Eye update …
In a bizarre twist, I awoke this morning with my left eye really stinging! I went and rinsed it out (which did not help), tried to rest it (which did not help), and took a shower hoping the steam would help … it didn’t. Anyway, several hours later my eye was very inflamed and still stung, so Lisa asked me to go to a clinic to have a doctor look at it.
After a bit of a bad start, eventually she drove me to the hospital emergency room herself. There we waited over three (3) hours just to see a doctor! He checked my eye out with a cotton swab. Then a nurse came and attached a plastic cup (like an oversized contact lense) to my eye and ran a tube from the cup up to a saline bag, which really rinsed it out! Then the doctor came back and used a special dye stick and ultraviolet light, detected the cause of the problem – two tiny scratches on my cornea. The nurse then gave me an antibiotic gel for my eye and patched it with white gauze.
Total time in the emergency room, from when we entered the building to when we left … four (4) hours.
On the way home I got Lisa to stop at a drugstore so I could get an eye patch. I’m wearing it now, as I write this. Cool! I look like a pirate! [If we go and see Pirates of the Caribean later, I'll look like a big fan of the movie or something.]
T2 Review
Thursday, Lisa and I went to see Terminator III: Judgement Day. I had been told different things about the movie. Many critics complained that it was way too “80′s” and looked very dated next to modern action movies like The Hulk and Matrix: Reloaded. My brother, Tammer, commented that it was a rehash of the plot from T2 but that it was also a lot of fun and worth the money.
So, we go see the movie and I agree with all of the above! It was a rehash of T2, with a few minor twists. It was also a little dated, but the action scene where the T-X is driving a giant crane truck and tearing things up … tre’s cool! Finally, my brother was basically right, it was a big, fun, action movie and more then worth the price of admission. Not something I’d see more then once, but not that bad, either.
There was one philosphical point I’d like to make, though. In the first movie, The Terminator, an important part of the plot was the inevitability of the future. Skynet (the super AI that wants to destroy humanity) was trying to change the past by sending a T-101 unit (played by Arnold) back in time to kill the mother of the human resistance movement. But, the AI was doomed to fail – the past had already happened and even it’s attempt was part of the situation that precipitated the event that ultimately had to happen.
In T2, they pushed a different theme. In this movie, T3, it was symbolized by the epitaph on Sarah Conner’s grave ~ No Fate But What We Make. The point of the second movie was to prove that free will could change fate, the future was not already written, it was still being written.
In this, the third movie, we have a return to the attitude in the first. Sarah Conner was wrong. All she was able to do was postpone the inevitable. What was fated to happen, would happen, and all the attempts to change that were actually part of the chain of events that eventually lead up to it.
I may know why.
The first Terminator movie came out in 1984, during the cold war with the USSR. Many people believed that diletante could not be maintained forever. The cold war would have to eventually become a hot war – and that means nuclear war. Therefore the idea that a nuclear apocalypse lay in mans future did seem ‘fated’ to many thinkers. Then, in 1991, USSR changed radically with the failed coup in August and eventual collapse in December (see this CIA document).
When the second Terminator movie came out, in 1991 – the same year as the collapse of the Soviat Union, attitudes were much different. Maybe the horror of nuclear annihilation would not be mankinds fate. Maybe there was some, small hope, that humans could change the inevitable. The second movie certainly carries that hope.
This begs the question, why a return to fatalism in the third movie? USSR has not been our enemy for over 12 years and everyone acknowledges that the USA is the worlds sole remaining superpower. We won the cold war, and without the predicted heat-up. I think it is because the world is now, much more complex and even more dangerous. With the attack on 9/11 and John Ashcroft saying publicly that another attack is inevitable … a return to the seige mentality of the 80′s is not that surprising.
In a way, the terrorist threat is much worse then the Soviet threat. Not only can we ever be 100% safe from terrorist attacks, but reprisals and the fear of reprisals (the doctrine of MAD that shielded us during the cold war) have no effect on our new enemies. How do we stop them? They are powered by an idea and killing an idea is much, much harder then killing people.
Maybe war is inevitable, maybe another attack like 9/11 is also. But, unlike the protaganists of T3 I agree with Sarah Conner … the future is NOT written … we are still writing it.
