FAKE!

The pitch made by the makers of the movie La La Land: "Picture it - a musical set in modern-day Los Angeles. We'll have a dance number at Griffith Observatory. And little scenes shot on Angels Flight, and Watts Towers, and Grand Central Market. And a spectacular opening number in a traffic jam overlooking the city. And we'll have sunshine and palm trees and John Legend. I think Rachel is going to love it." Why were the creators of this movie talking about me in the pitch for the film, you ask? Because it was obviously made for me. The tag could have been: "For Rachel. Duh." I have been spending the last 2 weeks getting over a cold so I wouldn't be That Person in the movie theater but the expelling of lungs has slowed down and I finally got to see it this weekend and they were right, I loved it. Who wants to go into the city with me for spontaneous dancing?

A note on music in movies: I get really annoyed when the movement of the musicians in a movie don't match the music that is being played. For example, when someone is playing the piano and their arms are clearly moving in the opposite direction of the notes.  It drives me bonkers and it happens in A LOT of movies. I realize all of it depends on editing but it just looks shoddy to me. Of course I don't expect actors to play the instrument but at the very least learn the basics of how it should look. So it's very high praise from me that I thought Ryan Gosling did a passing job as a jazz pianist. It was clear that he wasn't playing but it was also clear that he made a solid effort to look like he was.

Can I make a total change of subject? The other day I was watching the spacewalk on the ISS, as I do. Although they've been available for viewing online for ages NASA has recently been live-streaming them on Facebook. Which, as you would imagine, opens this experience up to a whole bunch of kooks with keyboards. I'll give you a sampling of the comments that flashed by: "Fake! The government has been lying to us about space exploration for decades! They're hiding aliens from us." "Fake! This was obviously filmed in a swimming pool." "Fake! Where's the sun?" (This was asked when the ISS orbited to the night side of the earth. It is what we like to call a shadow.) "This is actually filmed on a secret base on the moon that they don't want us to know about." I would say about 10% of the comments were like this. What can you say? People are dumb.

But also, people are magical because there was a whole group of folks who were saying, "Fake! The Earth is flat and the government doesn't want you to know that so they filmed this on earth and made a computer generated spherical earth to fool you. WAKE UP PEOPLE!"  You guys! There are people who really believe the earth is flat. In 2017. People with brains and computers and eyeballs. There's an entire society with a website. You have got to check this out. It is hilarious. They call me, you (I presume), and every other fool who believes in a round earth Globularists. Isn't that the best? They pride themselves on being radical freethinkers. I'll say! What a grand world we live in.