Eclipse

How anxious am I to dive into the Philando Castile drama? I’ll put it this way. I have spent the last few days watching and re-watching all five movies from the Twilight saga. I think I watched Eclipse like three times. Insert gag reflex here.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’d rather drink molten lava than suffer through a stupid, cheesy, over-the-top, vomitorious sap-fest about some goofy teenager’s meaningless love triangle, especially when it’s salted with sixth-grade-level special effects. Well, apparently that still ranks higher on the list than actually dealing with events of the Castile variety. So, either I am subconsciously lamenting the fact that adolescent lycanthropes and the undead have more exciting social lives than I do, or I’m desperately grabbing at anything that could somehow eclipse the black-people-and-cops debate, even if only for two hours at a time.

Thank goodness the new Transformers movie came out yesterday, so at least now I’ve got some upgraded special effects to binge-watch. And I can get out of the house while I’m at it.

Controversial police shootings are my… they’re just… I can’t… there are no words to really convey what they are. I’ve used this blog as a whining post before whenever my two sets of loved ones predictably part like the Red Sea and spar from a distance with me in the middle. Like Bella says in one of the cheesiest slices of the Twilight cheese-a-thon, “from now on, I’m Switzerland, okay?”

Any time there’s a controversial officer-involved shooting, it happens. And I mean, like clockwork. These folks sing the “it’s open season on black people” song, and those folks likewise revert to the usual tropes: “cops deserve to go home at night,” “y’all need to quit whining and take responsibility for your own actions,” or (my favorite) “that guy [meaning the dead person] wasn’t exactly an angel.”

It all just makes me want to take my dogs and move to Antarctica. And I f*cking hate the cold.

I guess I’ll have to say something about the Yanez verdict at some point. Just gimme a minute. Meanwhile, check out what NRA darling Colion Noir had to say about the whole situation on Facebook. In short, Noir the Attorney says the not-guilty verdict was probably warranted under the applicable legal standards, but Noir the Human says Castile shouldn’t have had to die.

I am very curious what the NRA leadership thought of Colion Noir’s post, since they’re usually so quick to trot him out as their prized poster child. The organization has taken some heat for being conspicuously silent on the whole ordeal, even despite promising early on that it would “have more to say” after the facts got out. So far zippo, at least as far as I’ve seen.

However, lots of people did have lots to say about Noir’s post. The comments and shares number in the thousands and are still accumulating. And while I normally try to steer clear of comments, I did catch a whiff in this instance. Funny how fast so many former Noir fan-boys suddenly turned on him. It’s cool and hip to be in the Noir Club until he veers even ever-so-slightly off the talking points. Last week he was a refreshing new perspective, but now he’s a racist racial-justice-peddling race-baiter. Most of the dissenters (of the ones I saw) didn’t even acknowledge Noir’s ultimate conclusion that the Yanez verdict was probably well-founded.

Okay, my soap box is starting to buckle, so I’ll go back into hiding for a while. Maybe after sufficient doses of cinematic escapism I’ll work up the strength to delve into the Castile case a little further. For now, I’ll just fantasize about blotting out the sun and transforming.