The other day I noted that I again had reason to be ashamed of my state. Now, it's my county. Even Eschaton took notice.

I had a long conversation last night with the Beallsvonian's New Hampshire correspondent. (I'm going to run with this gimmick for a while--humor me.) In the course of the conversation, he said that he had finally found a movie worth fitting into the third slot of the ultimate "Movies that Suck So Hard that They're Really Fun to Watch" tripleheader. The two movies we already had in place for this were Tammy and the T-Rex and Garbarge Pail Kids: The Movie. Here's the remarkably succinct and dead-on plot summary of Tammy and the T-Rex from the IMDb:

An evil scientist implants the brain of Michael, a murdered high school student, in an animatronic Tyrannosaurus. He escapes, wreaks vengeance on his high school tormentors and is reunited with his sweetheart Tammy. Together, the couple try to elude the mad scientist and the police and find a more appropriate vessel for Michael's brain.

What this leaves out is that this movie stars a before-she-was-famous Denise Richards. There's comedy, there's high comedy, and then there's Denise Richards being out-acted by her talking animatronic dinosaur boyfriend.

If I need to explain to you why Garbage Pail Kids was a horrible, horrible movie, then there's just no hope.

The new nominee, which I cannot personally vouch for, is The Never-Ending Story 3. From the conversation, I gather that the only thing this movie has going for it is another before-they-were-stars siting--Jack Black in a role that will surprise you. I make no claims for or against this film, but I trust the judgement of the person who does.

Three movies immediately come to my mind for that coveted third spot:

1. Nail Gun Massacre. All you need to know is the tagline: Cheaper Than a Chainsaw.
   
2. Slaughter High. The first thing I ever contributed to the IMDb was this film's classic tagline: Marty majored in cutting classmates.
   
3. Viva Knievel. I can't say enough about this movie--Lauren Hutton, Dabney Coleman, Red Buttons, Leslie Nielsen as a villain, Frank Gifford as Frank Gifford, and of course Evel himself. I rented it and ended up watching it twice. For some people, Gene Kelly's legacy is An American in Paris and Singin' in the Rain; for me, it will always be Viva Knievel and Xanadu.
   

I might also suggest this movie, but I don't actually hate my readers.

No entry yesterday because blogger.com was coming up 404 every time I tried to bring it up. Annoying. All I was going to say yesterday, anyway, was that the downside of the comments doohickey is that I now find myself checking it obsessively, and actually getting upset when there's a comments drought. I know it's my own fault for getting caught up on stuff like Mauritania--and after this post there will definitely be a Mauri-torium, at least until I think up or steal something funny to add about it. So if you've got something to say, share the love.

I've continued my non-fiction kick over the last couple of weeks, and I've finished two books since I lasted posted here about my reading. Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem is basically the first half of a two-book set with The White Album. Again the major topics and California and the 1960s, and the essays range from fairly straight reporting to intensely personal. The title essay looks at the culture of Haight-Ashbury around 1967, and the story is much more complex than the reminiscences of either conservatives or former flower children. Didion tells of the drugs without really moralizing, although she is clearly horrified by the five-year-old children "turned on" to acid and the like. She also tells of stories of free love and of rape--sometimes the same stories. But she is fundamentally sympathetic, even as she identifies these youngsters (and most are in the 14-18 range) as a type of not-exactly victim, but "product" perhaps of an anomic culture where bonds that held people together (she talks about concrete relationships--cousins, great aunts, lifelong next-door neighbors) have fallen apart. The historian part of my brain is skeptical of the explanation (plenty of people still grow up around great aunts, and plenty of people 100 years ago moved around a lot as children), but I appreciate the reportage--the combination of empathy and intelligence that tells me that Didion comes by her explanations honestly, even if I ultimately disagree with them. "Goodbye to All That" was also very interesting to me, as she told about how it feels to fall into and out of love with a new city as a young adult. Been there, done that, and though the details are very different, Didion definitely captures the idea.

Before Slouching I read Wallace Stegner's 1954 history Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. The fact that I'd never heard of Powell until graduate school confirms something I also learned in graduate school--American history looks very different from the West than it does from the East. Powell led the first American expedition all the way from the beginning of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to the Virgin River at the Arizona-Nevada border. Powell's expedition and subsequent work in the West was central to modern mapmaking, geology, and other earth sciences. Since Stegner wrote this landmark account, Powell's ideas about water usage have also been seen as a tragic road not taken for many people who believe that water rights in the West have been granted in inefficient and unfair ways. I still don't know enough about Western water rights to comment intelligently on that idea, but Stegner does make a convincing case that Powell's waning influence in the late 1880s and onward was a tragic misstep orchestrated by a coalition of Western politicians and business interests, and certain "truisms" that held for the East and Midwest but not for the arid regions of the Plains and Rockies. Basically, Powell denied the idea that water would always ultimately be plentiful where it was needed and that "rain follows the plow", and suggested rational management of scarce resources.

The first section of the book stands out if you're looking for an exciting narrative--the story of the actual expedition down the Colorado is a true adventure story. The rest of the book is about Gilded Age politics and, to a lesser extent, science. Some things don't work for me, most notably the continued references back to Henry Adams as an Easterner and contemporary of Powell's with very different experiences and ideas. OK, that's probably true, but I'm not sure of its relevance or what it contributes to the book's arguments. Still, if you want some insight into the still complex and controversial water politics of the West, this is a good place to start. Supposedly the book to read on this subject is Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert; I'm hoping to get to that before too long, and I will of course share my thoughts here if and when I do. In the meantime, I'll be taking a break from my break, as I'm actually getting back to reading my Western fiction thanks to a timely gift from the Beallsvonian's New Jersey correspondent.

This weekend, in an effort to avoid driving in the snow, I managed to drive through the worst snowstorm to hit the area in ten years. Other than the obvious answer (because I'm a dumbass), why did this happen? Well, on Friday reports were that 4-8 inches of snow would be coming early on Saturday. Since I had to teach in Pittsburgh Saturday afternoon, I asked Bill if I could stay over at his place five minutes from downtown Friday night. I did that, and as I headed in to class Saturday afternoon, not one flake had fallen on my car or anywhere else. I taught class, then visited some other friends in the city who I hadn't seen in a really long time (I'm not telling who--wild turkeys couldn't drag it out of me), and then met Bill and a whole group of people to see Daredevil. (I enjoyed it, though I attribute that at least partially to just being happy to go to any movie nowadays, since it's infrequent.) After the movie we went to Eat 'N' Park (think Denny's, but more, um, Pittsburghy) for desert, and it was approaching midnight by the time we got out. As we were driving back to my car I commented about how unexcited I was about the hour drive home, and Bill suggested I stay again. This, of course, was the FRAUGHT portion of the weekend.

I woke up Sunday morning and waited for the snow to stop. And waited. And waited. Finally, at 3:30, I decided to leave at four if it hadn't let up, so that I could be home before dark. I made the normally 50-minute trip in about an hour and a half, and there were some very treacherous moments, but interestingly the roads got better the farther into the country I got, and so everything was OK. I was home at 5:30--or, almost home, rather, because I couldn't actually pull my car into the driveway due to snow accumulation. I was able to park at my uncle's next door because he has more of a lot than a driveway proper. At that point we had maybe 6 inches of snow. When I got in the house, I found out that by the following morning we were expected to have 18-24 inches. When dad and I were shoveling the driveway Monday afternoon (work, school, anything involving leaving the yard was right out), we put the yardstick into a flat, undrifted area and got a reading of 17 inches. At least I got the cardio of shoveling out half the driveway, and neither of us had a heart attack, which is an extra bonus!

We did ultimately make one brief trip yesterday, as once we got the cars dug out, the actual roads were pretty clear. As a result, my car is now at the body shop, and by tomorrow afternoon it should be as good as, well, used.

Oh and just when I thought the news about Pennsylvania's antiquated and ridiculous Liquor Control Board was getting better, along comes this moron to once again squelch any state pride I may have been starting to feel.

Who's the leader of the club that helps when you can't breathe?

Here's a toy I could play with all day. See what hot-button issues are forcing average Americans such as you as and me to take action. Here are some actual petitions I found browsing this site:

• Give NASCAR its own channel
  
• End animal slaughter in Romania
  
• Make Spiderman 2 only have one villain
  
• Help neopets fight off the Chia lawsuit
  
• Justice for Traficant!
  
• Ban online petitions (how meta!)
  
• Bring back the bullpen car (the only one I actually signed)
  
• Fire Calgary Stampeders COO Fred Fateri (CFL teams have COOs?!)
  
• More education money for the Schenectady Metroplex (Metroplex?!)
  
• Take a stand against (8th-grade) dances being shut down
  
• Peter Pan supports drugs
  
• Replace Spinzels with Goldfish on Northwest Airlines flights
  

Good God, I could do this for hours. My readers will come to rue the day I learned to make an unnumbered list!

You can now follow the U.S.'s current Terror Alert status in the blue area of the left column. Click here to see all the possibilities.

Lonely Planet's take on wanting to go to Mauritania is a somewhat politer version of, "what? are you stoned?!"

We're looking at another day with a high of about 20 degrees here. On the whole I'd rather be in Nouakchott. "Mauritania" and "chess" does not make for a particularly good google search unless you're into stamp collecting. And, no, the 1984 World Chess Championship does not seem to have had anything to do with Mauritania--they just did the stamp. If I were Dave Barry, however, I might point out that "The Rooks of Mauritania" would make an excellent name for a rock band.