Random Stuff from Late at Night

I can't WAIT for the Birthday Season to be over.

Missy's was last weekend, the Peeper's is this weekend, and he's been a real pill, honestly, for about a week and a half, whining about presents, who's getting them (mostly other people) and who isn't (exclusively him).

So we have his birthday do tomorrow although his real advent is this coming Thursday. He'd have freaking exploded if we'd made him wait until next weekend.

The weather looks poor; rain and wind, chilly for May, not conducive to getting little boys outside. Not sure whether I have enough liquor in the house to survive seven six-year-olds inside for two hours high on greed and chocolate.

I think I'll put out the special welcome mat...(h/t to Blue Gal, whose find this is.)

I see that the Timbers won their first game tonight. Good. They looked undertrained and overmatched when my friend Brent and I went to see them Thursday.That the lineup that started tonight got two goals and a win - better. I'm still hoping to see more of Alex Nimo. I'm still hoping to see the backline start marking up on set plays and crosses; this is professional football, boys, you can loll about marking goddam space now. I'm through hoping that Takayuki Suzuki is ever going to step up and become a scorer - this ain't the AFC and you ain't gonna score on Rochester like the traditional powers of Oman and Syria, Taka.

Mostly I'm just happy that the American soccer season is under way. I'm ready to get outside and kick the ball around again.

Speaking of sport...I'm already starting to get excited about the 2009 Giro d'Italia. How about the cast of characters, starting with the newly-repaired cyborg-Armstrong and his bolted-together collarbone. His old rivals Basso and Sastre. I'll miss Cadel Evans, but the rest of usual crew will make things interesting enough. Plus the questions of how effective the dope testing will be, the "New Blue Train" of Astana taking on the western European teams, and the fun of watching the upstarts of Columbia/High Road and Garmin-Chipotle shoulder their way onto the cycling roads of the old continent.

I came across thissomewhere on the web and had two thoughts:

One, why would you want to hold still while someone jabbed someting that long and painful that into your backside, and, two,

What's the point? Why would you want something like this? Is it like those bulletin boards you occasionally see in mens' rooms; something to read while you're...umm...otherwise occupied? WTF?

People are wierd.

One last thing as I wrap up the Peeper's little Star Wars guys...we watched "The Revenge of the Sith" again (for like the third time) tonight. It's a very flawed picture for a lot of reasons (George Lucas can't write dialog, for one), and only because it's a space opera do I avoid my usual tactical nitpicking "Who the hell trained you to move/shoot/dig in like that?!?" and barking at the screen I usually do at the screen when war films come around.

But the third time I finally put my finger on a very specific thing was bugging me in the film.

It comes near the end, where the bad evil former-President-now-Emperor dials up his clone army commanders and says simply: "Execute Order 66". This is the signal for all the soldiers to cut down their "Jedi knight" commanders, shooting them in the back.And I realized what about that bugged me, what had bugged me about that from the first time I saw it; it just doesn't work, even for fiction. It requires you to believe something impossible, and for the characters to act in ways that people just DON'T.

I'm not saying that soldiers have never and would never shoot down their officers, or turn on their leaders. They have at times throughout history. And, of course, certain officers practically invite fragging just by being incompetent, ruthless or just dicks. And the movie postulates that these guys are "clones", and the "Order 66" compulsion is bred into them, like an instinct for retrieving into a Labrador.

But, by and large, fighting with someone, for someone, depending on them for survival...that changes you. And your relationship with them. You may love them or hate them, but you get to know them in ways you might not know a regular friend, a lover or a child. And, while fighting soldiers can get pretty callous about people they don't know, with the guys they've fought with they can be closer than family. These troops and the Jedi officers aren't supposed to be strangers - in fact, crucial to the plot is the relationship between the clone soldiers and their Jedi officers prevents the Jedi, who are otherwise vastly more deadly than their identical troops, from cutting their way out of the ambush.

So there was the problem: here's this huge plot point, one of the most dramatic in a movie full of blood and thunder, that totally depends on having one person shoot and kill another who is, not a stranger or a nameless authority, but someone that they have risked their life with, fought with, braved fear and danger with, seen tired and silly and angry and hopeful, talked with about their home and family, of the peaceful times they hoped to survive through the fictional war they were both fighting.

Even for fiction...nah. It just doesn't work. And clumsy fiction just bugs me. It lacks...elegance. What do you think?

But regardless of what WE think, my kids loves it, and it's HIS birthday.

So I'm off to bed to get some sleep before Birthday Order 6-year-old.G'night.