Organized sports brings out truly vile behavior in some people. In Pittsburgh, a T-ball coach paid one of the little tykes on his team $25 to bean another teammate in the head with a baseball. Motive: the coach didn’t want this kid, who happens to have a cognitive disability, playing on his team. Mind you, we’re talking about T-ball. Do they even keep score in T-ball? Was the coach worried his team would miss that last wild card spot in the T-ball playoffs? Fucking idiot.
I saw War of the Worlds last weekend. I liked it a lot. Seeing that tripod burst out of the street was one of the more frightening experiences I’ve had at a movie recently. WARNING: Quit reading if you don’t want to see spoilers. I also thought Spielberg’s decision not to show us the entire battle in the field by the farmhouse was brilliant. It could have been a massive CGI spectacle, but limiting our perspective somehow made it feel more authentic. But one thing about this story, in all its incarnations, bugs me. Here you have a supposedly advanced race of aliens with technology that can crush half of America’s military before supper. Before invading, you would think the aliens would have thought to get their shots. I mean, didn’t they do simulations and stuff to prepare? Did the sensors on their tripods fail to detect those pesky microbes? The ending makes the aliens seem more incompetent than menacing.
