Month: May 2010

Family Resemblance

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Evie, looking at Nathan’s shirt: “Uncle Nathan, do you like bacon?”
Uncle Nathan: “Yes, yes I do.”
Me: “You must like bacon too, you ate a lot of it this morning.”
Evie: “Well, I don’t have a bacon shirt.”
Uncle Nathan: “Yet. You don’t have a bacon shirt yet.”

We were watching some kids playing soccer and Evie turned to a kid who was about 14 years old and said, “What’s that little boy doing?”

Sara: “Sometimes when babies are born, people wonder who they look like. Like if they look like their mom, or dad, or sister. Who do you think Oliver looks like?”
Evie, with a big smile on her face: “Nala.”
::later::
Evie: “Oliver looks like Elmo.”
Me, cautiously: “He does? In what way?”
Evie: “Well, my Elmo can’t sit up or stand and neither can Oliver.”

We’re about to lose LOST

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Well, at long last, we’re losing LOST. For those of you living under a rock, the iconic series is coming to a close this Sunday.

Ah, Lost. We’ve had our ups and downs. But I have to say, they’ve mostly been ups. 6 years we’ve been watching that show. And, although there have been disappointments, they were mostly just when the show failed to be less than absolutely awesome. The good parts of the show sort of set the bar so high, that when it couldn’t be that good for every single second (which would be impossible of course), people were disappointed. No matter how it ends up, I think I can safely say that I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent on it. Certainly, it is one of the few shows remaining that I actually get excited to see. It might be the only show that we always watch the same night the Tivo records it. In other words, after 6 years, we still plan our night around it.

So here’s to you Lost, for providing us with many, many hours of entertainment (both those spent actually watching the show, and all of the time discussing, pondering, reading blogs about, and generally obsessing about Lost)

In any event, many people will be planning Lost parties for Sunday, and thus might need some Lost-based food, sort of like a Dinner and a Movie type deal. My favorites include Shephard’s Pie, E-Clairs, and of course, to wash it all down, a Sun Jin Fizz.

Link courtesy of Sara.

Supernatural Part II

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Okay, I wanted to keep talking about Supernatural, but it didn’t feel right to put it in that last post.

So this was originally supposed to be the series finale, not just the season finale. And it would have been a great cap to the show. Everything that had been building up for the entire series finally came to a head, with a good and satisfying ending. But then, the show was picked up for another season.

Where do you go after defeating Satan and aborting the apocalypse? Isn’t anything else going to seem a little silly? You can’t really escalate from that. And Sam is trapped in hell, which means there has to be some stupid explanation about how he can escape. And what do you do next season, when you have to end things? Because this seems to be the ending you were working towards all along, so now you have to throw some hasty new ending together.

In other words, though I love the show, they should have let it be done.

I can think of two other series that had this same problem, where they came up with an ending and then the show got extended, forcing them to back their way out of it. On Charmed they changed their identities and walked away for good, only to be back next season with some throw away line like, “Oh, that was a nice vacation, but now we’re back!” And of course you have Buffy, who actually died and had to be resurrected. In both cases, the “final” ending ended up not being as good as the original ending. Interestingly, Supernatural is on the CW, formerly the WB, which hosted both Charmed and Buffy. So maybe the network is to blame. Regardless of who is to blame, I sure hope Supernatural can pull it off.

I have to leave you with a clip, so here you go. (Sorry, I looked long and hard for one you didn’t have to click through to see, but I couldn’t find one. I still recommend you click through and watch the clip. It’s short, I’ll wait.) In order to re-open Satan’s prison, the Winchesters had to get the keys by defeating each of the 4 horsemen, including Death himself:

How Janesville stopped the apocalypse

/ Shane / 1 Comment

There’s an awesome show by the name of Supernatural.

This season as been about the appending apocalypse, and the efforts of the Winchester boys to avert said apocalypse. The final episode of the season aired a little while ago, so I think I can talk spoilers here, but if you don’t want to know how the whole thing comes out, you might want to skip a little bit. However, there is no way I can talk about the crucial role that the Janesville GM assembly plant played in stopping the apocalypse without talking about how the apocalypse was actually stopped.

So, the entire season (nay series, I’ll get to that later) was culminating into this last episode. Satan wanted to use Sam as his vessel to destroy the world (since he was currently in the body of Jacob from Lost, but I digress), and Sam came up with the plan of letting Satan possess him, and then leaping into the prison they had accidentally let Satan out of in the first place. Long story short, it didn’t go according to plan, and Sam was not, in fact, able to master Satan.

Here’s where the Janesville assembly plant comes in.

Throughout the show, the Winchester brothers travel around in an awesome ’67 Impala.

In the final moments, Sam catches sight of the Impala and remembers all the good times with the car, his brother, his dad (it was originally their dad’s car), etc. Using these memories, he is able to throw off Satan, and jump into the prison.

Now, since the car played such a pivotal roll (THE pivotal roll), the show devoted probably a good 10 minutes of the final episode to discussing the place where the car was manufactured: the Janesville assembly plant. They not only mentioned it by name, but they played old clips of the plant and talked about its history! Sara and I kept looking at each other, like, “Did they really just say that? Are they really talking about the Janesville assembly plant?”

So, to all of my relatives who worked at the plant (including my father): you might have lost your job and had your town ripped apart, but you stopped the apocalypse. That has to count for something.

Bad Influence

/ Shane / 4 Comments

So, there is a flip side to the social butterfly coin.

We had a situation the other day. We were at the garden, and there was a little girl from the neighborhood who didn’t have a plot in the garden there. This little girl…hoo boy. Words escape me. She was the worst kid I have ever seen. She wouldn’t listen to anything. No matter how many times Sara said not to touch people’s gardens, or touch our things, or leave this or that alone, she just kept doing it. And the worst part was, she was convincing Evie to do it. She pulled out every trick in the book, telling Evie that her parents said it was okay to do things, telling us that Evie wanted her bike helmet, even though it was just a ploy to get the bike helmet we said she shouldn’t touch, etc. It was even worse than that, she had such sass on her. For example, she was trying to convince Evie to take off her shoes:

Sara: “Evie, don’t take off your shoes”
Girl, in her sassiest tone: “They’re not shoes, they’re boots.”

If we stopped watching them for even a second, the girl talked Evie into some compromising position; taking off her boots, practically strangling her trying to take off her helmet, getting her to take off her clothes so they could “shave” with sharp sticks. At one point I looked up and she had Evie by the hair and was getting ready to smash her face into the ground. She was, “washing [Evie’s] hair”. She never once called Evie by the right name, and even got into an argument with me about what Evie’s name was. Talk about oppositional defiant.

Did I mention this girl was 3 years old?

Poor, sweet Evie was completely unprepared for this. All of her interactions with other kids has been more or less adorable. Sometimes kids are bossy, but Evie’s okay with that. But we’ve never prepared her to resist being really taken advantage of or manipulated. It was actually quite startling.

It wasn’t all bad though. I was particularly proud to hear Evie say, “Remember what my mommy said…” a couple of times to the girl. It was like Evie was trying to do what was right, but she was totally overwhelmed by this other girl.

So here was the horrifying part. Evie wants to make friends so badly, that she was putting up with all of this. In fact, when the girl finally got called home (Thank god!) Evie said she was sad and she missed her. That really made my heart shrivel up inside.

Of course, when we did get back from the garden, Evie was not listening to us anymore, and being naughty. I was thunderstruck. We were around this girl for less than an hour, and, until her spell wore off, she had more influence with Evie than we had in years.

Thus the true horror of bad influences on your children was revealed to me. And to see Evie desperate for this girl’s attention, and to see how bad and corrupting this girl was, if only for a short time. It made me think of abused wives going back to their husbands. Now I am scared to send Evie to school, lest she fall in with a bad crowd! And furthermore, imagine being in that girl’s class in school. The teacher would not be able to give attention to anyone else, she would have to focus completely on dealing with her.

Really, the victim here is not Evie, it’s that poor little girl. If she acted like that with us, imagine what she is like at home. Imagine what her home is like in general. I feel really bad for her. However, at the end of the day, she’s not my responsibility, Evie is. And that’s why I am always going to be nervous whenever we go to the garden, that she might be waiting for us.

I kind of hoped I wouldn’t have to deal with things like this for a few years!