When birds were dinosaurs

Very true. In another era, we might not have thought they were so sweet.......

(Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis)

The Last Gasps of the Dinosaurs

I was planning to write another post about Trump and his minions a couple of days ago, but in the meantime, Bannon turned around and APOLOGIZED for his inflammatory comments about Trump and his family. So now I’ve got to comment on this. I mean, who writes this stuff? It’s better over-the-top drama than most of what you’ll find in the theater these days, better than the worst soap opera out there. It’s bromance, folks—bromance between Trump and Bannon. They’ve had a tiff and they’ll be making up soon. Bannon has already held out the olive branch. Now Trump just needs to take it. Because you understand what happened here. Bannon, like a jilted lover, decided to take a little revenge on Trump, to make him pay for how he badly he treated him. We’re talking pride here—the old male dinosaur wounded pride. Remember the old expression ‘Hell has no fury like a woman scorned’? Methinks this expression can now be applied to men too; in fact, it always could be, because men can be amazingly vengeful when they want to be. Bannon’s fury has now abated. He got what he wanted—the attention he seeks, all eyes on him. His fifteen extra minutes of fame. And in addition, the entire country is about to make Michael Wolff a millionaire many times over. Maybe Wolff will cut him in on some of the profits. I’m guessing Trump and Bannon will kiss and make up, and then we’ll be subject to more of Trump’s tweets talking about what a great guy Bannon is. And that the media reports of his having said that Bannon had ‘lost his mind’ are more evidence of fake news. Wait and see.

It’s just that I, like so many other Americans, want to be spared this farcical circus. I literally cringe every time I see either one of them on TV. I cringe when I realize this is what we present to the world. The lack of intelligence, civility, logic, rationality, and strategic thinking is glaring. GLARING. As in, sun-blinding. You can’t find the shadows, can’t find cover, can’t find a safe place to protect yourself from it. You can’t escape them and the old dinosaur chaos they represent. Everywhere you turn, the old dinosaurs are there, lumbering and lurching forward, crushing everything in their path on their way to oblivion. Because that’s where they’re headed. I just wish they'd get there already. I’m hoping that #Metoo is the huge comet that takes out most of them. It’s already a societal force to be reckoned with, having destroyed a good number of the old dinosaurs’ careers. Will we miss them? The answer is a resounding NO.

The last gasps of the dinosaurs. I feel sorry for the real ones, but not for these old men. They’ve ruined lives, careers, dreams, ambitions. They ruin people. They use them up and spit them out. But they’re sinking into the mire that will trap them for posterity. I can hear them gasping for breath—the bloated, overfed, pompous, arrogant, infamous, small-brained creatures—and they deserve all of the vengeance that society will wreak upon them. I just hope that the non-dinosaurs will be spared. It would be terrible to have to share posterity with them mired in the same mud.

Riding with the raptors

There’s a lot to love about the new dinosaur film Jurassic World. Mostly, it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is—a fun and fast-paced action film about a dinosaur theme park that bites off more than it can chew when it creates a new and better dinosaur, Indominus rex, to attract larger audiences. The new dinosaur has four different kinds of DNA in its genome, all of which have produced a cunning killer that appears to be unstoppable. Part of the fun is finding out what kind of DNA the scientists have used to create this monster. And as always in these kinds of films, scientists come off as the bad guys who can be bought, either by the paranoid military or by greedy companies or both. When you go to see these kinds of films, you know that within about thirty minutes after the start, it’s all going to go to hell, the dinosaurs are going to start eating people, and panic will ensue. And it does. Jurassic World is a dinosaur disaster film with a hero who gets to do the coolest thing I’ve seen on film so far—ride his motorcycle in the midst of the velociraptors that he’s been trying to train (with very limited success since they are cunning killers themselves). Their help is enlisted when it becomes clear that the velociraptors are perhaps the only creatures that can bring down Indominus Rex. But there is a neat twist here once the raptors meet Indominus, and I won’t give it away. The film is worth seeing, the special effects are very good, the plot is fairly predictable, the acting a bit stiff, but overall it’s a fun 3D ride. We all know that what is said is not nearly as important as what is done in these kinds of films. Action is what counts; in that regard, Chris Pratt will be a good addition to the genre for the future films. When I saw the first Jurassic Park film, and Sam Neill and the children stood watching the dinosaurs from a distance, I remember commenting to my husband that it would be so cool if humans could actually travel in the midst of the different kinds of dinosaurs, at their level if you will. In Jurassic World, they can and they do, with the help of the Gyrosphere, a computer-controlled sphere-shaped ride that has room for two people to sit in it, and that moves along the ground so that the park visitors can get a real feel for the dinosaurs. I’m looking forward to the subsequent films, although I cannot for the life of me figure out what ground the filmmakers are going to cover next. But I’m sure it will be one heck of a ride.