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Posted on 12/01/2006 12:55:15 PM PST by ecurbh
Welcome to The Hobbit Hole!
Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
That washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is anoble thing!
O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain.
and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;
but better than rain or rippling streams
is Water Hot that smokes and steams.
O! Water cold we may pour at need
down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed;
but better is Beer, if drink we lack,
and Water Hot poured down the back.
O! Water is fair that leaps on high
in a fountain white beneath the sky;
but never did fountain sound so sweet
as splashing Hot Water with my feet!
Evenin' folkses... got to SF OK. Which is more than I can say for most people here. :-)
[sip]
Got the DVD for "The Guardian" finally. Missed it in the theaters.
I liked it. Aside from one small problem (Kevin Costner) it was pretty well done. Very authentic "feel" about it. Some of it was shot (the cliff and cave scenes) near Astoria where I was stationed, so that was cool. Costner looked like he wanted to call it "Dances with Waves".
Of course there's plenty of license taken with the story, and some of it is a little over the top. But on the whole, it sells the job of the Aviation Survivalman (rescue swimmer) pretty accurately. Those guys ARE nuts. They do a lot of things that a right-thinking person would just turn and say "no, sir" to.
So there's that. Beyond Costner, it didn't really have any "big" problems. Other than Ashton Cutcher. He was a small problem. But the movie survives his acting.
Tom Petty stole the show.
Heh... that's funny :~D We'll have to watch the DVD with ya next time we're in the neighborhood.
Yup
I'm having a very hard time not checking spoilers.
Ungh! More than an hour and a half to go!
 |
I am:Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs)A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s. |
Hmmmm.?!?
Tom Petty? Hmm... I'll pay better attention next time...
:-)
Interesting: I notice on the IMDB discussion there's some fairly hateful comments about The Guardian. Did you know that it's a shameful propaganda film intended just to make the military look good and convince the weak-minded to enlist? Or that it whitewashes the Katrina disaster in order to make the Coast Guard (Bush's Coast Guard, I guess) look good?
Wow..
I may check him out at the library.
He should have had a big grey mustache..
GMTA -
G'nite.
Now down to just 30 minutes to go... come on over when you are ready... :~)
The special features and "making of" stuff is really good. The Director was excellent, and did a good job with the movie. He's the same guy from "The Fugitive" movies. It has that sort of tone. Too bad he didn't get Tommy Lee Jones for the Costner role.
I was impressed that Ashton Kutcher spent eight (8) months training for the movie before any shooting started, much of it actually at the rescue swimmer "A" school. The extras, the other guys at the "A" school were apparently all members of the U.S. Olympic swim team.
I think they captured the school reasonably well. Of course, to make a movie they compressed the school a bit. It's by far the longest "A" school in the CG, at eighteen weeks. I'm pretty sure that some of its happens out in San Diego at BUDS school, with the prospective SEALS. But there was none of that. The essence of the school is very much like BUDS in lots of ways, though. They did capture the fact that washouts are very high.
It takes a highly motivated, extremely fit person to even be considered for ASM school, and at that only about half of them make it all the way.
I'll give 'em credit. ASM's are in a class alone. They're tough in a world where tough is below average. They do stuff that would put most people in a blind panic. And... they do it for almost no money. Like our guys in combat. Only these guys find ways in peacetime to risk their lives every day in new an creative ways without the bother of waiting for somebody to be shooting at them.
Though... It would be nice if someday somebody would tell a Coast Guard story without it always being about the dang rotorheads. :-)
That apple thread I pinged you to...classically highjacked!
24:
I'm a little bugged by the PC creep into the story lines.
By the liberal line, you'd think we were actually carting Arabs and Muslims off to work camps.
As if.
All the stuff they fear so greatly is so completely out of scope with reality... we can't even profile (with arguable reason to do so) when we really need to and perhaps should be.
Given the reality of the overwhelming PC-ness of the response to the threat of terrorism, this bidness of supposing that the U.S. is suddenly going to be forming concentration camps or instituting martial law or even the most modest invasions of privacy... none of it is even remotely believable. People that believe in this stuff also believe that the Pentagon wasn't really hit by an airplane and that the WTC was intentionally demolished.
Hell... if a nuclear device actually DID go off somewhere in the U.S. the first story on CNN would be about the "bigger threat" that Bush ~might~ implement martial law in that city and they'd pan immediately to the protest marches demanding fair and equal rights for the bombers.
It's a story line with a basic plausibility problem.
People whine and moan about giving up liberty for security... what? What compromises of liberty have even really happened? Taking off our shoes at the airport? lighters or hair gel? c'mon... ya gotta do better than that. Sure, maybe they're dumb rules and they're a hassle, but a major affront to liberty? Don't think so.
That somebody inside the White House is plotting all this stuff behind the President's back, and that it wouldn't automatically result in his expulsion and arrest... dang... I'm must having a hard time with that story.
Aside from that... Jack is still Jack. :-)
While I've previously thought it good to portray arguments that would normally happen in 'times like that', they seem a little too pat and I'm a little bored by them, I'm with you on that. This episode seemed like filler.
Yah, I don't suppose that ~every~ hour has to be of the same intensity. Sometimes you've got to fill in the backstory. I'm OK with that.
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