The Fun Never Ends

When I was in my 20s, weekends meant riding my motorcycle into the mountains, going to movies, exploring remote hiking trails, or maybe camping somewhere so deep in the woods that Bigfoot would be afraid to go there. But it's been so long since I've had any real freedom on weekends that I've forgotten all those things. Now I just do laundry, wash dishes, run the vacuum cleaner, and pay bills.

That ain't right.

Sometime soon, a real rain's gonna come and wash away...no, wait -- that's not what I meant to say. Sometime soon, I'm going to take a real weekend, and do something that isn't totally lame. At least once during this summer, I swear.

I did run Waterton canyon on Saturday morning, and was reasonably pleased with my performance. After that, Tanner and I went over to the pool to shoot some video footage for my planned "Simplified Flip Turn" lesson I want to post online. Unfortunately, most of the footage was not usable due to glare, so we'll have to re-do it, maybe next weekend. I ordered a polarizing filter from eBay and had a mini-seminar with the boy about cameraman responsibilities (ie, you have to look at the entire frame!), so the next session should be productive.

Unfortunately, that's about where my accomplishments for the weekend ended. MTV was having a Star Wars marathon, and I hadn't seen most of those movies in several years -- so I ended up becoming a complete Lucasfilm couch potato, and consumed far too many peanuts and sodas to finish the day with any remaining self-esteem. I felt like Jabba the Hutt, only without the charisma.

But sitting through all of the movies sequentially does raise some questions:

• How would the movie have been different if the voices of Darth Vader and C3PO were reversed?
• Wouldn't you love to see a protocol droid actually engage in some protocol? (Whatever that meant, a long time ago and far far away.)
• How come General Akbar and his creepy fish-man relatives don't need to be submerged in water? The look like they should have gills. And shouldn't they have to turn their heads to get those googly eyes to be able to see the viewscreens?
• How come people can understand Wookies, Hutts, and the 7-dwarfs mutated pilot hobbit, but never reply to them in their own languages? And since those critters obviously understand English, why don't they just speak it? And isn't one or the other of them being terribly rude for their language chauvinism?
• If the trash compactor regularly squishes everything in the room, why is the cyclops snake thingy even alive in there? And seriously, why wouldn't they just jettison the garbage into deep space (the way the Ruskies do), anyway?
• Maybe I slept through it, but wasn't Jar Jar's motion to turn the Republic over to the ruthless Sith overlord implemented without a vote?
• Note to Emperor: Having your voice go all gnarly and getting that Visine-eyed char-pei face from using the "dark side"...well, it just doesn't seem like a very good recruiting tool. I'm just sayin'...
  
• If such a huge proponent of studying and training Yoda is, why didn't he ever take a basic grammar class? Hmmm?
• Why did the Emperor's lightning fingers get stuck in the "on" position when Vader tossed him into the energy chute? And since we had seen numerous examples of how the Force seems to enable something very similar to flying...and Sidius is the most powerful and experienced user -- why didn't he just fly back up and use his lightning to short circuit Vader? (And I'm not even going to ask why Luke ended up in a Jeffries tube when he leapt into a similar chute and the Emperor didn't. But seriously, didn't that whole "tossing the Emperor" scene seem just a little bit forced?)

Anyway, as someone with career aspirations of transferring into the video department at work, I guess I can justify sitting through a movie marathon in the name of "research". Maybe next weekend they'll play the entire "Police Academy" series; that would have to be educational, right?

Guess I'd better go to the store and stock up on chocolate-covered raisins, Junior Mints, and twizzlers. May the Force be with you, and have a great day!