As I type this, though it is still technically "Opening Day" for the The Dark Knight, the film has already grossed over 18.5 million dollars and is steamrolling its way to the record books. [Update 07/19: It's now officially made $66.4 million, an opening day record. Update 07/20: The weekened still isn't quite over, and it's up to $155.4 million, breaking the all-time opening weekend record set... last year. Who says the economy is in the toilet?] And I still haven't seen it.

There was a time when I would have been first in line for this sort of thing. In fact, I stood in line for Batman in '89 in the opening day crowd while wearing Batman Chucks, a Batman T-shirt, and a Batman baseball cap studded with Batman pins. While I still have all of that stuff, I'm not about to trot it out for a movie anymore.

Am I getting old? Probably. But it's not the years, it's the mileage. More often than not, movies simply aren't providing me with anything worth watching. Should I pay $12 to be bored for two-and-a-half hours? And if experience is defined as "practical knowledge derived through observation" (which it is), I'm sure I picked up a thing or two while suffering through the utterly wretched Batman Begins three years ago.

The many favorable reviews of this latest Batman film laud the moral and philosophical aspects of the story's representation of the Joker and Two-Face as warped reflections of Batman's driven dual-identity. Been there, done that. I distinctly recall having this conversation with friends in high school. And that was most of a decade following the publication of Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which covered this territory while, unlike Christopher Nolan's movies, actually showing us Batman landing punches on his enemies as he managed NOT to kill cops or any other good guys for that matter.

Since I'm on the subject, a few more movie-related gripes:

• You want to explore someone's psyche? The Joker smiles not because he is physically deformed, but be cause he's just crazy enough to think that the sick things he does are funny.
• How can anyone fight crime while squeezed inside a suit like toothpaste in a tube? If Bale is method acting, apparently he's trying to portray a sardine.
• Can we please just stop calling him "Harvey Two-Face"? They're not called "Edward Riddler," "Oswald Penguin," or "Selina Catwoman" (you win this round, Victor Fries!), so let's just let Batman Forever fade away already, okay?
• Scarecrow, Joker, Two-Face all in one movie? Is Batman even in this thing? I guess that's why it's nearly 3 hours long: no direction.
• Batpod? Seriously? If you're just going to feature stupid vehicles, let's see some Whirly Bats.

But even I have to admit that there is good news. There is no Katie Holmes in this movie.

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The world is a fascinating place. Earlier this week, it was reported that an 11-year old boy from Kentucky sold off his worldly possessions (which at his age amounts to what? A skateboard and some video games?) to raise $400 for the Clinton campaign. The story here is not that the child was willing to raise money, but that he was willing to raise money for the Clintons.

Think about it. A child (too young even to see Iron Man without adult supervision) has pledged all of his assets to invest in the political campaign of a candidate that has already passed the point of mathematical elimination from the race (unless the Democratic party loses its senses and ignores the popular vote). He's pledging towards a campaign that has simultaneously decried excessive government spending and unbalanced budgets while running up more than $20 million in campaign debt in the past year (does anyone remember Brewster's Millions?). And, here's the kicker, he's pledging the efforts of his closet-clearing fundraising, all $400, to the campaign for a multi-millionaire.

Who are the parents that would let their child do this? When I was 11, I worked odd jobs to earn enough to buy Optimus Prime. I wasn't concerned with helping Michael Dukakis overcome stupid tank photo-ops.

The boy was quoted by the Associated Press: "I think she can do just like Bill Clinton did in the '90s and we can have a good economy,'' he says. "I think the majority of people around here are struggling due to the economy. And she can get us out of the war.'' When the 1990s ended, this boy was no more than 4 years old. The only war he's familiar with is a card game.

I've long feared that American politics was a play put on for the naive. What's more naive than an 11-year old boy who thinks that Hillary Clinton can end a war? I sure hope that this story is fiction. I'd hate to "think of the children" and be faced with such distressing facts.

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I received my Congressionally-approved $300 of Economic Stimulus yesterday alongside my income tax refund.

I've given a lot of thought about how to spend it. I decided to donate the sum to a presidential candidate's campaign fund.

No, I'm kidding. That'd be throwing my money away. I'm spending it on lottery tickets.

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Two years ago, my father decided that he wanted to start keeping bees. So he invested in a hive, a suit, and a starter swarm. This week, he finally collected his first honey, which he put into those familiar little bear-shaped squeeze bottles.

He gave me a bottle and let me sample it. The locally produced honey does indeed taste fantastic. Then he revealed that after dividing the cost of the enterprise by the number of bottles that he was able to produce, he figures that each bottle was worth about $85.

It doesn't taste that fantastic.

Maybe I'll be able to afford a bottle when costs come down. In about 5 years.

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My mother was cleaning out some old scrapbooks today and I found this ad in an issue of an 1967 The Daily Tar Heel newspaper from North Carolina:

Adjusting for inflation, those shoes should cost me over $50 today. Yet I can buy Nike-produced Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star high-tops for under $40 in local department stores now. That's a pretty good deal, really. Thank you, underaged, third-world sweatshop workers!

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Hell, it's my blog I can bitch if I want to. And it's Friday the 13th, so I'll kill someone with a machete while wearing a hockey mask if I want to, too.

PayPal really knows how to get my goat. One month ago tomorrow, I shipped a 24 pound package via USPS Economy Parcel Post to Argentina. (The contents were some Masters of the Universe figures I sold for a friend on eBay.) The buyer has grown impatient after a mere 3 weeks of waiting for an international Economy Parcel Post (read as "slow boat") package and has earlier this week opened a dispute with PayPal for the cost of the item. Of course, this means that PayPal has put a "temporary hold" on my account in the amount of the payment. If this were a $29.50 item, that's be no big deal. But it's not. It's a $295.00 item.

So now, my Paypal account is essentially useless to me until PayPal realizes that I did ship the item, the buyer is just being incredibly impatient, and I'm in the clear. My past experience with Paypal tells me that this will take about 90 days. Meanwhile, PayPal will be hassling me to pay them what I "owe" them (HA!) and I will be unable to take eBay payments through PayPal. As anyone who sells on eBay knows, this means that it is pointless to try to sell anything on eBay. Therefore, no income for me for 3 months.

Once again, let me say to you people out there: PayPal sucks. If you use it, learn to enjoy the sensation of someone grabbing you by the balls and squeezing while ramming a Louisville Slugger up your ass. Fuck you, PayPal.

(Granted, I am well aware that the problem in this case is not actually PayPal, but the dipshit who decided that economy international postage should arrive on his doorstep within 3 weeks of shipping. But since I'm not currently in the mood to travel to Argentina to avenge this disruption in my life, I'm attacking the messenger. PayPal doesn't care.)

On a completely unrelated note, why do MLB and the NFL have Breast Cancer Awareness Months? Exactly how many players in either of those leagues are female? In 2002, only 3,000 more women in the U.S. were killed by accidents than died from killer breasts. (That's less than 10 a day in a country with 300 million people.) When was the last time you heard of an Accident Awareness Campaign? Breast cancer isn't even the largest killer of women in America. It doesn't even make the top 5. Alzheimer's Disease is credited with killing more women than breast cancer. (However, a Alzheimer's Awareness Month wouldn't make much of an impression, as everyone who cared to promote it would forget about it by the time it arrived.) I suggest that breast cancer is so widely championed these days simply because it is the only one of the top ten killers of women that doesn't also kill large numbers of men.

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