The World According to End-of-the-World Movies

Yesterday, I was exercising to a couple of SyFy Channel end-of-the-world movies. Both involved stuff raining down on Earth and destroying cities -- meteors in one case, technobabble electrical phenomena in the other. In both movies, the hits were random, sudden, numerous, and unpredictable. In both movies, the main characters escaped death by running madly while zigging and zagging. Occasionally, one would yell, "Look out!" and pull the others in a different direction. This tactic did not work for all of the extras running around in the background.

From one of the movies, I learned that, despite walking for days on end in a semi-post-apocalyptic landscape, the pretty female had some secret way to keep her hair clean and her makeup fresh, and the rugged male lead was able to stay clean shaven. (Maybe he was a eunuch! No. That would have been a very different movie.) On the bright side, he wasn't wearing stupid facial stubble. His hair stayed clean, too. So did the clothes on both.

In the same movie, the female lead was wearing high heels when rescued by the male lead. After walking for days and then finding themselves in semi-abandoned Los Angeles, they didn't take the time to get her a pair of sensible running shoes for the remaining days of walking.

The Abominable Mr. Selfridge

We watched the first episode of the new Masterpiece series "Mr. Selfridge" last night. I won't bother watching any of the rest of it. Mediocre writing, distasteful characters, inept acting, uninteresting story.

My advice to the Masterpiece people: Don't pander to American audiences by including American characters, and certainly don't focus on the American characters. You've done very well in the past with your period tales of upper-class English families in expensive clothes and surroundings. In any case, and above all, focus on the story and hire the best writers and actors, and please don't reuse the gang responsible for this failure.

Get the government out the marriage business?

So now the right wingers are adopting a seemingly libertarian stance on marriage and saying that the government should get out of the marriage-sanctioning biz entirely and leave that up to churches and synagogues (maybe some of them add mosques, but I'm skeptical).

Fine, if they also mean that all the laws granting married couples any kind of special status compared to single people will also be removed. I'm sure they don't mean that, at all. I'm sure they just want to sucker libertarians*, yet again, with the aim of making marriage even more restrictive than it is now.

 

* Is it in the DNA of libertarians that they're so often so easily suckered by the right wing?

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but plagiarism ain't

Someone sent me an e-mail alerting me to a blog post about vampires that lifted a lot of text from my essay about vampires.

A link to my essay would have been nice. A polite request to use some of the text, with attribution, would have been even nicer.

Unfortunately, I don't see any contact information on that blog or even a way to comment.

Hmph.

Rand Paul Planning to Run for President in 2016

It says here:

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2013/03/18/rand_paul_planning_2016_bid.html

So maybe my political prognostication wasn’t so far-fetched, after all.

Political Prognostications Are Worth the Electrons They’re Written with

But they’re so much fun.

Listening to a bit of the speeches and interviews at CPAC on NPR this morning, I'm suddenly reminded of the conservative movement in the early 1960s, during part of which time I shared a college dorm room with the president of the Indiana University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (who was a nice guy, when we weren't discussing politics).

My roommate and the other young conservatives — which seemed like a real oxymoron to people like me, back then — were rallying behind Goldwater, and they were utterly convinced that if only Barry could win the Republican nomination in 1964, the whole country would flock to his banner. Because, as they knew in their hearts, the American people are fundamentally right wingers. If they had been correct, then the slogan of the Goldwater campaign during the 1964 election, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” would have been a brilliant one.

They also assumed that the Johnson campaign would be incompetent and wouldn’t exploit all the weak spots in Goldwater’s positions. Obviously, they were wrong on both counts.

No, Goldwater didn’t lose in a landslide because of a supposedly unfair Johnson campaign commercial about a little girl picking flowers as the nuclear bombs start going off. That commercial struck a lot of us at the time as being right on the money, but that’s irrelevant. Goldwater would have lost in a landslide even if that commercial had never run.

Because Goldwater mellowed a bit in his old age and condemned the Republicans for their homophobia, people who don’t remember 1964 think that Goldwater wasn’t such a bad guy, after all. Wrong. He was correctly seen as a raving loon. At the very least, if he had won, his administration would have been filled with raving loons he would have been unable to control.

Now I’m beginning to think that maybe Rand Paul will be the GOP nominee in 2016, instead of any of the familiar names the pundits are backing, and that the result will be another Democratic landslide similar in magnitude to 1964.

The Surprising Benefits of The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed

Ten years ago, during a period of stressful, worry-filled, and embittering unemployment, I wrote an essay about the experience, titled The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed. It was an attempt to talk about unemployment in a tongue-in-cheek way, and it served as therapy for me.

I put the essay on my Web site, although I worried that other unemployed people would see it there and would find it upsetting. After all, there’s nothing humorous about losing your source of income and not knowing when or even if you’ll secure another. Reading an essay that seems to be making light of that situation could result in anger and could deepen the depression that inevitably accompanies being unemployed.

Fortunately, it had the opposite effect: It cheered people up. Over the years, I’ve received a steady stream of e-mails from unemployed people thanking me for writing the essay and saying that it helped them cope with being unemployed. Some of the e-mail correspondences went on for years.

For me, following the writing of the essay, there were more alternating periods of employment and unemployment. I had more thoughts on the subjects of unemployment and job hunting, and I expanded the essay into a short book with the same title. People buy copies of the book from time to time, although the number of hits on the essay is far greater than the sales numbers for the book. When you’re unemployed, free is obviously better.

Out of curiosity, I started tracking the number of hits on the essay and found that it was a fairly reliable leading indicator of the economy, so I created the tongue-in-cheek SBOBU Economic Index. I haven’t updated the data in a while, however.

Today, I got another e-mail thanking me for writing the essay. The writer said she had just accepted a job offer after being unemployed for seven months. I realized that I’ve been getting very few of those e-mails lately. This is evidence either that the economy has improved or that the essay’s supply of comforting humor has been used up. I hope it’s the former.