin' mind. And they will rock, because I make some damned fine biscotti. Mangiare!

Done!

I think I'm well and truly done with Christmas shopping, now. Just got a couple more things for the boys. Shew. I picked up a couple of additional Lego things for the boys, was waited on by the world's cheeriest clerk -- I don't even know how she managed to keep that level of energy up in the retail hell of a Lego store, but she did it.

I'm amazed that both of my boys have grown 5 inches in the past 2 years! Lordy! I can tell they're getting bigger, but sheesh!

Jackhammer

Somebody with a jackhammer started working streetside at 5:00 a.m. sharp! Haha! Life in the big city!

I didn't go to that show the other night, btw. Lame. But it was so cold and blustery, and that club was such a PITA to get to (that is, if it were summer, I'd have simply biked up there, but in winter, other transportation options = PITA), and since the ticket was only $15, I passed. Guess I'm getting old! Bahah!

Work has been crazy-busy of late. Which is fine by me, in truth -- I don't mind being busy at all. I never get people who complain about being busy; it's part of the deal, hello? You go to work, you work, right?

JACKHAMMEREREREREREERERERERRERERERER

Gonna do my usual morning write, now. 

Train in Vain

I'm not really surprised by this...

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technocracy/2011/12/high_speed_rail_is_dead_in_america_should_we_mourn_it_.html

To be honest, I never thought high-speed rail ever had a chance in this country. It's far too much of a First World kind of conveyance for our country to seriously consider it, particularly as we slide into post-imperial Second World status (and, sorry, but that's where we're heading, folks).

The kind of capital expenditure and infrastructure awareness high-speed rail requires doesn't fly in the land of car culture -- Americans like cars, like sprawl, like highways (hell, I like cars, too, although I recognize that a proper rail network would strengthen our country, not weaken it).

Only when gasoline is about $10/gallon will Americans begin (and I stress "begin") to wonder if alternatives are desirable. And even then, the politicians are likelier to offer non-solutions like hydrogen fuel cells or some other meta-contrivance to something like a rail service, let alone a high-speed rail service.

This article is also illustrative:

Why Conservatives Hate Trains

So long as our government panders to reactionary crybabies, nutballs, flat-earthers and whiners (mislabeled "conservatives" in our Gliberal Media), we'll continue to fail to see progress in things like rail. Frankly, it should be confined to blue states, rather than trotted out across the entire country. Let those who get it, get it (although maybe, even in blue states, people don't get it). I dunno.

Naughty or Nice?

You better watch out! You better not cry! You better not pout, I'm telling you why: Santa Claus is coming to town. He's making a list, checking it twice, he's gonna find out who's naughty or nice. Santa Claus is coming! Santa Claus is coming...

Here Comes Santa Claus! Here Comes Santa Claus! Right down Santa Claus Lane!

Santa's helpers will be coming in your chimney, ready to stuff your stockings, so be good, for goodness sake!