Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Bad weather in Dallas tonight. Actually it is throughout the North Texas area, but the rain is not kidding around. When I left the house earlier to pick Jenny up for dinner and a movie it was pouring and then stopped completely until I got home, some four and a half hours later. The air was calm when we left the movie theater, I dropped Jenny off and noticed lightning starting as I made my way home. I parked and got out of my car and the sirens started. There was no mad dash for my apartment, but there was no sauntering either.

I should have known there was no tornado about to blow through my apartment. The sirens are used way to frivolously. Bad weather was approaching, but it was just high rains. In a perfect world, to me, these sirens would only go off if something very disastrous is approaching. A tornado has been spotted coming for an area, a siren. The rain is going to pick up, no siren. I know they cannot track tornadoes quickly but I believe they have a general idea.

You may disagree, but this siren leniency does nothing but instill pointless paranoia. The same people who freak out and drive like morons when it is barely drizzling outside hear the sirens and become even worse. At least if they were used more sparingly, for real emergencies, their alarm would be somewhat justified.

On the other end of the spectrum there are those, like myself, who hear the siren and dismiss it as another useless noise - kind of how car alarms have become in our society. Someday we who dismiss the warning will be bitten in the ass like those around the boy who cried wolf.

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On a brighter note, we saw Coraline in 3D tonight. What a wonderful film. The stop motion animation is only outshined by the beauty of the pieces it manipulates. Neil Gaiman has written a highly imaginative story and Henry Selick adapted for the screen perfectly. I have not read the book yet, but you can bet I'll buy it now.

One crappy thing to come of this movie is the unenlightened members of the press. More than one source, including the Chicago Tribune, have referred to the film as Tim Burton's Coraline. It's bad enough that Selick had the glory stripped from him with Nightmare Before Christmas, but now he does a movie away from Burton and neither he, or Gaiman, get praise? What the hell? Do your damn research "journalists!"

Go out and see Selick and Gaiman's Coraline, preferably in 3D if it's playing around you.

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