September 30. That’s the day for Serenity.
No, not for me. For the release of a movie by the guy who knows how to create seriously unique “shades of gray” characters armed with unexpectedly snappy one-liners and cleverly complex personalities.
Serenity‘s characters emerged in a Fox-nixed series, Firefly — an intelligently crafted mixed-genre saga that obviously rose too high for Fox viewers to understand and enjoy. Except for thousands (maybe millions) of the younger set (under 40) who got it, banded together, and fan-forced interest in getting the movie made.
Joss Whedon, that guy who also created one of my other favorites, the beleaguered Buffy, created a Firefly universe that is absurd in the way that the one in which we live is; a cast of characters as quirky and diverse our best misunderstood friends; and situations that reflect the deepest and most frustrated longings of the human soul.
What, you say? Such verbiage over a sci-fi movie based on a series that lasted one season? Just remember, it was on Fox. We all know how stupid Fox is when it comes to recognizing true talent. Or just truth, for that matter. If Fox says is bad, it must be good. And vice-versa.
From infocusmag.com
Universal’s decision to greenlight “Serenity,” the big-screen sequel to “Firefly,” was said to have been influenced by “Firefly’s” phenomenal post-cancellation DVD sales. An extraordinary 200,000 copies of the “Complete Series” were purchased in the first four months of its release. On July 6 of this year, more than 18 months after the DVD set’s release, it would rise (again) to the number-two spot on Amazon.com’s daily “top seller” list.
I was one of those who bought the DVD. I wish I could be one of those in line on September 30, and maybe I will — depending on how absurd my universe gets on that day.
One of the most intriguing characters on board Serenity (which is the name of the space-faring vessel of Firefly fame) is a girl with telepathic abilities who had undergone some kind of brain tampering before she and her brother make their appearance in the Firefly series. Over the past several weeks, quick video clips of undocumented origin have found their way onto the internet that give eerie glimpses into River Tan’s ordeal before she boards Serenity.
I’m told that the place to go to check these out is http://www.session416.com/mirrors where you can watch a few stark River moments.
If this post leads you that far, you should watch the clips in the following order:
Session 416, Second Excerpt
Session 1
Session 22
Session 165
Session 416, First Excerpt
I have no idea what the plot of the movie is because I haven’t been able to get to any of the pre-screenings. But if it’s anything like the Firefly series, the plots (clever as they often are) are really vehicles for the characters to unfold more of themselves and face dilemmas that really have no black and white solutions. Only shades of gray.
Serenity. Not just for the kids. Go see it. And don’t forget to get your senior citizen discount. And then let me know what you think.

Blogger “Ernie the Attorney” tried to get out of New Orleans
but after 4 hours of driving I had only made it 15 miles. I was alone and tired so I decided the safe play was to return. It’s kind of sad when the ‘safe play’ is to go back and wait to be pounded by the gnashing fury of a Category 5 hurricane.
He’s intent on chronicling his experience on his blog, including photos from his camera phone as long as his connections hold out.
His current post says:
I almost certainly won’t have power soon (if the cellphone towers get hammered, which is pretty much a given). I probably won’t be able to post much to the web, but I have my paper journal. It never needs rebooting. So I’ve got that going for me.
He’s the blogger to keep track of for a terribly personal view of what seems to be building into a massive disaster.
As non-blogger myrln observed:
The potential worst-case scenario with the hurricane is too horrible to believe:
Given that New Orleans is a bowl below sea level, and given the plethora of petrochemical industry in and around the city, and given the likely storm surge of 20 feet, a state health official says they’re looking at the possibility of a “witches brew” of poisonous chemicals, petroleum, sewerage engulfing the city and a poisonous air flow above it. Imagine, he said, houses below the surface of that for some time to come. Asked for a guesstimate of the likelihood that tomorrow evening we might be looking at a New Orleans and saying, “We have lost a city,” he responded, “I’d say it’s 50/50.”
Of course, the moneyed class is already saying, “Yup, this’ll drive gas prices up even more.”
Fill your tanks tomorrow.

Potassium bitartrate is “a white crystalline powder,” of which my mother has six containers. I discovered the overabundance of the stuff, commonly called Cream of Tartar, when I was looking through her spice cabinet.
why do you have six cream of tartar, you ask her, to which she replies that she doesn’t know. you remember over the past five years her asking you to get her yet another cream of tartar at the supermarket. and so you would do that. you never asked her why she needed so much of the stuff, and now you’ll never know because she doesn’t remember.
Actually, cream of tartar has lots of uses, mostly culinary. And you can also make a paste of it with white vinegar to clean black marks off stainless steel pots an stove burner inserts. I think that’s what she used to use it for. But now we’ll never know.
And so now there’s two lifetimes’ supply of cream of tartar — most of it unopened — sitting in her cupboard.
I absolutely believe that, when it comes to one’s brain, you either use it or lose it. I’m discovering that there were parts I hadn’t used much before, and so I always assumed that I wasn’t good at certain things — like spatial relations and putting puzzle-type pieces together.
But, here I am, putting together my fourth piece of “assembly required” units, and I get better each time. I even went out and bought myself a mini power screw driver. At this very moment, I am sitting at an “assembly required” computer desk with a pull-out keyboard shelf and a drawer that I bought at Rite Aide for twenty bucks. Some of the directions were wrong, and I was missing two screws, but I figured it out. All by myself.
They say “too soon old; too late smart.” I’m on a campaign to prove whoever “they” are, are wrong.
If someone finds six containers of cream of tartar in my cupboard when I’m 89, I’m sure as hell going to know what I use them for.

Munching on my bagel this morning, I watched the tiny wren trying to dig out some food from the bottom of the bird feeder, which was hanging on empty. He sat on that perch for almost a half-hour, futilely pecking and looking around and watching for someone to come out and fill the feeder. He had faith that someone would. And so we did.
Last night, I watched a totally unknown movie, The Edges of the Lord — a film that never made it into the theaters. I didn’t know what it was about, but I picked it up to watch with my mother, since it’s set in Poland, 1942 and has kids in it. She likes movies with kids.
It’s an amazing movie about faith — or rather how it does not sustain us, not really, in times of terror. And it’s a lot more than that — it’s about all the shades of gray in which faith gets waylaid. Except for the two known actors (Haley Joel Osment and Willem DaFoe), all the others performers are unknowns with definitely accurate accents and appropriate last names.
The priest (DaFoe) at one point says something like “some are blessed, but the edges aren’t blessed,” explaining to Osment the process of cutting out and preparing holy communion wafers. And Osment says something like “how do we know if we’re blessed or we’re the edges.”
The DVD box calls it a “coming of age” movie. What an understatement!!
Go rent it!

My second continuously most popular post (at least this summer) is the one about the Killer Tomato Worms. Lots of tomato gardeners seem to be having trouble with them this summer. As usual, I was ahead of my time; I fought those damn things last summer, and I lost the fight. (I don’t have a garden this summer.)
I’ve been getting several posts a week from people trying to find out how to get rid of them. I was never able to because I just wasn’t going to sit there, examine each tomato leaf, and literally pick off the little green-blooded buggers.
Interestingly enough, none of the commentors (there are 37 as of tonight) mentioned the bizarreness of the picture I put up of the worm. I guess no one noticed that horn and the big lips are superimposed on a picture of the hornworm. Their heads don’t really look like that.
On the Net, you can’t always believe what you see.
But you can share what you know about any effective way (besides squishing them) that you can get rid of those nasty tomato hornworms. Apparently, they’re on the verge of taking over the world. Or at least the world’s tomato plants.

There are just too many good lines in Jim Culleny’s No Utopia post on Just Jesus.
Go there and read the whole thing. It says it all.
And then go and read a great essay by a minister about “George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism.” that I discovered more than a couple of years and posted about. It deserves to be rediscovered.

bumper to bumper cars inch along this one main road through town. it’s a town for the young, skin tight, bellies out, low slung skirts rustling up gutter dust a half-mile from open sunflower fields and piles of old corn that’s still sweet. i can’t wait to be settled in, spices in racks, pc table glued together, toes curling into soft rug in blues and greens, the cat napping in a spot of sun.
this place was not ready for us and we were not ready for this place.
what’s your hurry says Momma Mountain. patience first. passion later. you know how slowly mountains move.
bumper to bumper cars crawl along the main street. the young bellies move lazily along the sidewalks, lean on stoop rails, laugh slow secrets. no hurry. everything can wait.
except time.

It’s bizarre living back in a “family” type situation, with a male, a female, and someone who is drifting toward a second childhood. I’m glad that I learned over the years how to stand up to males who are used to controlling everything around them. I no longer have the total power over my life that I used to have, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up any of what I have left without a fight.
We had a literal power failure for a few hours this evening, just as it was getting dark. That seems to happen frequently in this part of the mountains. We three sat outside in lawn chairs until it got dark, eating ice cream and hoping the bear didn’t decide to stop by.
When the power came back on, my mom and I watched a movie: The Upside of Anger, which ended with one of the young characters thinking: “the upside of anger is the person we become.”
At various times in my life, my anger propelled me out of where I was stuck and gave me the energy to reinvent myself. Anger is a powerful motivator.
The upside of anger is the person we become.
Yes, indeed.

Not as bad as lions and tigers, but we do have a bear that tore down our bird feeder and mangled our large garbage bin last night.
Such is one of the many differences between living on the third floor of a steel and cement building two blocks off the busiest street in a small city and digging in in the middle of the woods.
We wage a constant war against the insect kingdoms. The bear we leave alone and hope he/she finds better pickings somewhere else. Apparently DEC sees no reason to hunt him/her down; he/she hasn’t hurt anyone, yet.
And so we coexist.

Who’s your Daddy?

I’ve always held to the belief that we human beings create our gods in our own images. (Talk about narcissism!! But that’s another post.) Sometimes we tinker a little with images from other cultures — change their color, name, toga, etc — so that we can claim them as our own.
And then, of course, each #1 god or goddess is matched to a story of how he/she designed and created the universe. Comparing creation myths is a fascinating excercise — one on which I embarked with the eighth grade English class I taught back in the seventies as part of our study of Greek mythology. The exercise upset my students greatly as it began to dawn on them that an old man with a white beard creating the universe in seven days is no more or less logical than Sky Woman landing on the back of a giant turtle etc. But, of course, Joseph Campbell already covered all of that, and right on public television, too.
But Lord Volderbush (sorry, I’m reading Harry Potter)has gathered his monied minions in the guise of The Discovery Institute and they are on the march to redesign the universe to fit their particular mythology.
Jodi Wilgoren’s piece in today’s Times has this to say about the Institute’s role in promoting “intelligent design”:
Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win the White House, the organization’s intellectual core is a scattered group of scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of life’s origins known as intelligent design.
Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin’s defenders firmly on the defensive.
Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a carefully crafted, poll-tested message, lively Web logs – and millions of dollars from foundations run by prominent conservatives like Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Philip F. Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife. The institute opened an office in Washington last fall and in January hired the same Beltway public relations firm that promoted the Contract With America in 1994.
“We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution,” said the center’s director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of science recruited by Discovery after he protested a professor’s being punished for criticizing Darwin in class. “We want to have an effect on the dominant view of our culture.”
For the institute’s president, Bruce K. Chapman, a Rockefeller Republican turned Reagan conservative, intelligent design appealed to his contrarian, futuristic sensibilities – and attracted wealthy, religious philanthropists like the Ahmansons at a time when his organization was surviving on a shoestring. More student of politics than science geek, Mr. Chapman embraced the evolution controversy as the institute’s signature issue precisely because of its unpopularity in the establishment.
[snip]
As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design challenges Darwin’s theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility of supernatural influences. While mutual acceptance of evolution and the existence of God appeals instinctively to a faithful public, intelligent design is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities and science societies as untestable in laboratories.
Chapman says he wants “intelligent design” and evolution to be debated and compared in the classroom. Actually, what would be more accurate and academically sound is if the various creation myths were examined and compared first — including the Judeo-Christian version. And also the tendencies of each culture to create their gods in their own image. And also the human psychological need to feel there is some sense, some purpose to life — a need so strong that we create stories that explain it all in comforting terms. And also the fact that we humans are not so far evolved yet that we can live without rules. Religious-based myths offer models of behavior and try to instill fear of eternal punishment as a way of keeping wayward humans in line.
So, if students can first examine all of those psychological factors that make many of us need to believe in “intelligent design” and then examine why and how scientists have come to assert our “evolutionary” history, then the debate might have some value.
The bottom line is that pitting faith against fact is a great way to keep a country in turmoil. Faith requires a leap away from fact. For most of everyday life, it’s possible to keep a foot on each landing. But when it comes to a stand on how we got here and why we are here, you either believe the myths (as either actual or metaphorical) or accept the facts as they have been evidenced..
Lord Volderbush and his power-broking cronies are leading us into a time and place that will be even darker than our scariest fantasies if they are allowed to proceed.
Harry Potter! Where are you when we need you!