Innocence and the price of adulthood.

I have this thing for old movies. Not just any old movie mind you. I'm not about to sit through some old chick flick just cause it was made in 1972, no (though I did get through Funny Face a while back). My thing is old WWII and cold war movies.

I don't know. Maybe because I'm a product of the 80's, and grew up when the evil empire was the enemy, and "The Bomb" was a reality we were all waiting to see drop. I remember drills in grade school where we hid under our desks for safety. I remember them called earthquake drills. I grew up in the Willamette Valley, and I imagine we had a couple quakes when I was growing up. We even lived in the shadow of Mt. St. Helens (I remember the drive to church the morning of May 18, 1980), but the only one I can actually remember was after I was married. You might recall the video of the meeting at Microsoft with ceiling tiles falling and lights swaying. No, I'm pretty sure "earthquake drill" was the euphemism for "we're not going to survive the blast wave anyway."

I think though, that most of us that grew up so near the end of the cold war either tiring of the eternal paranoia, or began to see through it all. I distinctly remember having quite a fascination with the USSR and Russian culture. Not a "know your enemy" fascination, but a very real curiosity about the people, the history, and basic culture. I seem to remember a difference in the Russia we were taught about, when compared to the "Evil Empire" portrayed in a lot of the movies and stories that came out of the 50's and 60's. Maybe it was the gradual liberalization of the universities; the shift toward the socialist agenda that seems to permeate secondary education. I don't know. And honestly I was far to young to care at the time. I do know that I still enjoy a good cold war spy drama, or some post-apocalyptic nuclear fallout mutant flick.

So when The Day After was on some cable movie channel, I had to set the DVR and catch it again. Steve Gutenberg in a non-Police Academy 17 role. Jason Robards, John Cullum, John Lithgow. What a great cast! Amy Madigan, whom I remember from her Oscar level performance opposite John Candy in Uncle Buck.

As I was watching this movie over a span of about 3 days (I have 3 small children and a wife, I don't' get uninterrupted time), I marveled at the story telling. Rather than starting the movie out with a car chase and an automatic weapons fight (don't get me wrong, there's always room for more machine gun fights in movies) they spent the first hour or so introducing the characters.

I think I fell asleep the last time I saw a "modern" movie that tried this tactic. "7 years to fall asleep on the couch" is the title in my circle of friends. You figure it out. There might have been a story there. All I saw were 3 hours of mountains, and the insides of my eyelids. I grew up in the Willamette Valley, I know what mountains look like. I suppose if I had spent my entire life in New York City I'd call a 45 minute helicopter pan of some mountain range "brilliant film making." Really it was a director that was far to lazy to use the cutting machine for the purpose it was designed for, and a producer that should have just slapped the director in the face. That movie needed some nuclear detonations in a bad way!

Again, you have me on a tangent. I'm reminded of a humanities professor I had at Milligan College, but that's a blog for another day.

Back to The Day After.

So I sat down this evening to finally finish the movie, and my 3 year old wanted to sit with me, so she eventually started paying a bit of attention. She began to get excited when the missles started launching.

"Two rockets."

"Those are rockets!"

"Rockets fly up in the sky!"

"Rockets are fireworks! They're pretty!"

When you look at that beautiful face so filled with joy over a couple dozen ICBM's you just want to protect her from "the end of the world as we know it" just a little while longer.

Ain't she precious?

My wife has been bugging me to put up pictures. Here's a teaser.

Hopefully I'll get www.kingdomofd.com updated in the next couple of days.

MMMM! iSmoothie.

I was directed to this at the top of the Slashdot page this morning. As much as I'm avoiding the iCrap hype, this had to be shared.

Will it Blend?

Apparently this guy puts all sorts of not-normally-blendable items into his blender and reduces them to dust.

Kinda handy to have this guy around I think.

We the People

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

If you have talked to me during June or July, you have probably heard me relate the story of how my family spends the 4th of July. If you haven't, then you're about to hear it, with a little bonus at the end.

A few years back I had the opportunity to spend the 4th with my in-laws in Montana. In the area they live, most fireworks are allowed. Needless to say, for a boy from the cities of Oregon, anything aerial is just about the coolest thing I can think of. So I can't think of a much better family tradition than getting together and blowing something up.

And so it began.

Pretty much all the guys in my extended family are fans of fireworks. And I don't mean the kind of fans that buy a hat for the team they plan on rooting for while standing in line at the stadium. No, I'm talking the kind of fan that can dress from head to toe in a particular teams gear. Not just shoes and hat, but socks, gloves, underwear, and all the trimmings. They like fireworks. They know the best places to go and get certain kinds of fireworks.

Now I had seen fireworks, and I fancied myself worldly when it came to fireworks. I mean, I hadn't actually launched an inch-and-a-half mortar myself, but I sure had fired my share of bottle rockets and Black Cats!

Well, we all spent a little too much on the pyro-technics, and invited the cousins, aunts & uncles, and a few close friends over. And I gotta say, we had a pretty respectable pile of fireworks between us.

At dusk we started burning off the fountains, and the parachutes, and setup half-a-dozen mortar tubes. And we noticed one neighbor doing the same. And the competition was on.

We'd fire off a volley, and he'd follow it with one a little larger. So we'd have to show him up a bit, and he'd up the ante on the next one. And so it went for the next 45 minutes or so.

I had so much fun that for the next few days we were talking about what we'd do next year.

And each year we've stepped it up a little more. This year the tally was about $3000 to supply the show. And what a show it was! Just under 90 minutes of pyro-technic goodness!

We've taken to blocking off a section of road to prevent people from trying to drive through the staging area, as well as general safety. We probably had between 70-80 people present to watch the show directly. However, the road all the way out of the sub-division, and about a half mile down was packed with cars. The neighbors beyond the blockade pulled their lawn chairs out to watch. Best of all, We heard about a number of cars that stopped in the local department store parking lot to watch the show.

My kids were very excited for the show this year. They started asking about it at about 6pm. It was everything they could do not to spontaneously combust from the anticipation. I hope we didn't disappoint them.

But this morning I had a wonderful opportunity to talk with my son about why we do all of this.

He knew we were doing the fireworks to celebrate the fourth of July, but didn't really understand why the 4th is important. I got a chance to talk to him about America's birthday, and how the Founding Fathers wrote our constitution, and started this country to protect freedom and liberty. About how we light off fireworks to celebrate the freedoms we have in America.

He's six, so I'm not sure how much he really understood, as his idea of freedom is choosing chocolate milk in his Happy meal. But he listened, and I got to tell my son a little bit about the history of this great country.

If you haven't, take a few minutes to talk with your children about why we celebrate the birth of America. You might be surprised by how much they understand. And they just might grow up to be a driving force for political change in this country.