Archive for June 1st, 2008

Indiana Jones Jumps the Shark

Spoil­ers, as usual. The sum and sub­stance of my Indy IV expe­ri­ence con­sisted of me repeat­edly chant­ing at the screen: Please don’t let it be aliens! Please don’t let it be aliens! Please don’t let it be aliens! Guess what? It was aliens. Each of the first three films had a super­nat­ural element–The Ark melted Belloq’s face, the Shankara Stones burned through Indy’s WWII Mark VII British gas mask bag, and the Holy Grail healed Dr. Jones, Sr.‘s gun­shot wound. But these were all ambigu­ous. There was a lit­tle bit of magic, but it wasn’t explained. It was almost an after­thought, added to [ . . . ]

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Public Libraries are Hazardous to Your Health

This is a gross post. I do not often get sick. In fact, in the past 3 years, I have been sick exactly 3 times. For­tu­nately, they have all come at the least inop­por­tune times — dur­ing var­i­ous breaks. I got sick two Christ­mases ago, and then again last Christ­mas, and now I’m sick again dur­ing sum­mer break. All three times have been really insanely awful sinus infec­tions. I’m not the sort of per­son who gets sinus infec­tions with every cold. No, I only get sinus infec­tions when I get something–we’re talk­ing about for­eign bod­ies here–stuck up my nose. I don’t go around putting things up there delib­er­ately. Christ­mas [ . . . ]

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