FOR THE HELL OF IT     VOL. 3  NO. 7

RANDOM THOUGHTS And Musings

ON MOVIES AND ENTERTAINMENT

There’s a new movie out called Expendables 2.  It is the sequel to the stunningly boring Expendables 1.

I am certain the film will make money—certainly in France where films like this are considered art – as the French can’t conceive that a film so stupid could be anything but art.

Having said that – having come out and opined that this is fatuous mind-numbingly vacuous crap not worth the price of even a free ticket, I can’t wait!  Are you kidding me?! Stallone! Arnold! Willis! Stratham! And Chuck Freakin’ Norris!  OMG – I gotta see it before it ends up in a French Cineplex surrounded by Jerry Lewis posters and frequented by beret wearing New Yorkers who spent a week in Paris back in ‘87 and now smoke stinky cigarettes and sit sipping coffee at outdoor cafes while being pummeled by high winds and car exhaust.

If you missed the first film, they were really expendable.  In this film, they must be absolutely worthless! Expendables 2!  See it right away before it goes the way of John Carter or the remake of Total Recall.

…..

Here’s some hot news making the rounds in the world of entertainment:

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are finally going to get married. 

Jennifer Aniston is engaged to be married.

Kristen Stewart apparently cheated on her boyfriend and now he’s upset.

That young guy who was sleeping with Calvin Klein isn’t anymore and he’s going to write a book about his 2-year fling with the reclusive designer.

Gwen Stefani gained weight and then lost weight.

Let me make this as clear as I possibly can – if you actually give a crap about any of the above, you need to take a long hard look at your life and really weigh who you actually are with who you could be – a person who cares about the love lives of people who don’t care about you or yours or – and this is just one thing to consider – a crack cocaine addict who cares only about crack cocaine.

ON THE OLYMPICS

I watched some of the Olympic coverage this year because I know it won’t be back for quite some time…some experts have theorized it may not return for four years. 

My favorite thing: synchronized diving – men and women.  Awesome.  I had no idea that was even possible. I now feel ridiculous with all my youthful shouts of: “Look Mom!  Lookit me!” and then plummeting from the diving board into a painful belly flop.  Look at me indeed.  I should’ve triple lutzed with my best friend.

When I was a little kid there was a girl who was training to dive in the Olympics – I don’t remember the year – I was pretty young so it might have been during the summer of 1876.  Anyway I watched her dive from the high dive and on the way down she smacked her face on the side of the pool making the water look like an outtake from Jaws.  I was mortified and vowed never ever to even consider trying something like that. I mean it wasn’t a bad dive and most of her hit the water – just not her face or as we medical types call it – the mug.  She got a mashed mug. After a year of rehab she tried it again and guess what happened? Yep. Mashed mug again.  Hopefully she realized her Olympic dreams by medaling in the Synchronized Standing Around in the Shallow End competition.

My least favorite: swimming, soccer, skeet shooting and speed walking.  Speed walking?  Really?  I see better speed walkers every rush hour in Manhattan.  I assume some guy from Brooklyn in a crumpled suit, with a clip on tie, a brief case and old Nikes took the gold.

If we’re gonna have stupid sports why not crossword puzzle solving?  Underwater demolition combined with sponge diving? Let’s get that Lithuanian team in the pool for the Marco Polo competition.  We could have pantomime soccer – same scores, less effort.  Since they’re the summer games, we can’t have luge but we can have the 2-man loogey event – it would combine loogey grossness and loogey spitting distance.  What fun!

Of course it will be hard to forget the closing event…much as I’ll try.  Bob Costas introducing Beady Eye…nice.  Al Michaels on hand for The Pet Shop Boys.  And emaciated glamour models showing the athletes what bodies they could have if only they’d stop training and start regurgitating.

ON NUKES

There’s a great deal of international concern that the Iranian drive for nuclear energy is actually a thinly veiled attempt to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel is understandably worried about the very real possibility that Ahmadinejad might gain a nuclear arsenal.  Their concern is based on the simple facts that Iran has never been a good neighbor to Israel and that Ahmadinejad is a nut case whack job who is on record as wanting to destroy Israel.

He is also on record as decrying the holocaust as a myth created by the west, as saying that there are no homosexuals in Iran, that President Bush partnered with Osama Bin Laden on the 9/11 attacks and other offensive moronic comments that time and good taste prevent me from listing more fully. 

Israel has every right to be suspicious of Iranian intentions.  It’s amazing that we live in a world where science, technology and medicine have advanced so far that we are close to finding cures for the previously incurable, food for the hungry and hope for the impoverished and we are still one moron away from nuclear annihilation.  If my neighbor plays music too loudly too late at night, we can discuss it and come to an understanding – we find a way to coexist; but if my people – my country – has a religious or geopolitical worldview that is different from yours, the solution is my destruction or yours?  That can’t be right.  So instead of discussing my neighbor’s loud music I should just burn down his house with him in it?  What prevents a louder neighbor from rebuilding and moving in?

Here’s the thing, when I was a kid we were in the cold war – that’s like a real war but instead of bullets, each side sends bullshit ideas back and forth until one side convinces the people on the other side that their bullshit is probably less bullshitty than the bullshit their own leaders are spinning.  The governments in a cold war spend their time scaring their people with nonsensical rumors and fabrications in a vain effort to keep them from realizing that their rights are being slowly siphoned away.  The winner in a cold war is the side best able to fool their own people the longest.  (We won, by the way. Congrats.)

Anyway, we were frequently told that the Russians were going to nuke us.  They were going to do this because we were capitalists and they were socialists and these two ideas couldn’t coexist – even though they do in almost every democratic society in the world.  Because they couldn’t coexist and because neither side wanted to switch to other side’s socio-economic world view, we were going to bomb them or get bombed by them…depending on what day of the week it was or something scientific like that. 

We had tested nuclear weapons and even used them on the Japanese and our scientists and our leaders and our generals knew what these weapons could really do.  Being fully cognizant of the colossal calamity and utter destruction a nuke strike could have on any given target, our leaders advised us kids to take precautions.  They trained us to do the only sane thing kids can during a nuclear strike. They taught us to hide under our desks.

In those days secondary schools were equipped with school desks that had the chair attached to the desk with some metal piping painted institutional gray.  You could, if you weren’t ridiculously heavy, squeeze fairly easily under your desk and be, as it happened, fully protected from a nuclear bomb.  Now we didn’t know this when we went to school but it seems that the school desks in those days were more than just formica, wood and metal.  They were – we believed – able to withstand a nuclear attack.

Every once in awhile we would hear a loud piercing siren and the teacher would tell us to get under our desks and there we would wait for the end of the drill…or the end of the world…no real way to tell actually – until it was over one way or another.  After a few such exercises none of us really believed that an attack was forthcoming and we would use the time spent under our desks as wisely as we could.  Mostly staring at the many wads of gum stuck the underside of the nuclear resistant desk tops and trying to guess their respective ages.  It seemed possible to us that some of those wads could trace back generations.  (Most of us didn’t know that formica was invented in 1912 and wasn’t used as school desktops for many years after that and therefore the wads of gum could only likely be traced back 10 years at most.)

While tests haven’t been done on the effects of a nuclear attack on children hiding under formica-topped school desks, I believe that things would not work out too well…for the desks or the kids.  Granted, I was never good in science – could never get my science fair volcano to spew lava and to this day my appreciation for science begins and ends with a deep suspicion that all science – particularly litmus paper – is based on magic.  But I’m pretty sure that if such a thing ever happened, you’d hear a roomful of kids saying: “what he f—?” and then evaporating into a fine mist of formica and kid dust. 

It amazes me that after all these years, we still need to fear a nuclear attack.  Of course if we’ve learned one thing from countless hours watching television – while visionaries like Steve Jobs were out creating a new world – various Americans will survive a nuclear attack.  There will be a handful of kids, 1 really annoying stock market analyst, 1 frightened Priest who has lost his faith, 2 fat guys, 4 hot babes, 3 hot guys – one of whom is a sociopath, a couple older folks and a wise black man who sounds like Morgan Freeman.  Together these fine folks will rebuild our torn world and recreate America – using guns and the same “it’s us or them” mentality that led to the attack in the first place. 

So nuke attack or not, we will carry on.  We won’t have learned anything, but we’ll carry on.  And I like to think that this troop of survivors will happen upon a little school in a small town and wander inside and find a roomful of kids – frightened but unharmed – hiding under their formica desks.

ON POLITICS

This may already be a tired story by the time you read this but I need to chat a bit about Missouri Congressman Todd Akin.  Mr. Akin is a Republican and he’s running for the Senate – having won the primary. 

Mr. Akin recently offered his opinion on rape and the potential for pregnancy due to the rape.  Mr. Akin said:  “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down…”

Okay.

First, one wonders, what is a legitimate rape vs. an illegitimate rape?  Isn’t rape pretty much rape regardless of what qualifiers this douche wants to put on it?  And on to the suggestion that women possess some magical mystical power to prevent pregnancy, should they suffer rape?  If they possessed such Hogwartian charms, why wouldn’t they have used their magic vaginas to repel the would-be rapist and turn them into garden gnomes and then smash them to smithereens with a hammer?  If women had the power to control the birth process why wouldn’t they have stepped in and stopped the birth of fetuses they knew would turn out to be bad?  Why wouldn’t Mrs. Speck and Mrs. Gacey and Mrs. Attila the Hun just have used their powers and not had those kids?  I betcha Mrs. Akin would’ve had some serious second thoughts if her magic vagina had told her that Todd was going to be an embarrassment to every woman in the world.  My gosh – he’s an embarrassment to the Republican Party! Do you realize how much it takes to embarrass those people?  They were actively trying to get Americans to vote for Sarah Palin!

It must also be remembered that Rep. Akin sits on the House’s Science, Space and Technology Committee.  He’s on a science committee in the US Congress.  Scientists have to explain stuff to this guy and have to get funding from this guy.  He is a liaison for the American people and scientific community!  And he opines about something called “legitimate rape”?  And he believes women have the power to not get impregnated by a rapist?  OMG! 

….I guess he must know a boatload about space and technology because he knows nothing about science.

See you next time!