Entry 203: Strategy

So the government shutdown and the debt ceiling brinksmanship roll on.  It looked like a deal might be brokered last night, but it didn't happen.  Obama seems to be quite serious about his requirement of a "clean bill" before he engages in good faith* spending negotiations, and the Republicans seem quite serious about their requirement of getting something -- anything at all -- that doesn't make it look like they "lost" (even if they don't know what that is).  These two positions seem to be mutually exclusive, so ... here we are.

There's really nothing to like about the situation, but if you had to find a silver lining, it would be watching the Republicans completely bungle things over and over again.  What this whole foofaraw really hammers home is the unmitigated, collective delusion of the GOP (especially the Tea Party wing) -- the "Republican Bubble" as Bill Maher calls it -- an insulated little pocket that neither fact nor logic can penetrate.  The reason this is so obvious now is because the Reps' delusion is largely hurting themselves.  That's when you know it's legit.  By contrast, last year, for instance, when the GOP ignored reality (and basic statistics) and insisted that Mitt Romney was going to win the election, they weren't hurting themselves all that much, other than just looking stupid, which obviously they aren't too bothered by***.  This time it's been a different story.  They're getting the bulk of the blame.

And let's look at why they're getting most the blame, and what a masterful job they've done bungling everything.

For starters, they completely misjudged Obama's resoluteness on not allowing them to use a government shutdown or the debt ceiling as leverage in negotiations.  They thought he'd cave for some reason, and then they had no contingency plan for a graceful exit when he didn't.  This was especially absurd at the beginning when their demands were the defunding of Obamacare.  Could anything possibly be more delusional than thinking the POTUS is going to agree -- under any circumstances -- to wipe away his only signature piece of legislation, especially one that's been legitimize by all three branches of government?  (Well, maybe thinking the End Times are upon us, but that's more flat out nuts than it is delusional.)

And, by the way, herein lies the sweetest bit of, I'll say, irony, for lack of a better word.  The initial roll out of Obamacare has been the figurative train wreck its opponents said it would be.  The complexity of linking to all the various agencies that are needed to confirm all the appropriate qualifications has made the online exchanges incredibly glitchy, causing many people to not be able to use them.  This should be an incredibly embarrassing time for the White House. If the Reps had a modicum -- just the tiniest iota -- of realism in them, they would have known trying to defund Obamacare was a fruitless endeavor, and they could've used its calamitous beginning to their advantage in a major way.  Instead Obamacare's failings have been a relatively minor story, completely overshadowed by the Reps' decisions to shutter the government and get everybody in a lather over the debt ceiling.  Strategically they couldn't have given the Democrats a bigger PR gift.

Which brings me to my next example of delusion.  No matter what the polls say**, no matter how many elections they lose, no matter by how many votes, the Republicans always think they're the true voice of the American people.  Any notion to the contrary is deemed illegitimate in some way.  It's funny, isn't it, that a group who ostensibly prides itself on being the party of personal responsibility blames everybody else for its (and the nation's) failings -- the liberal media, moochers, immigrants, academics, gays, minorities, young people, single moms, Hollywood -- instead of pointing the finger where it really belongs.  The Reps would be wise to heed the message of a creepy dead pop singer.



But they won't.  And so their retreaded ideological war will continue -- a war they can't admit they're losing and that unfortunately we all get to be pawns in.  Maybe it will hurt them in the midterms next year, maybe it won't.  In the long run it probably hurts their brand, but that's the problem with the long run -- it's the long run.   I'd prefer things get settled by Thursday.

Until next time...

 *I love that this term always gets slapped in there when talking about negotiations, as if it actually means anything.  "I'll agree to negotiate, but only in normal faith."

**The "boomerang effect" discussed in the linked story is very applicable to me.  As anybody who has known me for at least the last six years knows, I was not an Obama fan in the early going.  Now, I'm a supporter, completely by contrast.  The craziness of the GOP has made me an Obama supporter.  This is another amazing gift the Reps have given the Dems.  Just look at Obamacare: the Reps somehow managed to turn a very conservative, free-market, for-profit healthcare system into a coalescing of liberal cause.

***One subtle thing I find hilarious about this clip is that, ignoring his "legitimate rape" comments, his position on abortion in rape cases is to punish the rapist.  How controversial!  And here all this time I thought the solution to the whole rape/abortion quagmire was to let rapists proceed with impunity.  Thanks Todd, for finding such a great and relevant solution.

Entry 202: May You Live In Interesting Times

The title of this entry is a proverb* of unknown origin, and it perfectly sums up my feelings right now.  If I was a resident of some far away land, monitoring the U.S. from afar, I'd find this whole government shutdown fascinating and humorous, and I'd be genuinely intrigued by where it was headed next.  Instead I'm in the U.S., in the nation's capital, as it is, and I find it only frustrating and sad.  OK, and a bit humorous, but mostly those other two.

[A minor effect of the shutdown in our neighborhood]

I had a masterful political rant chambered in my brain, and the plan was to lay it all out in this entry, but for reasons not related to a shutdown of any sort, government or otherwise (they're more of the work and parenting variety), I'm short on time and energy this weekend.  I'll just give you the gist:

SCREW THE REPUBLICANS!
SCREW THE TEA PARTY! 

This is entirely their doing.  They can try to spin it as "Obama won't negotiate" (a line of bullshit their "fans" are all too happy to gobble up, and worse, that many independents use to justify an "it's both parties' fault" cop-out stance), but it's obvious to any objective observer with a half dozen active brain cells that the Reps don't want to "negotiate".  What they want is to use a government shutdown and default (much worse than a shutdown, they say) as leverage to extract things that they cannot get through proper government processes.  This is the antithesis of democracy, and it's what President Obama and the Senate Democrats aren't budging on.  Rightfully so.  But now we all suffer.  Awesome. 

[The whole Willy Wonka thing was tired about 20 memes ago, but this is too spot on to not post.]

Anyway...

I'm going to wrap up this post now, but I'll give you a few links I found interesting/helpful.

Ezra Klein: The Shutdown is a Republican Civil War (My fear is that it's not a civil war and what's really going on is that the Republicans are in the incipient stages of morphing completely into the Tea Party.)

Jonathan Chait: Why the Shutdown Is Leading to Debt Default; or, What Happens When You Take Hostages Without a Plan (A good account of how the Reps convinced themselves Obama would cave if they held the government hostage.  Remember these are the same people who legitimately thought the polls said Romeny would win the election.  Also, many of them aren't too big on science.)

Paul Krugman: What They Say Versus What They Mean (Paul Krugman on the real -- and really transparent -- motives of the Republicans.)

John Ydstie: Part-Time Workers Search New Exchanges For Health Insurance  (Short article, or audio story, on the likely effect of Obamacare on some part-time workers.)

Elizabeth Warren: A video of her speaking on the senate floor (Forget Hillary.  If you want a badass chick in the 2016 presidential race, you should go for Senator Warren.)

Until next time...

*Thanks to my friend RT for bringing it to my attention in a text.

Entry 201: Parent Meeting & My Way-Too-Detailed Breaking Bad Prediction

Had a parent meeting tonight at Lil' S's daycare.  It was okay.  They had a food, which was a huge plus, but there was also a lot of talking with very little information actually passed on.  And a high percentage of this information was of the easier-to-look-at-a-website variety, anyway.  The whole thing should've taken no more than 45 minutes, and it went on for over an hour and a half.  The forum type was bad.  It was one discussion leader riffing on loosely outlined subjects and fielding questions as she went.  You gotta save questions for the end with something like this.  Otherwise you turn the floor over to the windiest person in the room, and the discussion devolves into a personal Q & A between that person and the discussion leader.  Which wouldn't be so bad if the person was asking helpful questions, but usually they're asking about things that are really only pertinent to them.  Or they're talking just to talk, which is worse.  Anyway...

So Sunday is the big day.  The Breaking Bad series finale.  It should be good, but even if it's not, it won't be that big of a deal.  Breaking Bad is like a baseball team with a ten-run lead heading into the bottom of the ninth.  Even if their closer is terrible, they're still almost certainly going to win.  I don't really see a bad way to end it.  I mean, I do, of course, it could be revealed that Walt is actually an alien from Melmac and then Alf could come out and the two of them could do a duet to Don't Go Breaking My Heart, while Walt Jr. slowly dies from accidentally ingesting ricin.  But within the parameters of the show as we know it, I don't see a bad way to end it.

[Great song.  Better video.]

I almost never try to predict what's going to happen in TV shows or movies, because, among other reasons, I'm terrible at it.  I would make a bad detective.  I just don't pay attention to detail in that way.  But on a podcast, somebody posed the question, which of these four things will be true after the last Breaking Bad episode: 1) Just Walt will be dead, 2) Just Jesse will be dead, 3) they both will dead, 4) neither will be dead.  I started thinking about it, and then I started thinking about how it would happen, and then I started developing the outline of a final episode in my head.  And then I told it to S, who said (in a "What's wrong with you?" sort of way), "Wow, you really put a lot thought into this."  And then I wrote it down.  Now I'm posting it here.

What follows is my final-episode, guaranteed, Breaking Bad prediction.  I make no claims about it's accuracy, but I guarantee that is in fact a prediction.  It contains spoilers if you haven't seen the penultimate episode yet.

Inspired by Elliot and Gretchen dissing him on Charlie Rose, Walt wants to carry out the plan he told Saul -- kill the Nazis and get his money back.  His conduit to the Nazis is Lydia, whom he can track down through her work.  He finds her, and convinces her to talk to him at a cafe.  He then creates a diversion somehow and slips ricin (remember he went back for it in a previous flash-foward) into Lydia's tea while she's not looking, or so we think.  She won't give him any info about the Nazis, so he holds up the empty vial, and tells her that he just poisoned her tea, and that doctors won't be able to diagnose her fast enough to save her, unless they know exactly what it is, and he's only telling her if she gives up the Nazis' locale.  In a Lydia-esque panic, she does, and then she demands to know what she's been poisoned with.  Walt tells her its "crystalline saccharose", and then when she asks what that is, he replies, "sugar".  And then he tells her that if she tells anybody about their encounter, he will come back for her and her daughter, and it won't be with sugar.
 

Walt scopes out the Nazis' compound from afar and notices that they're holding Jesse captive.  When they leave at some point, he's able to sneak in past the cameras to talk to Jesse.  They're not cool with one another, but they agree to a plan to get the Nazis, involving some sort of chemistry shit with Jesse cooking.  It's an "I don't trust you, but I have no other choice" type of deal.  They set up their trap, and then Walt leaves.

Walt finds Skyler and gets her to talk with him.  His first line is, "I didn't kill Hank.  I begged for his mercy."  And she replies, "Does it matter, Walt?"  He gives her money and tells her he wants to give her more, and she tells him she doesn't want it.  She's not as unforgiving as Walt Jr. was when Walt tried to reach out to him, because she knows deep down she's complicit in it all, as well.  Walt tells her to make a deal with the DEA to turn him in for immunity, and then tells her where he's staying.  He tries to say something touching, but she turns her back and walks away.

There is a quick scene of Walt in a sleazy motel room just finishing a self-video.  We don't see what it is, but we see him posting it on YouTube.

Walt goes to the Nazis' lair to carry out his plan with Jesse.  They dispense of the Nazis, but that beady-eyed Todd is still alive.  He starts shooting at Walt and Jesse, and he hits Jesse in the chest, seemingly killing him.  Todd draws his gun on Walt, but Jesse unloads on him, killing him, with a gun he snagged from a dead Nazi.  Jesse, howling in pain, then tries to shoot Walt, but he used all the ammo on Todd.  In a crazed state because of his wound, Jesse turns the gun on himself and pulls the trigger over and over while making about-to-die noises.  It's clear he's going to bleed out.  Walt takes Todd's gun and kills Jesse, Old Yeller style.  Walt sees the money barrels and starts to roll them out before realizing there is no point.  He just leaves them.  

The next scene skips ahead in time, and we see Walt in custody of the police, but he's at a cancer treatment center.  The doctor tells him that they don't know for sure, but they think he beat cancer again, and the definitive results will be in in a few days.  When the doctor leaves, Walt takes out the real ricin capsule and ingests it.

The final scene is a montage.  It shows Sklyer signing an immunity deal, and then working a dead-end job, while a neighbor takes care of Holly; it shows Marie alone in a little apartment, no purple to be seen; it shows Jesse's funeral; it shows Skinny Pete and Badger getting high after Jesse's funeral; it shows Saul managing a Cinnabon in Nebraska; and it shows Brock at home with his grandma.  Played over all this is the audio of Walt's video that we didn't see earlier.  It intermittently cuts to his face in the camera.  The video is similar to the one he made in the first episode where he's trying to explain himself.  It starts, "My name is Walter Hartwell White. I lived at 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, Albuquerque, New Mexico. 87104. This is my confession."  He makes sure to mention all the work he did to start Gray Matter (to stick it to Elliot and Gretchen), and then he tries to justify his actions.  At the crescendo of this monolog the camera suddenly cuts aways.  The last shot is of Walt Jr. who's been watching the video on his computer from his community college dorm room.  Somebody, presumably his girlfriend, breaks his attention, and asks him what he's watching.  He replies without emotion, "Nothing important" and closes his laptop.  The camera follows the laptop lid, and fades to black as it closes.  The credits roll over the theme music.

Until next time...

Entry 200: Nap Lajoie

Wow, my 200th entry.  I thought about honoring the occasion with a "clip show entry" were I post excerpts from my favorite entries of the past, but that seemed like too much work.  And I don't really like clip shows.  They always seem like a cop out.  Plus, there isn't really anything special about a 200th entry, other than it means I've been at this blogging thing for a while (three years and two months), but in that way, 200 isn't indistinguishable from any of its neighboring entries.  200 does have two zeros at the end, but if we like zeros so much, we might as well just count in binary.  In that case, 256 would be the next big one, Entry 100000000.

Anyway, I took a long nap today, and it messed me up.  A 20-minute power nap I can handle, but I really don't like going into a multiple-hour deep sleep in the middle of the day.  It never makes me feel refreshed.  It just discombobulates me and makes me feel like I wasted my day.  Today, however, it was probably the lesser of two evils.  The little guy got me up early and wouldn't let me hit the figurative snooze button as he sometimes does.  He was in "Look, I'm not going to back to sleep anytime soon, so you might as well get that coffee going now" mode.  I felt like a zombi all morning, so when he went down for his afternoon nap around 1:00, I followed suit.  Problem is I didn't get up until 4:00.  Now I have that logy, post-nap ennui.  Oh well...

If you're wondering, Napoleon "Nap" Lajoie was a major league baseball player from 1896-1916.  As you can see from his baseball card, he was also called Larry Lajoie.  Somewhere I have this baseball card (a reprint, not an original, which would be worth some serious coin), and as a kid I thought the Larry written in parentheses was an unusual pronunciation* of his last name, so for the longest time I called him Napoleon Larry.  Nap was quite good, one of the greatest second basemen of all-time.  He was so good that his team, the Cleveland Bronchos, actually called themselves the "Cleveland Naps" for over a decade (The Seattle Felixes?).  After Larry left the team they rebranded as the Indians, their name to this day.

Speaking of Indians, this comic brought a smile to my face.  I mean, as much as genocide can make somebody smile.

Speaking of Indians, the other type of Indians, a woman of South Indian descent was recently named Miss America.  As I said on Facebook, if I cared about the Miss America Pageant I would think this was really cool.  S is of South Indian lineage, so I'm somewhat familiar with the different peoples of the region.  The new Miss America is named Nina Davuluri, and she was born in Syracuse, NY to Telugu immigrants.  Telugu is closely related to Kannada, which is what S's parents are.  They can actually speak Telugu, but S and her sister can only really speak Kannada.  Or so is my understanding.  I can't speak any of it, so I'm not 100% sure how it all works out.  S actually lived in Syracuse for a long time, and she is very beautiful, so she has other things in common with Miss America.

Of course, after Davuluri won, the Internet explored with racist tweets or at least stories about racist tweets.  It's tough to really get a gauge on this whole racism thing.  I mean, how representative of the general population are the tweeters in the article?  It's not hard to find a handful of idiots voicing their opinions online.  Porn and idiots, that's what the Internet has in spades.

In general, I tend to have a Carollian mindset that there aren't actually all that many racists in this country, but there are a lot of assholes.  I suspect many people tweeting racist shit would never dream of saying such things to her face, and probably a lot of them have no problem with the brown people they encounter in their everyday lives.  It's more just they want to put somebody down who's in the spotlight.  If she was fat, they'd make fun of her fatness (of course then she wouldn't be Miss America); if she was dumb, they'd make fun of her stupidity.  But she's beautiful and apparently smart, so they have to find something else.  In this case, her race.  Or maybe I'm completely naive when it comes to race, and we really are still a largely racist country (ahem... The South), who have legit problems with non-white people succeeding (ahem... The South).  I don't know.  Whatever the case, I'm moving on, because I spent three paragraphs on Miss America, and I don't even like beauty pageants.  I'm kinda with the woman who wrote this article.

To completely change the topic, I got a new iPhone.  Not the latest model that you had to stand in line for hours at 3 a.m. to get.  But the one right before that one.  (I think, I don't actually know what model is what.)  I didn't want to get a new one.  I try to staunchly fight against the push to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.  For one thing, it's usually unnecessary, in that the amount of utility I derive from a new phone is trivial.  For another, there's a slight learning curve with something new.  Why do you want to spend your free time constantly learning how to use devices that are almost just as good as your old devices?  I mean, if you're really into gadgets and like that sort of thing, by all means, but for a typical non-tech schlub like myself, I don't always need the latest and greatest.  However, my screen finally cracked on my old iPhone, so when we got a new plan, I made the change.  My new phone is lighter and longer, which I like, but the battery is way worse.  That's another annoying part about upgrading: when you like a certain feature on the older model a lot, and then they get rid of that feature.  In this case, I'd much rather have longer battery life than a slightly bigger screen.  Oh well.  It's just a phone.

All right that's it.  Until next time...

*What happened to the second "o" in pronunciation?  It must be in the same place as the first "i" in explanation.

Entry 199: Hack, Wheeze, Repeat

Another week of sickness here at the G & G household.  Lil' S started it all by catching something at daycare, and then we just passed it around.  I'm feeling much better today than I did earlier in the week, although, oddly, my symptoms are worse.  I've been hacking and wheezing all day.  I think everybody is on the mend now though, which is good.

A big part of the problem for me is that I can't sleep enough to recovery quickly.  With Lil' S's new schedule, I'm responsible for getting him in the morning everyday but Friday and Sunday.  So if he gets up at 5:30 a.m., I get up then too.  I know, I know, this is pretty standard parenting fare, but it's especially hard on me, because I have trouble waking up in the morning.  This sounds like bullshit -- "trouble waking up in the morning" -- but it's not.  It's science.  Different people have different preferred sleep schedules and mine involves staying up all night and sleeping all morning.  The schedule I've had to adopt to hold a job (and a wife) -- go to bed about 1 a.m., wake up about 8 a.m. -- is just about at the edge of what I can do.  Trying to shift it even earlier is going to be tough.  I tried to go to bed around 11 p.m. a few times this week, and it didn't take.  I just lied there unable to sleep (which is always worse than just staying up).

I've only had to wake up really early (pre-7:00 a.m.) over an extended period of time once in my life.  Summer 2000, I stocked merchandise at The Sports Authority and had to be there by 6:00 a.m.  When I first started the job, I figured I'd adjust and learn how to go to sleep earlier, but I never did.  I was tried the entire summer.  I'm worried that that's what's going to happen now, only it's going to be a lot longer than three months, and I'm not 22 anymore.  Well, at least I like coffee.

Anyway...

We took Lil' S to the park today, which was fun.  He's almost old enough to play and interact with other kids.  These two little girls, sisters, I think, kept coming up to him and patting his head and giving him kisses.  It was really cute.  We slid him down the slide, which he really enjoyed.  I think he's going to be a little scrapper when he gets a bit older.  He already loves the physical stuff.  Like when I bounce him on the bed, he can't get enough of it, and he wants to climb everything.  He likes anything that's a little bit thrilling or rough, and I'm not just saying this because I want it to be true.  S would back me up on it.  This bodes well for him liking sports.  I've also been indoctrinating him by playing him baseball videos every morning while he eats breakfast.  I can't tell if he likes them or not, but he doesn't cry while they're on, which is good enough for me.

So, I gotta get going (I have to go lie in bed sleeplessly), but before I do, I want to plug a few things.  First, my brother just finished his second novel.  If you like sci-fi / fantasy, you should definitely buy and read it.  If you don't then you should buy it anyway.  It's the second book of a series, so I also recommend the first one.

Also, I started another blog.  It's mainly about football, but I'm also putting up original crossword puzzles, and I'm doing reviews of The Ultimate Fighter.  I was going to review Project Runway also, just because, but I didn't have time to get into the latest season.  Anyway, I hope you check it out, but if you don't, it won't hurt my feelings.  I've decide that my lot in life is to write copious amounts of material that almost nobody will read.  Hey, it beats watching TV all night.

Until next time...

Entry 198: So I Guess My Wife Isn't Going to Iraq After All

Turns out S isn't going to Iraq after all.  You might not even have known she was going to go in the first place, but she was.  And now she isn't.  This whole Syria quag has elevated the threat-level in the Middle East or something like that, so her trip is off.  I can't say I'm disappointed.  It was only going to be for a week, and she would be in a guarded compound the entire time (safer than a lot of neighborhoods in any major city in the US), but still.  Iraq is Iraq.

One thing that's funny is how S, whenever she has to go on a work trip to a country with a bad reputation, always tries to downplay the safety concerns by telling me things that don't mean anything to people outside her field.  For instance, her thing with going to Iraq was, "It's just Erbil."  Oh!... Okay... it's just a city I've never heard of* in a country we've been invading for the last decade, where a non-trivial percentage of the population thinks killing random Americans is religiously justified.  Gotcha.  And here I was worried.  I'm sure "It's just Erbil" is very meaningful to people who work in international development but for a guy whose knowledge of geography comes almost exclusively from studying an atlas made in 1964 as a 10-year old (Hey, there's a New Mexico.), it doesn't do a whole lot.



S's canceled trip set off a chain reaction that has turned into a near farce.  S's mom and aunt are currently staying with us.  The plan was for them to stay through next week while S was in Iraq, so that they could help out with the little guy -- fill in the gaps between daycare (Lil' S started daycare last week) and my work schedule that S usually fills.  Now that we don't need them to do that, they want to go back to South Carolina this weekend.  But there's a problem.  S's aunt left her passport back in SC, which is going to make taking a plane difficult, being that she has no ID, isn't an American citizen, and can't speak English.  (If you're wondering how they got here in the first place, they drove from SC with S's dad who drove back last week.)  The easy solution should have been to have S's dad overnight the passport from SC via certified mail.  But there's a problem.  The passport is in a safe, and the keys to the safe are, you guessed it, with S's mom here in DC.  See, what I mean about the farce part?

By the way, I completely understand this type of forgetfulness.  I do shit like this all the time.  (See the time I had to call a locksmith to get my stuff out of my gym locker.)  I am certainly not judging here.

So now, there are a five options: 1)  Rent a car,  2) Overnight the key, so that S's dad can overnight the passport, 3) Take a bus, 4) Take a plane and set up an "interview" with the airline before hand so that they can verify S's aunt's identity, 5) Have S drive her mom and aunt to North Carolina where they will meet S's dad who will take them to South Carolina.  1) is out because S's mom doesn't drive long distances and her aunt doesn't drive at all.  2) is out because I'm not sure why.  I never really got a straight answer from S, and she speaks to her family in Kannada, so I can't always figure out the dynamics of the situation.  3) is out because S doesn't feel comfortable putting them on bus, especially one involving a transfer.  4) is out because the language barrier seems too formidable to even try it.  This leaves option 5).  So S is going to drive them to NC tomorrow.



And this is where I get put in a lose-lose position.  Either I have to take care of Lil' S the entire day by myself without a break, which at his age is a nightmare.  Or I have to be a deadbeat dad and have S take him with her, which, by the way, she is willing to do.  But then I'm basically saying I'd rather have my kid sit in a car for six hours, while I goof around on my computer than take care of him.  That doesn't seem right.  Like I said, lose-lose.

And my whole thing is, wait, what's wrong with option 2 and option 3 again?  You know they have certified mail... and the buses these days are very nice... But it's not worth pushing the issue with S and potentially causing marital discord.  I'll just suck it up and take care of my kid.  Yes, I am a hero.

Until next time...

*Actually, I knew how to spell Erbil without looking it up, so it must have been somewhere in the recesses of my mind.  

Entry 197: Date Afternoon (Why Do So Many Movies Suck?)

The in-laws are in town for a while, well, actually it's S's mom and her aunt, her dad left this morning.  It's nice when they come because they help out with cooking and watching the little guy.  (Oh, and also it's good to see family just to see them, too.)  Today they gave us the chance to have a "date afternoon" at the movies, and being that it was ostensibly a celebration of my birth (I turned 36 last week -- thank you, thank you -- it's good to not be dead yet), I got to pick the movie.  So I started browsing the listings, and every time I do this I'm amazed at how much garbage there is, even though I thought the exact same thing the time before.  It's like you can't actually know how bad the movie selection is unless you're actively looking at it.*  Here was the selection, as best I can recall.

• A movie in which Ethan Hawke's wife is kidnapped, so he has to do a heist as ransom, but he gets carjacked by a cute young woman (you know, because for a lot of cute young women carjacking is the only way to make money -- if only she was a young, inner-city, black male she could get a job as a coffee barista or restaurant hostess), and this young woman gets involved.  This simply isn't my type of movie.  I prefer movies that aren't of the obviously-suck genre.
• Some movie about the making of boy band I had never heard of.  Pass, obviously.
• Lee Daniel's The Butler.  As I joked on Facebook, this movie should be called "Holy crap!  That guy looks old now!"  Remember when John Cusack was the eternally fresh-faced, loveable lead?  Apparently eternity only lasts about 15 years.  Alan Rickman looks like he's starring in a sequel to cocoon, and when I saw Cuba Gooding Jr., I thought Ossie Davis had been resurrected.  I wouldn't have a ton of interest in seeing this movie if it was getting rave reviews.  With lukewarm reviews, I'm definitely out.

[Cuba Gooding Jr. in Lee Daniel's "The Butler".]

• A remake of Star Trek XXXVIII and the zombie movie du jour.  No and no.
• A comedy in which a man (a man!) has to take care of a little kid.  I'm living this premise right now, and it is funny, but almost certainly not for the reasons portrayed in the movie.
• Another comedy starring Jason Sedakis.  What's the batting average for SNL cast members' movies over the last 20 years?  I'm just playing the odds by avoiding this one.       
• Jobs.  I almost pulled the trigger one this one.  I really wanted to watch an Ashton Kutcher train wreck.  I've had it out for Kutcher ever since I saw an interview in which he was complaining about the paparazzi and all those Us Weekly-esque, crappy magazines making money off his image without him getting a cut.  If Sean Penn were making this point, fine, but Ashton Kutcher?  He should be kissing the paparazzi and praising all those crappy magazines plastering his image everywhere.  That's the only reason he's famous.  He's an atrocious actor whenever he has to play a role that's not a caricature of a dumb person.  He's the male version of Heidi Klum, somebody that doesn't quite get the distinction between good looks and talent (being a straight male I give Klum a bit of more of a pass).  But, I didn't pick Jobs, mainly because S didn't want to see it, but also because I was worried Kutcher would just be boring bad, not train wreck bad.  Or worse... he'd be really good.
• All the movies at the local indie theater.  They all looked long and depressing.  I make fun of Hollywood blockbusters, but I've seen plenty of bad indie movies.     

So it was none of the above.  I decide to go with The World's End, the third of the Simon Pegg / Nick Frost / Edgar Wright movies.  It was risky choice -- I hated Shaun of the Dead and never saw Hot Fuzz -- but it ended up being a decent one.  It was fine.  Nothing great, but enjoyable.  A solid, fun, summer watch.  I asked S if she liked it, and her response was, "Yeah... Well... I mean... It was OK.  It was probably the best of all our options."  My thoughts exactly.

OK, now it's time to go watch something that will hopefully be mind-blowingly awesome, Breaking Bad.  I'm preparing myself for a let down.  I mean, eventually one of these last episodes has to be a stinker, right?  I don't know.  I hope not.

Until next time...

*It doesn't help that this happens to be a horrendous dry spell for movies according to the movie review Bald Bryan of the Adam Carolla Show.