Sunday, January 13, 2008

Why Are They Lying Down?



Tried taking some pictures of Catherine today. A couple turned out decent. Catherine had a birthday party to attend this afternoon. Ginger took her to that. No pictures though since I forgot to give Ginger the small Nikon. Not that it would have mattered, the small Nikon does terrible at indoor shots anyway.


I had Quinn while they were out. Quinn actually ate some mac and cheese at lunch. Not a lot mind you, but like five little noodles. Which may not seem like a lot, but for him to eat that much is a major accomplishment. So I was feeling overly generous today. I let him play a couple of races on the new Donkey Kong Barrel Blast game. And after that I had planned on taking him by the comic shop and then to bowling. But when we got to my car we discovered his car seat wasn't in it. Last Friday it was his turn to take some food by the Lamb Center, so we had taken the car seat out of my car so that he could use it to get there when riding with someone else. Later in the day when Ginger picked him up they put the car seat in the trunk of her car, but had never taken it out. So this meant Quinn and I weren't going anywhere today. Had it been an emergency I would have probably put him into Catherine's car seat, but her car seat is borderline too small for her, so it's probably not really safe for him.


So instead Quinn played outside for a bit creating an obstacle course that was a "Donkey Kong Barrel Blast" course. I tell you, when that kid gets engrossed in something, he goes all out. He played around at that for a while, and while he did that I foolishly went and tried to weed some more in that patch where all the poison ivy used to be. We'll see over the next couple of days whether I managed to avoid getting any on me this time. But we weren't outside overly long, and once Quinn finished with his course and we started playing frisbee was right around when it started raining. So then we moved back inside, and I decided since he had done really well trying something new I would let him watch something on TV as a reward. And I decided on the first Star Wars (first in my mind being Episode IV). He really seemed to enjoy it and I can even claim it was educational since he read the "long time ago in a galaxy far far away" all by himself (I did have to help out and explain the word galaxy though). I did have to explain some things, like why the rebels were lying down after the stormtroopers boarded the ship in the beginning (my answer? "They're sleeping from getting hit by the laser").

I have the original and enhanced version and I evidently put in the enhanced one. So all kinds of things are "wrong", like Han doesn't shoot first among other things, but he wasn't paying attention to stuff like that. He just liked the aliens and the robots. Luckily he was chatting most of the way through the film, so they couple of swear words that went by were mostly ignored I think. I will say it's been a long time since I've actually seen the original film. Watching it now it looks like something that someone made using Microsoft Movie maker with all the sweeping scene transitions. It does sort of amaze me how far film making has come since then. Scenes back then tended to run a bit longer. In today's short attention span world I can't imagine Star Wars would have the same success if released today (either that or it would be about an hour shorter).

We only got about an hour into the show before Ben showed up. He was bringing us some stuff for Ginger's Mac and staying for dinner. But since Quinn had eaten the mac and cheese earlier I had told him he could have unlimited Wii play time while Ben was here and wanted to play. So Quinn dragged Ben off to play the Wii while I started dinner. Then Ginger and Catherine got home and Catherine joined in playing the Wii until dinner was ready.

3 comments:

gaz said...

star wars... swear words... where?

JamesF said...

To be honest, I've seen the movie numerous times, but was never aware of the swearing until watching it with my six year old beside me. Then it seemed every time I heard a word I would wince. I mean I know he's going to get exposed to it eventually (and probably even by me on a bad day or something), but still. At least on the order of magnitude these are probably the lest offensive swear words.

Owen: Well, he'd better have those units in the south range repaired be midday or there'll be hell to pay!

....

Ben: I have something here for you. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn't allow it. He feared you might follow old Obi-Wan on some damned-fool idealistic crusade like your father did.

....

Han: What the hell are you doing?

....

Han: Damn fool. I knew that you were going to say that!

gaz said...

it shows how desensitized we become to things. i've never really picked up on those.

like why the rebels were lying down after the stormtroopers boarded the ship in the beginning
i just said that anyone they see who looks like they've been killed is just pretending to be dead, it's their job, they get paid to do it. when the camera's switched off they get up and go home! that's how you see the same person in a different film as a different character.