03-13-07

Nearly Random Mini-rants
Obviously I don't have the clarity to expand any of the following bits into a full-bore rant, and to be honest, none of them deserve to be expanded.  They're just semi-random thoughts.  The truth is that having been forced to recreate my local mirror yet again, I just wanted an excuse to upload something besides the crap that was already up on the main site.

"It's round, Captain."
It struck me, as I was dismantling my old drive (I tell people I dismantle old drives to protect myself from identity theft, but the truth is I really like the magnets which are, without a doubt, the coolest magnets in the universe), that maybe we were wrong back in the day to make fun of those old Sci-Fi movies and series that depicted all futuristic advances as some sort of featureless box or (if it was really advanced) sphere.  Seriously.  My hard drive is essentially a featureless box.  In fact my computers main system is housed in a featureless box.  The DVD-ROM is a box with a tray that accepts silver discs.  It has a light and a button.

Even the entertainment center in my living room.  Seven featureless boxes with no clue (to someone teleported to the present from, say, 1968) as to what they do.  Sure there are numbers, and the analog tuning dial on my amp would provide a slight clue, but almost everything else is marked in international symbols.  If I were brought forward to now from 1968 would I be able to operate even the TV?  Of course not.  I was four years old in 1968. 

Look around your house and ask, "What would Captain Kirk, or the Robinson family have made of this?"  My car can't fly, but in terms of the sixties it looks like it could if it didn't have those pesky wheels.  My computer operates using a strange rounded device.  ("A 'mouse' you say?  How does it know it's moving?"  "It bounces a laser off the surface beneath it and reads variations in the beam."  "And how do you prevent this laser from burning through your desk?  Is it made of some sort of advance metal?"  "No, no...just wood."  "He's obviously deranged, Spock.  Set phasers on pureé.")

You're just an American, Stupid
I have decided that in order for anyone to be allowed to call themselves any kind of hyphenated term defining their heritage, they should be required to show some reasonable connection to the place of their supposed secondary nationality.  Senator Obama's father is actually from Kenya, so it's reasonable for him to call himself an "African-American", but how many other hyphen-Americans are there running around claiming that where their great-grandmother came from is somehow relevant to the way they live their life today?

It's divisive.  Worse, it suggests a loyalty to something other than your home nation, your neighbors. 

While I'm at it, what the hell is a Hispanic-American?  Isn't it a little ridiculous to lump more than half the population of the hemisphere together into a "common" group simply because their ancestors were conquered and enslaved by the Spanish (or the Portuguese, in the case of Brazil)?  Does anyone honestly think that Argentines have anything in common with Mexicans other than the structure of their last names and the root source of their language?  Stop it.  Just because someone's name sounds vaguely Castilian is no indicator of who they are or where they came from.  And don't get me started on the Hispanic Foods aisle in grocery stores that is entirely stocked with foods eaten by natives of Northern Mexico and the Southwest United States.

It's Not Horror if It Makes You Vomit
...it's just gross.  I can't be the only one whose tired of "gross-out" horror films.  I saw the original Saw and I got it.  Crazy guy who gets his rocks off forcing people to do things they wouldn't normally under survival stress.  Okay.  Nice premise.  Two Sequels?  I think not.  Never mind the more recent crap-fests that are half knock-offs of Hideo Nakata films and half high school lit mag stories based on local urban legends.  Every time I see an ad for one of those, it makes me think of Mr. Burns comment during the The Shining spoof on the Simpsons:  "That's odd, the blood usually gets off on the third floor."

Say Good-bye, Charlie Brown
Lately, every time I open the comics page, it breaks my heart.  There he is, his big round head ready to droop at yet another disappointment.  But it's not "another" disappointment.  It's the same one he suffered in 1963, or 1978, or 1981.  Over and over, the same stories, lifted from the prodigious Charlie Brown archive.  Forty years of dailies, Sundays, and specials.

Charles Schultz died seven years ago, but he lives on, dragged from his grave to a zombie half-life.  I think it's time to let it go, let him go.  Say Good-bye, Charlie Brown.