Last week, while reading the enjoyable blog, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I discovered the latest in really asinine talk about God’s judgment - via natural disasters - courtesy of a Mr. Jason Werner of Ohio. Werner has written a piece on his web site that would definitely have been worthy of at least a (dis)honorable mention in my first annual “People Who Should Stop Talking Awards” earlier in the year.

Werner is one that is absolutely certain Hurricane Katrina was brought upon New Orleans by God’s anger at the city’s sinfulness. So, now that severe flooding has ravaged many states in the upper-midwestern U.S., he, trying to make sense of it within the same framework, stopped to think, hmm, what have these people done wrong to anger God so? His main concern was Iowa as he seemed to think the state was especially some exceptional example of goodness amidst what he thought was generally God-approved territory, as he writes,

I’ve been blaming the atrocity that occurred to New Orleans by a storm called Katrina on the area’s sin…

So I began wondering about Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It’s innocent Iowa. What could possibly be wrong with an area in “God’s country”.

Well, I guess, just as it is said, people see what they want to see. So just as Werner once saw this mythic region of godliness, he now has dug up all sorts of reasons why Cedar Rapids alone must have deserved such “punishment”: everything from how many casinos and bars there are to funding for embryonic stem-cell research and the people’s apparent willingness to coexist with homosexuals. The list goes on, but none of it is really worth mentioning, because it is just ridiculous.

I know that people have been attributing the weather and other natural events to the moods and whims of deities for millennia now, but the continual insistence these days of claiming to somehow know (I won’t even bother mentioning the much more widely known figures that regularly say the same kind of things) that God selectively - and quite inconsistently I might add - doles out punishment in certain areas of the country through natural disasters, and then, trying to attribute that punishment to some key formula of sin, e.g., “there was a huge gay pride parade scheduled and there were X number of abortion clinics and casinos…”, etc., is remarkably dumb.

Can’t these sorts of “disasters” be seen as, oh, I don’t know, natural events that, you know, just happen? While maybe the idea of God’s judgment helps some people deal (in a very strange way) with what otherwise seem like harsh, random acts of nature, it still seems silly to think of certain kinds of natural events as merely acts of judgment that wouldn’t come about if the people in a given area were simply godly enough. Haven’t these things happened for ages in accordance with natural patterns of weather and geography regardless of where people were? And aren’t they only really considered disasters, because there just happens to be people there to call it such as it is disastrous for them? And isn’t that a price that has long been paid by mankind in exchange for sedentary civilization, as people, time and time again have chosen to live near rivers that are prone to flooding, by seashores that are potential targets for hurricanes or typhoons, or on fault lines that are prone to earthquakes, and so on, all while they even anticipate such events, making preparatory attempts to withstand them?

And if mankind’s actions have any part to play in such occurrences at all, I would assume it is far more likely due to the severe impact we have on our natural environments than to the incurring of random judgment by severe weather from God. Oh, but talk like that, I’m sure that just sounds too much like some radical, wacko-environmentalist crazy-talk. How could I expect that to be taken seriously?

I saw the new Pixar film WALL•E on Saturday, and it is still floating around in my head in a really good way. There is something truly special about this film, and I could go on and on about many aspects of it, from the technical and the setting to how well the characters and their relationships work and the remarkable ways they and the story are communicated (in all senses of the word). But since the film is so new, I don’t want to get too much into that stuff until people have had ample chance to see it. However, if you are interested in an opinion review, I suggest starting with this short discussion of the film on the podcast Filmspotting. I listened to it yesterday, and, amazingly, the Filmspotting guys almost perfectly summed up a lot of what I felt about the film, from what makes it great all the way to what are perhaps its very few and minor weaknesses and how even those weaknesses help illustrate how strong the premise and setup of the film is overall.

With all that said, though, I have to just write a couple things about the character, WALL•E, himself, who has to be one of the must lovable characters in the history of film. If an essential criterion for a great film is how much it hits the core of your being by making you care about the main character(s), then WALL•E is, without a doubt, one of the greatest films I have seen in a very long time. I might even go so far to say it is as good, or maybe even better than E.T. in that regard (that is a BIG first impression maybe though).

But WALL•E certainly begins with just as much charm and brilliance as the hilarious E.T. at home alone, downing beers scene had, or, for that matter, the unforgettable and endearing introduction to Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back as well. And the film only had to run for maybe 15 or 20 minutes, at the most, before I was fully and deeply invested in little WALL•E the robot and his story. It might not even be possible to express exactly how this happens or what exactly the experience feels like, but, to put it simply, I believed in and loved this little guy as much as it is possible to when watching an animated story (if not any kind) on screen. I profoundly connected with his every emotion though there was a surprisingly little amount of words spoken. And that is something very primal and real that I am sure will stick with me for a very long time. To achieve this so incredibly well, particularly in the brilliant way they did with this film, confirms in my mind that these filmmakers have a remarkable gift that puts them right up there with the very best of their predecessors and far ahead of most of their contemporaries.

Of course, since I’ve already so boldly put WALL•E right beside some of the greatest icons of my generation, I have to consider the possibility that WALL•E (both the character and the film) owes at least some part of its greatness to its influential and landmark sci-fi predecessors, whose inspirational presence is felt in various ways all throughout the film (and even authoritatively evident in the case that the one and only Ben Burtt created the “voice” of WALL•E, just as he so wonderfully did for R2-D2 so many years ago). And while I think WALL•E the robot is a significant new creation all on his own, he does seem, in many ways, to embody something that feels a bit like the natural end result of mixing together all the most endearing parts of such monumental forebears as, E.T., Johnny 5, R2-D2 and maybe someone else like Gizmo for good, cute measure.

All that to say, I obviously really enjoyed the movie. I know many people who are likely to come out of movies disappointed, because they go in with too high of expectations, so I hope I haven’t upped anyone’s expectations to such a dangerous level with my unabashed praise. I’d say if you just go into the movie, like I did, with no other expectation but to enjoy watching an incredibly cute, Short Circuit reminiscent robot in a Pixar film with an intriguing premise that is fully new ground for their brand of animation (if not most animation), I guarantee you will not leave disappointed and might just come away as highly impressed as I was.

So I began working part-time at a college bookstore a couple weeks ago. Last week I mostly worked in the back room, packing up leftover summer semester textbooks to be returned. While doing this I’m pretty much left alone to my thoughts and what seems to be the official shipping and receiving department music: radio station 98.7, “Kiss-FM.” As its name suggests, this station plays a lot of R&B along with a certain assortment of what sounds like the more soulful progeny of disco - or what disco was the less soulful progeny of - both of which I’m more or less cool with, to a certain point.

But after working for about 3 hours or so with it constantly playing, it really becomes about as unnecessary and annoying as if the super-cool Max Rebo Band in The (original) Return of the Jedi had been hanging out and playing somewhere in the background throughout the entire movie, regardless of what was going on. That just wouldn’t have worked at all, but their two or three moments on screen are quite enjoyable indeed.

So yeh, that’s kind of what it’s like working in the backroom with Kiss-FM; or at least that’s my nerdy working analogy of what it’s like, which might be more than just a little bit off. But any remotely plausible excuse to use the funky jams of Max Rebo in a comparison is an opportunity I just can’t pass up.