what is this with alliteration?
"We're number one! All others are number two or lower!"
So has anybody noticed the Grand Cross bringing fame and fortune to their lives? Me neither.
Darin and I went to see Mystery Men tonight. It's the story of some pretty pathetic "superheroes" (Ben Stiller, William H. Macy, Hank Azaria) who are trying, real hard, to fight crime in Champion City, without much success. Without any success, actually. Crime is really fought by the over-advertised Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear), who's losing endorsements because there's no good crime to fight. So he dreams up a scheme to release supervillain Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) from jail so that he'll have an antagonist. Casanova quickly takes care of Captain Amazing, and the only ones left to fight the supervillain are none other than our hapless superheroes.
The movie is uneven: there are some very funny bits and some really draggy, uneven scenes. Janeane Garofalo (as "The Bowler," the only person who actually has a superpower: the skull of her father is in a magic bowling ball) is very funny. Jokes are repeated, which is dreadful, and some opportunities are missed. There are also plenty of good comic book hero jokes, and several very funny elements that might go right by if you don't pay attention.
Of course, this movie will probably be gone by this weekend, so if you're going to go, go.
Oh geez--some Learning Channel this is. They're doing an entire special on the Shroud of Turin. And guess what the upshot is? That it's real. (People, if it's real, Jesus had the freakiest body known to mankind, let alone the body of a Jew in Palestine 2000 years ago.)
Darin and I listened to a discussion on "Talk of the Nation" about the Kansas-evolution debacle (my word, not TOTN's), and I suddenly asked Darin (he being the resident Jew), "Are there Jewish Creationists?"
He thought about it and said it was unlikely. Then he said, "Well, there probably are, but they don't send their children to public schools." Of course, Jews prize education very highly, and they're not going to let little things like their private religious beliefs interfere with something like learning.
As Darin said, Christians own things in this country.
This whole Kansas thing is about Christianity, and how some people don't think their beliefs can hold up under scrutiny. They just won't admit it. They'd rather put their efforts into a stealth attack against the most major development in biological science ever, as though wishing will make anything so.
The answer to yesterday's question: Egyptian researchers discovered a treasure trove of mummies far from the Giza Plain, where most Ancient Egyptian artifacts have been found. These mummies haven't been touched and have whatever they were buried with still with them. I heard on the news there might be as many as 10,000 mummies, which I think every researcher gets a mummy to study and a mummy as a pet. Plus a mummy for the kids to play with.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com