You were probably just reminiscing about your penguin-murdering exploits. Good times.

Growing up I often heard about homosexuality being deviant because it wasn't found in nature.

One of my roommates sophomore year in college told me this. Of course, he also believed that he could identify a Jew by his/her smell.

Here's the relevant excerpts from the Will (a conservative, but not a neo-con) article in the Post:

This summer's movie stars are not the usual bipeds but other animals-- emperor penguins and grizzly bears. Their performances are pertinent to some ongoing arguments.

"March of the Penguins" raises this question: If an Intelligent Designer designed nature, why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins? The movie documents the 70-mile march of thousands of Antarctic penguins from the sea to an icy breeding place barren of nutrition. These perhaps intelligently but certainly oddly designed birds march because they cannot fly. They cannot even march well, being most at home in the sea.

In temperatures of 80 below and lashed by 100 mph winds, the females take months to produce an egg while the males trek back to the sea to fatten up. Returning, the males are entrusted with keeping the eggs warm during foodless months while the females march back to the sea to fill their stomachs with nutriments they will share with the hatched chicks.

The penguins' hardiness is remarkable, as is the intricate choreography of the march, the breeding and the nurturing. But the movie, vigorously anthropomorphizing the birds, invites us to find all this inexplicably amazing, even heroic. But the penguins are made for that behavior in that place. What made them? Adaptive evolution. They have been "designed" for all that rigor -- meaning they have been shaped by adapting to many millennia of nature's harshness.

Of course, not having an ounce of feeling for anything but baseball left in his soul, he misses out on the childlike wonder that the natural world should inspire.

I've read that short story, Sean. It's in one of the Year's Best collections, from the middle nineties. I can't recall title or author.

All of my comment above was the impish idea of what Whileaway would look like on a movie screen. For one thing, how do you signify that it's not a chick flick, despite its (gasp!) having mostly female characters? For another, how many in the audience would understand the parody of the male astronauts? I think the best it could hope for would be a fate similar to the American version of Solaris -- noble failure, and an appearance on AMC within a year.

I've read that short story, Sean. It's in one of the Year's Best collections, from the middle nineties. I can't recall title or author.

I think it had something about living, plat-like boats in it too, but yeah, that's the one.

I think the best it could hope for would be a fate similar to the American version of Solaris -- noble failure, and an appearance on AMC within a year.

And it would probably wind up a critical semi-darling. Probably 50% darling among the critics, with the rest loathing it as pretentious crap. (but yeah, now I get what you meant)

You were probably just reminiscing about your penguin-murdering exploits. Good times.

Great, now I'm flashing on John Turturro beating a penguin to death in front of Jodie Foster in 5 CORNERS. And it still disturbs the hell out of me.

Great, now I'm flashing on John Turturro beating a penguin to death in front of Jodie Foster in 5 CORNERS. And it still disturbs the hell out of me.

Me too! But Frank and I often share the movie watching brain. When I'm not sharing it with Vonnie or Scrappy.

Thanks for making me relive that. Sometimes I hate you guys.:)

I'd completely forgotten about that movie. And now I remember.

And smiley "I hate you," makes me feel like Harmony. But some places if I don't do that, people take it all wrong and think I'm serious.

But some places if I don't do that, people take it all wrong and think I'm serious.

I don't think we're that place.