Friday Movie

It was a tough week at work, which contributed to my posting lethargy. So to take my mind off of things I went to a movie Friday afternoon. Alone.

This was only the third movie I've attended alone. My first solo flick was during my watermelon days in Seattle, when I skipped work to see "Bob Roberts" - Tim Robbins' mockumentary lampooning a folk-singing, conservative politician. Walking out, I remember feeling quite smug about indulging in such irreverence on company time. Stickin' it to the man!

My second was "Miracle" - Minnesota boys taking on the Soviet Red Army. This was pure red meat for a Minnesota boy who always wanted to take on the Soviet Red Army.

Yesterday was different. It was a murky, sodden day, and after my week I was in dire need of some inspiration. So I trudged to the theater and bought a ticket to "Benchwarmers".

I did so hoping to witness a duplication of Jon Heder's rousing role as maladjusted hero; however, five minutes into the movie a sullen dread seeped into my conscience. Wasn't it too soon for another Heder "teenage outcast turned hero" film? What about Napoleon - what would he think of my attending this movie a mere two years after his triumph? Quickly overcome by feelings of betrayal and exploitation, I stood up, yelled "Not Now!" and marched out. The two stoners I shared the theater with must have shared my angst - they stumbled out and straight into "Scary Movie 4".

Lost, confused, but still yearning inspiration, I scanned the cineplex movie roster for something that would start shortly - "Larry the Cable Guy", "Failure to Launch"... Both seemed like strong candidates, but I just wanted something... more. I settled on "United 93", and stepped into the theater just as the opening credits were rolling.

There, I spent two of the most searing, agonizingly poignant hours of my life.

Psssst, Buddy. Spare a Planet?

I just visited an official Earth Day website and completed an Ecological Footprint Quiz, which supposedly measures the extent to which I abuse Our Mother. If the results are indeed accurate, the Menendez Brothers have nothing on me.

I knew I was in trouble after reading the first question - How often do I eat animal based products? Growing up, my parents walked a side of beef through a warm room and called it dinner. Or breakfast. Unfortunately, I've yet to kick that habit, so I undoubtedly started off in ecological chaos.

As I progressed through the exam, I learned that I'm a garbage-spewing, space-hogging, fuel-wasting brute. And if everyone lived like me we would need 12.8 planets to sustain our collective lifestyle - quite the footprint.

Just call me Sasquatch.

Pee Wee, Meteorologist

Without a doubt, the most grating Minneapolis media personality is meteorologist Paul Douglas.

For those reading this post who are not "one of us", I should explain that Minnesotans don't want someone to simply recite the day's events to them -- we want to be tucked into bed, given a cup of warm milk and softly hummed to sleep by our newscasters. This is why, in the mid-'80s, our local NBC affiliate changed its call letters from WTCN to KARE (get it?).

KARE's production featured down-home, hug-a-bear cute anchorfolks and Paul Douglas, who fed this nauseating mush by pioneering the "Let's step out onto the patio and have a look" weathercast. Sure, he was creepily effeminate, but gol' darnit he was one of us and look -- he's outside!

Minnesotans devoured this tripe & catapulted KARE to perennial ratings dominance. Unsatisfied, Paul seized on his saccharine celebrity and left us for the big bucks of WBBM Chicago, where he was slapped down like a Durham stripper and within months crawled back to the safety of "We Like it Here" Minneapolis.

He's as queer as ever (queer means many things, people), performing his schtik at another Minneapolis station, but the ass-pounding he received in the big time changed him. Yearning to be taken seriously, he has fervently adopted the Global Warming cause and incessantly proselytizes about upcoming environmental upheaval.

I don't monitor the tv ratings much, but I don't think we're buying into the New Paul. Minnesotans are suckers, but like the nation as a whole, we will not stand for our peculiar Pauls overstepping their bounds.

By air...

Gainesville, Fla. (AP) - A small plane crashed into a sport utility vehicle parked outside an airport Sunday, hurling it through a terminal wall, officials said. Three people in the plane were killed.

Apparently, had the SUV not selfishly positioned itself at that very spot, those poor folks would be alive today. Not to mention that helpless terminal wall...

Murder by land, sea, air, rail... If we're not vigilant, they may become accomplices to psychopaths committing unspeakable atrocities.

What next, I ask you. What next?

Easter Insight

I don't understand why infrequent churchgoers select Easter as one of their "must see" masses.

Christmas is easy to get -- it's a birthday party. And you can derive a fair understanding of the holiday by watching the Charlie Brown special.

It's tough to deduce much from The Easter Beagle.

This morning, we got all dolled up and went to church. Since we send BENRY to the church school, we're common fixtures in the back row and recognize many of the parishioners. We of course arrived late (Pretty worked really hard to look, well, pretty), so the usher herded us into the balcony, where I recognized no one.

Now standard Catholic proceedings are difficult enough for children (Stand up, Sit down, FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!); however, Easter is a different gig altogether. The hymns are longer (Look at me, I'm playing the piano!), the homily is insufferably drawn out (Listen to me, I know my book!) and simple prayers & responses are transmogrified into torturous sing-song that doubles the length of the entire event.

It's a production not unlike the Super Bowl. Except no one really knows why they're there because Linus never explained the meaning of Easter in the first place. At least before the Super Bowl, Dad will make it clear to his unknowing kid that he has a hundred bucks on the blue guys so root for them, damnit.

At Easter mass, children hopped up on a breakfast of jellybeans and chocolate are supposed to figure it out themselves. Like the squirt in front of us. I'll say he was four years old and had not attended church since his baptism -- the little shit was a whirlwind of kicking, jumping, banging, squirming and chattering. Finally, after slapping his sister and pulling his mom's hair, he stood up during the homily and screamed, "I AM THIRSTY! I WANT SOME WA..."

He never completed his thought. Dad's hand came out of nowhere, and, with the force of a cruise missile cupped the kid's mouth vacuum-tight. Clearly startled, the guttersnipe looked wide-eyed at Dad. Then, at Mom, who was staring back, aghast, at Dad. Then this kid, who couldn't or wouldn't display a rudimentary understanding of civilized behavior before this occurred, showed the social moxie of Dr. Phil. He cried. Screamed, bawled, flailed and let Mommy and everyone else around know what Daddy did to him. Mom angrily gathered their belongings, grabbed their coats and said to Dad, "Are you happy now?"

As the family shuffled out, I smiled reassuringly at the dad while recalling the great line from "Vacation" - "Are you happy now, Clark? She's deaf." Ahhh, marriage.

I don't blame the dad. I don't blame the mom. Hell, I don't even blame the bratty kid.

I blame Linus.

Changing the World

When my good friend Eric at whataworld convinced me to start a blog, the conversation went something like this:

Eric - "You should start a blog."
ckoz - "OK."

I'm very impressionable and easily convinced to do things that I probably shouldn't consider, like climbing that 100-foot crane in Madison after attending a Brewers double-header on nickel-beer day. Or blogging.

I've always been a tortured writer, one who needs to express his thoughts just so and will re-formulate sentences and paragraphs a myriad times before settling on a final product. This stream-of-consciousness thing is painful.

However, I must admit that a mere 3 days into this endeavor, Eric was right.

This morning, while scanning the AP wire, I came across this story:

Granada, Colo. (AP) - Six migrant workers apparently leaving jobs on a farm were killed when a freight train collided with a sport utility vehicle driven by a 15 year-old boy near the Kansas state line, authorities said.

This is, of course, a tragic story. And the fact that the boy was driving an SUV is utterly irrelevant. Nonetheless, this AP writer, Melissa Trujillo, acknowledged that a human being actually took the steps to ignite the vehicle and propel it forward -- the SUV did not act alone.

More importantly, she mentioned it in the story's first paragraph.

Would this have happened four days ago? Or did Ms. Trujillo stumble upon this little blog and subsequently take a small step toward instilling a modicum of reason into her organization?

As they say in the Tootsie Pop commercial, "The world may never know..."

First Sleepover Tonight

It seems like yesterday that #1 came into our lives. Unbelievably, he's close to 9 years old and in the 3rd grade.

#1 is an extraordinarily intelligent little guy, but he's always had difficulty dealing with life on a social level. At 3, we noticed that he became fixated on certain things and couldn't stop talking about them -- trains, space shuttles, railroad crossings -- and simply couldn't grasp the meaning of our facial expressions. I viewed this as a cute idiosyncracy that he'd outgrow (although it did get a tad frustrating that he'd laugh when I'd scream at him not to use our CDs as skates on the hardwood floors). My wife Pretty did not.

Over my objections, she arranged for a 3-hour evaluation of #1 conducted by a team of Child Psychiatrists. After studying his play & thinking patterns, they arrived at a diagnosis: Aspergers Syndrome, a mild form of infantile autism.

They handed us various psychiatric abstracts describing this condition: "Average to superior intelligence... Disinhibited in social situations... Profound difficulties understanding abstract concepts, etc." Yep, that was him.

However, they also provided lists of therapists and instructional booklets on how to secure additional government funding for his "Special Education" needs. WHOA there, Nellie! No f'ing way was my kid going to ride on the short bus right out of the chute! I envisioned some Matt Dillon-like teacher putting him in a cage and calling him "Mongo" while the students pelted him with rotting fruit and poked him with sticks...

We were two years away from kindergarten so I agreed to enroll him into a very supportive school in Minneapolis. Pretty quit her job to focus on this bump in the road, and within a year, he was much better able to cope with the world around him.

After a huge battle with our public school system who damn near kidnapped him to secure their extra cash (subject for another post), we placed him in the local Catholic school.

He's had his ups and downs, I'm sure just like any young pup, and to this day he displays minor difficulties in reading social situations. However, he has surrounded himself with a nice core of good boys and last week was invited to his first slumber party. This morning he couldn't stay in his skin, excitedly jabbering about all the junk food he was going to eat and the video games he was going to play.

Have fun, #1. If you get lonely, I'll be sleeping by the phone.

Too Soon?

So it's "too soon" to promote & release a movie that accurately depicts the events of 9/11? I invite everyone who falls into this camp to study the release dates of the following movies about Pearl Harbor:

"Secret Agent of Japan," Twentieth Century Fox, 1942
"Little Tokyo, USA," Twentieth Century Fox, 1942
"Across the Pacific," Warner Bros., 1942
"Remember Pearl Harbor," Republic, 1942
"Submarine Raider," Columbia Pictures, 1942
"December 7, 1941," U.S. Navy, 1943
"Air Force," Warner Bros., 1943
"Blood on the Sun," United Artists, 1945

Amazingly, The Academy awarded "December 7, 1941" director John Ford an Oscar for Best Documentary (kindly note that this was a US Navy propoganda film!).

My, how times have changed...

Maybe it was just hot?

No, this blog will not solely focus on the ongoing media war against those malevolent beasts. But this just in, from today's Star-Tribune:

Henderson, KY (AP) - The last of six people killed when a sport utility vehicle plunged into the Ohio River more than a week ago has been recovered.

They kill by land, they kill by sea...

About that title...

A few years back, I noticed a strange phenomenon. Local newscasts and my hometown paper began reporting accidents involving SUVs as though the vehicles were living organisms performing dastardly deeds on their own:

"SUV Rolls, Kills Family of Four"
"Pedestrian Crippled as SUV Hops Curve"
"SUV Plows through Outdoor Market, Maiming 14"

As an SUV owner, I began to wonder if this was a concerted effort to demonize these vehicles or if 2-door sedans were just better-behaved. So I wrote a letter to the editor.

In it, I politely stated my case that unless the SUVs themselves were malcontents, weren't the drivers responsible for these calamities? Or is this just a politically-motivated attempt to stigmatize this vehicle genre by Group-Thinking Vehicle Nazis?

The paper published my letter, but of course parsed it to make me look like a rabid anti-PC revolutionary. My friends rib me to this day about the slogan I seem to have coined.

In reality, I'm no social agitator. What I am is a sales manager & father of two boys -- Benjamin & Henry (aka BENRY). My wife Pretty and I live in suburban Minneapolis, where I do my best to behave.

I'm starting this blog because my good friend at Whataworld told me to. Guess that's as good a reason as any... Along with the ability to circumvent those snot-nosed commie bastards at the Star-Tribune!

Should be fun...