SSINFO et un film (ou deux)

Grades got posted on SSINFO this morning. I'm mostly not disappointed.

The past couple of nights were pretty cool. Monday night I went over to the Elder's with some folks and played some cards, had (a little) popcorn and wassail, and watched the greatest movie of all time, A Christmas Story! If anyone reading this hasn't seen A Christmas Story, I advise you to hang your head in shame. Then go watch it.

Last night I went to see Flightplan with Allen and Zach and a couple of Northsiders. The movie was actually better than I expected. For those of you who don't know, it's a movie about a woman who takes her daughter on a huge new airplane and her daughter ends up getting lost. They start with some mundane asking everyone to check and see if a little girl is next to them because there's a worried mom looking for her, and no one sees her. As things develop, it turns out no one even remembers seeing her daughter. Ever. And there's no record of her even boarding the plane! Dun dun dun. I remember the trailers from way back when, thinking that the movie looked like a parody of itself the way the protagonist started off all calm, but sorta neurotic, and ended up going completely ballistic and ended with a dramatic shot of her smashing a fire extinguisher into the camera. While it was somewhat comical how crazy she was acting with the lengths she was going was a little funny when I don't think it was meant to be. But over all, it was a lot better than I expected.

At some point in the movie, a conspiracy was devised that involved a couple of Arab guys. You know it was inevitable. A movie about fishy circumstances on an airplane, there's gotta be something up with the Arab guy. The consipracy was hatched on shaky details, and eventually the conspiracy gets pushed aside. That was the only really obvious agenda being pushed--that Arab guys on an airplane don't necessarily mean bad news. My experience flying tells me that whenever there's a lone Arab or a couple on a flight, people share nervous glances when they think no one is looking (or even when they don't think no one is looking). How many of them actually cause a scene? Virtually none. We're just paranoid. For a good reason? I'm not even totally sure.

A while back, we were paranoid of SARS (10% chance of death, symptoms include high fever and overall feeling of discomfort according to CDC). Now that the media has settled down, we've looked at the facts and see that more people die of the flu each year, and the flu is far more common. In the same way SARS was hyped, plane hijacking is hyped too. It's hyped at least enough that we think twice when we see a Middle Eastern man on a plane when we're really pretty safe.

Just my theory anyway. So I think there were much worse things Hollywood could have been pushing in the movie Flightplan.

In other news, it looks like I'll be heading to the second home in Connersville this afternoon where I'll stay until a few days after Christmas, and then it will be off to stay with Paul in Chicago until school starts. Assuming he doesn't kick me out before then. Yay!