Prawnwarp

So there’s a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood are reminiscing about the good old days.  It goes like this:

INDY: I never meant to hurt you.
MARION: I was a child! I was in love.
INDY: You knew what you were doing.
MARION: It was wrong. You knew it.
INDY: Look, I did what I did. I don’t expect you to be happy about it. But maybe we can do each other some good.
MARION: Why start now?
INDY: Shut up and listen for a second. I want that piece your father had. I’ve got money.
MARION: How much?

And here’s the actual transcript of the story conference between George Lucas (G), Steven Spielberg (S) and Larry Kasdan (L):

G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
L — And he was forty-two.
G — He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.
S — She had better be older than twenty-two.
G — He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.
S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.
G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he…
S — She has pictures of him.

So, you know, that puts a whole different gloss on their relationship.  What the fuck, people?

I predict success.

I’ve lived through two volcanic eruptions and Mt. Redoubt was my first.  Now it looks like it is going to go bananas again some time soon.

Nothing says “you are small and easily killed” like inch after inch of abrasive volcanic ash falling on everything, everywhere, from 50,000 feet.

Today is an extremely awesome day for America.

To celebrate, the Bush administration released a free .pdf listing 100 things Americans may not know about how great they were. One of the categories is “STOOD ON PRINCIPLE, REFUSED TO PUT OFF TOUGH DECISIONS, AND SHOWED THE WAY AHEAD”  It is a little unbelievable, and like all good medieval documents, it is typeset in Jensen.

Rat baiting

and

Monkey baiting

are not awesome.  I can get behind human baiting, though, because it appears that humans rarely win.

Today is Poisoner’s Day.

We watched You Better Watch Out last night, repackaged by Troma as Christmas Evil, and it was great.  It’s better than Silent Night, Deadly Night - cheaper, uglier, stupider, and with a much better ending for all you Christmas-haters out there.  You really feel for the guy, and his apocalyptic spurts of violence are understandable.  My only complaint is that they shied away from the very obvious naughty-child-murdering compulsion the main character labored under - the death toll is, in fact, surprisingly scant. But his rad Santa van makes up for it.

The “Killer Santa Claus” keyword led me to this movie, which looks fun, too.

Oh man, I’m sitting here eating bread and it is so delicious.  My friend Dan, among other weird things, grinds his own wheat. So over Thanksgiving I got him a sack of raw wheat berries down at the Amish store in Elkin.  And Dan, being a stand-up guy, brought us a loaf of his bread last night to say thanks.  This was bread still warm from the oven, made with wheat ground that morning. Chances are good you have never had this.  To say it was fantastic is a slap in the face to fantastic things everywhere - it was transcendent.

Here’s a cool video from America’s first brush with Fascism, made even cooler by the secret identity of man #2, the exterminator.  See if you can tag him and then scroll down to the comments to see if you are right.