Into the Void

Snakes On A Plane!

What else do you need to know? How the snakes get on the plane, what the snakes do once they’re on the plane, who puts the snakes on the plane, who is trying to get the snakes off the plane…This is not for you to ponder. There are snakes on the plane. End of fucking story.

I’ve got to see this movie. Samuel L. Jackson kicks snake butt. Hey, do snakes even have butts? I don’t know.
Picture it… you’re flying in coach wedged between a guy who’s coughing like a tuberculosis patient and an over-dressed woman who wants to engage you for the next three hours with her desperately boring life story. There’s a kid kicking your seat back and a baby howling in the row in front of you. The flight attendants are surly and slow. The in-flight meal was a bag of peanuts and some warm, flat soda, which are synergistically chewing a hole in your stomach. And the plane is in a patch of turbulence. You want to use the rest room, if only the aforementioned over-dressed woman will decide what she’s drinking and let the flight attendants move the damn cart out of the way.
Suddenly, Samuel L. Jackson, followed by a seething mass of venomous vipers, stumbles in from first class, waving his arms wildly and shrieking
Snakes On a Plane!
Where do you go? What do you do? FOR GOD’S SAKE, CAN’T SOMEBODY CATCH THEM AND RETURN THEM TO THEIR NATIVE HABITAT?
Yesssssssss, I definitely will see this movie. In the theater, too, I’m not waiting for the DVD.
And I want to add the title to my lexicon. I’m going to drop the f-word, forget “dang”, and throw away a half-dozen other inane, ineffectual expletives.
Snakes On A Plane!

I finally got around to seeing Heart of the Beholder.
The movie was very engaging. It follows Mike and Diane Howard from before the birth of their first child. Their hopes for a better life are realized when Mike’s gamble of opening a video store blossoms into a popular video store chain.
That’s where the problems begin. A local religious splinter group targets the Howard’s video store chain for offering blasphemous videos such as Tom Hanks’ “Splash“.
When Mike refuses to cave to their demands, their leader blackmails the DA into inventing charges against them. There are death threats against Mike’s little girl, and things get just plain ugly.
Eventually justice prevails, but it’s too late. The weight of the legal expenses crushes the Howard’s dreams.
I don’t want to spoil it for you, but how the Howards get revenge is hilarious.
The movie won the Bluegrass International Film Festival “Director’s Choice Award” for Best Feature Film. Congratulations!
See previous entry.

The Hidden Messages in Water by Dr. Masaru Emoto, scientific researcher, healer, and popular lecturer.
Masaru Emoto: Miraculous Messages from Water contains some beautiful photos of these snowflakes.
For the engineers in the audience, perhaps you remember the discovery in the 1980’s of the Josephson Junction. The Josephson Junction is a silicon device that is so sensitive to electromagnetic waves that it can detect the small EM waves emanating from a person’s brain. In fact, it has been tested in mice as a brain-machine interface.
I submit that water crystals may be a natural manifestation of the Josephson Effect.

Just found the web page for a new movie, Heart of the Beholder. It’s about a family-owned video store chain that is targeted by a religious cult for offering - supposedly - obscene videos. The story is true.
The main video they objected to was Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ“, a movie that was attacked by religious fanatics from the first day of filming. As I recall, the author of the original book was excommunicated for writing it.
But the cult also objected to some movies that I thought were pretty innocuous. Was there really beastiality in Tom Hanks’ “Splash“? I must have accidentally rented the PG version.
I don’t need anyone to tell me what movies I can and can’t see, much less someone from a completely different culture.

It’s rare that the powerless can beat the odds, but this film is Rocky versus the Religious Right, and the fight isn’t over till it’s over.

Sounds like a must-see.
Update: The movie played in St. Louis last month. Attendees included old Video Library employees and some of the folks involved in the original boycott. It seems that some of them have seen the error in their hurtful actions against the Tiptons.