Stood Up and Subjected

I had a really tough day at work yesterday spending the entire afternoon glued to the computer screen wrestling with the 1970s Canadian technology upon which our entire scheduling system is based (so we’ve got that going for us).  I’m in charge of migrating that data into forms the current, state of the art, technology on our buses will recognize.  It’s not exactly a marriage made in heaven (somewhere considerably south of there). 

I was therefore looking forward to the weekly date night to relieve the stress and general malaise these type days impose.  My wife had staked out a position she didn’t want to see this week’s movie but I’m usually able to shame her into accompanying me.  I guess my charisma is starting to fade because last night she preferred her sewing machine (and I-phone) to my sterling company.  Her argument was twofold:  she doesn’t like going out in the rain (despite growing up in one of the wettest places on earth) and she didn’t want to see a movie about sentient apes fighting humans in a post-apocalyptic world (huh?  still don’t understand that). 

So I was flying solo last night to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes which was pretty good.  I’ve seen all the ape movies dating back to Charlton Heston’s initial effort and this is one of the best.  The use of CGI is almost mesmerizing.  All the other ape movies had humans walking around in silly ape costumes, one step up from the old 3 Stooges gorilla.  The apes in this were all authentically simian and capable of incredible character. 

Old friend Caesar has established an ape utopia in the woods north of San Francisco while the rest of the world was destroyed by a simian flu epidemic.  The straggling remainders of humanity are eking out existence in the ruins of San Francisco when the two cultures collide; hilarity and warfare ensue.  It was startling to see one of my favorite cities reduced to ruin but everything about the movie seemed authentic.  You can’t help but suspend disbelief the apes are computer generated.  They alone are worth seeing the movie for, well except for one rainphobic Panamanian.

I returned home to catch the Derek Jeter fellatio–fest, whoops I mean the baseball All Star game.  I understand the need to recognize a player who will go down as one of the true greats but Fox went out of their way to make the whole game about Jeter.  Instead of making an understated tribute to a great player they tried to manufacture an emotional event.  They spent an entire inning interviewing him while the game was reduced to a sidebar.  Each announcer got a chance to take to his knees and bask in the radiance of Jeter’s magnificence.

It was embarrassing especially since a pretty good game was going on between the best players on earth.  The show reached its nadir when a pitcher was forced to come out to be interviewed by a vacuous female reporter to assure the world he didn’t mean it when he suggested he grooved the pitch Jeter got a hit on.  It was criminal that we were subjected to this type inanity.  You can’t manufacture the type emotion Fox was aiming for and they only embarrassed themselves as well as Jeter.  Of course I could just be in a bad mood from being jilted out of date night.