Sing It Like You Mean It

I don't get to go to the theatre that often, so when I do, I usually don't want to go see some kids movie. Don't get me wrong, there are some great animated films out there (see: The Incredibles), but typically, these types of "family friendly" films are geared more towards kids than families, with a few "adult" jokes thrown in to try and keep the parents from gouging their eyes out in boredom and frustration, which, to the studios' credit, has a decently high success rate. Especially considering that taking a family of four to the movies, including tickets and concession, is somewhere in the sixty to seventy dollar range, it's rubbing salt in the wound when I also have to shell out that kind of cash for a movie I have zero desire to see. Cue the "Won't somebody think of the children!" Simpsons meme here.

Sing, the latest and greatest from Illumination Entertainment, seemed even less appealing to me as it seemed from the trailers and everything I had read that it was little more than an excuse to show animated, anthropomorphic animals singing pop hits from both past and present. I tried to push the kids towards Moana, which seemed like it had landed among Disney's more palatable fare, or a second theatrical outing to Rogue One, but I was outvoted by both the kids and wife. I'm not sure when the fuck this family became a democratic republic, but I followed my typical strategy in most social situations: go along quietly, bide my time, and implement a silent campaign of espionage and misinformation, manipulating events until the perfect time to strike.

Atomic Supermen and Geriatric Soldiers: Captain America, We Need a Hero

In recent years, the concept of security has become an increasingly popular topic in our collective consciousness, what with political and military unrest abroad, the seeming rise in terrorist activity both international and domestic, and a whole host of other atrocities like school shootings and the various unnecessary death of non-white citizens at the hands of their much paler police brethren that seem to be plaguing the United States like some kind of..., well, plague.

Though on the forefront of our consciousness, there has been very little actual rumination from the common folk, or really anyone in the upper echelons of our governments and world leaders, and the Band-Aid solutions they usually slap on the most recent wound inflicted at worst are completely ineffective and at best mostly ineffective.  Perhaps highlighted best by the Patriot Act, the discourse surrounding security seems to have drifted more and more towards some strange social economy where capital in the form of freedom must be exchanged in greater and greater amounts to achieve higher and higher levels of safety. The problem with this particular paradigm is that, taken to its ultimate conclusion, the only way we can achieve Total Safety (the abandoned and admittedly less action-packed sequel to TOTAL RECALL) is by bankrupting the Bank of Civil Liberties, which may be the only bank in the Western world that may never be deemed too big to fail. While it is true that you can keep your dick free of sexually transmitted infections by keeping it in a hermetically sealed, temperature-controlled, fragrance-enhanced plastic enclosure with a tube up your urethra for proper drainage, it wouldn't be all that conducive to fucking, which is a fairly self-defeating system.