lethesbootslist

 Yes, I went out and  made history, seeing Avatar on the day after Christmas.  I found it delightful all through -- I was never bored and often thrilled and elated.  That was by the astonishing and convincing 3D effects, the care and attention lavished on every detail of every moment -- the 300M that Cameron spent was all on show.  The scenes in the Floating Mountains (whose gravitational oddity was never explained; maybe something ot do with the huge planet around which the moon Pandora revolves? Nemmine:  Lots wasn't explained, and much was unexplainable).

As to the story -- it was astonishingly standard, every element, every twist, every emotion having been seen a thousand times before.  It was nearly identical to both Disney's and Terence Malick's Pocohantas, but more Disney -- the heroine even closely resembled Disney's.  But it also took from John Ford cavalry epics and a dozen other sources.  It also was a derivative of Ursula LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest, one of her lesser and more platitudinous all-life-is-sacred-and-women-know-it stories, up to and including interconnected wise trees and brutal uncaring corporate and military types.  Hilarious, actually, rather than lowering. Every thousand-to-one chance taken came out right, every just-crazy-enough-to-work hunch worked,  the main badguy met the main goodguy in hand to hand combat at the end.  I laughed a lot, sometimes all by myself.

It's striking that this movie, made by an army run by a macho general, was harder on the US military than any film I remember since Apocalypse Now.  I almost expected the flat-topped axe-faced commander (closely resembling Doc Savage on the old book jackets) to say "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" as his attack force bombs the innocent loving aborigines' tree home.  Technically the armed force was composed of contract mercenaries, Blackwater style; but the point was clear.  Well:  Maybe it will help these attitudes to become generalized.  Of the two simplifications offered, the life-is-sacred and leave the natives alone is the preferable.

My daughter said the story had been made intentionally simple and obvious so we didn't need to pay attention to it, and could admire the effects. 

Of course the picture of extraterrestrial life was absurdly earth-like:  the (single race of) beings, five fingered, teeth in their mouths, with language not much more different from modern white American humans than Plains Indians or aboriginal Australians, with a language you could almost translate yourself and a biology based on the standard symmetries.  But who'd make a movie starring really strange beings?  Not at these prices..  Their social relations (she the daughter of the cheif, betrothed to the top warrior, falls for the outsider, who is put through successive tests of strength and still never accepted as One of Them) comes from Fenimore Cooper or maybe earlier.  The animals -- ferocious six-legged mammals  and pterodactyl-winged flyers -- come from Barsoom by way of Frank Frazetta.

And when I tried to explain the basic premise to my duaghter, and why it was called Avatar, I realized that it made no sense at all.

But walking through those ferns! Looking deep deep down into those corridors!  It was way better than House of Wax, or even Fort Ti.

 No, just kidding.  But there is a small but annoying problem in Health Care I am trying to solve.  At least where I live, and I bet for almost everyone with health insurance, it's very difficult to avoid making several trips to the pharmacy to have various prescriptions filled.  If you take (say) four pills a day, and will forever (or until death parts you from them), and you have prescriptions for a month's worth of each, it would be very nice to be able to go to the drugstore and pick them all up each month at once.  However, if it so happens that one or another of these was first filled on a different day from the others, it can only be refilled on the thirtieth day after that.  The insurance company will not allow you to reset the refill day, because that would mean their paying for a month's worth of new pills when you still have old ones, and incurring a cost.  Tsk!  Your doctor can't rewrite the prescription for the same reason.  The only way you could do it would be to pay for the off-calendar prescription order yourself, and only if you demand to be allowed to.  This was explained to me by the pharmacist.  My only recourse, she said, was to manipulate the time I put in my refill order:  the insurance company will allow you to reorder as much as five days before the refill date.  If you calculate this all very cunningly -- maybe make a spreadsheet, or perform an algorithm -- you can slide certain refill dates successively backward till they meet the date of the laggard.  But not too far! then you're back where you started,  

Why is this not addressed in the bill?  (Maybe it is.)  Why did Harry Reid not rail against the injustice of making seniors take multiple trips to oppressive CVS's in faraway neighborhoods?  (Maybe he did.)  Why is there no CVS in my town? (Hope there never is.)  Injustice persists.

.... in this NY Times sentence (the actual sentence is longer but the rest is not relevant):

As a relatively new phenomenon in the crowded arena of journalists whose specialty it is to report the news of the catwalks, fashion bloggers have ascended from the nosebleed seats to the front row...

As I do every year (or at least intend to on Rexroth's birthday), I commend to your attention Kenneth Rexroth's poem for Brother Antoninus, "Advent" (with due recollection of the strange course of the life of the only Beat poet who was also, for many years, a Catholic monk):
( Advent )

I know you are growing weary of these, but I had another request today and it is easier to borrow Nisa Asokan's photograph while giving proper credit to the photographer than to link to the Flickr page. I am the myrrh-bearer wrapped in the starry robe (well, Chicago 2016-logo hoodie, anyway), leaning portentously on his authentically ancient Eastern staff:

( wise? )

  Comments are closed on Climate Change, a highly contentious issue which I actually never meant to raise. Grammar Whiz winners are anselmo_b  for one understanding ("hit" as a noun) -- his the funniest of several takes running this way.  ANd joculum and proximoception for the sense the article had ("hit" as a verb).  It sounds slightly better in the original:  

These resorts, which boasted top-flight entertainment — Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Don Rickles were among the comedians who sharpened their wit on area stages — attracted upper-middle-class Jewish New Yorkers, nearly a million of whom migrated north as soon as the humidity hit to mambo in the mountain air.

  These are usually guessed as as soon as I put them up, which makes me feel like a fool for having stumbled over them when my scanning eye lights on one in the paper (I mean the online ones, natch).  ANyway, make a grammatically correct and intelligible sentence out of this by adding words to either end or both ends. No c=altering the phrase itself (e.g. inserted punctuation. as the humidity hit to mambo

Readers of the NY Times excluded.  What might the following headline mean?

Dry Coffers Can Mean that Fires Burn Longer