Air Force One

The bummer is, I went back and checked the archive of my Web site that I kept on disk and discovered that the files from early December were corrupted there too. So there is no getting back the first two weeks of December. I will never know what it was I was doing.

Like I know what I'm doing now.

On one of the diary lists I belong to, there has emerged a flame war...oh, sorry, discussion of how stupid Americans are, how ignorant Americans are, how basically useless Americans are in any way, shape, or form. It's getting tiring; it's already forced one intelligent, thoughtful person (who happens to be American) off and may be forcing another who considers herself to be an intelligent, thoughtful person (me).

To put it another way, whenever you say all people x are y, you will be all wrong. Always. You can't say it about racial characteristics, whether physical or behavioral, you sure as hell can't say it about gender, you can't say it about any group larger than, say, yourself, and even then you'll probably be wrong.

Darin's current favorite example of this is trying to define species, which can be precise or accurate but not both. (Wrap your mind around that one.) If you say all Americans are ignoramuses who can't see beyond the end of their shotguns, you are wrong. And you will piss all of us off.

(Yes, that was a joke.)

That being said, we went to see Air Force One today.

I am really curious as to how superpatriotic movies like this one go over overseas. They cut these audiences up pretty well here -- no cynics were watching this movie. (Well, there were, but we kept quiet.) Serious quantities of American kick-buttism, the kind of in-your-face flag-waving that frankly makes me want to hide under a chair. (I couldn't stand this aspect of Independence Day.)

AFO is a fun movie, nonstop action of the sort where you understand what's going on and why people are doing what they're doing. Harrison Ford is great, although it requires serious brain lock to believe that a US President could do any of this. Gary Oldman plays the bad guy and is great, as always.

I'm not telling you about my Gary Oldman dream. Phhhbbbbbbttttt.

As we were walking out of the theater, I heard one excited viewer exclaim, "I'd like to see Trudeau do that!" I believe this was immediate Canada-bashing, which after the little contretemps on diary-l I have to say I don't mind, but I have to say two things:

• It's hard to imagine any world leader or in fact anyone doing the things Harrison Ford did in this movie. They're just not as good with the sucker punches as they used to be.
• It's Jean Chrétien now. They've had other losers like Brian Mulroney and a couple of other guys whose names just don't come to mind in office between Trudeau and Chrétien. Trudeau made the biggest impact on us down here.

I forgot. Americans are ignoramuses. Or is that ignorami? Anyhow.

As we came back home, Fernando pointed out that there wasn't enough male kissing (between the Russians) and Darin honed in on the completely unbelievable aspects, like the milquetoast VP (Glenn Close). We discussed it for a bit, then we stopped. So it was a couple-of-blocks movie.

The party last night at Darin's cousin's was great. Once again I have met yet more of Darin's relatives; they just keep on a'comin'. Nice people.

From Darin's cousin Claire I discovered a new place to go exercising: the Hollywood Reservoir, which is evidently quite nice and safe and lots of people go jogging, walking, etc., around there. It's 3.2 miles around, which is just perfect.

New spoilers:

• Everybody dies but his best friend.
• It's only a brain tumor.

Remember, there is a Complete Spoilers Game.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

No non-Paperwork pages so far today.

About 8 miles this week. I'm taking today off, going again tomorrow.