Another taped treasure from my basement

You are never lost in Iceland

Miss Congeniality

After swatting flies all day (see previous blog), last night I relaxed with this pleasant, undemanding little movie.  After watching the Seahawks get creamed in Green Bay for a while this afternoon, I decided it would be more fun to write a blog.  So here it is.

Do you know that Sandra Bullock is 52?  I haven’t seen her for a few years, but she always strikes me as being about 30, beautiful and brainy.  Other important cast members include Michael Caine (of whom one can safely say that no movie with him in it is ever truly bad), Candice Bergen (who had a brief heyday about then, now thankfully terminated), someone named Benjamin Bratt  (whom I liked but know nothing about ) and – sadly – Captain Kirk.  Where were you Scotty?  You might have beamed him out of there.  I hate to see a man who can stand down the Klingons make a fool of himself.

Okay, the movie is only 16 years old and was fairly popular (the critics didn’t like it, but who listens to them?).  That means you’ve probably already seen it.  So see it again; it is good for psychic tension.  The plot is not particularly deep or taxing to follow: sad-sack imperfectly civilized female FBI agent is transformed into a beauty queen to stop a threat to the Miss Something beauty pageant.  Plenty of chuckles, lots of pretty girls – what’s not to like?

BUT be sure to avoid Miss Congeniality II, which (I saw the first 30 minutes) was terrible.  Even Michael Caine couldn’t have saved it.

MY ROOM MATES

You probably know the old gospel song that goes something like this: “Go down Moses, Go down Moses, Go on down to Egypt land.  Tell old Pharaoh; tell old Pharaoh, LET MY PEOPLE GO!”   In the event, old Pharaoh capitulated, after Moses unleashed ten plagues of increasing severity, and the Children of Israel began their long journey through the Wilderness.

Well, would someone please inform God that I am not any kind of Pharaoh, that I have no people to release – and that I sure would appreciate it if He withdrew the Plague of Flies He has visited upon me, for whatever sins I cannot guess.  He doesn’t seem to be paying attention to me. 

It goes like this.  It has been cold but sunny for several days (now, however, it is cold and snowy).  Three days ago I came into the kitchen to find a window nearly obscured by at least 100 smallish house flies.  They were lethargic, barely crawling around – so I swatted the lot and vacuumed up the corpses.  Later that same day I returned to that window, and found it again thick with flies.  Again I swatted & disposed of the bodies.  Within a few hours the window was again rife with moscas.  And so it has gone, for three days.  I am making progress, however – this morning there were only a dozen to kill.  But twelve is about fourteen too many.

So, would somebody tell me what is going on?  There are no dead animals lying about, nor conspicuous piles of rotting food.  I take out the garbage fairly regularly.  My cat is clean.  It is almost winter, surely not prime housefly breeding season.  Yet still they come; dozens and dozens of diminutive crawly things, easy to kill but seemingly impossible to eradicate.  Not fun,  at all. 

To make matters worse, some of the little bastards apparently escape the fly swatter and grow into full-fledged annoying houseflies, of the hard-to-kill variety.  For instance, two of them took a fancy to my TV screen last night.  You have no idea how hard it is to absorb what Katty Kay (BBC World News America) is trying to tell you about Aleppo when a fly is attempting to crawl up her nose!  Nor how hard it is to write a blog with a buzzing nuisance apparently fixated on your right ear!!

Help!

AN ADMONITION

Sheik Abu Bakr ibn Beck al Beaumonti

Urges verbal restraint

On the effective use of the F bomb:

The word “fuck” can be used as a verb, a noun, and a simple expletive.  As “fucking” it is an adjective, and as “fucked” it can be used as an adverb.  It is a most versatile word, and one that once had a most important use – it allowed a person to convey that he or she was very unusually disturbed about something.  Now, alas, it has become mere throw-away verbiage.  As a daughter wrote recently, we need a stronger word, now that you-know-who is in charge.

I have seen several recent Facebook postings that exemplify the over use and cheapening of the F word.  One utilized the phrase “fucking shit-ass” four or five times in a half-dozen lines.  Another described conditions as being “fucked” at least five or six times, in a short posting.  I seldom resort to “social media” that I do not encounter our F…ing friend.  That’s sad.

Why is it sad?  Well, for one thing, it allows the user to avoid valuable mental exercise.  Instead of inveighing against "fucking shit-ass" weather, why not simply describe it as "atrocious"?  Rather than declaring that with Donald Trump as president, we are fucked, try “we are in serious difficulty.”  This sort of thing would allow humanity to save the F-bomb for truly unusual circumstances.  Then it would be a real bomb, and not a pathetic fizzling fire-cracker.  I like the F word, and I want it to mean something once again.

Yeah, I know: you are thinking that I am an old man, with speech patterns stuck in the 1950s.  That is true.  But it also is true that later on I was known as nearly the most profane man in geology, second only to Bob Butler.  Butler later became my field partner.  We resorted to lots of colorful phraseology – and saved the F word for when the tent leaked.