Reply to Mary's Moment of the Day Re: Fire Safety

Mary's Moment of the Day:
Entry for October 16, 2006
In class the fire alarms started blaring. Apparently I was the only one concerned. As I slid my coat on I realized no one else was moving, the instructor informed us that it was probably a drill, but he didn't know. As he explained that we were on the third floor and the stairs were way away there was nothing we could do. "We could get out" I chimed in. Everyone sat calmly listening in class while the bright fire alarm light flashed like a strobe for the next 20 minutes. Finally I asked him to see what other class rooms were doing. Some had left and some had not. "What's wrong with these people?" I thought to myself as I pictured tonight's news featuring our burned up bodies and the reporter claiming we would have lived if we just would have left! Finally it stopped, I'm guessing the bulb burned out. If it's not obvious by now, we lived.

My Response:
So I'm sitting in Publications class listening to a guest speaker. The fire alarm starts going off, and we just sit there. Everyone looks at the flashing light and contemplates for a minute I guess. I'm sitting there assuming we'll get up and go outside, you know, like we learned to do in kindergarten. Nope. We just sit there and continue on with class. Finally someone gets up to see if anyone else is leaving. Once she comes back and says the best idea would be to go outside, THEN we all get up to go outside. (After gathering all of our stuff, of course.) Once we get outside, after our slow stroll through the hallways, we wade through all the smokers who are standing right next to the building, blocking the door. If they were testing us for fire safety we all failed miserably and would be dead if the building was in fact on fire. Did NO ONE else go to elementary school and have a fire drill every month or so? Geez. (We too lived through the ordeal Mary, but I feel that I lost a couple IQ points by witnessing the spectacle.)--Kath

Movie: Man of the Year

Starring: Robin Williams, Laura Linney, Christopher Walken, Lewis Black, and Jeff Goldblum.

I was so enthused with the beginning of this movie. It creates an illusion of how politics should be. It's so much fun. You're thinking--I want to go vote right now! Yes! John Stewart for President!....I mean.....Tom Dobbs. It's just a movie of course.

Sadly, like the 2000 elections, not everything turns out how it should. Laura Linney, as usual, plays an infuriating character with awkward lines that should have been but out right from the beginning. (I like her but her characters are always twitchy and crap.)

Robin Williams was funny. He really did take on his role I thought. However, the movie wasn't meant to be stand-up and Christopher Walken can only do so much. I think perhaps the writers should have decided what kind of movie they were going to make before they started filming and the editing crew could have hacked up about 20 minutes of boredom.

I'm not terribly angered that I paid to see it, but I was expecting much more than a few clever moments. If you have the opportunity, just watch the first 20 minutes or so. It'll make you long for the kind of politicians that we deserve to have.

The Departed

Starring: Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, and Alec Baldwin.
Ok, so the cast is good, but can you have too many stars in one film?
No. Or at least Scorsese is immune to over-celebritizing.

It's a relatively bloody, South Boston, Irish-American cop movie. Has a bit of a Boondock Saints flare to it with the whole Irish/Boston thing and there's not a clear line between good guy and bad guy. It's not as cool as Boondock Saints of course, but it serves you with several well-placed plot twists and very intriguing, ocassionally psychotic characters.

While we watched the credits some guy sitting behind us kept muttering something about Scorsese and Oscar (to himself). It was a good movie, maybe not THAT good, but apparently people are saying stuff about this Oscar guy. Just because a movie didn't suck doesn't mean it should win something. That's like putting a kid on the honor roll for getting a D+.

PS- No need to stay for the credits if you're wondering.
Oh! And the music was fantastic.

Let me know what you think:
Should I start writing my reviews on my blog, or should I leave them on my webpage?
If I blog them, then you can leave me comments. Or yell at me if you hated a movie I said was good.

What in Pagan hell makes you think I agree with you??

If one more person in one more lit. class says anything is a "christian allegory" I am going to personally create a voodoo doll of them.

If one more professor makes a comment indicating that everyone in his or her class in a Christian, I am going to throw a hissy fit.
I am not a Christian and not everyone in every class is a Christian--even here in the Catholic capitol of the universe.

Not every story is meant to be an allogory of some sort. Some fairy tales are just fairy tales; sometimes people manage to be creative on their own without using the Bible as a reference.
I have not read the Bible cover to cover, nor do I wish to. Do not assume that I know all the stories from the Bible and can recite them in class. When others are reciting, do not assume that I have any clue as to what they are talking about.

If you want to talk about fiction we can talk about Harry Potter. At least it's a bit more modern. I can come up with Harry Potter allegories if you MUST compare literature to something other than itself; even if that goes against everything I think it should be.
I've paid for these classes with the intention of learning something, and moreso just to graduate, but I didn't think it was going to be Sunday school for grown-ups.