Force Field

Hello World, Where does the time go, I ask you that. So here we are, at the last weekend in January already, and staring down both barrels of February, which will be here - guns blazing and nostrils flaring - on Monday, ready or not. After that, it's just a very short hop, skip, and a - holy jumping jambalaya! - until Mardi Gras hits the streets on February 9, which means that Ash Wednesday has to be hard on its heels the next day. Of course, this ushers in the season of Lent for grouchy Christians everywhere [Note to all 2016 Presidential candidates: my vote goes to anyone who will implement legislation, by executive fiat if necessary, making it mandatory that people who have given up chocolate for Lent must wear a sign to warn unwary bystanders - and long overdue, I don't mind saying] and also trapping poor Valentine's Day in its penitential grasp besides, thanks not. With Shrove Tuesday being so early, and not to be an alarmist, but we can't even get out of March before Easter comes hopping down the bunny trail on the 27th, which is itself so early that it beats Passover by more than a month this time around. This certainly would have surprised the heck out of early Christians in Jerusalem, I dare say - since the whole Easter story of the Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection started with the disciples in the city to observe Passover in the first place, and here we've now gone and put the cart before the horse, as it were, by rather a wide margin, and tossed the whole time-line right out the proverbial window. Our Eastern Orthodox friends at least have the sense to wait until after Passover to celebrate their (late) Easter on May 1, of all things (suntan lotion and watermelon, anyone?) which seems ridiculously late, but has the advantage of being in the right chronological order, after all. Besides, it will give those marshmallow Peeps plenty of extra time to get even more stale in their packages, if that would even be possible. In fact, I can see where people might wonder if these confections are actually left over from Biblical times, but not so! I understand that archeologists have discovered cave paintings of them, way back from the times when our old friends the dinosaurs were roaming the great unformed land masses in the primordial ooze, and they probably hadn't even started to go stale at that point. Garcon, more of those Troglodyte Peeps, if you please! In sports news, one thing we still have to look forward to in January is the Pro Bowl on Sunday, and if there's any more rejuvenating sight than watching football in January from Hawaii, I'm sure I would have a hard time coming up with it, I kid you not. This would be a far cry, and a relaxing change of pace, from the previous week's championship games, where the NFC saw the Carolina Panthers clobber the Arizona Cardinals, while the AFC provided a genuine nail-biter between the Denver Broncos and New England Patriots. It's the Panthers and Broncos going on to meet in Super Bowl 50 on February 7th, and it remains to be seen if the experience and cunning of the veteran Peyton Manning can overcome the youth and energy of newcomer Cam Newton - although if the fix is in, I wouldn't entirely rule out Tom Brady either, and it goes without saying, I know better than to turn my back on the evil spirit of Affirmed, that's for sure. (Mint juleps, anyone?) It's true that Carolina has the better record this season, but Denver has 7 previous Super Bowl appearances, winning twice, while the Panthers have only been there once before in a losing effort. On the other hand, if there’s any possibility of collusion behind the scenes between the Patriots’ Tom (“Shady”) Brady and the evil spirit of Affirmed, Super Bowl 50 could be the first one in history where neither team wins - and in spite of the odds, I know better than to take that bet, believe me. In other entertainment news, we finally joined with the rest of humanity (albeit very belatedly bringing up the rear, ahead only of people who are currently in a coma, or living in primitive conditions without electricity) and went to see the new Star Wars movie, "The Force Awakens" in glorious IMAX 3-D at long last. The latest installment from this franchise obviously needs no help from me, and petty detractors will scarcely register, as it continues to barrel along breaking box office records of every description, all over the planet - and very probably, far distant solar systems all over the universe, I shouldn't wonder. It is no insult against its popularity to say that we saw it with a tiny smattering of other viewers in the IMAX theater, since it was not only a weekday evening, but also long after its original release, when everyone else was seeing it for the 3rd or 4th time, no doubt. This blockbuster represents the 7th in the Star Wars canon, and is being universally hailed as one of the very best of the bunch, with kudos heaped upon the new young stars taking up the crusade, while still paying homage to the seasoned veterans of its storied past. The studio certainly threw everything they had at it, and then some, and it definitely features some of the most eye-popping special effects, gadgets, and gizmos you will ever see this side of hyperspace, and devil take the hindmost. Over the years, I've seen all of them as they've come out, and while I will say that the first one (“A New Hope”) is still my favorite (and I will cheerfully admit that I simply don't remember how bad “Attack of the Clones” was) but good or bad, I always find them impressive and worthwhile. I think it’s fair to say that I stand alone in disliking this newest one, which I thought was noisy, disjointed, confusing, and humorless - and which struck me as something of an implausibly long-winded intergalactic car chase punctuated with explosions, for the most part. Not to spoil things for anyone just now coming out of a coma and going to see it, but killing off central characters is no way to woo fans, and that alone would have been a deal-breaker for me, even if I had liked it in the first place. Frankly, I never thought I would see the day I would long for Jar-Jar Binks, alas. And speaking of things that are hard to see, I don't mind saying that the horn on the Aveo is so impossible to find on the steering wheel that one can only assume that Chevrolet has come down squarely on the side against noise pollution, and safety be hanged, because you're not going to just go tooling around town blowing your horn if they can help it, by golly. It's true that there's a tiny incomprehensible black-on-black splotchy area on the side of the steering wheel that ostensibly indicates where the horn is located, but by the time your average person would locate that minuscule nonsense, whatever it was that they wanted to honk the horn at, would have long since vanished and gone along its merry way, which is probably just as well. You can pound on the steering wheel all you like, and never get so much as a peep out of it, in spite of your best efforts, and I ought to know. Trying to look on the bright side, at least it doesn't go off when you don't want it to, for instance when making a turn, rolling down the window, or switching on the windshield wipers, and hitting the horn button by mistake. As it is, all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't see their way clear to hit the horn on purpose, much less by accident - although I would still have a hard time trying to recommend that as a safety feature, try as I might. But it does qualify in the category of good neighborliness, since you can't possibly bother anyone with any wild and unwarranted honking at all hours of the day or night, and I suppose that has to count for something right there. So for all of the pedestrians and other motorists out there in the wide world, who can't stand it when they're going along minding their own business, and someone honks at them from out of the blue, for whatever reason and perhaps no reason at all - you can relax, because you won't hear it from me. Elle