Interstate 380 is Officially an Altima Death Trap

I'm back in Davenport visiting My Girlfriend for the second time this week. You may recall earlier this week, I left to attend a very important business meeting and almost met a firey, yet poetic death. This event occured on Interestate 380. Traffic moved along fine until halfway through Cedar Rapids. Then suddenly, and without warning, traffic grinded to an absolute halt. It happened so sudden that everyone, including me, almost rear ended what was in front of me while simultaneously geting rear-ended from behind. What a beautiful sentence that was. Eventually, whatever obstructed traffic got pushed to the side of the road, and we continued our leisurely drives. What stopped traffic you ask? How about a semi truck smashing a Nissan Altima. The side of the car was beat up, but no one appeared hurt. I bring this up for no reason other than to warn all Altima drivers to maybe exert a little patience and not drive like crazy fools on 380. If you do, you will die.

Onto happier thoughts. I want to end the week with a movie review and weigh in with my thoughts on Don Imus and Duke rapists.

First, let us talk about what may very well be one of the worst movies ever made-Eragon. I hear the book is good, which makes the movie all the worse for wear. Here's my business advice for movie studies everywhere: stop making fantasy movies, unless you can make a guaranteed 250 million. Because if that's not guaranteed, your movie won't get a big budget and your sets will look fake, your stars will look gay, and your special effects will look cheesy. Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are awesome. Their worlds look real and they suck you in almost immediately. Chronicles of Narnia and Eragon are terrible. The stars are hideously unattractive, appear to speak with fake British accents, and again, look gay.

Let's talk about that for a second. I would like to clarify, I have nothing wrong with gay people. Some of my best friends could be gay. (At this point, I can't say they are gay, I just assume. I'm looking at you Dave!) Regardless, if you are going to wield a sword and violently hack and slash strange scaly monsters to death, you have to either a) look tough or b) acknowledge you look like a geek. Harry Potter works because he's supposed to be a normal, geeky kid who all of a sudden is the Chosen One. Eragon on the other hand, is supposed to be a farm boy. Has Hollywood ever seen farm boys? I'm from Iowa, and I can safely say not one farm boy weighs in at 95 pounds and comes with a full tank of wuss fuel. They are beasts. They would make convincing sword-wielding warriors. Instead, this movie asked me to believe that wuss boy could save the world? Wrong. Instead, he spends the whole movie giving Jeremy Irons "screw me" eyes and completely ignores the fact that the Princess or whatever she is wants to love him long time.

Stupid. For crying out loud, Gandelf IS gay, and the Lord of the Rings finale had all the Hobbits jumping around in bed together, and they still seemed tough. Relatively so.

I ask for a cessation of fantasy movies until Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies are each ten years old and forgotten about. Everything else looks terrible. You can bring in star power (Brother's Grimm) or religion (Chronicles), and it will still suck. Agreed? Good.

After offending the entire gay community by implying they could not realistically portray tough characters (which was not my point, so get over it), let's move on to Don Imus shall we? Everyone seems to weigh in on his comment with one of two sides. He's horribly offensive and/or everyone is making too big of a deal out of it. Usually I think the media makes too big a deal out of just about everything (ie Anna Nicole's baby. Don't care about the baby; don't care that she died) But Imus' comments were terrible. Not because of the "nappy-headed" part. Nappy is an adjective, it means "the appearance of nappiness." Let's face it, the Rutgers gals aren't using Pantene Pro-V hair product everyday. The bigger issue is that he non-chalantly referred to a team of women as "Hoes." But since women's lib didn't pick up on that piece of it and instead allowed society to focus on what was a stupid, but not necessarily racistly intended comment, the real issue is lost.

And dammit, I've never wanted to be someone who adds any sort of credence to these situations by commenting on it, but I did. Three blogs in, and I'm already ashamed of myself.

As for the Duke rape case. It's a perfect example of how our society has clearly shifted to a "Guilty once Accused" scenario. I don't care that the accuser is an exotic dancer. I don't think that makes the accusation of rape any less serious. What I do care about was instead of reporting it as news, ESPN and every other news outlet painted the Dukists as monsters, without having any of the facts of the case.

This all leads to a bigger issue. I'm becoming terribly uninformed about what is going on in the world. I don't watch the news; I don't read the newspaper. Nothing is news any more, it's all stories. If I want to enjoy a sensationalist plot, I'll read a damn book or watch a movie (just not Eragon). But the media, like everything else, is just one giant business, sucking away our dollars while we remain blissfully unaware. What's worse, is we all know it, we just go along for the ride.

Before moving on I should clarify I don't identify with liberals or conservatives; I find both sides have broken down into petty little whiners who are crippling the country. However, our media needs to be fixed. It becoming a corporate owned entity has caused Americans being more worked up about Federline and Lohan potentially canoodling in a Hollywood hotel instead of getting worked up about the fact that 37 million people in our country live in poverty and cannot adequately provide for themselves.