Thursday, October 04, 2007

The Official and Proper Way to View the Star Wars Movies

As we all know, I have 14 (OK, four) children. Because I love them all dearly, I want to give them the best that life can offer. To some people this might mean feeding them proper meals at regular intervals, finding them good schools, signing them up for piano lessons and dance lessons and clarinet lessons and other, more obscure lessons involving how to kill a man with just your toes (Carrie took that one), and nurturing the hell out of them to within an inch of their lives.

But not me.

No, the greatest lesson and legacy I can teach my children is this:

NEVER TRUST GEORGE LUCAS.

Which really means, don’t trust someone else to show you the stories you want to see. And the Hollywood Machine will almost ALWAYS disappoint you in the long run.

Like many people of a certain age, I grew up with Star Wars. I saw the original in a packed theater in 1977 when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. It was magical and wonderful and quite literally left me thirsting for more. I think I saw it three or four times that year, and each time I think I fell in love with the movie a little more. I can’t tell you how many times I sequestered myself in my bedroom and I single handedly re-created Han, Chewbacca, Luke, and Leia’s great escape from the Death Star. Especially the part where Han lets out a blood curdling scream and charges at the storm troopers. (You know the scene, I’m sure.) Plus, I could do a killer Chewbacca impression back then. “Yarwl!”

I was still young enough when The Empire Strikes Back came out that the glory was still there. By the time Jedi hit the screens I was old enough to see that Lucas had taken what was great about the first two movies and substituted in a bunch of koala bears, running around the woods tripping up storm troopers with vines and large rocks. Whatever. The magic was gone. Well, except for the bit with Leia in a gold bikini, that is priceless and almost, but not quite, makes up for the Muppets littering the screen later.

And I think that’s why everyone was so devastated when “Episode 1” came out and blew chunks all over the screen. All those people who felt the magic back in 1977 expected; no, we demanded that magic be re-kindled. When all we got was Jar-Jar and poor little non-actor Jake Lloyd, we were pissed.

Here’s the thing about Jar-Jar and Episode 1 and all that clap trap: If you show it to a kid, say, a nine year old boy, THEY DON’T CARE. They love it. They don’t see that Jar-Jar seems to be a thinly veiled, slightly racist caricature. They totally relate to Anakin and groove on the fact that he kicks butt in the pod race. That whole movie (and really, when you get right down to it, the entire series), is meant for pre-pubescent boys. And girls, too, of course; though it seems to touch a deep, sub-terrarium need in little boys.

So though I loathe George Lucas for obliterating all my fond childhood memories of Star Wars with the living abortion that is Episode 1, I laugh at the absurd title “Attack of the Clones” and I cringe at the Darth Vader un-veiling “Noooooooo!” scene in Episode III, I do get where he’s coming from. Plus, you have to admit, the light saber battles in the prequels are totally kick butt. Poor Alec Guiness was about 147 when they filmed his battle scenes so he didn’t move that well and they didn’t have such great CGI back then. Even Luke’s later saber battles with Darth Vader in Empire and Jedi weren’t as good as the Darth Maul vs. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon battle in Episode 1. And Yoda with his little bouncing-all-over-the-place routine? Very fun.

So here is my Official Pronouncement on The Order in Which Young Children Should Be Introduced to the Star Wars Movies:

It doesn’t matter.

But, having said that, I’d start with Episode 1 and continue from there. Just go with the chronology and forget the theatrical release schedule. The kid will totally be into it, no matter what order, so don’t try and re-create that same magic you felt when you saw the original Star Wars back in that hot and sweaty summer of ‘77.

Except.

When the DVD of Episode IV gets to the cantina scene and Han is facing off with Greedo, you MUST pause the entire kit and kaboodle and explain to the kid this salient and undeniable fact:

Han shot first.

I know, the latest incarnation of the DVD has Greedo and Han shooting essentially simultaneously; Greedo shooting a hair earlier, missing and Han blasting the be-jezus out of Greedo, but this is NOT how it should be. As everyone who has a pulse and cares about such things knows, in the original theatrical version, Han bush-whacks Greedo and then casually flips a coin to the bar-keep, apologizing for the mess. It’s great, because it sets up Han’s character as a rogue figure and when he comes through in the end for Luke, there is redemption. Plus, it’s just cool.

Don’t try and mess around with getting the Laser Disc version which mirrors the theatrical release or something choppy and awful off the Internet, just stop and explain how the scene should really play out and let life go on. George Lucas may be many things (though “good director” is not one of them), but he did make some movies that little boys and girls always love. I have never met a kid who thought even one of the Star Wars movies were dumb and awful. That comes later.

Except to say that HAN SHOT FIRST and that is the end of the discussion.

Jon scribbled this mess on 10/04/07 at 10:08 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

But We Were on a Break

Can I just take a moment here and explain how my life works most of the time? Without going into nauseating detail, here is how my typical day goes:

Get up. (around 7:30 AM. ish. whatever. Maybe it’s closer to 8). I shower and get dressed. I get the little kids up. We fight about breakfast choices until someone is either crying or there is blood in someone’s oatmeal (those little goobers bite when they get all riled up!) I bandage everyone up and drop the kids off at school and pre-school.

Go to work.

Work all morning. (this is not a euphemism for “get on the fast connection at work and start the bit-torrenting everything under the sun,” I promise.)

Take a short lunch in which I read websites, goof off, plan to go and then abjectly fail to go to the gym around the corner where I am a member and have never once visited.

Work all afternoon until 6. (Almost all of our clients are in L.A., so we keep Pacific time for the most part.)

Come home. Help make dinner. Beat the children until they do their homework. Do the dishes. Issue more beatings to get people to go to bed.

With the exception of Lucas, everyone in the Deal Family compound is a night owl, so everyone (including Ellis) is up until at least 10:30, even on school nights. Yes, we are bad parents, but we don’t care what you think.

Everyone goes to bed and I start writing a blog post for the next day. Depending on how glib I feel, this takes anywhere from 3.5 minutes to a couple hours.

Go to bed.

Repeat as necessary.

So what has been happening of late is pretty much the same thing all day until I get home. Lately we insert the following step after dinner:

Go to Home Depot

Wander around, trying to find whatever thing it is I desperately need. Whatever it is, it is almost guaranteed that I will A) get the wrong size, color, strength, consistency, or shape; B) they are out of stock of the thing I am dying for, necessitating a trip to a totally different Home Depot (usually located one county over), further wandering of the aisles and purchasing the wrong size, color, strength, consistency, or shape of the thing; which in turn means I have to go back to Home Depot after pulling into the driveway and examining my purchases more carefully and coming to the realization that A) I’m a moron; B) I’m an idiot; C) I hate myself; D) I should pay more attention to the size, color, strength, consistency, and shape of the crap I buy. Home Depot sucks my brain right our every time I walk through the doors.

After all that Home Depot-ing, it is now 9:00 PM and so I stay up to do whatever it is my contractor assigned me to do. Since I suck at all this home re-modeling crap, I usually have to do things at least twice. (Ask me about wiring the basement and I’ll talk your ear off with all my attempts at trying to wire up a 3-way switch.)

And you should know, that even though I totally gave up on doing ANYTHING else on the house a couple weeks ago, I’m still on the hook for a couple things, namely demolition and quarreling with my sweet bride about light fixtures and doorknobs. We generally have almost exactly the same taste in “stuff,” but every now and then one of us has to be reined in. Though I thought my days of loitering at the Home Depot were pretty much over, I was quite wrong. I really should buy some stock.

After I have done all my “assignments” it is approximately 2:30 AM. And even if that is a gross exaggeration and it is only 11:00 PM, I assure you that I was working like a dog to get it done, and it was probably pretty strenuous work, so I’m flat out exhausted.

Which brings me to this point:

A) I really can blather on, can’t I?

B) For the time being, I have two full time jobs. My normal one, which has been uncharacteristically annoying and somewhat busier than normal of late and a second, physically demanding job of doing all the junk at home, which I am woefully unqualified to do, but I slog on anyway.

C) I’m being a rather suck-y blogger type at this point, since all I think about is work, how best to beat the children so the bruises won’t show and we have to have the Child Welfare Service people all up in our business (again! for the 17th time) and the DAMN HOUSE. And even if I manage to think about something besides those subjects, I’m too stupid tired to write and get anything out.

So what I’m saying is that posts and all the stuff you have some to expect from me on a somewhat daily basis will slow down a bit until the DAMN HOUSE is done. I’m sacrificing quantity for quality and though many people might make a reasonable argument and say, “what quality is he talking about, exactly?” I’m just going to ignore those folks for the time being and also release myself from the prison of “you really MUST post EVERY day.” I will still be writing, but maybe only once or twice a week.

I have signed up for NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) in November, so rest assured, quality will totally go down the drain again as I try and post EVERY single day in November. You could even say that this lull I will have in October is merely preparation for the onslaught of AWESOME-NESS which will be comin’ attcha in November. Or you could say other things, which might not be as nice, but again, I’m choosing to ignore the haters.

Also, at some point this fall/winter I fully expect to have the Ransom Note Typography store officially up and running, with more crap (OK, funny tee-shirts) than you can shake a proverbial stick at. Just in time for Holiday gift giving!

In the meantime, I share with you these few photos, so you can feel the joy and pain of my life right now:

The state of the kitchen before I went medieval on it over the weekend.

My delightful and charming wife, helping me get all medieval on the kitchen. Although, now that I think about it, she went and took a nap during the heat of battle while I whacked at stuff with a crowbar. I’m still wondering exactly how she got away with that. OH! Take a good look at the right side of that image. See all those white spots? That, my young padawans, is SNOW. It was still decidedly September then. I call UNFAIR, in the extreme. Plus, it wasn’t that light and fluffy snow we love here in Utah. It was basically coming down like a Piña Colada Slurpee. All wet and gukky.

This is the end of the wire that used to feed the dishwasher that almost killed me over the weekend. I thought the breaker had been thrown AND that the electrician had cut the lines to that area of the kitchen, but I was quite wrong. The flash and EXPLOSION (ok, a sort of loud pop) when I cut that wire were tremendous. Luckily (really, very lucky) I was using fully insulated wire cutters as well as sporting a sturdy pair of gloves. At the very least, I know now that I jump VERY high when I have the shit startled out of me.

The kitchen as it is right now. “Everything BUT the kitchen sink” is gone. The fridge still works, but that’s about it. Technically, the sink isn’t even that usable, as the garbage disposal isn’t working right now. (no switch). Oh! And see that dark stain on the floor to the right of the fridge? That, my young Jedi warriors, is a crap load of water damage we were blessed with. Seems the drain for the washing machine had a slow and indiscernible leak. Every time someone did a load of laundry, a splash or three of water would squeak out and over the course of a zillion years, that sub-flooring turned to mush. Fun, huh?

Anyway!

I’ll be back!

Jon scribbled this mess on 10/02/07 at 12:01 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Thursday, October 04, 2007

The Official and Proper Way to View the Star Wars Movies

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

But We Were on a Break

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