System 13

My son started Kindergarten last year, and in picking him up from school, I’ve overheard some peculiar conversations. One recurring conversation revolves around where the school buses park, and why my fellow parents are angry about this. I wish I were kidding.

You see, directly to the left of the building which my son comes out of is the bus pull-in area. It has large, rectangular blocks painted on it – all of which have the dimensions of a bus. Imagine that. I’m fairly sure that means that the buses are supposed to park there. Months of research, conducted when picking my son up, has shown me that I’m onto something here: the buses always pull in to this area to pick up the bus riders.

This is a problem, however, because parents who pick up their kids want to park there. Now, I know what you’re thinking: but the buses have to park there! If there are vehicles parked there, how are they supposed to do so? I’m in agreement with you here, but apparently, the bulk of my fellow parents are not. Every day, there are at least 5 or 6 cars parked on the bus lot, perpendicular to the painted rectangles. Almost every day, a teacher or school administrator comes out and tells the cluster of parents: “If you’re parked there, you’re going to have to move. The buses need in there.”

What follows is… I’m not really sure. A communal act of idiocy? Rather than seeing the logic behind what the person in charge is saying – hi, that area is for the buses only, as they are large and cannot park elsewhere, whereas you can park along the street right next to the school – they instead began ranting and raving. “Well, I can’t believe this.” “I have to move my car? But I’m here to pick my kid up!” “They can’t wait 10 minutes?” “Wow, I don’t know what her problem is.”

I just don’t understand the sense of entitlement on display here. I’m a parent. I have to pick my kid up. And you know what? I park along the street, as do the vast majority of the parents. Sure, I might have to walk a block or so, but I don’t exactly see that as unreasonable. There’s plenty of parking available, these people just don’t want to bother with walking a little bit.

It could be worse, I suppose; all of the people who park in the bus lot could just stop in the middle of the street. Last week some lady parked in the middle of the street for 10 minutes, waiting for her kid to come out, and then got angry when a bus pulled up behind her and the driver honked at her.

Ah, humanity. Sometimes you baffle me.

I recently renewed my Netflix account after having it on hold for a number of months, and have thus watched a fair number of movies in the past few weeks. A few thoughts on each:

Night of the Living Dead

The game Left 4 Dead was actually the reason I watched this movie; I bought the game a few months ago, and it sparked my interest in zombie-stuff. I figured watching one of the classic zombie films would be a Good Thing.

I was rather let down by it, really. There were a few scenes that were shockers (such as when the zombies are shown eating body parts), but overall, I was mostly bored by it. There just wasn’t much suspense. The zombies looked bored, not bloodthirsty, and their super-slow movements made it seem as if the heroes could easily take out all of them with baseball bats and crowbars.

It didn’t help that I was actually wanting half of the survivors to not make it. The blonde woman particularly got on my nerves; I realize they were trying to portray her fear and panic, but after a while, I felt like the other folks should have been throwing her out the door. The guy who was holed up in the basement and was trying to boss everyone around also deserved to be tossed to the horde.

Favorite line from the movie, coming from the sheriff on a news broadcast: “They’re dead, they’re all messed up.”

28 Weeks Later

Again, I watched this one mostly because I’ve been playing Left 4 Dead. I did however see the original movie, 28 Days Later, and liked it a lot.

While I enjoyed the sequel, I didn’t think it was as good as the first one. Perhaps I’ve simply forgotten, but I don’t remember the infected from 28 Days Later regularly throwing up blood in the faces of their victims. They did this constantly in this movie, and after once or twice, it basically came across for what it really is: hey, look, a way to get more blood and gore into the scene, wow!

It’s also not clear what function it has. I felt that it was implied that some of the infected were eating victims, but it’s also pretty clear that the infected don’t attack / eat one another (for whatever reason). To go out of one’s way to infect victims by spewing blood at them seems rather counterproductive.

Then again, it’s a zombie flick, and I’m overthinking things. For a zombie flick, it was decent.

The Hunt for Red October

Not a whole lot to say about this one. I quite enjoyed it, and smiled a lot at the fact that a Lithuanian, Russian-speaking skipper (Sean Connery) had a thick Scottish accent. I wonder, has any director ever asked him to lose the accent for a role?

Star Trek

I’ve never been much of a trekkie, but I figured I would give this a go. It was a fun two hours, but… wow, it had problems.

Black holes do not equal time travel. You don’t sky dive onto a planet from space. What is red matter, exactly, and why does it make black holes? If it just takes one drop, why do you need 50 gallons of the stuff? If a black hole has just formed in the middle of a ship, why in the world would you feel the need to zap it with photons? Wait, did Nimoy just say that a supernova threatened to destroy the galaxy? Also, did I mention that black holes do not equal time travel?

Okay, so perhaps I was bothered by a lot more in Star Trek than I initially thought. I can think of more things that irked me, but I’ll leave it at that. Hey, at least William Shatner wasn’t in it…

Yesterday I broke a major rule: I bought myself something right before Christmas. My friend Joshua told me that amazon.com had dropped the price for the complete Farscape series down to $58. This is a pretty awesome deal, as the individual seasons hover around $30 each (the first one is $45). At first I was going to hold off on it until post-holidays, but the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea; if I were to go to amazon.com in January and see the price raised back up to nearly $150, I’d kick myself.

I watched Farscape years ago when it was first aired, but I’m fairly positive I didn’t see all of the episodes. What I did see, I’ve completely forgotten, so I’m looking forward to watching it again. It should be interesting for another reason: I’m about halfway through season 8 of Stargate SG-1. Assuming I start Farscape shortly after I get it, I’ll soon be watching Ben Browder and Claudia Black switch back and forth between their Farscape and SG-1 roles. Whether mass confusion will ensue, we’ll see.