I’ll Watch Avatar When They Read the Health Care Bill

I had to go to the doctor today. I hate that. I woke up at around 3 a.m. with an unpleasant sensation in my right eye, and I was afraid I had aluminum swarf in it. It got much better by the time I woke up, but if there is one rule I have learned in life, it’s “Don’t take a chance on going to the emergency room on a weekend.”

I found an ophthalmologist who was willing to see me in a hurry, and we had a pleasant visit. He said my vision was “fantastic,” which is strange, because it was so much better when I was young. Maybe he meant I have fantastic vision for a fossil. I can see the edible weeds and grubs better than the other stegosauruses.

He couldn’t find metal in my eye, but he said I had some kind of crud accumulating around the inside of my eyelids, so now I have to clean my eyes once a day. My bet is that he found bird dust from Marv and Maynard. African greys and cockatoos generate a fine powder from their feathers, and I wrestle with my birds all the time, so I’m sure my eyes are always full of that stuff. I tried to force myself to bathe them every day, but of course, I wussed out. Now I pay the price. I keep their cages nice and clean these days, so I don’t feel too bad about the progress I’ve made.

I think I need to get serious about eye protection. Yesterday I was wearing a face shield (I used the grinder) plus reading glasses, and I still got burned. Maybe I need to get goggles that close up better. It’s so easy to forget the safety lessons you’ve learned. Now that I think about it, I recall a piece of a wire brush coming around that face shield.

I may have put metal in my eye after taking the safety stuff off. It’s possible to have it on your hands if you miss it while washing.

You know how doctors are. This guy talked me into a full-blown middle-age eye checkup. I go in next month. I guess it’s a good thing, although I have no idea what he could have missed today. Vision test, glaucoma test, and microscopic exam.

I tried jowl bacon at breakfast today. I can’t say enough about fried pork for breakfast. It’s quick, it goes great with coffee, and it’s better for regularity than cereal.

The bacon tasted good, but it had a strip of tough material down one side. I gave up on that part. The birds are enjoying it. I don’t think I’d eat jowl bacon this way again, but I can see using it in other dishes. It has lots of fat compared to ordinary bacon, so it’s a little funny, eating it by itself.

I’ve decided to review Avatar without seeing it. Here goes. A young Marine with a disabled body and a gung-ho brain volunteers to have his mind hooked up to a giant blue alien so he can function on the alien’s planet and mingle with the species, which Dick Cheney’s great-grandchildren are trying to conquer so they can make them buy Halliburton stock. The Marine is supposed to be a mole, but–SURPRISE!–he realizes the rulers of the United States of America the earth are evil, and the blue aliens are wonderful, peaceful people who have fantastic sex! He falls in love with a sexy alien who trusts him completely, and he vows to ruin the plans of the Cheneyites and President George W. Bush VIII. He becomes a guerilla and sabotages the whole mess, and then there is a weird plot twist which I am too lazy to guess. Probably something where the blue girl thinks he’s the enemy and decides to kill him, but love conquers all, and she decides taking a chance and letting him live is better than dying alone with a cat. After this, earth loses, and Barack Obama’s body is exhumed and flown to the alien world to apologize. Then a descendant of Al Gore reads a poem so bad the blue people send him to a penal colony.

I may be totally wrong. Maybe Hollywood had an original idea for once, and this isn’t just Dances with the Surrogate Matrix Wolves. But it’s fun to try to guess. If it’s not an attack on the imaginary Military-Industrial Complex, it will be a shock worse than the end of The Crying Game.

Seriously, what point would there be in a movie where the Marine thinks everything is swell, slaughters as many aliens as possible, and then retires to a trailer park? Where is the plot in that? That wouldn’t be good fiction. That would be life.

Some day I want to see a movie about a liberal doofus who goes to work for ACORN because he’s totally brainwashed, recovers his sanity, and becomes a righteous plant for Front Page Magazine. Or a movie about a Marine who gets to know a bunch of blue aliens, decides they’re incredible jerks, and sleeps soundly in the knowledge that he is fighting a bunch of creeps.

I think that in a movie of the Avatar type, the people who look and act most like hippies are likely to be the heroes. Also, they look like cats. And you know how liberals love cats.

This is Almost Unnecessary

Why does life have to be so predictable?

From a review of Avatar:

There is no underlying novel or myth to generate his story. He certainly draws deeply on Westerns, going back to “The Vanishing American” and, in particular, “Dances With Wolves.” And the American tragedy in Vietnam informs much of his story. But then all great stories build on the past

Translation: “I am a hippie and I never get tired of stale hippie myths.”

The story takes place in 2154, three decades after a multinational corporation has established a mining colony on Pandora, a planet light years from Earth. A toxic environment and hostile natives — one corporate apparatchik calls the locals “blue monkeys” — forces the conglom to engage with Pandora by proxy.

Later, Al Franken moves to Pandora and gets himself elected Senator by means of a series of hallucinogen-assisted vote recounts.

How come entertainment-industry hacks are never called “apparatchiks”?

But as Jake . . .

Stop. “Jake”? This is one of the movie names I banned a few years ago, along with “Stryker” and “Devlin.” No Jakes. No exceptions. A court of inquiry must be held. The guilty will be punished with soap and Debbie Boone CDs.

But as Jake comes to see things through Neytiri’s eyes, he hopes to establish enough trust between the humans and the natives to negotiate a peace. But the corporation wants the land the Na’vi occupy for its valuable raw material so the Colonel sees no purpose in this.

“Neytiri”? That’s a name for girl who wears jewelry in her nose and writes “face painter” in the “occupation” box on her 1040. Neytiri is an annoying vegetarian. Bet on it.

The only question is: How will Cameron ever top this?

Maybe he can do something even more original, like a buddy movie. Or how about The Three Musketeers, featuring the Blue Man Crew?