Cowboys and Aliens (in a one-dollar theatre)

Julie and I saw the previously-mentioned movie in the dollar theatre in Raleigh tonight.  Not Daniel Craig's or Harrison Ford's best or even second best, but still a decent flick.  I left feeling a little better about the whole Cowboy/Indian misunderstanding... ("Oh, this was YOUR land?  Oops.  Well, we're already here, so...")  and I also felt a little bit of sympathy for the Aliens.  I mean, sure, they're abducting us to perform experiments to figure out the best way to wipe out our entire civilization just so they can have easier access to our gold, but who wouldn't do that in their position?  We do experiments on mice and rabbits with the justification that there's a lot of them and they don't have as sophisticated brains as we do.  Well, to a brilliant Alien, our minds are quite inferior, and we've overpopulated the planet, anyway, so picking off a few cowboys really won't make too much of a dent.  It's all about comparisons.

In the luxurious theatre that we saw the movie, the seat next to mine was broken, and about 300 people kept asking to sit next to us (the place was packed- cheap bastards, all of us) and we had to tell them the situation.  You know, not one of them thought twice about why there was a broken seat in the movie theatre.  "This seat is broken."  "Oh, okay."  How often does this happen?  What if I had said, "This seat has an invisible man sitting on it."  Would they have still just said, "oh okay"?  Or what if I had said, "This seat sometimes spontaneously combusts into flame"?  "So, is it available?"

My new job is pretty fun, except the espresso machine is TOTAL CRAP and my bosses know it.  I'm going to be PUSHING for a new one very soon.  In the mean time, I have to learn how to stop the damn machine from ruining all my lattes.

-Tim