…BEING LOST IN SPACE.
I am a lucky man. That is, I suppose, apropos of nothing but it seems a good way to begin after a short vacation from posting. The news that interests me these days flows like the water over Niagra Falls. I spend a couple hours reading NPR and now the NY Times every morning just to keep up. Its not all Trump but everything I read seems poised to enter his event horizon.
David Brooks who I often agree with but also often looks at Trump with rose tinted glasses does express my sense of things in a piece today suggesting that Italy’s resurgent Berlusconi is what the world has to look forward to today. Its hard for me to shrug this off.
Ironically, one of my hopes lies with Hollywood, the perpetual Pandora’s Box of ideas that makes folks think about taboos from cannibalism to integration. We watched most of the Oscars Sunday night. Usually we only catch the last half hour of it for the big awards, but this year we’ve seen a great many of the movies. Claudia has seen more of them than me because she watched several of them on cross country flights. Hollywood is a great Pied Piper. Yes, there are blockbusters like Birth of a Nation which cemented the South’s Post Civil War view of stupid freed slaves as dim witted and lazy, sex crazed, “coons” over the rest of White America. Yet today its given us the Black Panther which offers up a magnificent comic book myth suggesting what Africa could have been if only it had been hit with a meteor filled with “vibranium.”
BTW – Claudia and I endured the most excruciating viewing of this movie, also on Sunday. We had to sit in the plush recliners immediately below the movie screen. What we saw was a fantastic blur of a movie that glazed over even our grandson’s eyes not to mention ours. Afterward I had to take a twenty minute nap to rest my eyes.
Also on Sunday, we watched two new episodes of the Tick. This is a marvelous potentially family friendly series and we watched it with our grandsons. Then the hero described something as a “cluster fuck.” It was absolutely a perfect description of what was going on but gosh – it wasn’t necessary. How am I supposed to teach my grandsons that some words should be used with great restraint when it rears its ugly head during family television viewing time? AND NOTE: This appears to be the first time that I’ve used that term in my blog. Hell, I’ve used the “N” word a dozen times and I find it even more objectionable.
So, here’s a little good news. I found the trailer below for the new Netflix series “Lost in Space.” If you want a real cluster ef just crash land your space ship with your entire family on a hostile foreign planet. When the first Lost came out in the 1960’s I
was really looking forward to it only to be brutally disappointed with the results. Fortunately, a few years later Star Trek redeemed the Networks.
Well this trailer shows what modern sensibilities and tech can do with such a promising premise. I’ll enjoy watching this with my grandsons just so long as they avoid the gratuitous language.
