Random Associations

I've been thinking about writing some posts.  Decided against it.  Thought I'd write some other posts.

I just got back from giving blood.  Giving blood is a great, easy way of fulfilling Christ's command that we give comfort to the sick, without ever actually having to go anywhere near someone who is, y'know, sick. 

I wonder if the fact that I enjoy the cookies they give me after giving bood negates any spiritual rewards I may have accrued? In accepting a handful of cookies am I accepting my reward?  Is it possible to lose Heaven over an Oreo?

The kids have put on "The Empire Strikes Back".  These movies always cause a disagreement and a fair amount of confusion between elder and myself whenever we try and discuss them.  Me:  "Now, in the second movie, Luke learns that Vader..."

Elder: "Luke isn't born yet in the second movie, Dad." 

I don't really admit the existence of the prequel trilogy.  Midichlorians? Really?


Harry Potter movie is coming out soon.  I haven't been a huge fan of the movies, though I did enjoy the books.  I imagine the structure of the books themselves makes film adaptations a nightmare.  the books are highly episodic, each chapter pretty much a self contained short story, with one tiny detail that connects this chapter to the next, or to the overall story.  The movie adapter cannot put in all the chapters, but he has to put in all those little points.  I think the books would have been better served as a television series.  They could have done the full story.

I don't hear people objecting to the books so much, anymore.  For a time there people objected to the books because they used magic.  If we were to rid ourselves of all the books with magic in them, the children's bookshelves of the world would be very thin indeed, and very dull.

I haven't seen any superhero movies lately.  Was Green Lantern any good? Or Thor? Anyone looking forward to Captain America? 

My taste in movies has become mighty pedestrian.  There was a time I wouldn't be caught dead going into a crass, commercial Hollywood movie.  It was small, independent, preferably foreign movies for me. (I know, Hollywood is foreign to someone in Canada.  that's not what I meant.)  I did see a lot of good movies back then, movies that had a following that was intense if not large.  But I also saw a lot of dogs. One day, I saw one too many Gallic meditations on meaningless sex and dysfunctional famililes, and how life is a struggle with existential emptiness and blah blah blah.  These movies have become, for me, the opposite of the must see movie, the movie you just have to see before you die: that is, I hope I die before I see another. Now I seek a lower consciousness.  Comic book movies are great for me.  Or anything with lots of explosions and very little in the way of plot. 

I used to work in a comic book shop, years ago.  The owner must have been the inspiration behind the Comic Book Guy on the Simpsons.  Fat, scraggly beard, sense of superiority over muggles, perpetual game of dungeons and dragons going on in the basement.  We also had a most unusual clientele.  I remember one guy who was a screaming genius, but he was also an unusual personality, very strange.  (It was because of him and a few other real geniuses I met down through the years that I formed my theory that we aren't meant to get all that smart.  The really, really smart people I know are all messed up very, very badly.)  I remember one day as he paced back and forth in the store as he expounded on the possibilities of the character "molecule man" whose power was that he could control molecules.  He was becoming more and more agitated as he went on.  "He could do anything, absolutely anything he wanted.  No one could stop him.  He could scatter our molecules with a thought.  But that's just the beginning.  He could do..." here he went on theorizing about what such a being could do until he came to the conclusion: ".... he could do anything! Everything! Don't you get it?  THIS GUY WOULD BE GOD!"  He had stopped breathing, and he was staring at us with breathless intensity as he tried to glare into us the enormity of his point.

 "Ummm...." I ventured.  "He doesn't really, y'know, exist."

"BUT WHAT IF HE DID?" he screamed.  "WHAT IF HE DID?"


There is a part of me that misses the days of having serious arguments over whether or not Wolverine's claws could pierce Captain America's shield, or what would happen if The Blob, who was an immovable object, were to fight the Juggernaut, who was an irresistable force?

Anyone ever wonder what's the point of blogging?