Happy Fourth of July!

Or "Happy Holidays," for those of you who can't stand patriotism.

This will be a short enrty and the last entry for a week or so, as I'm travelling north to visit the in-laws, and Mrs. Cornell has no patience for vacation blogging. I return to real life a week from Monday, and I'll likely return to regular blogging then, too. I may be able to sneak in an entry or two when she's not looking over the next week, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Enjoy your Independence Day, and please don't abandon me altogether whilst I'm away.

Wall-E: Avoiding the Lorax

I went and saw Wall-E yesterday with the kids, and the proof that Pixar has made another winner was that the flick held Stalliondo’s undivided attention for almost the entire movie. (He got fidgety near the end.) I ended up liking the film a whole lot more than I thought I would, probably because I was bracing myself for a high-tech version of The Lorax, a story that makes me wretch just thinking about it.

Who could forget the colorful piece of bile that is The Lorax? It’s Dr. Seuss’ environmental screed about a fluffy busybody that wants to shut down the Thneed industry. Thneeds, which everyone needs, are made out of Truffula trees, and the Lorax speaks for the Truffula trees, doncha know, but the Onceler is chopping all of them down and choking the rivers and leaving a desolate wasteland, forcing the Lorax to lift himself by his buttocks into the sky, leaving behind a platform that says, pretentiously, “Unless…”


It’s preachy, didactic crap that makes no sense. I mean, come on! Ol’ Onceler would be replanting Truffulas all along the way so as to keep the Thneed industry in business and make sure his product line never stopped moving. People fail to understand that those who make their living off the land have a vested interest in ensuring that the land remains profitable – which means keeping it in good, fertile condition. The government and the tree huggers want us to abandon the land to its own devices, but the results aren’t great. Believe me, I’ve tried that technique in my own backyard, and it doesn’t work well.

(As a tangent, I should note that My Esteemed Colleague once protested the removal of a grass island in the middle of his street by sitting in front of a bulldozer and reading The Lorax. Now that would have been a sight to see.)

Anyway, The Lorax is, I think, the gold standard for maudlin environmental claptrap, and by expecting a similar dose of green guilt, I was relieved to discover that wasn’t really what Wall-E was trying to do. It’s there if you look for it, though, especially in the idea that it’s unfettered capitalism that will do us in. The world has been co-opted by a massive corporation called “BuyNLarge,” run by a president played, in live action, by the brilliant Fred Willard, and the corporation also runs the government, too.

As if the problem we face is that capitalism is running wild! We’re hobbling capitalism every chance we get, all around the globe.

And capitalism is far better for the environment than Obama-style centralized command-and-control government. Anyone remember Eastern Europe in the Iron Curtain days? The egalitarian communists were far greater polluters than we decadent Westerners. So it’s silly to fear a metastasized Wal-Mart taking over the world.

There. Moaning over. Because Wall-E uses that as a backdrop to tell a very simple story about one lonely soul who finds true love. And that’s really what interests the screenwriters, so it doesn’t really matter what the backstory is. The character of Wall-E is remarkably expressive, and the movie is at its most powerful in the first act, when he and his lady love, Eve, are essentially the only “living” souls onscreen. Can a movie with only two characters and no real dialogue really hold the attention of a three-year-old? Yes. That’s a colossal accomplishment.

The movie falters somewhat as we leave what remains of Earth and rejoin the human race in outer space – I’ll wander into mild spoiler territory from here on out, so skip to the end if you want to avoid any and all plot info – because suddenly it’s not just about Wall-E and Eve, it’s about the fate of humanity. I found that distracting. I didn’t really care if humankind found its way again – I just wanted to know what was going on with Wall-E and Eve. In this sense, the movie almost fell prey to what I call The American President Syndrome, which I will explain quickly.

You remember The American President, don’t you? It was a movie where Michael Douglas was a widower version of Bill Clinton who falls for a lovely lobbyist in the form of Annette Bening. The whole thing was billed as a romance, but it’s a bait-and-switch. Because to win his lady love, he has to appear before the press corps and give a ten-minute speech featuring highlights from Michael Dukakis’ Greatest Hits, including praise of the ACLU, a defense of flag burning, gun control, and, of course, reducing carbon emissions. You realize by then, if you didn’t before, that this was the filmmaker’s agenda all along. Oh, sure, they’ll throw in a sappy romance because that will get you into the theater, but it’s just a spoonful of sugar to make the bitter leftist medicine go down.

(It’s interesting to note that Aaron Sorkin, writer of The American President, brought the same concept to TV with The West Wing, promoting movie Chief of Staff Martin Sheen to TV President and abandoning the romance in favor of dramatized DNC talking points. Is there really any question as to what story he wants to tell?)

Wall-E almost goes down that road as humanity is forced to come to terms with its failures, but, thankfully, it never fully succumbs. Even amid the commentary, there’s a beautiful extended sequence in outer space featuring two robots, a fire extinguisher, and static electricity that’s as magnificent a silent love scene as has ever been put to film. And even after the fate of humanity has been settled, there’s a final scene between Eve and Wall-E that resolves the story that matters, the story that never gets fully subordinated to Lorax-style greenhouse gaseousness.

Yes, Wall-E has some dumb ideas, but its heart is always in the right place. It’s Pixar’s second-best film – after The Incredibles, of course. Needless to say, it’s a movie worth watching.

________


I’m done reviewing the movie. I’m now going to talk about something tangential, something in which my wife had absolutely no interest when I tried discussing it with her last night.

I want to say how cool it was to have them use those excerpts from Hello, Dolly throughout the film. That’s Michael Crawford, he of Phantom of the Opera fame, trying unsuccessfully to mask his English accent and sing “Put On Your Sunday Clothes,” a delightfully sappy old tune that I once sang as a solo for the Kids of the Century long, long ago. I know all the words and was singing along – it’s hard to sing the line about “A lovely lilt that makes you tilt your nose,” though, because the L's get all cluttered together.

Lest you get any mistaken ideas about renting the whole Hello, Dolly movie, let me disabuse you of that notion right now. The movie version stinks. They ditched Carol Channing – the quintessential Dolly Levi who, if she’s not dead, is probably still touring with the show – in favor of – *shudder* - Barbara Streisand, who sucks. I saw Carol Channing play Dolly live back in the early Eighties, and she was magnificent. Babs blows.

The end.

Stallion Cornell: Automotive Bonehead

So remember how Mrs. Cornell said she was happy about being married to me 364 days out of the year?

Yesterday may very well have been day 365.

It began with our Suburban stalling in the garage. The battery was dead, so I needed to jumpstart the thing with our Camry. The problem is that the garage is filled with bicycles, so I thought it would be easier to roll the Suburban out of the garage than it would be to move 150 bikes. It was a simple enough thing to get the car rolling, and my plan was to jump in the driver’s side and hit the brakes when it reached the right point.

The problem was that I left the door open too long and it caught the side of the garage door on the way out, wedging the Suburban up against the wall. It was an unpleasant thing, but I didn’t realize the enormity of the damage until later. (That’s called foreshadowing. It’s a literary device. See, even in my hour of despair, I always write good.)

I was able to jump the car where it was and drive it forward back into the garage, and the door closed without incident, although it seemed to catch a little as it did. I unwisely decided to keep my mouth closed about the whole thing, as I didn’t want to call attention to my own boneheadedness. It turned out to be a wasted effort, anyway, because the battery died again and the whole car had to be towed to the dealership. The battery was under warranty, so Mrs. Cornell got a rental, they fixed it all up, and all was well.

It was when Mrs. Cornell went to pick up the car that the trouble really started.

“Someone has tried to break into our car,” she said. Apparently, the door was out of alignment and it was unbearable to drive the thing on the freeway, because the wind whistled past you, and you can actually see the sky through the crack in the door. The mechanic who fixed the battery had noticed the point of impact on the top of the door and assumed the thing was jarred out of whack by a botched break-in.

I’m not proud of what I did next, which was nothing. I let Mrs. Cornell tell me the story and then hung up, unsure of how to approach the problem. Surely the door would have to be fixed, but we’re driving the thing up to Washington on Thursday, so I thought we’d have to wait until our return to take care of it. That would buy me enough time to muster up the courage to tell her about my little maneuver in the garage.

It was about a half hour later that I called her back. I began the conversation by saying “Nobody tried to break into our car.” And then I clumsily related the rolling door episode. Mrs. Cornell was rightfully upset, and she told me that she’d already filed a claim with our insurance company based on the idea that the car had been vandalized. So I had to call Progressive back and tell them, no, it wasn’t a vandal; it was a bonehead. Thankfully, no one seems interested in prosecuting me for attempted insurance fraud, although Mrs. Cornell was none too pleased.

Paradoxically, she’s less upset now, because she got in a fender bender this morning in a parking lot, which demonstrates that I don’t have the monopoly on vehicular flubs. This is surely going to do very interesting things to our insurance rates, but, thankfully, I think our marriage will survive.

I’m a bonehead. Did I mention that earlier?

Mrs. Cornell Tells All

Mrs. Stallion’s sister, code name T, is compiling the stories of how all the in-laws met. I told this story in two controversial blog posts - one here and one here -  so I thought you might enjoy her side of the story. My editorial comments are in brackets.

___________

Okay - where to begin. Well, the first time Stallion and I met he proposed to me. Wisely, I turned him down.

I met Stallion a couple of weeks after starting school at USC in the fall of 1992. I had already heard a truckload about him, because my roommate J had a huge crush on him and that's all she could talk about. Now, my roommate was many things, including being really weird, so I didn't expect too much from this guy.

[Editorial note from Stallion: See? Her roommate dug me! Look how desirable I was! Actually, I don’t want to dis her roommate, as she was a nice enough girl, but the romance thing with her just wasn’t happening. It made things awkward when we started dating, because we’d end up smooching with J in the other room. Very tacky on our part.]

So a bunch of people from the single's ward were going to Bugs Bunny on Broadway at the Hollywood Bowl and invited me to come along and since I was new and had no friends, I went. Stallion was sitting by some freshman who apparently was also a theatre major and I guess they were having a contest of who could make the bigger fool out of themselves so they started propositioning all the women within shouting distance. First, asking for dates and then with marriage proposals. I got one of the proposals. He doesn't even remember asking me, so apparently I was not the only fish in the sea. All I could think of was that I REALLY didn't fit in because everybody else was laughing at Stallion and just thought he was the funniest thing alive and I thought he was just obnoxious, poorly dressed (he was wearing some multi-patterned plaid shirt over a rolling stones t-shirt), and way too skinny.

[Stallion editorial note: I don’t think I had a Rolling Stones T-shirt at the time. Might have been a Springsteen T-shirt, except I didn’t wear my old Springsteen T-shirts by then. I did, however, sport the open-button-down-shirt-over-t-shirt look, so I think her memory is reasonably accurate. And I was very, very skinny.]

We attended the same ward so our paths crossed every Sunday, but we didn't say much to each other. He did teach Gospel Doctrine and I was quite impressed there. I could tell he was quite a smarty pants and I started to appreciate his offbeat sense of humor. (I still don't think yelling marriage proposals is even a tad bit funny).

[Stallion editorial note: If they get laughs, they’re funny.]

At Christmas I went home and I remember talking to A about some of the people I had met at USC. Stallion was one of the people who came up and she asked why I wasn't dating him. It hadn't even crossed my mind until then, but I think that may have planted a seed.

[A is Mrs. Cornell’s militant leftist sister who I once took, without telling her in advance, to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Good times.]

So when I got back after Christmas break, I got an invitation to a wedding reception of a friend from BYU that was being held at UCLA. It was a ring ceremony as well, so I didn't want to sit there alone and I really wanted to go see my friend, so I started trying to figure out who to ask to go with me. My roommate was busy. I was a bit embarrassed to take some of my PT friends because then I would have to explain the whole "ring ceremony" thing (I know - lousy missionary). Anyways, my roommate suggested Stallion because he wouldn't take it as a come on, just a nice platonic night out. So I asked and he said he would and it just turned out really fun. I know we got lost and missed the whole ring ceremony. We only talked to my friend for a second, but we talked on her wedding video (which she showed me years later), and then I think we left and went home. I remember he opened my door for me, which I thought was very polite, and then he proceeded to crawl across my lap to his seat. Yeah, my hubby is nothing if not a gentleman. But we really hit it off and we talked for a long time before he dropped me off. His passion for politics was quite fun - I was a big Ross Perot supporter at that time so we really got into it.

[I know, I know. I married a Perot supporter. Scary. She’s repented since then.]

Anyways, he called me back a couple of days later and asked me out again. That time he took me to this great little hole in the wall restaurant and then out to the Santa Monica pier. It was such a great date. I thought he was so original. (Needless to say, I didn't know he took all his dates to the same places. The first 2 dates were great - and then it was nothing but dinner and a movie, but I was hooked by then).

[Yeah, I had three dates pretty well planned out through trial and much error. I didn’t have much occasion to proceed on to a fourth.]

We had a few rocky spots after that - like when he tried to kiss 3 women in the same day, but some how we got through those and got hitched. And 364 days out of the year I'm pretty dang happy about that.

[I only kissed two girls, although I was aiming for three. And I should be happy with the 364 day average.]

Second Amendment Thoughts

Gun rights advocates are cheering the welcome ruling from the Supreme Court yesterday that affirmed that the Second Amendment hasn't been repealed. That's a very good thing, and it's nice to know that the basic rights embodied in our constitution still survive - but just barely. 

What's terrifying is that this right was one vote away from disappearing altogether. 

That's just flabbergasting to me. Amending the Constitution is supposed to be an arduous, torturous process, with two thirds of the House and Senate and three quarters of all state legislatures having to agree to do such a thing. Yet we've reached a point where five people in black robes can amend the Constitution at will, depending on their mood swings or what they had for breakfast. Four of them - four! - believe they have the authority to essentially disregard the plain language of the Constitution because they don't like it. And one more - Anthony Kennedy - goes whichever way the wind blows, so now it's illegal to give child rapists the death penalty, and terrorists at Gitmo essentially get the same legal treatment as US citizens. 

So the law is not something that has to pass two houses of Congress and get signed by the president.  It's not even the plain language of the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment, for instance, has been completely ignored for decades. And the Second Amendment was just a hairsbreadth away from going down the same road. 

The law is whatever Anthony Kennedy says it is. 

That's tyranny. And it's wrong. It needs to stop. 

There needs to be some kind of check on judicial power. Congress ought to be able to override a bad Supreme Court decision with a two-thirds vote, the same way they override a presidential veto. Because even a real live Constitutional Amendment can be ignored by arrogant judges with no respect for anything but their own hubris. 

The next president will almost certainly replace Justice Stevens and probably Justice Ginsberg, too. Neither Obama nor McCain will appoint anyone who will move the court in the direction of actually adhering to the law. We need more Scalias, but the one we've got ain't getting any younger. What if we lose him? It's unlikely that we'll have the opportunity to replace him with anyone remotely comparable, and if we lose Scalia - or Roberts, or Alito, or Thomas - we lose the Second Amendment forever. 

I just hope the corpse of  Jacques Cousteau realizes all this after he sweeps into office. 

Newborn Twins

So I recently got a Facebook message from a high school friend telling me that her sister, another high school friend, has just had twins, and she asked if I could pass along any pointers.

The answer is no.

It’s not because I’m withholding information; it’s that there’s nothing I can say or do to make the experience any easier. Dealing with a newborn baby is hard work. Dealing with two newborns is like getting hit in the head repeatedly with a large metal object.

In the first place, you never sleep. Ever. I should note that since my wife has nursed all of our children, I’ve had it pretty easy with most of them. The deal was that I would get up when the baby cried, change the diaper, and then hand the baby over to the parent with breasts. It’s times like that where being male really comes in handy.

With two babies, all bets are off. They took turns nursing, which means I always had to feed one of them a bottle. That’s why, over the course of the first six months of their lives, I slept for a total of seventeen minutes.

I had a friend who also had twins, and the way they handled this was that he and his wife took care of both babies on alternate nights. That way, one night of hell was the price for a subsequent good night’s sleep. It just so happened that on one my friend’s nights, nothing he did was able to keep the baby from crying. The bottle, the gentle jiggling, the shushing, the swaying back and forth – none of it was having any effect whatsoever.

It got so bad that his wife finally roused herself to come in and see what was going on. What she discovered was a bleary-eyed husband who was too tired to realize that he had left the baby in the crib. He was trying to stick a bottle into a pillow.

I have twin sisters as well as twin sons, so I once asked my father how he and Mom coped with two newborns at the same time. “Our only goal was to keep them alive,” he answered. Believe me, that’s a higher threshold than it seems, and miraculously, he succeeded. So did we. Corbin and Cornelius are both seven years old now, and they’re a whole lot of fun. Once they started sleeping, pooping in toilets, and feeding and dressing themselves, life gets a whole lot easier.

About a year ago, I started digitizing old VHS movies to transfer them to DVD, and we stumbled on some footage of the boys as toddlers, pawing their way around the furniture of our St. George house. At that moment, both Mrs. Cornell and I felt a sudden wave of exhaustion as all the memories that we’d blocked out of our minds came rushing back to the fore. In many ways, it’s nice to have had one more baby after the twins, because we’re able to appreciate all the joys of infancy without falling asleep face first in the soup.

If I ever find out I’m having triplets, I’m going to head for the hills.

Beware of Exercise

Update: The group “One Dozen Strong for Jacques Cousteau for President” now has 16 members! Nothing can stop us now, except Mr. Cousteau’s continued French deadness.

Primary elections here yesterday – my friend Mark Walker lost his race for state treasurer, which is really too bad, as his opponent went out of his way to smear him and it worked. The more earth-shattering news is that Jason Chaffetz unseated six-term congressman Chris Cannon, one of the good guys in Congress who didn’t deserve to be ousted. I don’t think this bodes well for Utah or the nation at large.

I don’t want to talk politics anymore. Too depressing.

I’ve lost over twelve pounds these past two months as a result of diet and exercise – WAY too much exercise – and I’m close to my personal goal of having my chest stick out further than my gut. That’s never been the case at any time in my life, due largely to the fact that even when my gut was relatively tiny, my pecs were even tinier. So I’m currently in the best physical I’ve ever been in, which is really, really sad, if you think about it for too long.

My wife teased me about how much I would moan and complain after my personal training sessions, which involve five minutes of one-minute exercises and then a single minute of rest. This sequence consists of a circuit, and the goal is to complete five circuits per session. Each rest minute goes by at lightning speed, whereas each exercise minute lasts about fourteen years. So Mrs. Cornell took to calling me “Rest Boy,” because she’s a tough physical therapist who doesn’t put up with crap from her patients. I learned this firsthand when I broke my arm about six years ago, and she, as my own personal therapist nursing me back to health, dubbed me the whiniest patient she’s ever had.

Then she came with me to one of the classes.

This is a great thing, because on the rare occasions that someone else is in the class, it means the trainer can’t focus entirely on me. As such, I can slack off occasionally when he’s not looking. It was also great because she was forced to concede that the exercises were quite brutal, and even though she’s in much better shape than I am, it was quite a workout for her, too.

Bottom line: she doesn’t call me “Rest Boy” anymore. Although she probably will after she reads this post.

The hardest exercises are the ones that don’t require repetition, just sheer endurance. Squats and curls and all the aerobic stuff can vary in intensity, but that’s not true with, say, a wall sit, where you’re forced to bend your knees with your back to the wall and put your hand in the air, holding that position for what feels like an eternal sixty seconds. We’ve taken to punishing our kids with wall sits, and initial results are encouraging thus far.

Or planking. Planking sucks, man. That’s when you get down on your elbows and hold your body still, like a plank, for one of the longest minutes of your life. Side planks, where you do the same thing, only on your side, are just as awful.

The Superman may be the worst of all, though. You lie on your stomach and strike a “Superman” pose, lifting your arms and legs above the ground as if you’re flying. But trust me, you’re not – gravity becomes a major, major issue.

This morning’s exercises were especially wicked because I was up twice with three-year-old Stalliondo, who had severe diarrhea in the middle of the night. I shouldn’t complain – his nocturnal crapping saved our lives on a fiery Christmas night – but it put me in a crankier mood than I normally am when I’m Supermanning.

This is the best time of the week, though. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, it’s the longest time before more exercise.