Today's Chuck Norris Fact:
An anagram for Walker Texas Ranger is KARATE WRANGLER SEX. I don't know what that is, but it sounds AWESOME.
I know the last two posts were kind of long, and didn't have the usual entry with the day's Chuck Norris fact. This post is meant to be a bit more lighthearted (though I haven't been feeling terribly lighthearted much lately), and back in my usual "musings" style. And the next one, which I'm still formulating in my mind, will probably be a hybrid piece that both touches on very serious subjects but also is more in the "musings" style you've all come to know in my posts. So sit back and enjoy.
Heidi is showing like crazy, to the point where we're starting to wonder if she might be further along. They say that a woman's second pregnancy is just like the first, only more so, and I think I have to agree with that. She's in wonderful spirits, though, and that's the key. We're both SO looking forward to this baby...I think we'd be just fine if it popped out healthy right now.
Have you been watching Heroes on NBC? It's on every Monday night at 9:00 Eastern/Pacific, 8:00 Central/Mountain. It's AWESOME! And I use that word in both its traditional sense of "creating great awe" as well as its modern sense of "being really, really cool". The show's tagline is "ordinary people discovering extraordinary abilities;" Heroes is the story of a handful of normal people who suddenly but slowly discover they have super powers. One is a New York politician who can fly. His brother is a ne'er-do-well dreamer who can take on the powers of others. There's Japanese office worker (in a twist of ironic humor, his name is "Hiro") who can manipulate space-time; he can jump backward and forward in time, make time stop completely and interact with the scene, and teleport himself at will. He alone of all of the Heroes seems to understand the gravity of his power and take it seriously, but only because he's so well-versed in comic book heroes and how they behave. There's a high school cheerleader from Odessa, Texas who is nearly indestructible; in one episode we see her try to kill herself several times, without success. There's a LA cop who can hear other's thoughts as whispers in his own head. There's an drug-addicted artist who can paint the future when he's high. The last is a Las Vegas stripper with a sinister, powerful alter ego who performs incredible and terribly acts but leaves her without any memory of it. There's also an Indian man named Mohinder Chandra; his father was a well-known geneticist who published a book on people with special abilities, but who was mysteriously killed for his knowledge. Mohinder at first sought to find out why and how his father was killed, but is now working to validate his father's work (and his own relationship with his father). Finally, there's a mysterious man named Siler, who kills people by freezing them and stealing their brains, and who (apparently) has multiple powers; we see the LA cop shoot him 6 times, only to see him get up and fly away. Even worse, Siler appears to be the foster-dad of the Texas cheerleader, though we're not certain of this yet.
The storyline is very well-done, but the actual writing...the situations the characters are placed in, the way their individual stories unfold, the way these people don't know each other directly but seem to keep bumping into each other, the interactions with friends and relatives who may or may not know about their special abilities, the temptations each faces to use and misuse their abilities. In my opinion, it's one of the best TV serials I've seen in a long time, and that includes shows like Battlestar Galactica, ER, and CSI (in it's many forms). There is a great deal of formula in those other shows; Heroes has no formula aside from the age-old myth of the superhero discovering his powers. Every part of the story has provided just the right amount of suspense without being heavy-handed with it, while maintaining the right amount of amazement and interest in each part of the storyline, and all the while bringing the disparate bits inexorably closer to their inevitable collision.
If you haven't seen it yet, just watch one episode. I guarantee you you'll be hooked.
Does any of you wonder why the coasts run an hour behind us here in the central US? I never understood why the East and West Coasts run prime-time from 8-11, while we run it from 7-10. Having never lived on either coast or experienced that lifestyle, I can't provide any basis for reasoning on this. Perhaps the coasters thought we backward farmer-type and cowboy-types would do better with things set an hour earlier, so we could get to bed earlier and make it up early enough to milk the cows and slop the hogs. Maybe there's some more logical reason, but I sure can't see why. Yet this artifact of earlier days of TV has maintained its position for as long as I can remember. I honestly can't recall a time when I didn't hear "Thursday at 8:00, 7:00 Central ." In fact, it's been around so long that it's understood; I remember hearing it this way when I was a kid: "Thursday at 8:00, 7:00 Central and Mountain". They don't even throw in the "and Mountain" any more. If any of you know the origin of this, would you let me know?
Well, we're into winter here now in Denver. It's snowing today.
...............sigh...............
I have to say that North Korea is going to have to tread very lightly. It will be interesting to see how the world reacts to the continued belligerence of Kim Jong-Il and his crackpot regime. I'll guarantee you that George W. Bush won't put up with it...
It's election season, and I was tired of campaign ads, and especially negative campaign ads, a month ago. It's a bad sign when the democratic process makes American sick to their stomachs. Think we'll ever take voting or politics seriously again?
Thanks for reading along.
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