Happy Feet

We watched Happy Feet tonight. Frankly, it was more revealing than a barrel full of Rorschach tests. When a person sits down to tell a story about penguins with the moral "We should rethink our fisheries policies"* and it comes out as an anti-religious anti-classical music pro-rock'n'roll-and-specifically-R&B eco-fable (while relocating the desire for the mysterious to technology-superstitions, i.e. aliens), you get a pretty clear idea of what happened in the black box of their imagination. What's sad about this is that it forms the imaginations of all those watching it.

Thank God mine has already been irreparably formed by the golden age of The Far Side.†

*Not a shocking thesis. A twenty-minute monologue from John Flory on the subject still haunts me when I'm awake at 3 a.m. Apparently the regulations, such as they are, simply encourage rape and pillage tactics during the "open" periods for different fish. I can feel perfectly comfortable on my soapbox here, because I never eat seafood (this is said with great complacency.)

†See if you can re-create the links between this post and one of my all-time favorite examples of the "Good Idea Meter"‡ having gone wonky.

‡The "Good Idea Meter" reads either "Good Idea" or "Not Good Idea," but sometimes the needle's choice is unreliable. The chances of getting it right should be one in two, but sometimes they end up being much lower.