mellicious | Do you want to date my Avatar? (Reply)

I have C-SPAN on (which, for all my interest in politics, I only very rarely watch) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is currently enumerating the "faults" of the healthcare bill. I see plenty of faults in it but I don't think most of the ones he sees are the same ones I see. In any case, I have been saying for a while that some sort of healthcare bill is going to pass because the Democratic Party knows it's screwed if it doesn't - I could still be proven wrong when it comes down to the conference committee but I gather the Senate is supposed to have the votes to pass this tonight.

I have been trying to figure out all day what to say about Avatar, and I can't say my thoughts are too coherent about it, still, so here are my rather disjointed ones. I did enjoy it quite a lot, but I think its mindblowing effects are overstated, on the whole. (Or at least, it failed to blow mine too thoroughly.) I did not particularly see it as racist - see here if you're not already aware of that debate. I felt like Cameron thought that the Na'vi, the blue-skinned natives, were superior to the humans not because they were noble savages or anything like that but more because of the way they were connected with nature. I think this movie is to a great degree a treatise on the "rape of the land" and concepts like that, and how many people are going to disagree with that? And I rather agree with

cleolinda that its attitude towards the disabled bothered me as much as the other stuff (although I apparently liked it considerably more than she did, overall). It was certainly a pretty thing to look at - and I also have to admit that I continue to think Sam Worthington is really pretty to look at, just as I did in Terminator: Salvation. I suspect there are technical ways, if nothing else, in which this movie will genuinely be groundbreaking, but comparing it with Star Wars as a game-changer? Not hardly.

Ooh, they are voting on cloture. This seems like a pretty big moment.

I have a jewelry class tomorrow night -

columbina take note. I keep forgetting about it. I signed up for it about a month ago and promptly forgot all about it. It's a good thing I wrote it down in the datebook I keep in my purse. And the girl who signed me up for it wrote my name and address down on a loose piece of paper, so I hope it got written down somewhere more permanent because I doubt that I know where my receipt from a month ago is.

Cloture passes, 60-40. And huh, they are now having a roll-call. Is somebody missing, is that what that's about? I saw them wheel Byrd in at the beginning so I know he's there. Interesting.

I better go get some beads together for this class. I know me, I'll be running late tomorrow. And if I walk in that store without a pretty good selection I'll end up buying a whole lot of stuff. Happens every time.

(The Senate just adjourned; I'm still not sure what that roll-call business was. The ways of the Senate seem to be exceedingly mysterious.)