Evolution Revolution Love, Red Dragon Style

Fucking International Herald Tribune. Put together a potentially awesome article about the evolution of sight and lunar triggers for coral orgies and then throw in an absolutely twat-faced paragraph like this:

'People have known about the moon's romantic possibilities for a long time. Shakespeare in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" relies on moonlight to set the mood. The 1987 movie "Moonstruck" features a love story centered on "La Bella Luna."'

It better have been an intern or a daughter on a Daddy/Daughter Day that put that shit together. I mean, if it was in the Metro or something, fine, but the IHT? Do you ever get the feeling everybody is dumbing down everything? And bringing up Moonstruck, indeed. Moonstruck was the rape of a culture. Did anybody buy those people as Italian besides fat bone-white troglodytes who pronounce it 'Eye-talian' and 'lazag-nee'? And they bring it up in the same sentence as Shakespeare. What a joke. What a fucking world.

You must excuse me - the first news item I saw today wasn't that, but the news 126 people were just blown up in Pakistan. So I have the feeling the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I feel like that more and more these days. I can give myself pause, think about world wars, colonialism, concentration camps, Inquisitions, sown epidemics, potato famines, and lots of things like that, and try to convince myself the world is no closer to getting to hell than it's ever been, but I find that technique works less and less at abating my feelings of impending doom.

I guess as people get older they tend to stop thinking things like "the Tudor period was hard, the Second World War was awful, Colonialism was a massive international disaster that benefited a tiny fraction of the people involved - why, things are quite good now in comparison!", because they realize that you can Capitalize and categorize historical events or periods of time in a textbook, but in real life history has a sloppy way of leading up to the present. And all the shit in the world gets to feeling cumulative instead of episodic. Or maybe they don't realize that and that's why people are so shitty at understanding each other when it counts. I don't know.

Anyways, that sort of culmination might only be on my mind because we watched 2001: A Space Odyssey last night. Stanley Kubrick obviously had a thing for sandy blue-eyed blondes who look like The Ex. Besides noticing that I have to say I lost most of my interest once there were no more monkeys.

The monkey bit, however, was awesome. I totally bought it. That was a great discovery of how to bash things, and it was one hundred percent believable to me that the monkey was inspired to bash by looking at the pretty smooth alien thing. Hollywood should make more caveman movies, that's a genre they've left pretty fallow since the 70's, which means it's due as God forbid they should think up something original. It'd be so cheap too - just dress a bunch of actors up in rags, get them to grunt, carry on, and invent the adjective or something. Get some big trained cats and some bears in to add tension, and film all the love scenes doggy-style. There. Done.