Traffic Jam

I don't know what it is about the traffic on Ballards Lane on Thursdays. It's not generally so bad any other day, but Thursdays, particularly during term time, suck. I suppose I also really don't know what it is about parents driving their kids to school. I mean, what happened to self-sufficiency?

My mother used to drive me to school when I was little, and frankly I'd have preferred it if she hadn't. This is mainly because, like me, she has Five More Minutes Syndrome. However, unlike me, she doesn't tend to time herself to arrive at least five minutes early to everywhere to account for possible delays or other problems, and therefore has White Rabbit Syndrome as well. ("Oh, my ears and whiskers, I am LATE!") So for the first three years of my scholastic career, my mother drove me to school and I was perennially late, through no fault of my own. My teachers during those three years basically understood because, you know, it's not a kid's job to make sure the parent gets out of the house on time; it should be the other way around. However, fourth grade brought Mme Feldman, and Mme Feldman wouldn't have taken 'Act of God' as an excuse for tardiness, even with incontravertible proof. My mother admitted that my tardiness was all her fault to the teacher's face when Mme Feldman brought it up at a parent-teacher meeting (probably around the same time as she bitched that I didn't make my paper snowflakes to look the same as the other kids'; gods, that woman hated me), but Mme Feldman kept giving me a hard time over it. Until, finally, my mother got sick of her bitching and me dragging her out of bed going, "C'mon, Mum, I'm going to be late and she's going to yell at me again!" and got me a bus pass. That way, she figured, if I got to school late, it would be my own fault and I couldn't bug her about it. After that, how I got to school was my own responsibility: I lived a 20-minute walk from the school during my Bumblefuck years, and when I was at St Chris, it was about a half-hour walk maximum, and the bus networks in Montreal were good. Once I was getting to school on my own, I was very seldom late to school (and when I was, it was generally because I forgot to wind my old-fashioned alarm clock; I had a backup plug-in clock radio, but Mum 'borrowed' that when her very old clock radio broke down. She then added insult to injury by destroying it in a fit of rage when that fucking Bryan Adams "Robin Hood" theme song came on the radio for the 53rd time in two days, then not replacing mine when she got her new one because "You have an alarm clock".)

Anyway, the point is that a lot of these kids do not need to be driven to school. They can walk. They can use the bus if it's raining or snowing or too far. Okay, I'm reasonably content to have these kids off my bus most of the time, but I could really do without the traffic jams the parents cause by driving their kids into a school that's maybe a 20-minute walk away. They could at least car pool or something.

Another thing I really don't get is how I got more sleep last night than I got the night before last, yet yesterday morning I was reasonably bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the start of the day (as much as I ever am, anyway) and today I feel horrible and zombiefied. The coffees! They do nothing! *sigh* Wanna go home and play with my Sims.

The Childhood Dreams Strike Back

First, a happy birthday to happypickle (I was going to do this later on today, but saw the post on aberranteyes' journal and thought I'd better do it lest I forget.

I was having a conversation with dodgyhoodoo the other day and he asked if there was any chance Lucas was going to release the unaltered Star Wars IV-VI on DVD. From what I'd heard, they aren't, so I said as much. Oh, thank the gods; I was wrong.

Okay, I'm a geek and a dork and stupendously sad. This is fantastic, as far as I'm concerned. Look, when I was a kid, Star Wars was something cool and awe-inspiring and fantastic. I saw all three films in the cinema, mostly because they screened the first two films before showing RotJ and Dad took me to see all three as Sunday outings. I remember standing in the queue with him emptying a packet of assorted fruit chewy sweets into his jacket pocket so I could dig through and try to guess what flavour I was going to get as a way to beat queue-boredom. I remember loving every minute of that, albeit hazily (I was, what, six at the time? It's gonna be foggy). I didn't think it could be improved.

Fifteen years or so later, and the trilogy's coming out again. With 'improvements'. Yes, some of the bits they added are pretty. To me, though, a lot of it just broke the illusion because the late 90s CGI truly clashed with the late 70s / early 80s cinematography. If they were going to put the Jabba the Hutt scene back into ANH, where it was intended to be in the first place if they could have done a mobile Jabba back then, they should have taken the Greedo scene out first, because frankly, the only reason the Greedo scene was there in the first place was to replace that "I want to have him talk to Jabba but can't because I can't get a moving Hutt to work right" bit. Personally, I've had preferred it without the Jabba bit (see above about the CGI clashing with the cinematography; they could not make that mesh), but it should have been one or the other, because the two together were redundant. And don't even get me started on who shot first. I will never understand what anyone involved was thinking with that one. When I was a kid, I had no damn problem with Han shooting Greedo and still thinking of Han as a fairly decent guy; I figured it was self-defence. Hey, I even had a soft spot for Greedo but I still didn't blame Han Solo, my favourite character ever in that trilogy, for shooting him. If a six-year-old girl gets that, what's the problem?

So my quandry, after the 'improved' versions came out, was as follows: I wanted the movies, but I wanted my movies. I wanted them as we used to rent them on VHS (or, for a brief period, the Betamax that my father clung to like a terrier worries a rat). More to the point, I wanted them as I watched them on the big screen when it was all magic. So I never bought the 'improved' versions because, nifty CGI notwithstanding, the films were not improved.* They were only improved for the sort of people who value biggerbetterfastermore CGI and other special effects more than they do ... y'know, plot and things. The additions to the script were unnecessary and, in some cases, just plain stupid. This is why I don't like 'Director's cut extended version' stuff on DVD most of the time. Sometimes a scene belongs on the cutting room floor, and adding it back in afterwards just because the film without that scene in was successful enough for the director to say, "Fuck you, I'll do what I want and people'll pay me for it" is sheer hubris and an outright pain in the arse.

Anyway, I can stop grumbling about it now. I can stop thinking, "God, I'd love to watch Empire ... but they only have that pigfucking 'improved' version, so I guess I'll just have to be wistful". I can have my childhood back. So at least I have something to thank Lucas and his lot for. Gods know I haven't had much reason to since Ep 1...

* Okay, maybe the Trench Run.