There is no news today - except how F%*^ing bad Independence Day was

"What are you looking at? And can you turn off that
torch while I'm trying to sleep", her look said.

The title of this post has been bandied about by many since the dawn of newspapers, but most recently mentioned by Warren Ryan, ABC radio's senior rugby league analyst.
I mention this because as I came into the office earlier in the week to begin this week's post, it occurred to me that I had nothing to write about, and thus, should I say that, and not produce a post this week?
But then those that know me well will tell you that they have difficulty recalling any time when I didn't have anything to say.
Scott, here at work, is a good example, he couldn't begin to enumerate the amount of times I have gone into his nacelle and said "just briefly I want to tell you this...", and have still been there, bending his ear, an hour later. 
But then last night as I was watching TV, the roof of my tent began rolling like waves on the ocean and I realised that the possum was back.
Why is she news?
Well, she's not, it's just that now I have to go into lock down mode every night to stop her waking me up.
When you live with animals, as I do, you have to go into virtual spring clean mode every night when preparing for bed, as any food left out will send out the signal to the assorted wildlife that make their home with me that, the smorgasbord is open for business.
A single banana peel for instance, left out where it's smell can permeate, will start a range war between the possum and the rat, over who gets to eat it.
Which kind of leads us where I wanted to go, which is, this week's philosophy: nothing is all good, or all bad.
What has this possum got to do then with that?
Well, there have been nights in the past where I wanted to kill that bloody animal, usually for waking me up at three am, most famously when she put her paw on my electric jug, which began boiling, frightening her, and waking me.
But her presence keeps the rats in check, I'm not exactly sure how, but there is no denying that when she is on patrol, the rats go elsewhere.
So in general I just live with her nocturnal perambulations.
So if we follow the same philosophy, then there must be something good about John Howard.
Those who read last week's blog will know I spent the whole time railing against the man, mainly for his advocating the use of nuclear power.
So I had a hard think, and am having difficulty coming up with anything, and so I'll put it out to you reading this.
If anyone can come up with something good about John Howard, please say, you can fill in the comment section below.

Independence Day

I wouldn't go to work with this hanging over my town.

Some time ago I had a rant about 'The Bodyguard', with Whitney and Kevin overacting to a level hard to believe.
At the end I mentioned two other films that I considered too appalling for words, saying I would get back to them one day, well that day has arrived.
I still resent the two hours of my life wasted, literally, as you'll soon read, watching Independence Day, but I was drawn into it like this.
Some of my engineer mates said that they had heard the special effects were great, so why didn't we all go see it.
I agreed, and we headed down to the cinema complex in George st, Sydney.
We snuck into "Hooter Alley", as named by my friend Daz, and smoked a joint before we went in, then took our seats and waited for the actinic light show.
However, within a vanishingly short space of time I was already furious with the damn movie, even stoned I was tearing big, huge, staggeringly large holes in the plot.
So poor was this laughable excuse for a plot, that I couldn't enjoy the special effects.
Many would say, "suspend your disbelief, and enjoy it", but as a hard nosed character, I simply can't do this, and quite frankly, feel that the producers of the film should give me, for my $15, good special effects and a plot that works.
So what was wrong with it?
Well that is a genuine "where do we start?" question.
Perhaps the best point to begin is a point raised by my friend Lloyd.
The hero of the film is Will Smith, and his wife is a stripper.
Will works for NASA, so I would have thought she didn't have to go to work for monetary reasons, so I'm guessing that her job was a thinly veiled, both literal and metaphoric, excuse to get a near naked woman on the screen.
Anyway, the Stilettan Armourfiends of Stitterax arrive en masse in their giant spaceships which they park above all the major cites of the Earth.
They've blown up the White house, for no discernible reason, yet Will's wife still goes to work.
She is next seen gyrating up and down a pole in some seedy bar in east LA.
Now I've taken some sickies in my time, but even I, a bullshit artist par excellence, would have thought that, "I'm not coming to work today because there are giant space ships all over the place", would have sufficed.
Sometime later for reasons that escape me, and the script writers apparently, said wife has to run into a tunnel under a freeway.
The 'fiends are coming, and she spys a metal door, deadlocked, with a large padlock on it.
In need of quick safety, she opens it with one kick and she's inside.
My first thought was that I would call the LA highways department and say that they need to strengthen their doors if a single kick can open it, but we'll move on.
The Stilletans lay down a napalm-like strafe of goodness knows what alien chemical weapons, and an enormous firestorm goes down the tunnel.
Some time later the firestorm clears and then she emerges from her hidey-hole in rude good health.
Sorry, but a firestorm of that nature would have sucked all the oxygen for miles around into the conflagration, so she would have died of either heat, or suffocation, and would have welded the door firmly shut.
But then she had high billing in the credits, and so this was enough to protect her.
Then there's Jeff Goldblum, who is an actor I had previously respected.
He plays a computer guy and in despair at the inability of the Earth military to penetrate the Aliens force field around their ships, get loaded on scotch in his office.

Then his father comes in to find him lying on the floor near dead from drink and gives him an idea to defeat the force field, load a computer virus onto the alien computer network.

So Jeff jumps off the floor as if he hasn't had a drink in a year, and writes a super-complex computer virus for an alien computer system in less than two hours.

Done to explain this bit of the "plot".

Oh, please.

Then Jeff and Will get in an alien spaceship that has been lying around at Roswell for the past fifty years, without a service I might add, and fly up to the alien mothership to load the virus.

And before you can say 'knife', they have flown up, docked, connected with the network, loaded the virus and they're away.

Jeff even had time to write this "what's going on" screen widget.

Meanwhile back on Earth, we can't even get the computer in the admin office to print.

Finally, mercifully for you, the reader, we come to the climactic battle scene, even here I was chewing big lumps out of the arm of my movie chair.

Why did they have to fly up in jet fighters?

Don't they have thousands of millimetrically targeted missiles in silos in Nevada that can hit a city block in Moscow with a deviation of less than five metres?

Apparently not, and so Bill Pullman (the president), Will and  Randy Quaid, as usual for reasons not adequately explained, fly up in jet fighters and destroy the Armourfiends once and for all.

Again it wasn't adequately explored how many deaths occurred when horizon engulfing torrents of destroyed alien ship debris rained down across LA, but there you go.

Bill couldn't hit a suburb-sized alien ship
from the ground.

But even then among the things I couldn't believe about this film was that some large quantities of morons gave it a collective rating of 6.8/10 on the international movie database (IMDB).

The only part of that rating I would have agreed with was the ".8", and that I would consider generous.
It's been a long time since the film came out but I nearly gave birth while doing the research for this rant to discover that they are making a sequel.
I wonder if Bill will have improved his aim in this new one, and can hit a flying saucer the size of Sydney Harbour from the ground?