deeplyshallow // death to suits

death to suits

I mentioned a few days ago that on Friday I was driving to Santa Barbara to see a screening of E.T. in a park. Well, we blew that off. Susan hounded the event organizers for a couple of weeks and finally got the answer to the all-important question — which version of E.T. are you showing — on Thursday. The answer? “The print we got says ‘2002 Restored Edition’. Is that bad?” Hell’s bells, bitch. Of course it’s bad. What kind of person doesn’t investigate the proper movie to show at a screening that they’ve organized? Last year, when I drove to Wyoming for the Close Encounters showing, the Rolling Roadshow folks put on the original theatrical release of the movie. E.T. and Encounters are in a similar boat right now — you can easily go to the store and pick up the expanded/restored edition of either, but try getting your hands on the movie you saw when you were a child. It’s nearly impossible.

So we blew off E.T. Instead, Susan whipped up some hot chocolate and we stole some cookies her little sister had baked, and we drove up into the little mountains to watch the evening’s other show, the meteor shower. The small vista point we stopped at was, of course, completely black, and neither of us had a flashlight. (I knew the iPod’s ‘always on’ backlight setting would one day come in handy.) The shower ended up being sort of half-assed, like most celestial displays I’ve seen — five streaks and blurs later, it was over.

A week ago my cousin forwarded me a pretty amateur Powerpoint presentation. No idea who put it together. It wasn’t him. The slide show claimed that as August wears on, Mars will become larger and larger in our sky, and that at its pinnacle, Mars will be roughly the size of the moon to the naked eye. Which would be pretty cool if it were true, but it isn’t. Three years ago, Mars was closer to the earth than it had been in some sixty thousand years. I spent two nights looking for it, and when I finally saw it, it was pretty underwhelming.

The Powerpoint is a hoax, is what I’m getting at. There’s nothing in the news about Mars being closer than ever a mere three years after the last time it was closer than ever. The few news articles about Mars seem to be mostly about the hoax email, like this one, which I like because it claims that this hoax will forever destroy the curiosity of children.

I went on a bit of a Carnivale binge this weekend, plowing my way through most of the first season. That first episode was good, but it wasn’t until the second that I got sucked in. I’m not sure why it took so long for me to get around to this show, but as with most great shows that get cancelled, I’m glad I wasn’t obsessed with it when it got the axe. It’s painful to see the great ones cut down before they’ve had time to fully come into their own; add it to the list of reasons why I don’t like to watch television in real-time. The suits play hell with your loyalties.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a cable network dedicated specifically to saving and resuscitating drowned classics? I don’t mean something like TV Land or Nick at Nite, dredging up Mary Tyler Moore and Newhart reruns. I mean, what if a network existed solely for the purpose of rescuing the shows that all the fans want to see, but the suits refuse to renew? You’d see Arrested Development and Firefly again, picking up as if they never left. That’d be nice.