Good grooming

We fell in love, we got married, and lots of life has happened since then. When our little boy was on the way, she woke me up in the middle of the night and exclaimed that she was terrified that she’d never finish her book.

I responded, as only a Zen master (or sleep-deprived husband) could:

“Finish it, then.”

I committed any help I could provide to help her make sure it happened, and lo and behold, a few months later, she finished it.

Now the book is done (absent last minute editing and corrections), she has an agent, and her book is sold. We await its publication date this summer.

This past Christmas Eve, as we were packing up our station wagon to the hilt with presents, dog, luggage, and other accouterments, the UPS truck pulled up with an unexpected delivery… her galleys. This is the first time her book is in actual printed form; an actual, for real, book, before our eyes!

It’s really for real, and the cover looks beautiful – the publisher found a wonderful shot of a stilthouse to use.

Here is her website with more information about the book, and a mailing list where you can get signed up to hear more, when we know more.

- The labor is the easy part; after that it gets hard.

- For the first few weeks, your wife’s only job is to keep the kid alive. Your only job is to keep her alive.

Feed her, keep the mounds of shit from piling too high, and be the gatekeeper. Be ready to say no – don’t let visitors come if either of them are napping.

In the first few months, people will keep telling you time flies so fast. This is the last thing you’ll want to hear, because every hour seems like a day, every day seems like a week, and every month seems like a year. Time drags for the first three months.

After that, time does start to fly. The first three months seems like a year. The next year seems like three months.

True, there is no way we could give up so many points and expect to win.

However, the Packers game back from a huge deficit to get back in the game and tie it up. A little luck from a missed FG by the Cards and it was suddenly our game to lose.

But with a bunch of bad calls (or no calls) in a row, including this blatant face mask to Rodgers as he fumbled the ball (and lost the game), the zebras screwed us.

A terrible end to what became a great season.

During the day, he wears the cheapest disposables we could find (Target brand).

During the night, the extra cash towards sleep diapers are well worth the expense. Those things could hold a gallon of pee and still manage to keep the poop contained.

I’m not sure how much they are, but I’d wrap his butt in cash money if it meant a little extra sleep.

I really enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help watching with a critical eye. I think most people have just been so wowed by the spectacle and technology that they’re calling this a great movie when it definitely has some plot holes and/or character flaws.

The 3D was quite awesome. It’s by far the best movie I’ve ever seen done in 3D. The glasses were somewhat annoying but tolerable.

What makes this special is that absolutely everything was shot in 3D… live action, CGI, all in 3D. It’s not a gimmick (or *just* a gimmick).

That said, it’s still not going to be the Next Big Thing in movies (as 3D has been hyped to be – in the 50s, before in my life, and now again with this movie). It’s beautiful, interesting, but it’s not really helping the storytelling. Given the expense, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone is going to go through such an effort to do this again anytime soon… anyone that isn’t named Jim Cameron, at least.

I loved the Colonel. Great bad ass. Sigourney also fit her role well.

Spoilers Below

So my complaints with the plot:

- They never explain how the link is made between the human and the avatar. One presumes some sort of electromagnetism (since there’s no other option in our current universe). Yet when they went to the Magic Floating Mountains, the link still works? Of course this had to be done, else it would have been a trivial matter to find the humans after they went rogue; if the avatar and human can link, then that human is emitting something that would be easy for the other humans to find. The whole thing was a little bit of hand-waving that I’m prepared to accept, though.

- Michelle Rodriquez’s character is essentially a marine pilot. She trained with the people she flies with and fights with. She depends on her comrades with her life, and they depend on her. War historians have shown time and time again that the reason people give when they fight in horrible battlefield conditions is “for the man next to me”. Not for country, not for honor… but for the men they fight with. That man is your brother, and you are his. You will give you life to save his, and vice versa.

She may have thought what was going on was bullshit, and maybe she wouldn’t pull the trigger on innocent natives. Maybe even she’d bust out the Good Guys to go help the Space Elves. However, no way do I see her actually opening fire and killing her own people. It could happen, but Cameron didn’t give us a reason to believe it.

- How is it that in the first half of the movie, all the arrows bounced off the ships, but then started to penetrate in the final battle scene. Did they get armor piercing arrows?

- Why in the fuck would the armor battle suit (a la Aliens) have a huge armor battle suit knife in its holster? If a knife was ever actually necessary, the gun ALREADY HAD ONE.

- So the Space Elves have a ceremony where the spirit of a human can be transformed into the body of a human engineered half-breed creature by Gaia (or whatever the Pandora mother spirit was called)? This has come up before?

- Clearly the Space Elves were patterned off the modern myth of the Native American in harmony with mother nature. This is a myth, as it turns out that Native Americans were pretty brutal to the local ecology… they just moved on when an area was decimated, and they simply didn’t have the numbers to do any serious damage to such a vast area. I’m just sayin’.

- The Space Elves were pretty fucking stupid. Hey, huge war machines are rolling into your house. You’re going to wait until it’s ON FIRE and FALLING before you get the fuck out? Makes you wonder if Darwin’s rules don’t apply on Pandora.

Again, it was a fun movie, it was interesting. It was done extremely well. It was pretty. It’s just not a *good* movie; it’s not going to stand the test of time.