Friday, July 23, 2004

Harry Potter And The Incredibly Blatant Star Wars Ripoff

On the cutting edge of societal evolution as always, I recently read a book entitled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  Perhaps you’ve heard of it. 

This Potter fellow could really use a more aggressive publicity push, as I had to walk a full two centimeters into a public space before falling over evidence of the books and the movies and the candy and the Presidential nominations and the Hogwarts Brand Suppository.  I thought this was a book—and it turns out they are several, each exponentially larger than the last, until by the end of the series we shall find ourselves wholly treeless but by-God Potterfied—about a hirsute landscape specialist, so you can imagine my surprise when the whole thing turned out to be a truly magical Star Wars ripoff.

Lookit, if you’re going to steal from The Lucas, do it right.  At least have the good grace to name your driving mystical entity something other than “The Dark Side.”  Also?  The villain?  Named “Voldemort"?  Is clearly Vader’s older brother with a mold problem.  We’ve got dead parents!  We’ve got a wizened old mentor!  We’ve got blue bolts of deadly electrical light and a curious plethora of British accents! 

The Potter series is into Book Five Hundred and Twelve, or something like that, and I eagerly await the next installment, when Harry carries Frank Oz around on his back and tongues his long-lost twin sister.  

Thursday, July 22, 2004

Richard Nixon Back Again

Sorry for the temporary radio contact silence. I was in Washington DC for a few days, solving crimes, hurting feelings, and in general creating world peace through bitching. We now return to our regularly scheduled angst.

-Award for the Best Conversation Snippet took place between Carah, the BFFE, and our college snickerer-in-arms, Margaret. Carah and Margaret were discussing a blind date from long and long ago:

MARGARET: You two were just not a love match. What did you guys talk about?

CARAH: Breast feeding.

-Award for the Worst Sermon Ever goes to the visiting missionary priest at the Cathedral of Saint Thomas Moore. This sucked from the bell, pretty much, because it was one of those Give Me Money So We Can Teach More Third World Countries the Words To "Taste and See" infomercials. My donation system when these people show up is to throw cash in the collection plate in an inversely proportionate manner to the length of the sermon. By the time this guy was finished, he owed me about a hundred thousand dollars. He talked for half an hour. It was the 1988 Clinton Democratic Convention speech moment of the Catholic Church. Also I had to keep deducting points for not only length but for lack of quality. The thrust of the entire sermon seemed to focus on the fact that none of the priests in the order wants to go to the Philippines, but finally one priest did go to the Philippines, and he got the sugar cane workers all riled up, and the government threw him in jail, and the sugar cane workers too, and then the media got involved, and so the priest was released, but not the sugar cane workers, so the priest busted back into jail and refused to leave until all the sugar cane workers were released too, so basically everybody was worse off than they were before this guy showed up but this was absolutely the best time of their lives, because they had daily Mass and sang hymns, which... if the highlight of your entire existence is sitting in a jail cell with only "On Eagles' Wings" for comfort, I'll take the sugar cane.

There was another extremely long, extremely plotless anecdote following the Ballad of the Priest Who Helped the Poor People By Getting Them Thrown In the Clink, but by then I was well tuned out and was making better use of my time by staring into space, contemplating Cheetos.

-Carah and I went to a screening of All the President's Men on the Mall. Three hours of people hanging up on Dustin Hoffman. One climactic scene consisted of Robert Redford switching back and forth between two callers. HOT CALL-WAITING ACTION!!

The last time I saw this movie, I was knee-deep in a thesis on Watergate, and even then I had no freaking clue what was going on. I understood more this time around, most likely because I had been drinking. The whole situation, however, practically pre-ordained sleep, and we did doze off at one point, thereby allowing me the ability to forevermore announce that I slept with another woman in front of five thousand people on the Mall.

-Washington, although also essentially one gigantic mass of snow globes and tacky T-shirts floating atop a swamp, is in many ways different from Florida. It was quite the unnerving experience to step outside and not immediately inhale water. I was also upset to find that one actually may travel out-of-doors without sunglasses and not immediately blind oneself. The sun, she was slanty.

-Liberals are the same wherever you go, it seems. I met one of them during the movie, and I immediately deduced her political affiliation when she started bumming stuff off of everyone around her: "Pass the cookies." "Where's the wine?" "Tink, could I have a stick of gum?" (Who demands gum within forty-five of an introduction? Gum rights demand at least two months of friendship and possibly even an airport pick-up. At least.)

I overheard a low-voiced conversation between her and a colleague concerning the ferreting out of conservatives in their place of work. Aren't these the same people who think McCarthy was the Worst Thing Ever? "Two people, I know, are conservative," she said. "And there are two others I'm not so sure about." Couldn't she tell by the KKK hoods and gnarled talons?

-This was my fourth visit to DC, and each time it had been as Tourist Woman, and when I rode the Metro it was at the perfectly sane hour of nine-thirty or so. Yeah. Try it at 7 AM on a weekday, Sunshine. It was like the last subway train out of Saigon. Sweet, cheerful Carah was momentarily transfigured from the mild librarian I have known for a decade into a raving, shoving maniac. I accidentally committed the mortal sin of standing in the middle of the escalator, rather than the side, and she looked at me all, "I can't believe I actually have to sit next to you now."

-BEST PROTESTORS EVER: In this era of terrorism, war, and political instability, these people were very, very concerned about... chickens. They'd gotten themselves a very impressive four-color panel booth entitled "Know Your Meat" featuring headshots of roosters. Front and center was a poster of Pamela Anderson announcing her resolve to "never eat another drumstick." What?! Pamela Anderson is concerned about the plight of the chicken? OMG!! Why didn't you say so before? NOW I'm TOTALLY on YOUR side!

Runner up to the BEST PROTESTORS EVER was the chick circulating the crowd with a clipboard in her hand. "Would you like to sign a petition demanding that John Ashcroft resign?" she asked politely. As this took place when I was into only my second cup of wine, I failed to engage her in an intelligent rebuttal, beginning with "Hell" and ending with "no." I sent her to a guy I'd seen waving a gigantic "W" flag instead.

They're awfully weird about Ashcroft up there. I talked to three different people who aren't fond of the man, and the first words out of their mouths was some sort of reference to the whole veiling-the-naked-statues kerfuffle, which, first of all, is so 2002, and second of all is a complete distortion of what actually happened, and... You know what, I'm tired of getting into this, so if you're interested in such peripheral things as actual fact, read about it here. When I tried rebutting with this information, I was met by blank stares, general fury, and a whole raft of variations on "That's not what I heard."

It was disappointing, if you want to know the truth. After three and a half years to kick him around, this is the best these people can come up with? Naked statue covering? That he didn't even know about? Wow.

-You know what, crippling depression looks good on me. I had hella-wonderful hair days for the duration of the trip. Perhaps this was due to the abnormally low humidity; perhaps it was because God smiles upon the chronically upset.

-The National WWII Memorial is quite impressive. I made what seemed like an eight thousand mile hike from the National Archives (which I had hoped to find significant and awe-inspiring, but thanks to the presence of an entire field trip of seventh and eighth graders, who were put upon this earth to be obnoxious, turned into merely yet another exercise in not strafing those who so desperately deserve it) to the white-marbled Memorial, and it was completely worth it. Open, bright, and wide, it carries the emotional significance of the Vietnam Memorial without its heaviness and anguish.

There was a very still pool on the far end of the memorial to represent the dead. Very well done. At the time I visited it was populated by a single baby duck, which I couldn't decide to be touched or pissed off by, as it was a cute little thing and represented New Life and Freedom and all, but it tended to detract from the solemnity of the whole affair, especially with all the tourists who were more thrilled over the duck than by this trifling idea of saving the entire free world. But hey.

To represent the national effort behind the war, each state is represented by a white pillar topped with a wreath, and when I paid my respects to my home state of Ohio, I was delighted to find that someone had left a row of buckeyes on the ledge. Of course, there was also a condom wrapper reverently placed at the base of Nevada, so to each state its own, I'm thinking.

Arched pylons (as always, I deeply welcome any opportunity to throw around my absolute favorite Ten Commandments term) on both sides represent victories in the Pacific and the Atlantic, and each arch has been totally Trumpified by the presence of four enormous eagles carrying a laurel wreath the size of Connecticut. It is Liberace Goes To War.

Also the place is a bit over-fountained. Rushing water over here! Spraying water over there! It is, overall, a tribute to the incontinence of the Greatest Generation.

-I have discovered a brand-new form of Potentially Crappy Suicide Methods: Death by Metro. There is a seriously charged third rail on those tracks, and if that fails, you've got an extremely fast-moving train, one every seven minutes, to back you up. But then Margaret had to go and party-poop it all: "You would get lots of attention," she said when I began enumerating all the positives of the plan, "but it would be of the pissed-off kind. People wouldn't be sad that you died. They would be pissed that you shut down the yellow line between Huntington and Crystal City."

-I was in DC, if you must know, on a job interview with a watchdog media group. But let's not get all excited here. They completely loved me, of course, as the interview went spectacularly well, covering all topics of great magnitude in the current political landscape, including Gary Stevens (for he is always with me), female impersonators, and Notre Dame football. Also the word "vagina" was used. I would fit in very well with this organization.

My best moment came when the interviewer said, "Now you've done some theatre, correct? Can you tell me about that?" Here I was in a total bind, because I have not, technically, done theatre, unless you count telling people on airplanes that I'm pregnant so I won't have to give up the aisle seat, but he seemed very pleased about the idea that I'd had an audience of more than a family of three from St. Louis, so I said, "Oh, yes, tons of theatre!" But then he pressed it, seeming disturbingly curious with the actual truth, and said, "What have you done?" and I seriously considered telling him I was a smash in Hair before going with the far safer choice of Shakespeare. And he still wasn't done: "Which roles?"

This set off a frantic mental search through the little I've retained of my Shakespeare For the English Major course. I covered the stalling by closing my eyes and smiling silently as though fondly remembering a torrent of rose petals tossed to me on the stage of the Kennedy Center, and then I said: "Ophelia."

This is what as known, in the world of crack job interviewing tactics, as "pulling things out of your ass."

I was asked back for a second interview, most likely due to my ability to contribute so astutely to the female impersonator portion of the conversation, but when we got around to Matters of Salary, I was quoted a figure so low that it will pretty much guarantee housing in a top-of-the line refrigerator box next to the chicken protestors. "We're looking for child prodigies," he told me. To starve, apparently.

Ah, well. There's always the Philippines.

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

7/20/69

Stepping and leaping, baby.  Stepping and leaping.

In honor of the Great Day, let us now enjoy my very favorite moon landing Moment O' Hilarity:

"The three Apollo 11 astronauts were honored in the Oval Office at the White House today.  Well-- Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were in the Oval Office... Michael Collins just circled the parking lot." 

(Admit it, that was TOTALLY WORTH WAITING an entire week for.)

Standing ovations for everyone out there who got that at blondechampagne@hotmail.com


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