Dame Edna In The Royal Box

Whenever I get a little down there are a few videos that I turn to to uplift my spirits. Here is one I recently discovered that never fails to cause me to smile so hard my face hurts. By the way, did you ever see Prince Charles smile so genuinely as he does here when he discovers that Dame Edna has entered his Royal Box?

Peace and Love

Me with my glads taken this morning on our back deck

"Peace and love, peace and love"...... isn't that what Ringo Starr always says when someone asks him for an autograph?

Well folks, that what I say this morning.  With the recent tragedy in Aurora, Colorado in which yet another whack job gunned down innocent people at a movie theater showing of Batman (of all movies),  my first response (other than the report that someone had a six month baby at the movie) was "Why is violence so celebrated as a form of entertainment?" 

Is it because most of the movie going public are adolescent boys who thrive on violent video games and want to see blood and gore in the movies?  I think so.

Is it our gun culture which gets hysterical every time someone dares to even suggest that automatic rifles are not needed for deer hunting?  I think so.

You know folks I'm about the most liberal person you'll ever know.  I have a natural aversion to censorship.  But there is a limit.

I've lost track of the number of movies I've rented from Netflix that I've ejected straight out of my DVD player when I realize that the movie is all about gratuitous violence.  One movie I saw started with a driver of a car who picks up a hitchhiker.  The driver fakes a flat tire.  He has the hitchhiker help him remove the flat tire.  While he's doing this, the driver of the car brains the hitchhiker with the car jack then drags his body out on the highway in front of a ten wheeler.  The ten wheeler rides over and crushes the head of the hapless hitchhiker like a squashed melon.  And they show the whole thing!  This is "character development"?

I had rented this movie because it had two actors that I liked.  But man oh man, this is how the movie STARTS?  Sorry folks, this to me isn't entertainment.

Now don't misunderstand me.  I'm not totally against realism or violence when it is part of the story but not violence, blood and gore just for the sake of it.

I'm not a hunter.  I don't like killing living things.  I don't even like killing bugs (except for mosquitoes maybe).  But I would rather watch a good story about interrelationships between humans like the TV series "Madmen".  And yes, I would rather watch Dame Edna and all her silliness any day than I would watch something like "Batman".

Dame Edna with gladious

I've watched some of the interviews on TV with some of the teenage boys who were at the Aurora shooting.  Maybe it's me but they seemed excited by the whole event.  Real stuff!  I could see them smiling and full of excitement that the real thing happened just like Jack Nicholson did as the Joker in a previous Batman movie.

One thing about these adolescent boys, they can't talk.  They can't string three words together in a sentence without saying "umm" or "like."  Maybe they should spend less time going to Batman movies that extoll violence, gore and mayhem and more time in the  classroom learning how to speak English.