Got this in from Netflix yesterday, watched it last night. There were many, many laugh out loud moments, and overall it was quite funny despite its shortcomings. I think a lot of it has to do with the charm of Luke Wilson as the star, but it also helped that we were prepared to enjoy it no matter what.

The premise is that stupid people breed at an incredible rate, while intelligent ones have fewer children or none at all. The illustration of this at the beginning is pretty hilarious. So. . .Wilson’s character, a man chosen for his complete averageness in every regard to participate in a cryogenics experiment which goes on for 500 years longer than expected, wakes up to find himself in a world in which he’s the smartest man on the planet. He goes from being a fugitive to Secretary of the Interior under a president who’s a former pro wrestler and porn star in a script that’s essentially a bunch of jokes and skits tied together into a plot, which is why the humor is a bit spotty. The good bits are well worth sitting through the less amusing ones.

Now, the night before, we sat down with “Forbidden Planet”. We’re trying to watch movies that are influential and referential in popular culture, so that when something is mentioned, or spoofed, or is the basis for a story, song, movie, etc., the kids will understand. This means that not only are we exposing them to Hitchcock movies, classics like “Casablanca” and “Citizen Kane”, but also stuff like the Brat Pack movies of the 80’s and early SF like “The Andromeda Strain”. Clearly, FP was a necessary part of the education, despite the fact that it’s a silly, silly movie. It had been so long since I’d watched it that I had almost forgotten how truly awful it was. (We kept waiting for Leslie Nielsen to say something funny, too. . .) It gave us the chance to show the kids that “scientific” language at that point just had to sound sciency, because nobody was fact-checking, and how amazing it was to see credits that listed only four guys for special effects. Yeah, it was bad, but now they understand the tie-in between FP and other “The Tempest”-based stories, the Ann Francis reference in the Rocky Horror Picture Show song, who Robbie the Robot is, and why Mom and Dad laughed so hard at “Amazon Women on the Moon”.

While we haven’t yet gotten them to reading much more of the newspapers besides comics and advice (sometimes local news or human interest pieces will attract Carolyn’s attention), we spend enough time talking with them about politics and world events, and explaining (less and less so all the time) what John Stewart or Stephen Colbert are talking about that they’re pretty savvy. Because of my fondness for blogs on the skeptical and scientific sides, I see a lot of news items about, and comments by, parents whose interest in protecting their children from the world is so intense that they want everyone else to follow their lead and get rid of anything in libraries, schools, TV, movies, and government that might taint their precious little ones’ minds. This just seems foolish to me. Just as not learning anything about cancer won’t protect you from ever getting it, not learning about the world will not make the world go away. The people who learn about cancer can do what they need to to avoid the risks, and the people who know about the world know how to protect themselves – and how to make it better. You can’t change things by pretending the bad things don’t exist. You need to understand the bad things, find out how and why they happen, and THEN you know how, not only to avoid them yourself, but perhaps also how to make things better.

At this point in my life, I know that I’m not going to be a major world influence, I’m not going to be famous, I won’t be mentioned, much less extolled, in history books. But I’ve done what I can by reading books to children who might otherwise not have had much interest in reading. I’ve taught children cool little bits of trivia to spark their creative instincts on field trips, projects, science experiments. . .I doubt that anyone but my own children will ever come back to me and say that I was an influence on an important decision in their lives, but I like to feel that somehow an adult telling them what they can do and not what they can’t could put a more positive direction on their lives than any burning, banning, or threats of damnation ever could.

So we watch all these movies, we enjoy them or ridicule them, we talk about their connections to the times in which they were made and their influence on the times afterwards, and watch as our kids’ understanding of all kinds of things grows. They’re armed not by parents who insulate and sheild them, but by their own powerful knowledge. And a pretty darned good sense of humor, too, I’d say.

And you never know what might happen. Hubby took the kids off to the water park, and I stayed home. I’m joining them later for Go-Karts and all that. The idea was that I’d have some quiet time and maybe even take out the clay. BWAHAHAHA!

I swam for a bit. The water’s perfect after all these hot days. Then I got an idea. I had put potted tropical plants around the pool to make it a bit less glaringly obvious, but you can’t really see them if you’re IN the pool. So I went to the wood pile and got some nice chunky logs and put the plants on those. But then you could see more of the blue plastic from outside of the pool. So I took the blueberries that I hadn’t gotten around to planting, put them in pots, and put those pots in between the logs. There was a space I didn’t like, still, so I took some cuttings from the butterfly bush, dipped them in rooting hormone, and potted them. Now I didn’t like the other side, so I moved a couple of other pots from around the yard, added a little more log action. While I was at it, I had four cacti and a cactus dish that needed to be put together, so I did that. Note to self – just break the little cactus pots instead of trying to pry the cacti out. Ouch. So I start cleaning up a bit and see the tent I’d bought for the kids, still in its original packaging. Oh, heck. I got the heavy duty rake and a spade, dug and leveled in the back corner until I reached a balance of even ground and being sick of digging and raking, and assembled the tent. Then back in the pool for a bit. Then showered and dressed. I have somewhere around an hour before it’s time to go.

As I was doing all this, though, I started to think about something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while, and I’m thirsty and hungry, and I can eat and drink and blog more easily than eat and drink and clay, dontchaknow.

So what is it with people trying to sell their houses around here? I know the market has gone soft everywhere, but there’s a strange reaction in these parts. Wherever I drive, I see more “For Sale By Owner” signs than realtor placards. Plus, the prices on the FSBOs is higher than the multiple listed properties. I really don’t understand this. If it’s a buyers’ market, and prices have gone down, why would you do something that would drive buyers away? If you don’t list your house, you have to market it and show it all by yourself, to a much more limited audience. Buyers will go to a realtor, who can drive them to multiple properties and tell them about the various neighborhoods, and take them through houses that meet their criteria or come close. If they are from out of state or out of town, they’re not going to want to do all the legwork themselves. Sure, they might look at the properties on a website, but they’re not going to go through multiple FSBO websites and try to schedule walkthroughs with all the different owners whose properties have nice pictures. Owners won’t be able to count on the help of realtors who might think half a commission is better than none, either. There are so many houses on the market, a realtor could show to a dozen buyers a day without needing to look outside of the MLS.

From a practical standpoint, unless you really like spending money on advertising and sitting around your house waiting for a potential buyer who might or might not show up to see the property, and having to keep everything spic and span all the time in case someone decides to pop in at a moment’s notice (and for a longer time, too, since your house will be on the market much longer than a listed house!), it makes no sense. Now, what often happens is that owners will get a market analysis to price out their homes, and use the number the realtor suggests – but list it themselves to save the commission. After all the expense they have to go to in order to sell it themselves, they might still end up with a little more than if they’d listed it. If it sells before they give up. But holeeee cow! People are listing down here for so much more than market value, it boggles the mind. A buyer gets absolutely no benefit from buying a FSBO unless it’s a bargain. Pricing a FSBO $50K above market value – heck, I’ve seen some at close to $100K above market (talk about delusional!) – is the most self-defeating thing I can imagine. Why bother trying to sell at all? Do you hate your neighbors so much that you want only someone really too stupid to be trusted with his own money to move in? Are you trying to wrangle your way out of a divorce settlement by showing the judge that you really did want to sell and split the proceeds but nobody wants to buy?

I dunno. I’ve done the house buying and selling thing a couple of times now. Making the process longer and more painful seems like a completely asinine thing to me, but maybe I’m the oddball. . .