The Lonely Orphan Ducklings

• Random Pop Culture:
• Angels and Demons is way better as a film than The DaVinci Code, just as it was as a book. It's not a great movie, but it's pretty good. It moves very quickly and the visuals are very good, especially when you consider that all of the Vatican scenes are sets or CGI.
• Caught Religulous on DVD tonight. As you might expect, it's Michael Moore-ish film-making at its Michael Moore-est. Maher talks about religion as a whole, but only interviews the most extreme people. It's mostly a diatribe against evangelical Christianity, but there is a little bit about Judaism and a good bit about Islam. It's funny and it makes some good points. I think, though, that you could make a very interesting film by interviewing people who aren't super observant and asking them why they identify as a certain religion. I fall in that category and I guarantee I'd have a really hard time answering that question without using the cop-out phrase, "culturally Jewish".
• On the good hand, the movie has a little bit at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. I've been dying to go there since I read about it in The Year of Living Biblically (and, for Pete's sake, if you haven't read that yet, you need to do it right this second), but my wife wasn't sold. Until she saw it in the movie. We'll now be taking a weekend road trip to the Cincinnati area at some point this summer. If they have cell service in the building, I will break the record for most snarky tweets per second.
• Speaking of Maher, his panel this weekend included two conservatives -- a rarity for his show -- and Dan Savage. You can throw any two conservatives at my side, I'll be happy to have Dan Savage blister them by himself.
• Random Hatred and/or Love:
• Yesterday, I mowed our back yard and then had to bring the mower and the fifty-foot extension cord up a hill to come around to the front. Rather than dragging the cord, I decided to throw it up to my wife, who was on the deck, so she could bring it out front. After failing a few times, I found a soda can, tied the coard around it to make an impromptu grappling hook, and proceeded to get the cord up. It probably took ten minutes or so of trying to get the cord up, but I was really proud of myself when it finally worked. I brought the mower up, plugged it in, and promptly mowed the extension cord in half.
• A Random And Very Important Question:
• I spent a couple of hours today watching Duck Tales episodes on YouTube. You can find at least the entire first season on there and I watched six episodes, including the five-part pilot. Here's my question: Huey, Dewey, and Louie lived with their Uncle Donald and then went to live with their Great Uncle Scrooge. Webigail lived with her grandmother, Mrs. Beakley. So was their some sort of weird illness in Duckburg that killed every parent? Ma Beagle is the only parent on the show.