Today's favorites

Bumper stickers sighted:

"Pro-Accordion & I VOTE!"

"At least we're doing well with the war on the environment."

Pixar movie that "everyone is talking about":

Wall-E, of course.

I saw it last night, and you know how I'm a sucker for robots in love. I kept thinking how the robot love message would prime a whole generation for having weirdly intimate relationships with robots. (Sci-fi is near reality now, folks.) I also kept thinking that the post-apocalyptic Earth Wall-E lives on is scarily realistic. Abandoned by humans, with giant towers of waste lining the sky. Waterways disappeared, a barren planet. Kudos to the people at Pixar for impressing those images on the minds of children, even those with conservative parents.

However, with my characteristic environmental pessimism, I disagree with the optimism of the latter half of the movie. It gives the message: So we'll fuck up the Earth, but at least we can escape on our giant spaceship, and then recolonize later. Even if we've gotten far stupider and fatter in the seven hundred years in between, and appear to be in no condition to do any form of work. For example: All of humanity claps when the spaceship captain manages to stand on his sausage feet and determinedly waddle forward. Then he speaks of growing "pizza plants." Perhaps there is a hidden seed bank of Domino's GM crop?

Regardless, if I had a child, I would let him watch this movie repeatedly. It's definitely cute. But the cutest part (for me) was when Marshall yelled out at the robots, "KEEP THE PLANT IN THE BOX!" and kind of thrust out his hands as if to take the plant from the screen. It was a very dramatic moment in the movie, and the plant held the future of humanity. But meanwhile, the 5 year old sitting next to us managed to contain himself.