Not sure where to begin, let alone end

I am back. It took a while to come back, yet again, but back I am. As I read that, I am thinking that Dr. Suess wrote that. That is fitting, as the good doctor's birthday is coming up (January 18th, which is the same day as the Lad's 14th birthday....the other 13 were, oddly enough, on different dates, but who is counting).

The Leafs are winning. They have 4 in a row and are playing in Phoenix, er Glendale, AZ, tonight. If they can win their 5th in a row, I am thinking that we have to plan the Stanley Cup Championship parade route. Oh yeah, that and Santa Claus exist, yet somehow Willie does not (damn, I wish I could remember how I proved that 25+ years ago. What logic did I use, it all seemed so plausible---apparently, I had not learned that alcohol and sleep deprivation were the enemies of logic and rational thought).

We have some weird weather. Well, not here in the Great White North. We have typical January-type temperatures, cold but not too cold and some, not a lot, snow on the ground. Apparently, we are to get more snow (how fucking boring am I that I am commenting on the fucking weather, as if anybody cares) on Saturday (that thought, apparently, has not stopped my from continuing the thought). Anybody that was on the Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico side of Mexico or the Dominican Republic would know from odd/bad weather. They had a lot of cloud and rain. Then again, any warm rain, is better than cold and snow, though we did have rain around the new year.

Speaking of new year, we are heading into the Chinese new year. It is the year of the rabbit. The metal rabbit to be exact. I am not sure what came first the actual rabbit or the rabbit vibrator. That metal rabbit must some mean feat of industrial design and engineering. We do, indeed, live in interesting times. Now, if we can do something about crazy climate extremes, North Korea, Iran, and extremism.

That brings me to last Saturday's shooting in Tucson. It is funny how both sides (Republicans and Democrats) seem to want to blame the shooting on the other side. I am not sure if it was politically motivated, at all. This Jared Loughner seems (great work in hindsight) to be rather unbalanced. I am not sure he is on any "side". He really appears, from what I have read, which is not much, to be on the crazy edge. It is kind of reminding me of the 1980-82 period, with the shootings of John Lennon, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. Only JPII had political connections (a Turk working for the Bulgarians as part of the KGB's/USSR's sphere of influence).

I do not know what it all, or any of it, means. In the grand scheme of things, I can see it, the shooting of a congresswoman, being used as a pretext to further separate politicians from the people they are supposed to serve. In that sense, it merely speeds the separation of a ruling elite from their constituents. Bring on the king, the public should have NO access to those who are supposed to represent them. This will make it so much more difficult to follow the money and really be assured as to who "owns" the politicians and whose bidding they will do. In any event, it ain't good.

Then again, an asteroid, or even Mother Earth and the Sun can hit that reset button and we will be like the dinosaurs...a forgotten relic. Of course, if you take your Bible literally, then dinosaurs never existed and in that vein, neither did we. All this begs the question as put first by Pink Floyd, "Is there anybody out there?"

Ciao!

My New Years Resolutions

I am back. I neglected to mention my new year's resolutions for 2011. I have decided to forgo the usual things. I am tired of trying to be a better me. Where the fuck has that gotten me? Nowhere.

I always backslide and then boom, the same old me, no new and improved version. This year will be different.

I resolve to be more cantankerous, caustic and ascerbic. As far as I am concerned, there will be no such thing as too sarcastic or too bitter. Those are resolutions I think that I can keep. I expect you all to hold me to them.

Happy New Year, once again. Ciao!

Back to the Future? Back from the Future? Funny how it turned out.

I am back. It is the first post of the new year and new decade. For what that is worth. Happy new year to one and all, I wish you all the best of health and prosperity in 2011. Now if we could only get the leadership of a number of countries to fall off the planet we may be safer, or at least safer for another bunch of whack jobs.



Funny, but Dr. Strangelove seems to be more pertinent to me today than it was 30 years ago. Of course, then, as I had said, we had mutually assured destruction. It is rather humourous how comforting that notion is right now.



Enough about that, though. You did not come here to read me wax poetic about death and mortality. In fact, I have a family who can hear all about it, if I felt the need to drop the melancholy blanket over them. I do not. I do not know when the "time" is up, so might as well have a good time, make it a good time, while I/we have it. Let's party like it was 1999.



Which brings me to the real humour. AMC just ran the Back to the Future trilogy. I was struck by many things. I recall the original being released in 1985 and going back to 1955 was funny. The whole scene when 1955 Dr. Brown questions Marty McFly about some events in the "present" (to Marty) and the joke about Ronald Reagan as president worked. The third movie also went back deeper into the past, so I really have nothing to laugh about there. It was the second movie that interested me. Marty goes 30 years into the future, which would take us to 2015, which is not so far off.

It was another way to see how the future was viewed back in 1985 and what would be. I noticed a lot of things that made me laugh. I cannot go into how I had suspend my disbelief about the future of Hill Valley. A cookie cutter suburb/development of 1985, somehow things in town did not drastically change, just cosmetic changes, in 2015,

I was into the product placement. The best one was Texaco. Who? Where are they now? By the later '80s, they had lost a HUGE breach of contract type of lawsuit in Texas against Pennzoil. The settlement they had to pay was exorbitant and bankrupted the company. Up here in Canada, Texaco's operation were bought, cheaply, by Imperial Oil (Esso, an Exxon subsidiary). I think, I guess I could have done the research (this where you realize that you get what you pay for), in the US, Texaco or its assets were bought by Chevron. In any event, not sure how the company exists in 2015 when it is nowhere in 2011.

There was a Pepsi placement. Not sure how big it was thought they would be in 2015. Think about it but they have grown and in ways I do not think were contemplated in 1985. Pepsi owns Tropicana, Frito-Lay and Quaker Oats, including Gatorade. That is big. I am also not sure if they still own their stake in Yum Brands (Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut), which was used to sell fountain drinks (Pepsi products to counter Coca Cola's McDonald's connection).

The strangest thing that struck me was this. If you recall, at the end of the first movie, Doc Brown comes back from the future to tell Marty in the present that there is a problem with his child. Now, the time machine does not need plutonium to create the 1.21 Gigajoules the flux capacitor needed. The vehicles ran on waste or garbage, which looked organic. If the hover cars ran on organic waste, then why was a large, integrated oil company advertising? We would need the Texacos of the world to create garbage for us? What the fuck?

I do not want to go into the fashion styles or the fact that these hover vehicles and hoverboards will not be existing, especially in commercial production in the "real" 2015. Let alone the automated, Max Headroom, like waitstaff at the 50s themed restaurant in Hill Valley.

I then got annoyed with the whole thing and turned away. Damn, ADD, and I did not think I could sit and critique the thing just for the sake of doing it.

Like most of my posts that could go on and on, I am ending it here. I just want to move on to something else for the day. Enjoy the Sunday post. Ciao!