How the movie August Rush could have been.

An orphan boy named Evan (Freddie Highmore) lives in an orphanage, although he firmly believes that his parents are alive. He hears music in the everyday sounds around him, and believes that this music is his long-lost parents trying to communicate with him. One day, two older boys are bullying him for being weird, when he hears the music of the wind in the trees. Dialogue as follows:

EVAN: Can you hear the music?

BULLY 1: What are you talking about, freak?

EVAN: The music is speaking to me, can you hear it?

BULLY 2: Oooh really? What’s the music saying, freak?

EVAN: it says… “Kill”

Using a carefully choreographed blend of dance and martial arts, he gracefully beats the two bullies to death as sweet-sounding neoclassical music (performed by Yanni and/or John Tesh) plays in the background.

“The Music” tells Evan to run away from the orphanage. He does, pursued by a mysterious government agent (Terrence Howard) whose motives are unknown. In New York City, he meets a street urchin who recruits him into an underground organization of child assassins, who practice a secret martial art which integrates music, dance and violence into a beautiful performance.

Wizard (Robin Williams), the leader of the Coven, along with his assistant (Angelina Jolie) find that Evan is a prodigy, who learns their art so quickly that after only one Rocky-style training montage, his skills surpass those of all their other pupils. Evan proves his mettle when he assassinates the president of Julliard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who we learn in a flashback was Wizard’s uptight roommate in college, and once told Wizard that his music was whack and his hat looked silly. When the SWAT team (Samuel L. Jackson, Michelle Rodriguez, Collin Farrell and LL Cool J) corner him, Evan kills them all using the strings of a harp to shoot poisoned darts at them while playing a haunting melody. The witnesses to the crime give him a teary-eyed standing ovation as he makes his escape.

One day, “The Music” of the cars in the streets tells Evan that he should leave the Coven to search for his parents. Wizard refuses, saying “I made you everything you are! Therefore I own you and you will do what I say!”

“You’re not the boss of me!” Evan replies angrily, “My Mommy and Daddy made me, not you! I’m eleven years old now and I know where babies come from! You’re a big fat liar!” They fight, as still more pretty but forgettable music plays. Evan appears to be winning, but then all the other child assassins join in the fight, and Evan is cornered. Angelina Jolie’s character appears and unexpectedly helps Evan by curving a bullet around him to take out the child-assassin behind him who is blocking his escape. As Evan runs away, Wizard kills Angelia Jolie’s character, to whom I haven’t bothered to give a name because I can’t decide between “Lara” and “Mrs. Smith”.

Evan meets his father in the street, and they have a conversation that oozes with bittersweet dramatic irony. In fact, it’s so ironic that might think it was contrived and artificial, and if that’s the case then shame on you for being such a Grinch.

DAD: Hey there kiddo. You sure are pretty good on that guitar.

EVAN: Sometimes I hope that when I play guitar, my daddy will hear me and find me.

DAD: I know what you mean. I think I might have had a kid about your age once. If I had only gotten that girls phone number before I had sex with her, then maybe I’d know.

EVAN: I notice you’re carrying a guitar. Can I touch it?

DAD: Sure. That’s not creepy at all. Do you want to play a duet with me?

They make beautiful music together

DAD: Well, that was fun. I’ve gotta go do something else now, but it was nice meeting you. Good luck with the whole “finding your dad” thing.

EVAN: Don’t worry. The Music will lead me to him. Can you hear it?

DAD: Ummm… big gulps, huh? Well; I’ll see ya later.

Dad hurries awkwardly away.

Eventually, Evan finds out who his parents are and they live happily ever after, but not before Wizard tries to kill the parents so that he can continue to use Evan to assassinate his enemies. Evan slays Wizard and all of his minions in a climactic battle and then goes home with his parents, who learn each other’s last names so that nothing this complicated will ever happen to their family again.

serendipitous musings

Today, as I was walking home from work at about 7pm, (and it being a nice warm June day and still light outside) I saw a purple parachute in the sky, not too far away. (somewhere between me and the mountain) and as I was walking and looking at the parachute, i wondered where he/she had jumped from. and since the parachute was purple, i assumed that the parachutist was in the sky for recreational purposes and not because their plane was crashing, and for whatever reason, the combination of the blue shy and the purple parachute and the sunshine on my shoulder (since I was facing east) (not unlike the John Denver song) and the thought of that random stranger floating through the sky just for the fun of it made me feel serendipitously happy.

When I got home, I decided to do some long-overdue grocery shopping, so, i got in my car and turned west - facing into the evening sun- and my windshield was quite dirty-since I only wash my car when I go on dates and that hasn't happened in the last few months- made it so that I couldn’t see because of all the glare on the dirty windshield - so instead of going west to my usual grocery store, Macey’s, I turned south at the first intersection and headed to Allen’s - the only grocery store that can be reached without going west. I pretty much never go there... but that sunset and my dirty windshield forced me out of my routine.

So, with my routine disrupted, I wended my way among the aisles of the unfamiliar grocery store, making impulse buys since I couldn’t always find my regular items - for instance, in my Macey’s routine, I always skip the aisle of chips and other junk food snacks because I don’t want to buy unhealthy things. but since I didn’t know where I was going, I found myself in the chip aisle and purchased a 99 cents bag of cheese puffs - because I saw the price tag and thought "what, nothing is 99 cents anymore. even though I never buy unhealthy snacks, its just 99 cents so what the hey."

As I got into one of the two checkout lines that were open (Allen’s is not a very busy store) I recognized the guy in front of me as an old friend who I hadn’t seen in some time. So, I talked to him, and I talked to the middle-aged cashier lady - for some reason. (You never get beyond tedious small-talk with cashiers at Macey’s, or Smith’s, or Wal-Mart – the kind where they ask you how you are doing today because it’s their job to pretend they care, and you say that you are doing “good” because it would be rude to say “just ring up my groceries please.” But being in Allen’s makes you feel like you are living forty years ago in a much smaller town, so it happens. Maybe it’s just because the checkout is so slow and there’s no one behind you.)

I got home, and opened up my bag of impulse cheese puffs. They were “Payaso” brand, which is Spanish for clown – one of those brands that you’ve never seen before. and they had a picture of a laughing clown on the front. I ignored it. And then a thought came to me – the thought lasted only a second, and it went like this “hmm”.
Now that, of course, means nothing to you, but my brain and I have been working together for twenty-five years so I understood it perfectly, and what it meant by “hmm” is something like this: why did this tiny, no-name brand bother to hire an artist to make a clown drawing, and then pay to have it printed on their bag when nobody’s even going to give it a second glance. Their customers don’t care about branding – they only buy the product because its 99 cents. Besides, nobody actually likes clowns and many people actively hate them with surprising vehemence.” It’s a good thing my brain doesn’t have to formulate sentences in English for me, because if it took as long to think it as it did for you to read that, I would have already gotten bored and lost the train of thought before it finished. But what I actually thought was “hmm” and I picked up the cheese puff bag and looked at the mascot clown again.

Looking closer at the clown, while it wasn’t a photo-realistic drawing, it was different from other clown mascots I’ve seen… I’m used to two types of portrayals of clowns… the one you find on things marketed to babies- cartoonishly drawn, round head, cutesy, - or the psycho knife-wielding horror-clown, if you know what I mean. This drawing looked like the face of an actual, middle aged man with vaguely Mediterranean features who had painted himself up as a clown, stuck a fake nose on, and was grinning. You could see his real eyebrows underneath the painted-on-giant clown eyebrows. The grin was too wide to be natural.

So, I thought another “hmm” and this one was something along the lines of “real people actually become clowns, why? Either they don’t have many other socio-economic options, or they really, really want to entertain other people, or both. And in either case, how do they feel knowing that some people actively hate them, and most other people find them slightly annoying, and/or ignore them?” and then I wondered if the huge artificial grin on the face of the clown was there because he was trying too hard to make other people like him, or if he was grinning on the outside to mask the fact that he was crying on the inside. Or maybe he was just putting everything he had into his performance, whether or not it would be appreciated by anyone else. No matter what the reason was, there was a definite pathos in it.

Then I thought about how when I am walking somewhere, if there is a street performer, be it a clown, or a mime, or even just someone playing an instrument: somebody trying really hard to get people’s attention, and it makes me feel awkward, and I avoid eye contact, cross to the other side of the sidewalk and hurry past, and so does everyone else, and yet, the person continues, as the crowds part around them, and I don’t understand why they keep trying but they do.

Then I thought about how there are people I encounter in my life, and a few examples came to mind, who are like those street performers. Some who have annoying personalities, some are very socially inept, some wear strange clothes or makeup, some always want to talk about their dramatic problems that they’ve created for themselves. What they all have in common is that they are obviously crying out for attention and yet either I ignore them or am annoyed by them. And I thought to myself that I should clap for the street performer and give him a dollar or two whether or not I actually enjoyed his performance, just because he’s trying so hard to reach me.

Guitar Hero?

Today in church, i thought to myself that "guitar hero" should be renamed "guitar poser".

and on the subject of guitar hero, here's a website of a guy to make fun of.

http://www.guitarherobrokemyknee.com/story.cfm

More musings.

I've noticed that discovery channel sure does run "deadliest catch", their documentary about crab-fishing boats in the Bering sea, an awful lot. They ran it all day memorial day. And so, there must be some people for whom watching guys dumping a big wire basket full of crabs into a tank never gets old. For me, it was old the second time. Nothing against the show, it was cool the first few times i saw it, but you only need to watch a couple episodes and you've seen what there is to see.


Thomas Freidman had a bold op-ed piece about energy policy in the new york times that i read yesterday. check it out while the link still works.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/opinion/28friedman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Today's musing

You know that song "beautiful day" by U2, and how the chord progression feels like it's always building up to something but it never quite gets there? I used to think that was annoying, and then i realized that the lyrics were all about always going somewhere and never getting there. It's still frustrating, but now I appreciate the irony.

Don't try this at home.

So I was in the lab, melting rock powders into glass. We use little metal crucibles to melt the powder and then pour it into molds, but often, a few drops of motlen material get stuck in the crucible and don'y make it into the mold. leaving glass beads inside the crucibles when they cool. O

obviously we don't want to leave them in there to contaminate the next sample, so there i was trying to get these little glass beads out of the crucible. now, I can't use a metal tool for thsi because the crucibles are very expensive and we don't want to scratch them, so i was trying to pot the glass off with my fingernail. I gat a couple of beads off but there was one in there that wouldn't come unstuck.

So i thought to myself "i bet if I push the loose piece of glass against the one that is stuck it will come off", so i stuck my finger in there and pushed on it, and the piece of glass instantly embedded itself in my fingertip.

Now, I needed a band aid but i didn't know where to find one so i made my own band-aid out of duct tape and a piece of a tissue. Pretty brilliant, eh? if only I could say the same thing for my original idea.

The Bettsblog is back!

Today's musing: At the one volleyball game I ever attended, every time the Cougars scored a point the announcer would say "another point cougar" and the crowd would yell back "point cougar!" which seemed a little odd to me. of course, when the visiting CSU Rams scored a point, (which was often) nobody yelled "Point Ram!" but if they had, it would have been really funny. I wonder if they do that at CSU home games.

What do I want for Christmas?

World Peace, of course. What kind of material thing do you want? :P

Thanksgiving and candy bars.

How was your Thanksgiving break?

Thanksgiving was alright. coming back to school was difficult for me emotionally.

What is your favorite candy bar?

I have to be in the modo for candy bars. Right now, when its cold and I am not hungry, just the thought of candy is completely unappealing. When I am in the mood for a candy bar, which one i want generally is determined by whimsy.

The Fake Snow Controversy

This was in response to a question about whether or not ski resorts should use machine-made snow to extend the ski season. There are economic pros and cons, but I'm not an economist.

The fake snow controversy really doesn't affect me much because I don't really ski or snowboard. Not that I have a no skiing policy or anything, It's just a lot of effort and requires quite a bit of time. You can't just go skiing for an hour or two when you have an hour or two because you have to drive up to the mountains and rent skis and buy lift tickets and put on those bulky boots and etc, so it pretty much has to be an all day thing. The last time I had an entire day to devote to any kind of entertainment was in 2002 and I was just out of high school.