Football Blogging Be Back

In full affect, yo. At the old digs, but with a new cast of characters (if you know what I mean (I don't know what that means)).

Are You Fucking Kidding Me!

In case this has been taken down by the time you read this post, know that it

was a video of Usain Bolt running the 100 meter dash in an unbelivable

9.58 seconds.

Fantasy Football Time

It's fantasy football time again (which means its almost real football time again, hurray!). So far, I'm only in one league this year, and it only has eight teams. So, you know, keep that in mind when considering how stacked the team below is.

QB: Donovan McNabb

WR: Calvin Johnosn

WR: Reggie Wayne

WR: Santonio Holmes

RB: Adrian Peterson

RB: Kevin Smith

TE: Owen Daniels

K: Ryan Longwell

D/ST: Philidelphia

BN: Tony Romo

BN: Ryan Grant

BN: Eddie Royal

BN: Kellen Winslow

BN: New England

BN: Brandon Pettigrew

In Case You Were Wondering

This is why pro quarterbacks get paid lots and lots and lots of money:

Bitte Orca

Sweet zombie Jesus, this record has been blowing my mind.

And this song has been breaking my heart.

The Only Michael Jackson I Choose to Remember.

Holy Crap! A Real Blog Post!

So, I'm going to try and do better by this blog, starting now.  I've said this before, I think (without perusing the archives, I'm not one hundred percent sure on that), but this time I mean it.

My new job (I'm a temp, so I'll have one of these every couple of months until the state lifts it's hiring freeze and I can get on somewhere full time) consists of a lot of data entry and sorting other peoples filings.  In addition to being such a wonderful use of my not-actually-that-hard-earned English degree, this allows me a lot of time to sit and think about things.  Seeing as how this blog has been a big waste of every one's time for about, oh, it's entire existence, I figure I might as well try and write down the things I think about all day.

All of which is a long introduction to say I've been thinking about science fiction.  There are a few reasons for this.  The big one is that science fiction is awesome, and that I don't think about it very much.  The other reason is I recently saw the new Star Trek.  There are probably other reasons floating around up there, too, but let's not get tedious.

Probably my favorite bit of science fiction is the movie Blade Runner.  There are a lot of reasons to like this movie, not the least of which is William Sanderson in one of the more perfect bits of casting ever pulled off by Ridley Scott (a man who, if nothing else, is gangbusters at casting his movies).  But I think the thing that keeps me loving Blade Runner while hating, say, Minority Report, a movie that I think it's fair to say deals with some of the same things as BR, is that the former does not at any point undertake tedious arguments about the morality of future "technology" (in quotes because I'm using the term loosely as will become clear).  

Minority Report might not be the best example (as the "technology" in question, in perfect, hackish Steven Speilberg fashion, is actually "psychic powers" or something), but it was the movie that kept popping into my head when I was thinking about this.  Minority Report sets up it's moral dilemma in almost impressively straw man fashion; despite being set in the future, in which any number of perfectly scientific explanations as to how the cops are "seeing" people's actions before they happen are at the writer/director's fingertips, for some reason Speilberg decides that he needs some goddamn psychics.  What's more, every now and then one of them will disagree with the others.  This will be, I don't know, covered up or something. Or nobody will ask questions, maybe?  It's pretty unclear exactly how these minority reports are just systematically ignored by everyone until Tom Cruise has cause to get on his high horse.

Doesn't really matter either.  The point is, conveniently, the three psychics sometimes disagree (also conveniently for the movie's plot but not so much for it's premise holding together, the most powerful of the three is the one who disagrees).   Because of this...um, we'll call it a loophole?... Tom Cruise gets framed for murder, is forced to improbably fight off hordes of possibly mentally handicapped cops, and delves into the "depths" of the terrible conspiracy, exposing it and the system as corrupt.  It's all very dramatic, and there are some explosions and some gritty stares.  The point, you're led to understand by the end, is that you can't hold someone accountable for crimes they haven't committed yet.  So let that be a lesson to you should we ever live in a society where three creepy psychics suspended in some kind of special water are telling the cops who to arrest.  

Of course, since we don't live in that society this point is totally worthless and the movie, by extension, utter horseshit.  If you haven't seen it, thank me for spoiling the ending without warning you first, because now you won't want to see it and will be better for it.  But now I'm going to spoil (kind of) the ending of Blade Runner, which is totally badass and which you should see, so stop reading if you haven't seen it.

In Blade Runner, the cops are also trying to get some people before they commit a crime.  Kind of.  Actually the people have already committed a crime because their not allowed on earth, but the cops are really worried about what the bad guys, who are super humans called replicants, will do.  Specifically, a Blade Runner (the special cops assigned to stopping replicants) named Deckard, and played by Harrison Ford in the same way he plays every other character he's every played (not a criticism, because Harrison Ford is badass), is tasked with finding and eliminating a group of four Replicants before they kill people.  Replicants are genetically created human like things, built to be workers.  When early replicants rebelled, the company who makes them (and is housed in, like, this giant pyramid thing for some reason) built in a four year life span.  These four replicants, nearing the end of their four years, have decided they want to live and are trying to find a way to undo their, ahem, biological clocks.

Okay, that's the premise, but what makes this movie so badass is that at no point are the Replicants, or Deckard, or the company, painted as being the real bad guys.  The company has done a lot of good in the world, Deckard is just doing his job (and trying to mack on Sean Young, and who can blame him), and the replicants just don't want to die.  The situation escalates because, you know, that's how life goes some times.  Technology, like it does in our current time, plays a neutral role, while people, being imperfect and ultimately scared of dying, do what they have to to survive.  The movie doesn't use it's futuristic setting to set up a straw man argument about morality, but rather explores the very timeless issue of, you know, death and all that. 

Which is precisely what science fiction allows you to do: explore very universal issues without the baggage that comes with a historical setting.  The plight of Roy the Replicant is not less moving because he's an impossible creation of fiction.  Rather, the disassociation of Roy with any bigger storyline from our own history clarifies our own relationship to Roy (that being, of course, that we'll all be there in the end).  A million books and movies have dealt with this same thing, and in many cases very well (and in many, many, many more cases not well at all), but I think there's something about that final scene, cheesy as it is, when Rutger Hauer saves Deckard's life right before he does that you couldn't accomplish in, say, a World War II movie.  Because Roy is not the victim of a particular time but of the simple fact that, over time, cell deterioration fucks us all.

That got a little off track at the end.  To summarize: Minority Report sucks, Blade Runner rocks, and this blog is hopeful on the up and up.  Hopefully.

This post has been brought to you, upon rereading, by the word "Badass."