It all began with some muscle aches. Not that I knew it was the beginning of anything; I just knew that my body ached. More than usual. Look, I'm 50; I have a routine of muscle aches that center around my right shoulder, due to how I sleep on it. I noticed on Sunday or so that my shoulder was aching a bit more than usual and that it had spread those aches all through my back, etc, etc. But that kind of thing happens periodically, anyway, depending on how weirdly I may have slept, and I didn't attribute the ache to anything beyond the usual.
Except that it persisted for a few days which wasn't normal but also not enough to raise any alarm bells.
Let's talk about social distancing for a moment.
California was one of the first states -- Maybe the first? I don't remember -- to go to shelter-in-place, and that was especially true of the Bay area. My family has been doing all of the things. I'm the only one who has been out, because I'm the one designated to grocery shop, that being a thing I do anyway. I wear a mask and wear gloves. I avoid people as much as possible. Since the beginning of March, that's pretty much the only place I've been other than taking the dog out. The Bay area has been one of the most successful places in the United States at "flattening the curve."
I had no reason to have any alarm bells going off.
Wednesday night, while still having muscle aches, I started getting a touch of a sore throat, but I didn't really think much about it. It was late when I started feeling it, and I figured it would be gone by morning.
But I was wrong.
By Thursday morning, I was having the full blown sore throat and wondering where I could have gotten sick. And not just a sore throat; the lymph nodes in my neck were swollen, so my whole neck hurt, inside and out. It ached. That's not a thing I had ever experienced before. By that evening, I had a fever of nearly 102.
There were other symptoms, too, but I'm sure you don't need or want to know about all of them.
I did, however, keep my senses of taste and smell.
California is doing a big push to get testing centers open and do more tests. Tests, after all, are where all the data comes from, and we need the data. A testing center had just opened about an hour away that was running tests on people with COVID symptoms. I drove down Friday afternoon to get tested.
That was a week ago at the time I'm writing this, and I still don't have the results of that test. This is not the fault of California. The testing facility I used is being run by a national group that has been allowed to test in California as part of California's thrust to increase testing. They say they have been overwhelmed (yes, I called them), which is probably true, but it makes the test worthless. To me, at least. By the time I have the results, I'll be over the disease. I suppose the data will be useful to someone.
Needless to say, I'm not exactly happy with any of this. And I'm not talking the being sick part.
Let's look at two things:
First, the opencalifornia people. Or openwhateverstate people.
And I know some of them personally.
These people are ignorant and selfish. That's not an opinion; it's Truth.
I'm not going to break down the minutiae of their argument as to why we should just go on living as normal, because it all comes down to two things:
1. These are people not likely to be affected themselves in any real way if they get COVID-19.
2. If they are not going to feel sick, why should they alter their lives to protect other people?
I know a guy who went to one of the protests at the capitol in Sacramento waving around a sign that said "Facts > Fear."
Here are the facts:
Coronavirus is extremely contagious. That I picked it up is proof of that. I almost never get sick and, yet, I picked up coronavirus despite a mask and gloves and all the stuff. Not that the mask is preventative in that way. But the grocery store requires everyone inside to wear a mask so that anyone who happens to be sick will not as readily spread the disease. I got it anyway.
COVID-19, last time I did the numbers, is about 16 times more deadly than the seasonal flu. All of these people talking about it as if it's just a cold can go shove it up their asses. It's just gaslighting to justify their own selfishness on being able to do what they want to do.
The other thing to look at is the Federal response to all of this, which has been, frankly, pathetic.
I'm also not going to break down the minutiae of this. Remember that train wreck at the beginning of Super 8? Imagine if that whole movie had just been that train wreck. Two hours of slow motion train wreck. That's what this whole thing is like, except we're all on the train and can't do anything to get out of the wreck as it's happening. It all boils down to two things though:
1. "Our" #fakepresident believes that having cases of coronavirus is bad for the economy and, if we have a bad economy, he won't get re-elected.
2. Somehow testing creates the cases of coronavirus. If only we didn't test at all, no one would have it.
And that's where we are. In a society where people think not just that it's okay but that it's their god-given-right to carry guns to state capitol buildings to protest about how their freedom to do whatever the fuck they want is more important than other people's lives. More important than your life. Because, you know, if people die from COVID-19, it's not their problem. Those people were weak and needed to die anyway.
The unobstructed armed protest in Michigan is just another step toward what looks like an inevitable civil war in November. Sorry, but Wuher yelling "no blasters, no blasters" didn't stop Ponda Baba from pulling his and losing his arm for it.
Showing posts with label Super 8. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Super 8. Show all posts
Monday, May 18, 2020
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Super 8 or What's Behind My Back?
My wife screamed. I mean, she really screamed. I don't remember one time in over a dozen years when she's actually screamed during a movie. Generally speaking, she just likes to cut the circulation off in whichever of my limbs is closest to her during any suspenseful or scary parts. This time, she screamed. Loud. And ended up half in my lap. From a movie seat, so that was kind of impressive. She made me jump. I don't even remember what it was that caused the reaction, at this point, but she followed it up with 3 or 4 lesser screams throughout Super 8. And she squeezed my left arm off. Yes, it fell onto the floor, and I had to have it reattached. It was pretty gross, though. I mean, have you ever really looked at the... goo... on a movie theater floor? Let me just tell you right now, you don't want your arm laying around in it. Fortunately, because we went to a late showing several weeks post release, the theater wasn't very crowded, so there weren't many witnesses to take care of.
My first reaction to Super 8 was very positive. There's a good story there. An actual story about real people. So here's the warning: there will be spoilers. I want to actually talk about this movie and J. J. Abrams, and I don't want to try to do it while dodging around trying not to give anything away about the movie. Also, despite anything negative I may say about Super 8, let me just reiterate that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of watching the film. It's easily one of the best stories in a movie I've seen this year. Not the best, but, probably, top 5.
I have very ambivalent feelings about Mr. Abrams. The more removed I am from the experience of sitting in the theater watching Super 8, the more my ambivalence towards Abrams extends over to the movie. See, Abrams has this problem: he likes to hide things behind his back to generate suspense. You remember doing that when you were a kid, right? Or, at least, having it done to you? When you're a kid, it's kind of fun. Trying to "convince" someone to show you what he's hiding. It's fun because you know he really does want to show you, so, once you've played the game long enough, he'll give you a peek. Teenagers change this to the "I've got a secret" game, but it's really the same thing.
There are two problems with this: 1. the thing is often anti-climactic 2. sometimes, we already know. Oh, actually, there's one other problem: it only works once. It's sort of a cheap trick in story telling because of that, when the suspense is being generated by just holding the secret behind your back. There's no reason to go back and experience it again, because you already know the secret. As opposed to a movie like The Sixth Sense (and I hate using this, because I don't have much respect for what Shyamalan has become. However, you can't deny that this one film was brilliant. Possibly the most brilliant of its genre) where the secret is really in front of you the whole time, you just don't know it because you haven't figured it out. You can watch it over and over again marveling at how you should have figured it out but just didn't.
That was the biggest issue I had with Super 8; I had flashbacks of Cloverfield, which is a movie I just didn't enjoy. I appreciate what Abrams was trying to do (it was a great idea), but the execution was... well, it was just weak. A movie without a plot with the author holding a monster behind his back that he flashes to us for a brief moment at the end and leaves us saying, "That's it? That was all? Two hours of this just for that?" He applies this same gimmick to Super 8, and, although he gives us a better view of the critter at the end of the movie, I still felt like I'd been kind of cheated. It was sort of like finding out that all he'd had behind his back the whole time was a frog. There was nothing startling about the alien. It was an alien. Big deal.
Abrams' genius lies in his ideas. He comes up with great concepts. Like Cloverfield. He doesn't have the best execution, though. He lets the idea run away with him instead of harnessing the idea. His Star Trek is a great example of this. He has this problem. He needs to re-boot the Star Trek franchise, but he doesn't want to just do the same thing over again. How could he shake things up? Destroy Vulcan. Go off on a whole new timeline. It was a great idea. But red matter? Seriously? That's the best he could come up with? And some guy sitting around in a space ship for decades just waiting? Yeah, it sounds malevolent and all, but, come on, decades? There's bound to be a point where the boredom sets in. Don't get me wrong, I loved his Star Trek. It's the best Star Trek out there, but, in the end, it's still just Star Trek with things like red matter that make my eyes roll.
He seems to have a follow through issue, too. Like a cat in a field of butterflies. Alias comes to mind. Another great idea. The first season was exceptional. Hooked me and my wife. We watched the whole series based on that first season. Well, the second season was pretty good, too. Somewhere in the third season, though, he got a new idea, Lost, and left Alias to pursue that instead. And Alias was full of the "what am I hiding behind my back?" plots. Every season. Oh, and everyone was an enemy spy that they would just suddenly reveal "by the way, I have a secret." I haven't watched Lost, but it has sounded like it was much the same. Great concept. It must have been considering how many people flocked to it, but he left it somewhere in there to go do Fringe, which I couldn't watch. I tried. But it was just too Abrams. Oh, and there was Star Trek in there, too, so, really, all you people out there upset about how Lost ended, you can't exactly blame Abrams, because he wasn't there. Other people were responsible for whatever bad stuff happened at the end of the series. Oh, wait. Abrams wasn't there. I guess you can blame him. But, you know, he probably didn't have any idea about how to end it, either, so it probably wouldn't have mattered if he had been there.
Super 8 evokes all of these Abrams issues for me. I can see them all in there. However, 8 has one saving grace: the story is just E.T. With a twist. It's the "what if the government had found the alien first?" version. But it's still a story about a boy that has lost a parent and is trying to cope with his loss. By meeting an alien. If only that was an option available to all boys that have lost a parent. Spielberg gave Abrams an assist on the story, so it's not surprising that that's what we're getting. Just with a lot of explosions and guns and eating humans (because that's really the freakiest moment in the movie, the alien casually munching on a human limb like it's eating a chicken leg). It's a strong story, and I could probably watch Super 8 again for the story, although the suspense surrounding the alien won't be there. My wife said she'd watch it again just to see the train crash again. It is spectacular.
Abrams does an excellent job with the setting. It evokes that sense of nostalgia in people my age and older. Those memories of what it was like to be a kid at that time. It's probably the strongest thing about the movie. It's perfect. Kids riding bikes. Models hanging from ceilings. Star Wars posters and comic books. All those things that are gone from mainstream life today. No cell phones. No computers. Cameras that actually use film that has to be developed. In that respect, I'm not sure how the movie plays to younger audiences. I haven't seen anything from that demographic about it, and we didn't take our kids to see it. I'm pretty sure all the explosions would make up for any lack of connection with the world of the movie, though.
There's even a message. Most movies, these days, don't have messages. Or themes. Nothing beyond the good vs evil. Which is fine, but it can go deeper than that. Abrams doesn't want anyone to miss his message, so he states it plainly for the audience. I'm impressed by this. Not in that he did it, but that people have still missed it. I know they have. I've read more reviews about this movie than any movie in a long time, and they all missed it. I would have thought that stating it the way Abrams did was a bit heavy handed, but, evidently, you have to put it right out there for people to even have a hope of them getting it, and, still, people will miss it. It's like communication with teenagers. Maybe that's where he messed up; he didn't state the message at least three times. Having spent many years of my life working with teenagers, I have experience with the "at least three times" thing. Most of them will get it after three times, although some still miss out and have to come back and ask "what did you say?"
At any rate, it's a good message. So good, in fact, that I'm going to quote it. The whole movie, the whole story, leads up to this one line. From the very first frame, he begins setting up the story, with a true plot arc, to lead up to the one line of the movie that will sum everything up. However, I don't think it will spoil anything to know it ahead of time, because this particular aspect of the movie is about the journey. The journey of a father and a son trying to figure out how to connect with each other after the loss of the wife and mother. It's a touching journey and more grounded in reality than E. T., since the relationship in E.T. is the relationship with the alien. Who, then, leaves. Like Eliot's father left. This time, though, the boy is left with his father and the knowledge, "Bad things happen. Bad things happen, but you can still live."
My first reaction to Super 8 was very positive. There's a good story there. An actual story about real people. So here's the warning: there will be spoilers. I want to actually talk about this movie and J. J. Abrams, and I don't want to try to do it while dodging around trying not to give anything away about the movie. Also, despite anything negative I may say about Super 8, let me just reiterate that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of watching the film. It's easily one of the best stories in a movie I've seen this year. Not the best, but, probably, top 5.
I have very ambivalent feelings about Mr. Abrams. The more removed I am from the experience of sitting in the theater watching Super 8, the more my ambivalence towards Abrams extends over to the movie. See, Abrams has this problem: he likes to hide things behind his back to generate suspense. You remember doing that when you were a kid, right? Or, at least, having it done to you? When you're a kid, it's kind of fun. Trying to "convince" someone to show you what he's hiding. It's fun because you know he really does want to show you, so, once you've played the game long enough, he'll give you a peek. Teenagers change this to the "I've got a secret" game, but it's really the same thing.
There are two problems with this: 1. the thing is often anti-climactic 2. sometimes, we already know. Oh, actually, there's one other problem: it only works once. It's sort of a cheap trick in story telling because of that, when the suspense is being generated by just holding the secret behind your back. There's no reason to go back and experience it again, because you already know the secret. As opposed to a movie like The Sixth Sense (and I hate using this, because I don't have much respect for what Shyamalan has become. However, you can't deny that this one film was brilliant. Possibly the most brilliant of its genre) where the secret is really in front of you the whole time, you just don't know it because you haven't figured it out. You can watch it over and over again marveling at how you should have figured it out but just didn't.
That was the biggest issue I had with Super 8; I had flashbacks of Cloverfield, which is a movie I just didn't enjoy. I appreciate what Abrams was trying to do (it was a great idea), but the execution was... well, it was just weak. A movie without a plot with the author holding a monster behind his back that he flashes to us for a brief moment at the end and leaves us saying, "That's it? That was all? Two hours of this just for that?" He applies this same gimmick to Super 8, and, although he gives us a better view of the critter at the end of the movie, I still felt like I'd been kind of cheated. It was sort of like finding out that all he'd had behind his back the whole time was a frog. There was nothing startling about the alien. It was an alien. Big deal.
Abrams' genius lies in his ideas. He comes up with great concepts. Like Cloverfield. He doesn't have the best execution, though. He lets the idea run away with him instead of harnessing the idea. His Star Trek is a great example of this. He has this problem. He needs to re-boot the Star Trek franchise, but he doesn't want to just do the same thing over again. How could he shake things up? Destroy Vulcan. Go off on a whole new timeline. It was a great idea. But red matter? Seriously? That's the best he could come up with? And some guy sitting around in a space ship for decades just waiting? Yeah, it sounds malevolent and all, but, come on, decades? There's bound to be a point where the boredom sets in. Don't get me wrong, I loved his Star Trek. It's the best Star Trek out there, but, in the end, it's still just Star Trek with things like red matter that make my eyes roll.
He seems to have a follow through issue, too. Like a cat in a field of butterflies. Alias comes to mind. Another great idea. The first season was exceptional. Hooked me and my wife. We watched the whole series based on that first season. Well, the second season was pretty good, too. Somewhere in the third season, though, he got a new idea, Lost, and left Alias to pursue that instead. And Alias was full of the "what am I hiding behind my back?" plots. Every season. Oh, and everyone was an enemy spy that they would just suddenly reveal "by the way, I have a secret." I haven't watched Lost, but it has sounded like it was much the same. Great concept. It must have been considering how many people flocked to it, but he left it somewhere in there to go do Fringe, which I couldn't watch. I tried. But it was just too Abrams. Oh, and there was Star Trek in there, too, so, really, all you people out there upset about how Lost ended, you can't exactly blame Abrams, because he wasn't there. Other people were responsible for whatever bad stuff happened at the end of the series. Oh, wait. Abrams wasn't there. I guess you can blame him. But, you know, he probably didn't have any idea about how to end it, either, so it probably wouldn't have mattered if he had been there.
Super 8 evokes all of these Abrams issues for me. I can see them all in there. However, 8 has one saving grace: the story is just E.T. With a twist. It's the "what if the government had found the alien first?" version. But it's still a story about a boy that has lost a parent and is trying to cope with his loss. By meeting an alien. If only that was an option available to all boys that have lost a parent. Spielberg gave Abrams an assist on the story, so it's not surprising that that's what we're getting. Just with a lot of explosions and guns and eating humans (because that's really the freakiest moment in the movie, the alien casually munching on a human limb like it's eating a chicken leg). It's a strong story, and I could probably watch Super 8 again for the story, although the suspense surrounding the alien won't be there. My wife said she'd watch it again just to see the train crash again. It is spectacular.
Abrams does an excellent job with the setting. It evokes that sense of nostalgia in people my age and older. Those memories of what it was like to be a kid at that time. It's probably the strongest thing about the movie. It's perfect. Kids riding bikes. Models hanging from ceilings. Star Wars posters and comic books. All those things that are gone from mainstream life today. No cell phones. No computers. Cameras that actually use film that has to be developed. In that respect, I'm not sure how the movie plays to younger audiences. I haven't seen anything from that demographic about it, and we didn't take our kids to see it. I'm pretty sure all the explosions would make up for any lack of connection with the world of the movie, though.
There's even a message. Most movies, these days, don't have messages. Or themes. Nothing beyond the good vs evil. Which is fine, but it can go deeper than that. Abrams doesn't want anyone to miss his message, so he states it plainly for the audience. I'm impressed by this. Not in that he did it, but that people have still missed it. I know they have. I've read more reviews about this movie than any movie in a long time, and they all missed it. I would have thought that stating it the way Abrams did was a bit heavy handed, but, evidently, you have to put it right out there for people to even have a hope of them getting it, and, still, people will miss it. It's like communication with teenagers. Maybe that's where he messed up; he didn't state the message at least three times. Having spent many years of my life working with teenagers, I have experience with the "at least three times" thing. Most of them will get it after three times, although some still miss out and have to come back and ask "what did you say?"
At any rate, it's a good message. So good, in fact, that I'm going to quote it. The whole movie, the whole story, leads up to this one line. From the very first frame, he begins setting up the story, with a true plot arc, to lead up to the one line of the movie that will sum everything up. However, I don't think it will spoil anything to know it ahead of time, because this particular aspect of the movie is about the journey. The journey of a father and a son trying to figure out how to connect with each other after the loss of the wife and mother. It's a touching journey and more grounded in reality than E. T., since the relationship in E.T. is the relationship with the alien. Who, then, leaves. Like Eliot's father left. This time, though, the boy is left with his father and the knowledge, "Bad things happen. Bad things happen, but you can still live."
Friday, July 8, 2011
Reflections on a Week
We sat around at the fairgrounds waiting for the fireworks to start. We got there a little too early this year, so it was a long wait. However, between rounds of Uno and other card games, it gave me plenty of time to observe people.
The people were divided into two main groups: families (like us) and young people. Mostly, the families are uninteresting. I mean, they're busy corralling their kids just like we are. Or not corralling them, as was the case for most of them. I spend a fair amount of time trying to prevent my children from running amok, so there's not much interest for me in watching other people's children do so. Still, it was mildly amusing when the 4ish year old boy a few plots over grabbed a miniature lightsaber with both hands and attached it to his crotch and proceeded to act like he was peeing with it. Not that that in and of itself was amusing, but his mother started laughing uncontrollably and pointing the behavior out to everyone (strangers) around her. Of course, the positive feedback from his mother spurred him on to spin and dance around while holding the lightsaber in place. (I'm just not thinking the same behavior from a little girl would have been tolerated, much less encouraged.) This lasted until he spun himself so out of control that he could no longer stand.
When I say the other group was made of young people, that's not entirely accurate. I should say that the other category of people was made up of roving bands of young girls. Like packs of wild dogs roaming the streets in some post-apocalyptic world. Generally, 5 or 6 of them. Never fewer than 3. Hunting. Aged anywhere from 12 to 25. Mostly in short shorts and low cut shirts with artificial assistance to display their... assets. (Well, except for the 1 girl in a thin, white tank top with nothing beneath it except herself. There was nothing artificial there.) Roaming the crowd looking for stray boys. The problem being that there were no stray boys. And this is the part I find interesting. These kinds of events always attract groups of girls. Girls out to snag guys. But the guys don't show up for them.
Not that there were no guys. But the guys that were there were very obviously already attached. Like the guy behind us. He was there with his girl and 4 of her friends. I know this, because they had me take a group picture of them. The guy sat in his spot all night except for one foraging trip to the concession stands. Accompanied trip. Because it would be too dangerous for his girl to let him go off alone with so many predators around. No groups of guys wandering around looking for like-sized groups of girls, though. None.
Somewhere in there something is wrong. It's certainly not like the malls back in the 80s. Yes, there were the same packs of girls, but there were also guys. Mostly huddled in the gloom of the arcade hypnotized by flashing lights and the sounds of Donkey Kong. Or the food court. Of course, if you were in the book store, like me, you were safe. Completely safe. Better than hiding under a rock.
My daughter eats a lot. When I say a lot, I mean constantly. Like a hummingbird. We think she has a black hole in her stomach. I spend hours everyday trying to keep her in food. Which is in direct opposition to her desire to play. There was a watermelon eating contest for kids at the fairgrounds. I'm not exactly sure how they were defining kids, though. My daughter desperately wanted a snow cone. A $5 snow cone. Which I refused to buy. $5 for a cup of ice? What the heck is that about? The prize for the watermelon eating contest was a free snow cone, and the entry fee for the contest was only $1. So we let her enter. At this point, I'd like to point out that my daughter is 8. She was the youngest kid to enter at the time she was doing it. All girls and except for one other, all over 12. Did I mention the fact that it was all girls? One of those roving packs of girls, one other girl (with her father), and my daughter. She was upset because of all the big girls in the contest and feared she couldn't win. At the last moment, they split it into two groups: all the over 12s and all the under 12s. That just left one girl against my daughter, so it was a pretty easy win for her. However, she came in second out of the whole group. Pretty amazing. And she got her snow cone.
They have this thing here on Wednesday nights during the summer called, in all originality, Wednesday Night Market. It's what it sounds like. Local businesses and farmers set up stalls and sell stuff in the streets of down town. We bought some great peaches. My kids got to hold some snakes and a newt at a booth being run by the local herpetological society. My daughter, who is pretty fearless, adamantly refused to touch the snakes. Until her brother did. He's a cautious lad. Perhaps overly cautious. His first reaction was also no. Which is what I expected from him (but not from his sister). After looking at all the snakes in boxes, though, and watching all the other people hold them (and wear them), he finally piped up, "I want to hold one." As soon as he had it in his hands, his sister had to do it, too. No, she's not competitive.
Although the crowd at the market is a bit more eclectic than the crowd for the fireworks (which I'm going to blame on the farmers' market section), there were still those densely knotted groups of girls wandering through the crowds looking for the non-existent guys. Again, any guys there were definitely already owned.
There was also a trip to the Academy of Sciences museum in San Francisco. We just renewed our family plan with them, so there should be, at least, a few more trips there within the next year. The albino alligator was doing well after a recent algae cleaning. My daughter was completely engrossed in trying to count the number of moray eels. And she made a friend in the rain forest:
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Of course, then, my younger son also wanted to hold a butterfly, so he spent the rest of his time walking around with his finger out (Although my daughter hadn't been trying. It just landed on her). And trying to watch the frogs mate, which he also missed seeing. It was a fun day other than my daughter trying to constantly rush us on to the next thing before anyone else was finished with the thing we were on. That's just how she is.
That's most of the week. There will be reviews coming as soon as I can write them about Cars 2 and Super 8. I just want to point out (because I find it very (very) curious) that Pixar slams big oil in this movie, and it's the first of the Pixar movies to get bad reviews. Or less good reviews. Non-stellar reviews. But I'll talk more about that later.
The people were divided into two main groups: families (like us) and young people. Mostly, the families are uninteresting. I mean, they're busy corralling their kids just like we are. Or not corralling them, as was the case for most of them. I spend a fair amount of time trying to prevent my children from running amok, so there's not much interest for me in watching other people's children do so. Still, it was mildly amusing when the 4ish year old boy a few plots over grabbed a miniature lightsaber with both hands and attached it to his crotch and proceeded to act like he was peeing with it. Not that that in and of itself was amusing, but his mother started laughing uncontrollably and pointing the behavior out to everyone (strangers) around her. Of course, the positive feedback from his mother spurred him on to spin and dance around while holding the lightsaber in place. (I'm just not thinking the same behavior from a little girl would have been tolerated, much less encouraged.) This lasted until he spun himself so out of control that he could no longer stand.
When I say the other group was made of young people, that's not entirely accurate. I should say that the other category of people was made up of roving bands of young girls. Like packs of wild dogs roaming the streets in some post-apocalyptic world. Generally, 5 or 6 of them. Never fewer than 3. Hunting. Aged anywhere from 12 to 25. Mostly in short shorts and low cut shirts with artificial assistance to display their... assets. (Well, except for the 1 girl in a thin, white tank top with nothing beneath it except herself. There was nothing artificial there.) Roaming the crowd looking for stray boys. The problem being that there were no stray boys. And this is the part I find interesting. These kinds of events always attract groups of girls. Girls out to snag guys. But the guys don't show up for them.
Not that there were no guys. But the guys that were there were very obviously already attached. Like the guy behind us. He was there with his girl and 4 of her friends. I know this, because they had me take a group picture of them. The guy sat in his spot all night except for one foraging trip to the concession stands. Accompanied trip. Because it would be too dangerous for his girl to let him go off alone with so many predators around. No groups of guys wandering around looking for like-sized groups of girls, though. None.
Somewhere in there something is wrong. It's certainly not like the malls back in the 80s. Yes, there were the same packs of girls, but there were also guys. Mostly huddled in the gloom of the arcade hypnotized by flashing lights and the sounds of Donkey Kong. Or the food court. Of course, if you were in the book store, like me, you were safe. Completely safe. Better than hiding under a rock.
My daughter eats a lot. When I say a lot, I mean constantly. Like a hummingbird. We think she has a black hole in her stomach. I spend hours everyday trying to keep her in food. Which is in direct opposition to her desire to play. There was a watermelon eating contest for kids at the fairgrounds. I'm not exactly sure how they were defining kids, though. My daughter desperately wanted a snow cone. A $5 snow cone. Which I refused to buy. $5 for a cup of ice? What the heck is that about? The prize for the watermelon eating contest was a free snow cone, and the entry fee for the contest was only $1. So we let her enter. At this point, I'd like to point out that my daughter is 8. She was the youngest kid to enter at the time she was doing it. All girls and except for one other, all over 12. Did I mention the fact that it was all girls? One of those roving packs of girls, one other girl (with her father), and my daughter. She was upset because of all the big girls in the contest and feared she couldn't win. At the last moment, they split it into two groups: all the over 12s and all the under 12s. That just left one girl against my daughter, so it was a pretty easy win for her. However, she came in second out of the whole group. Pretty amazing. And she got her snow cone.
They have this thing here on Wednesday nights during the summer called, in all originality, Wednesday Night Market. It's what it sounds like. Local businesses and farmers set up stalls and sell stuff in the streets of down town. We bought some great peaches. My kids got to hold some snakes and a newt at a booth being run by the local herpetological society. My daughter, who is pretty fearless, adamantly refused to touch the snakes. Until her brother did. He's a cautious lad. Perhaps overly cautious. His first reaction was also no. Which is what I expected from him (but not from his sister). After looking at all the snakes in boxes, though, and watching all the other people hold them (and wear them), he finally piped up, "I want to hold one." As soon as he had it in his hands, his sister had to do it, too. No, she's not competitive.
Although the crowd at the market is a bit more eclectic than the crowd for the fireworks (which I'm going to blame on the farmers' market section), there were still those densely knotted groups of girls wandering through the crowds looking for the non-existent guys. Again, any guys there were definitely already owned.
There was also a trip to the Academy of Sciences museum in San Francisco. We just renewed our family plan with them, so there should be, at least, a few more trips there within the next year. The albino alligator was doing well after a recent algae cleaning. My daughter was completely engrossed in trying to count the number of moray eels. And she made a friend in the rain forest:
That's most of the week. There will be reviews coming as soon as I can write them about Cars 2 and Super 8. I just want to point out (because I find it very (very) curious) that Pixar slams big oil in this movie, and it's the first of the Pixar movies to get bad reviews. Or less good reviews. Non-stellar reviews. But I'll talk more about that later.
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