The perils of adulthood

I want to go see "Curious George."

Is that wrong? I like cartoons, I like monkeys, I'm a child at heart, and these books were among my favorites when I was younger.

Thus, despite my general allergy to Will Ferrell, I want to go see a cartoon that features a man wandering about going, "Monkey? Monkey?"

There's just one problem.

I'd be a 30-something man. Alone in a theater full of small children.

This is a lesson I learned (and may well have mentioned) earlier, when I went to see "Zathura," a movie about a couple of kids playing an outer-space board game that comes to life in their house.

It was a lot of fun.

It was also a theater full of three kinds of people that holiday weekend in Bloomsburg: Soccer moms. Their small children. And me.

I didn't really become aware of this until one brief, shining, adult-oriented joke.

So the kids are in their living room, dodging a meteor shower that's crashing through the house - the movie is based on a book written by the guy who wrote "Jumanji," which I've never seen, but had a trailer full of animals run roughshod through a house. And one of the meteors shatters a vase on the mantel, which explodes in a puff of dust.

The smaller boy screams, "Grandma!"

I laughed. Heartily.

And realized I was the only one in the theater. And all of those soccer moms were giving me a concerned eye.

Look, I may have my share of perversions, or as I like to call them, fetishes, but small boys aren't one of them. I'm a Jew, not a priest.

So if I go to see a kids' movie, it's because, well, inside I'm a little kid sometimes.

But it was really sort of embarrassing. After all, that's my hometown, and a small town. Somebody might know me, or my parents. Hillsborough's pretty much the same way. Swagger up to the ticket booth at the little theater and ask for one for "Curious George," with my buzz cut and stubble and general weekend disconcern for hygiene?

That's just asking for a visit from the Men in the Blue Hats. And badges. And nightsticks.

Sigh. Sometimes it's hard out here for a munkee.

Aside, relative to that gratuitous reference, was "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" winning the Oscar not the highlight of the night? For my money, the only really exciting, surprising moment in a funny, but by the numbers, evening. Yeah, I watched the Oscars, mostly. And Joan and Melissa, some, beforehand.

Before, when all I heard was everyone talking about how this was the first hip-hop song every performed live and all that yadda yadda yadda, I figured it had to win, what with the P.C. world and all. And I was kind of against it.

But when the moment started to come around, and they had such a fun time with it (performers, audience members and all), I was rooting for the underdog - because it didn't feel forced, or P.C., it felt like an underdog story.

So I was very pleased when 3 Six Mafia (is it Three 6 Mafia?) won, because they looked as shocked and happy as everybody else. No gloating, no politics, no B.S. Just joy. It was nice.


Finished another book: "Shiloh," by Larry J. Daniel, the story of "the battle that changed the Civil War." The first genuinely bloody battle of the war is covered by a pretty good book, though I'm hurt by my lack of familiarity with the war in the West. The book does suffer from some "who the hell is THAT?" moments, though, as three armies take part, and yet Daniel (to his credit) gets down to the regiments and units in his coverage. That (to his demerit) makes the book hard to follow sometimes. But the pros are more numerous than the cons, including a look at some of the societal context and some thoroughness that goes so far as to criticize other historians. By reputation, it's the definitive book on Shiloh, and I enjoyed it.

My latest Raiders column is up, too: More of a news-oriented story on the team's new (finally announced) coaching staff: Raiders finalize their staff

Links:
• Curious George, the books
• Curious George, the movie
• Curious George, the president
• The Oscars
• The battle of Shiloh

Oh, and my Mac browser (Safari) seems to have lost its ability to set the time on these posts, so some of them, due to laziness on my part (I could work around it with IE, but I discovered that's a royal PITA) will have the time I started them rather than the time I finished. Do you really care? Add an hour if you want a truer estimate - that's usually about how long these take me to write if they have any length to them. I know Stewie's blog got a little haywire lately, so my guess is Blogger changed something. We'll get over it, methinks.