He sat back in his overstuffed easy chair and watched the giant Space Force rocket blast off on his television screen. He smiled. It was about time America got back in space — and with the largest rocket yet! It must have cost a pretty penny, but it was worth every cent.

Tomorrow couldn't get here soon enough. Around the water cooler, everyone'd be eagerly talking about today's launch. In the past, they'd've shared the experience on social media, but that was the past. Things were better now. Great, in fact. Better the internets should be shut down than continue to spew their hateful hoaxes and lies. Some people were stupid enough to fall for anything.

He belatedly realized he wouldn't be going to work tomorrow. Work was canceled, thanks to Tommy. The jerk had come down with the Chinavirus on Friday, and the company was closed for quarantine. All the employees had been let go. Stupid Tommy. Didn't everyone know gargling a little bleach killed the virus? Oh, well. More time for golf, right?

Except that the course had been unplayable ever since The Wall had been finished and immigration had been outlawed. No one to cut the grass, they said. That's okay. He wasn't a very good golfer anyway. At least now he didn't have to lie to anyone about how many strokes he had taken; zero was the best number you could get on any hole.

The thought of exercise made him thirsty. He'd've liked a beer; all he had was the new official drink of America. There'd been an election on the issue. He'd meant to vote but couldn't take the time off from work. Heh. He had nothing but time now. It'd taken some getting used to, but vodka wasn't all bad.

The white rocket continued to slide up his television screen. So powerful, so beautiful, so white. Just like it ought to be. America sure was great again.

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I have been watching, with some amusement, the current wave of clown hysteria that is sweeping the country. The news is overflowing with examples of clown-inspired chaos in Georgia alone. An 11-year-old Athens girl took a knife to school for self-defense in case of a clown outbreak. Troup County had to close schools after kids reported clowns abducting people in unmarked vans. Here in Newnan, a traveling carnival worker was arrested for scaring people in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Things have gotten so out of hand that the White House had to address the matter in a press briefing.

Apparently, waves of "creepy clown" sightings have washed across America off and on for the past 30 years, but they have historically been written off as hoaxes. However, things are changing in the Internet Age. In social media, fear spreads faster than reason.

[EDIT: Check out AtlasObscura.com's interactive map of "creepy clown" news items in America.]

This is all mass insanity. Killer Clowns From Outer Space isn't a real thing. Why are we wasting time clowning around when a much bigger threat is on the loose? No, I'm not talking about Donald Trump. (He's a different kind of clown.) What I am talking about is deer.

The Great Deer Uprising continues unabated. The United States National Park Service says that the deer have amassed armies "more than 10 times greater" than common around the battlefields of Monocacy, Manassas, and Antietam. Once again, the fate of the Union hangs in the balance. Rather than wait for the deer armies to make the next move, the NPS is deploying sharpshooters. The bloodiest battleground in American History is set to run red again.

Once the deer are back in their proper place, then we can worry about clowns or whatever else you've got. In the meantime, humanity has a war to win.

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I think I'm on pace to see about 120 movies this year. That's down from recent years. I definitely need to devote more time to the couch. Here's the first batch of movies from March:

24. (962.) The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
Last month I complained that I didn't like adventures through the desert. Yeah. Despite having both Sean Connery and Michael Caine in the same movie, I found this boring. Oh, well.

25. (963.) The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)
Both the previous movie and this one were directed by the legendary John Huston. Both movies are well shot and edited, but both share a similar failure to develop their characters into anything other than plot devices. Looking back at Huston's filmography (The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, etc.), I see characterization certainly wasn't a problem for him early in his career, and it isn't a problem in some of his later films (Victory, Annie). Maybe the early seventies were just a rough patch for great director. Even Hitchcock struck out occasionally.

26. (964.) The Great Bank Hoax (1978)
This is a small-stakes comedy about corruption in a local bank. After watching several movies in a row with thin characterization, I really enjoyed Burgess Meredith in this.

27. (965.) Gravity (2013)
Ugh. Why are we supposed to care that Sandra Bullock gets back to earth? All she does is whine while everything mankind has ever put in space is destroyed before our eyes. I didn't think I'd like it, and I didn't. I especially didn't like that in a movie taking such pains to present the "reality" of life in space, physics was suddenly ignored so that when it came time to resolve George Clooney's character. So physics are important except when they're not? Ugh.

28. (966.) Swing Shift (1984)
It blows my mind that the same man who directed this romance directed Silence of the Lambs. Unlike that great thriller, this film meanders without much direction before just sort of ending. On an unrelated note, Goldie Hawn can act. (I had never before realized just how much Kate Hudson looks like her mother). So I guess there's that.

More to come.

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I just ran across an internet news item that reported that Japanese citizens were being scammed by companies selling sheep to people who believed that they were poodles. My usual fact checking (because my mama always told me to believe none of what I read) unearthed another report that said that the sheep-as-poodles story was a hoax. Should I be more disappointed that people can't tell the difference between poodles and sheep, or that most people don't have difficulty believing that people can't tell the difference between poodles and sheep? Is this a slur against people or poodles? (One would irritate me; the other wouldn't. I'm sure that you can guess which is which.)

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In today's newspaper, I saw an advertisement for the new movie Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters. The ad included this endorsement: "Perversely entertaining,...whups the ass of TMNT!" -- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone.

If you ever make a movie, give Peter Travers a few bucks, and he'll say something good about it for you to put in your promotional advertising. I don't know what Mr. Travers' personal taste in films is, but he seems to have something banal to say about everything, no matter how bad a movie it is. And I'm not alone in noticing this. Travers is oft called a "blurbwhore," and hollwoodbitchslap.com names their annual award to the critic most often quoted in promotional advertising the "Peter Travers Whore of the Year Award."

To get a handle on how many movies Travers shills for, take a look at the five other ads published today that used Travers' comments:
300: "Prepare your eyes for popping -- they just might fly out of their sockets!"
Disturbia: "A nail-biter. Cool stuff. Cool movie."
Grindhouse: "This tour-de-force gets you high on movies again!"
Hoax: "A devilish satire with mischievous wit."
Hot Fuzz: "A blast!"

Well, guys, perhaps you shouldn't all chose to quote Travers in the same week. It sort of weakens his endorsement if he endorses everything, doesn't it?

His blurbs tend to be very, um, visceral, clearly tailored for an audience desperate for thrills. His blurbs might not tell you anything about the movies themselves, but at least they're entertaining. Recent favorites of mine include the following:
King Kong: "What you will see will spin your head six ways from Sunday." (Ouch. Look away!)
Mission Impossible III: "The movie to beat in the race to push your pulse rate past the danger zone." (Past the danger zone? Watching this movie will kill me?)
Poseidon: "Hits the action button and never stops!" (Never stops pushing the action button?)
Rocky Balboa: "Stallone steps in the ring and every day is Christmas." (Sweet.)

(P.S. Note that Peter Travers has never reviewed the movie TMNT, at least so far as I can tell at Rollingstone.com. Therefore, how would he know if ATHF whups its ass? Sounds good, though, doesn't it, Peter.)

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