Countdown to Christmas #7 (December 12th)

Over the weekend the missus and I partook us a film. I haven't been to the movie theater in a good long while, plans have been made, and abandoned, to do so--most recently with the Oline's requests for Western fun being demolished by General Ennui. Not on my part I should add, to use the Oline's descriptive words, I'm a fan of dusty mustachioed men as anyone else. So this weekend I saw the next best thing this side of a Western, the Golden Compass.

The movie was fine, the book was better, blah blah blah, how many more times can i write that before it loses all meaning, throws us all into a semantic void and rearranges the world into a Lacanian hellscape where words no longer bear any relationship to the things they used to represent. But it was fine. The acting was good, the story packaged as well as it could be into a film form making things a wee bit more expository I suppose, and oh all those 'location' shots of ships flying/sailing all over the place that Croftie pointed out sardonically after the 6th time. okay, we get it, the boat is a placeholder for time passing and spatial advancement and a chance for your Industrial Light and Magic folks to sprinkle tech dust all over create some slick CGI machines.

By far the best part of the movie is the Aeronaut Lee Scoresby, played by Sam Elliot. I simply cannot convey the amount of hero worship I have for this man, and that i covet his mustache with a biblical zeal. Someday, when i grow up and my face decides to sprout more than five or six blond bristles I will become a man and rock a 'stache so proudly it will end world hunger. Just you wait.

things i find aesthetically pleasing (but probably shouldn't)

1. the smell of rotting leaves (that crunchy Fall smell which gets really augmented after a good rain).
2. mustaches. Sam Elliot, Tom Selleck, Eugene Hutz... who would not want to be enlisted in ranks such as these? Or, I suppose, if you are a member of the fair sex, who wouldn't want to woo and wed these mans?
3. comic books. print-media's red-headed step-child. getting fashionable now, in Criticism and in Academia, but those don't really count and are a double-edged sword. Its sorta like being an American voter in a state doomed by the electoral college to perpetually be red or blue. It's like saying "See, we pay attention to you and value your interest in comic books/vote but in reality we don't really think you as individuals/comics) are to be taken seriously, not really, but you can't complain because technically, technically you are being represented. And long-winded analogy of the year goes to...
4. that i-tunes nano comercial with the lady-girl-crooner Feist. 1, 2, 3, 4...
5. and according to Croftie and most fans of sports other than Baseball, the national pastime.