The Unofficial Badmovies.org Random Thought Thread!

[LilCerberus]

I think, for me, hell would be an eternal trip to Home Depot.

All that cool stuff's too expensive for you too?
Know how ya feel...

[indianasmith]

NO, that is NOT what I meant.

I hate every inch of that orange-painted den of torment!!!!!!!!

[akiratubo]

The first time I heard "carcharodontosaurus", I envisioned something like a great white shark walking on t. rex legs, with little t. rex arms instead of dorsal fins.  Was disappointed when I saw what it actually was.

[ER]

I'm proud of my second cousin, who got an award at his school's end of the year honors presentation last night, for a story he wrote that's essentially a gay romance set during the Civil War. It's sort of like Brokeback Mountain, but written by a sixteen-year-old, so it's a lot better. It's a touching tale, really, although the cornfield scene did put me right off corn on the cob for a while. Anyhow, way to go, Tyler!

[LilCerberus]

RIP Muhammad Ali

[LilCerberus]

It only just now occurs to me that The Matrix takes place around the same time everyone was worked up about the Millennium Bug...

[ER]

Today I was at a park with my kids having a talk with this man whose son I almost married, seeing him and my godson before they took off for Puerto Rico for a bit, and out of the blue he asked me, "Did you know I was almost a doctor?"

I said, "No, I didn't know that? How close to being a doctor were you?"

He said, "I never went to medical school, but I was set up to be pre-med and head down that pathway because my grandparents always wanted one of their children to be a doctor, kind of a symbol to them that they'd come a long way from their own youths when Catholics were the underclass. But they only had girls and at that time they didn't think girls should go to medical school, so when I was the first boy born in over a generation, that's what they planned out for me. That's what I was told all my life I'd be, a doctor. Like I didn't even have a choice, it was assigned to me like destiny."

I asked him why he didn't become one, and he said, "I was never sure I wanted to be one, but I went along with it, and the summer before I was supposed to go start college on a pre-med track, this doctor friend of the family's invited me along on his house calls to get the feel for it. He asked how much I wanted to be a doctor, and I must've given him a luke warm response, because he kind of grunted and drove me to this house in a poor neighborhood and said an old 'negro gentleman' who was one of his best patients lived there."

(I was surprised "negro gentleman" was still used that late in things, we're only talking maybe 1970 or so, but anyway.)

So he said they went into this run-down house and the doctor told him, "Joe, I will never get paid a dime for doing this but unless you can take on these sorts of cases out of the goodness of your heart, don't ever be a doctor, because you'll never be a good one, you'll just be a stuffed shirt with a fancy title in front of your name."

What waited inside was this diabetic old man whose leg was so messed up with ulcerating skin Joe said he could smell it as soon as they walked in, and as if that was not bad enough, when the doctor pulled the bandage off all these tiny black bugs the size of ants came scurrying out of the bandages and the wound itself.

Joe said he was determined not to get sick or even flinch, but he was shocked, and the doctor proceeded to clean the old man's diabetic leg wound, re-bandage it, give him medication, and said he'd be back the next week, try to keep it elevated and clean until then. And he didn't charge the man anything.

So when they were back in the car the doctor told Joe he held up well in there and might have the makings of a doctor after all. Then (this was a while ago) gave him a cigarette and smoked one himself.

But Joe said the smell of rot and infection was in his nostrils and on his clothes, and he'd never felt so defiled, he wanted to take a shower and burn what he was wearing, and he decided at that second he would rather flip burgers til he was seventy than do work like that. So he went to college and wasn't pre-med, his grandparents all-but disowned him, and he went on to make a lot more money than he ever would have as a doctor doing sales for several Fortune 50 companies.

I thought that was his message, a joking parable about dodging a bullet or maybe how you shouldn't try to force children down pre-set paths, but then he almost sounded choked up when he said to me, "And there has not been one day in the last twenty years, since I turned my life around, I have not felt guilty about that choice, and I keep wondering about all the people I might've helped, like that good man did, if I hadn't been so squeamish."

There was real pain in him saying that and it reminded me of the old adage about how at the end of our lives we regret the things we didn't do more than the things we did.

[indianasmith]

That's a very powerful story.

[LilCerberus]

Every time I hear somebody say "Straight Outa Compton", it makes me think about that digital encyclopedia you used to get with Windows 3.1 computers....

[Flangepart]

That's a very powerful story.

Yeah...and yet I can understand his feelings. Sometimes, we find out a weakness we never expected.

[ER]

Hey, kids! Strangers have the best candy!!!

[Leah]

Hey, kids! Strangers have the best candy!!!

[ER]

On the kids 'n candy theme, my uber-Jewish friend told me this one:

Q: What does a Catholic child molester say?

A: "Will you be coming to Mass tonight, my son?"

I was like, "Aw, c'mon..."

So she said, "Nah, it's all good, we have our own version. And she goes: "What does a Jewish child molester say?"

I said, "OK, what does a Jewish child molester say?"

She goes, "Hey, little kid, wanna buy some candy?"

I couldn't help but laugh, but that was wrong on soooo many levels.

[ER]

Funny how near the horizons of a child's perspective on time can be.

I took my daughter to soccer day camp this morning and she was standing there with some other girls, all under ten, waiting for things to begin, and I said something like, "Okay, go be the next female David Beckham."

And one of the girls goes, "Him? He was ages ago."

Ages ago?

[Rev. Powell]

Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds are the new Bill Paxton and Bill Pullman.