You cheered for garbage.

So I saw this new clip from a deleted scene from a Star Wars movie (okay, it's Return of the Jedi; I'm just trying to seem too cool for Star Wars) where we see Luke ("Luuuuuke") use a sonic screwdriver to tighten the thingies on his lightsaber, like it needed new D batteries or something. (I would have linkyed to the clip, but it done been taken down already.)

And the audience is cheering, "Oh, Yeah!" "Woo!" as they watch the hooded figure appear to jiggle this and twist on that.

They're cheering over a deleted scene. Deleted. Cut. Unfit to be in the initial release of the film. Garbage.

Directors cut scenes from movies for different reasons, for time, for pacing, because they don't reveal any new information, whatever. But it was cut and thrown away. When they were editing this in 1982 nobody thought, "Hey, I'll save this for the Laserdisc."

Remember, Return of the Jedi is the movie with Ewoks.

So if Ewoks are considered Good for the final cut of Return of the Jedi, then this deleted scene must really be crap.

But it just goes to show the hold that "new" has over people. We want everything first, before anyone else. So we celebrate crap because we got it first. It doesn't matter that the creator thought it wasn't worthy of the final product and threw it away.

MY GENERATION: You know, I saw Return of the Jedi in the theater during its original run.

THIS GENERATION: But we saw the scene that Lucas held back because he thought you sucked too much to deserve seeing it. He gave you Ewoks, but he saved this for us.

MY GENERATION: Touché. He gave us Princess Leia in a metal bikini, but Ewoks, yeah, George Lucas really must have hated us.

NERD ALERT.

I guess you've seen this, "Improv Everywhere Brings “Star Wars” to NYC Subway."

Isn't it cool that Princess Leia is reading a book! An actual book. I mean, R2-D2 had a built-in ereader device, I guess, since she stored plans in him. Maybe she had a whole series of Pirate Meets Princess ebooks stored there...

But here is an honest to goodness print book, Galactic Rebellion for DUMMIES.

FYI: GalaxyCat.org shows 5 copies of Galactic Rebellion for DUMMIES in the Alderaan Library System, but 3 of those have been marked MISSING/VAPORIZED and the remaining 2 copies on Delaya are checked out.

****

This has been a TEST of the Emergency NERD Broadcast System. The NERDS of your area in voluntary cooperation with the Federal, State and local authorities have developed this system to keep NERDS informed in the event of a NERDmergency.

***

Star Wars events are coded RED on the NERD Advisory System.

What the hell was the Annoyed Librarian talking about?

There's a little game I like to play called, What the hell was the Annoyed Librarian talking about?

There's a another game I like to play called The Stormtrooper interrogates Princess Leia which begins with the familiar line:

"Aren't you a little, uh, naked, for a Stormtrooper?"

But that's another story.

I don't know if you read The Annoyed Librarian blog, but she posts stuff and lots of people comment. I mean lots. She could post her grocery list and get 85 comments. By comparison, the.effing.librarian usually gets none, zero.

On October 29, I left the following comment on her blog:

just curious, but after how many comments does the thread take on its own life independent of the original post? here, I think it's 14.

So what I like to do is not read her post, but jump directly to the comments and scroll down to somewhere in the middle and read, often something like this:

"Marcia was an awesome cheerleader until that football hit her in the nose."

And I think, WTF was AL blogging that day? So I scroll back up to see that the topic was something about libraries and kitties making people feel good about themselves. Of course.

There's something positive to be said about being an unpopular blogger; I don't get confused when I read my own blog. I don't have to read weird crap and wonder how all these idiots found my site. I assume people clicked here by accident looking for pictures of naked librarians or library related sex toys or whatever goofy googly search got them here. And then they left the site just as they found it, like climbers of Mount Everest who take their poop back down with them in tiny bags. My site is a well-preserved monument to me.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a naked Stormtrooper here to see me.

You gotta listen to your heart

So I was taking a shower this morning (really? you've got to stop doing that; people come close if you smell nice), and I started wondering about the state of the world.

And I realized that Star Wars is right.

Star Trek pretended to solve all of our problems. And they were always trying to get other worlds to join the Federation. The Federation was sooo superior to other cultures. Even after TOS, some races still wouldn't join up and support the cause:

“Go to hell, Picard," you can hear the spacethingy say, “now when I get sick, I get to stay home, relax, and watch Zontarian Idol, and you want to take that away from me! Get off my planet. Do you think your photon torpedoes can stop me before I plant my three-toed web foot up your butt? You bald jerk.”

So Star Wars got it right. The bad news is that we're living on the Death Star. And there's nothing we can do about it.

Like they said in Clerks:

(The Blue-Collar Man joins them.)
Blue-Collar Man: Excuse me. I don't mean to interrupt, but what were you talking about?

Randal: The ending of Return of the Jedi.

Dante: My friend is trying to convince me that any contractors working on the uncompleted Death Star were innocent victims when the space station was destroyed by the rebels.

...deleted matter...

Blue-Collar Man: ...(pauses to reflect) You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this... (taps his heart) not his wallet.

With all the aggression in the world, this has to be the answer. We all just sell shoes and repair video games and make pancakes and do research and make coffee and breed beagles and restock breakfast cereals someplace on the Death Star.

We're just going through the motions, waiting for Darth Vader to return:

"Hello, Mr. Vader. Welcome to Starrbuxx. Your usual?"

I just hope he doesn't send his cousin, Darth Chuck.