Juno

My previous post about surrogate motherhood brought to mind the movie Juno, which we saw Friday night. In it, a 16-year old girl (Juno) gets pregnant and has a lot of tough choices to make. Abortion? Adoption? Get married? Raise the child herself? How to tell her parents? Among others. As she struggles to make the best choices (and granted, at least one of those is water under the bridge at this point) Juno goes about it in a pretty light-hearted and sharp-witted way that makes it hard not to like her. Plus there's a pretty cool mix of music to go along with it. All in all, my wife would say it was "really good!" (she wants to by it) but I can't go that far. I'll say it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

This is derifter (not Les Nessman) saying so long, and may the good news be yours.

Rent-A-Womb

This article discusses the (disturbing?) trend of Indian women becoming surrogate mothers for commercial reasons. It raises all sorts of questions from many different angles. In a very general way, I think I'm cautiously okay with it, provided that the contracts would be binding, and that the pregnancies are regulated consistently to ensure the health of the babies, mothers, etc.
Something that caught my eye was a question in the article's sidebar that read, "Are men becoming obsolete?" I thought that was funny. If there were no men, who would do all the work? I should go ask my wife about that.

Buffalo Wild Wings

Dat's right. We bad.














My brother and me.














We bad.

The Golden Compass Again

We made it out to see the new movie, The Golden Compass on Friday, and I gotta say it was pretty good. If you (like me) haven't read the books, you better get there on time and pay attention. Otherwise you'll spend a lot of time trying to figure out who's who and what's going on. If you plan on bringing the kids, keep the PG-13 rating in mind: There are some parts that young kids would find scary, and while the violence isn't graphic, there's quite a bit of it.

I wrote a little bit about the controversy surrounding this movie in an earlier post. I don't think the anti-God message is as strong as I'd heard it was, but it is there. I think you would pick up on it even if you weren't looking for it, but I say that as someone who went there looking for it. Rather than anti-God or anti-Christian even, the story needed a villain for Lyra (the heroine) to triumph over. It turns out that the Magisterium, which is apparently "The Church" is that villain. It's not so surprising that an atheist author would portray The Church as a body of money-hungry and power-hungry control freaks, who are the enemies of free will and free thought. That's not a unanimous view of the church in our world, but it's not that uncommon, and this never claimed to be a Christian movie. I think it's unfortunate that religion is portrayed that way in the movie, because the real church doesn't need any more bad publicity or people associating the church with bad people they need to avoid.

Having said all that, we did enjoy this flick. I read in an article somewhere that the awesome armored ice bears are loosely based on me, being as big and bad and fearless as I am! (cough)
I wouldn't mind commenting on some more specific scenes, but I don't want to post any spoilers. And I would fight an ice bear to get a voice like Sam Elliott's!

This is derifter (not Les Nessman) saying so long, and may the good news be yours.

Cocky Is As Cocky Does

The big game this week in the NFL is the 9-3 Steelers trying to keep the 12-0 Patriots from achieving a perfect 16-0 season. I'm hoping they do, and I know Josh is hoping they do, but Anthony Smith of the Steelers is sure they will! That sort of thing always adds even more fun to a game like this. I can't wait.