I'm Ba--ack...

I'm blaming everything on the fact that I've had bronchitis for a week.  Even all the stuff that didn't happen two weeks before I caught bronchitis.  Seriously, though, I have been very sick, just lying in bed and sleeping and not doing much trying to get this thing to go away. I've been to the doc three times.  Antibiotics, steroid shots, breathing treatments, oh my.  One night I was wheezing so much that Joan wanted to take me to the emergency room.  I haven't been in the pool for eight days and my chlorine content is dangerously low.

And there was all that other stuff, the starting the new job, the getting Obamacare, the sister coming to visit soon, the cat's little health crisis (well, it's not that much of a crisis, just that he keeps losing weight and we don't know why). And then came the hot dry winds from the west of Texas, which are enough like the Santa Anas in California that they threw me into the same funk. And thus begat the spring cold, which became the spring bronchitis.  The last time I was this sick, it was 2006 and I had pneumonia. Missed two weeks of work (!).  Luckily I worked for the Feds at the time, and they have pretty strict rules about firing people that seem not to apply to the rest o' the human race.  Not so now, and it's just that, you know, it's kinda embarrassing when you're in your third week of a new job and you have to call in sick two days.  My first job out of college, I ended up in the hospital (!) on my third day of work, with abscessed tonsils (don't ask, it was gross).  Missed two weeks there, too.  But I kept the job. Stayed there for four years, in fact. So I've been lucky, I guess.

I've also been lucky in that the world's as fucked up as ever, so it's not like I lack for source material here.  Now we've managed to lose an entire airliner. Yes, I know the Navy sometimes loses aircraft carriers, but that's usually just on paper.  Although, considering how big the world is and how small airplanes are, it's really kind of odd that this doesn't happen all the time.  Flying's pretty safe, you guys.  Speaking as a kid who rode around in a four-seater Piper Apache with Captain Dad at the wheel (yes, once in a while he let me drive), in which everything that could have gone wrong did and yet I'm still here, big airliners are really safe.  What's not so safe are cargo ships.  Did you know, that for every WEEK that goes by on this planet, we lose two cargo ships?  Two ships. A week.  Not the local bulk cruisers mind you, I'm talking about the big Corellian ships now.  That's over 25,000 tons of freight, on average, just gone.  To say nothing of the crews, which I guess are considered expendable because most of them are from that other part of the world that we don't care much about and anyway, their skin isn't white.  But seriously. Two ships. A week.  If that were two airliners a week, do you think we'd be paying attention?

In other news, despite a bunch of State legislators jumping all over it and the Right To Life getting involved, Justina Pelletier is still in State custody in Massachusetts.  She's been very sick, has been to the ER twice in the last two weeks, and one commenter wondered if the State wasn't just waiting for her to die, since if she's still in custody then, the State can order no autopsy and say, "Oh, well, she died of pneumonia, too bad."  It's a grim but possible theory. A decision was expected last Monday.  Then Friday. Now Tuesday.  Boy, if I was waiting to hear if I got to go home with my parents I'd sure want the Judge to keep not issuing a ruling.  (Recap: She's 15. She's been in State custody for fourteen months. She's seen her parents less than once a week, hasn't seen her sisters or friends at all and spent most of that time on a locked psych ward with no cell phone, no Internet, no TV. So she couldn't communicate anything that was happening to her?  Or for her supposed personal safety?  Anyway, it all started when her parents disagreed with her doctors.)

Ironically, I think there are going to be changes in the law coming out of this case.  I'd like one of them to be that parents have the absolute right to choose medical care for their children absent obvious, malicious harm, that second opinions should be legally required if they're asked for, and that every hospital has to convene its ethics committee (they all have them, and you can ask for one) any time something like this happens, before anybody can call the authorities or make any final decisions about treatment. What's even more ironic is that while all these resources are being poured into this one case, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of children in Massachusetts who legitimately need to be separated from their abusive families as soon as possible.  But, as usual, there aren't enough beds in foster care, the evidence is sketchy, the social workers are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't position and foster care isn't necessarily going to be any better, considering these statistics. Kids in foster care are almost always appointed a guardian by the Court, but either none of them are doing their jobs or the civil rights of their clients are simply not a priority.  I promise you, if you tried to put an adult in a psych ward for over a year, insurance would pull out, there'd be Federal lawsuits and Glenn Beck would even raise his voice.  Oh, wait, he did.  Never mind.

People, be nice to each other. It's been a rough week.  Signing off.

Indiana Jones and the Big Disappointment

(Spoilers to follow, obviously.)

Okay, I did it--I went to see the big Indy Jones Part IV that everybody's been going on and on about. Well, actually, come to think of it, nobody's been going on and on about it. Except maybe Entertainment Weekly and that was only until the actual movie came out. There was a decent size crowd though, which was more than I can say for the half-dozen movies I've seen in the last six months. And one might unfairly point out that all of those movies were seen on my sofa in my living room, and one would be right.

Was it a total waste of time? Nah. I could have done worse with two hours and eleven bucks. Shia LeBouf was great as the rebel without a point, and Cate Blanchett, despite the bad fake Russian accent, was a knockout as Evil Doctor Whatsherface. The sword fight between moving cars was awesome, and there were too many good lines to mention. And it was nice to see the Lost Ark again, however briefly. Still, I found myself kind of wishing I could have this one and Temple of Doom erased from my brain so I could remember the glory of Raiders and Lost Crusade unsullied by the memory of lesser filmmaking. It was a good movie, and if Indy hadn't been in it I'd have said it was a not-half-bad ripoff of an Indiana Jones movie. But from Indy you just expect more. You've got Spielberg, Lucas, Harrison Ford and John Williams, fergodsake. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, actually, I don't know. There was something just not there about this particular installation of the grand saga. I can't put my finger on any one thing. So let's just hit ten of 'em and hope that covers it.

10. Opening shot of the Paramount mountain faded into...a gopher mound. What?! Uh, look, people, said Paramount mountain has faded into a cool mountain in Peru, Mount Everest overlooking some nightclub in China, and an arch at Arches National Park. It's always something grandiose and cool. But a gopher mound? That's just--that's just not right somehow. Not even as a joke.

9. Indiana Jones was a colonel in World War II? Er, how's that exactly? The guy would have had to enlist as a lieutenant like everybody else. The war only went on for five years. That's really not enough time to make colonel. Unless, of course, you kill all of your superiors which, I suppose, could happen.

8. The chase scene through the library was missing a certain vital something. Oh, I know. It may have just been an oversight, but I really wanted to see that motorcycle slam into the card catalog and send cards flying all over creation.

7. Too much plot getting in the way of the story. Any time you have to have long scenes of exposition where the evil Russian doctor talks in a bad fake accent about bringing the capitalists to their knees with the use of - gasp! - psychic powers, you know you're losing your touch. Besides, psychic powers aren't all that scary. Trust me, I've written a book on the subject and I haven't sold anybody the concept. Or the manuscript, for that matter.

6. Space aliens? Come on now.

5. Flying saucer buried in Peru? Come on now. They did that in the first X-Files movie. They also did it better, scary as that sounds.

4. No big finish. Yeah, you had the temple collapsing and the rocks flyin' around and all that good stuff, but so what? The bad guys didn't explode (though they did disappear through a door to "somewhere else"), the good guys didn't get to smooch (too much company) and instead of a tidy wrap-up we got a lecture on the importance of staying in school. Which was nice, but--What?

3. Sorry, comrades, but Communists just ain't as scary as Nazis. Never have been, never will be. Pravda. Dosvidanya.

2. Marion Ravenwood didn't get to kick any butts, or for that matter, even shoot anybody. For cryin' out loud, Spielberg and Lucas, this is Marion frick'n Ravenwood we're talking about here. In Episode I she pan-bashed Arabs, decked gigantic Sherpas, blew away three or four Nazis with one shot, seduced a Frenchman, and pummelled hell out of a pilot with a pair of wooden blocks. This episode she gets to--drive a car. Gee, that's exciting. There wasn't even a courtesy girl on girl catfight with Cate Blanchett. I thought thirteen and a half year old boys lived for that sort of thing.

And finally (drum roll please) the No. 1 reason why Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Whatever The Hell was a big disappointment:

1. The older Harrison Ford gets, the more he looks like my father. Sorry, Harrison, but that's just a little weird.