Here’s my review of the show Fear Itself.

Itsucks.

I don’t like it.  I’ve watched three episodes now, and it’s like they’re trying to recapture the cheesy goodness of Monsters and Tales From the Darkside, but maybe they’re trying too hard.  There are too many, “oh please” moments, and too many, “Golly, who’d have thought that would happen?   Oh yeah, ANYONE.” moments.  Too many cliche characters and moments of disappointment from being right about how lame the next scene is going to be.

Too much dark.  Too many effects that have already been overused in better (and worse) movies.   In this episode alone,  we have the Mouth of Sauron, the hands of Dracula, the quickety-quick motions of about 10 other movies, I don’t even know what else.  It’s just sad.

Oh!  and I forgot to mention the fact that the theme song is kind of crappy, and the opening sequence is worse and incongruous to the music.

So we moved into this lovely home, with it’s huge maple tree in the front yard and nice undeveloped back yard.  Unfortunately, with it came ants.

I hate ants.  Of all the things I remember from my teenagerhood, ants is one of the worst.  In the time period between step-dads, ants where the bain of our existence.  For reals!  I mean they were everywhere.  Couldn’t even leave a jelly knife out on the counter, they’d be all over it.  Drip something on the floor?  Oh yeah.

So we have the same kinds of ants here.  Probably the same ants, waiting for their chance to make my life miserable again.

We started with diatomaceous earth.  Kills ants where you find them, but the white powder mess is annoying.  I then put Grant’s Kills Ants stakes around the perimeter of the house.  Then I got bug-killing shelf liner and some Grant’s inside baits.  And some Terro spray.

Have I mentioned how much I hate ants?  They are creepy and little and get into everything, get everywhere.  And after I’ve seen them crawling and creeping, I feel like some kind of tweaker, feeling bugs crawling on me.  When I was a kid, we would pour boiling water over them.  Now I use the D.E. to put miniscule holes in their carapaces so they dry out.  Take that!  Nasty little things.  And stop dying on my counters!  I don’t want to clean your filthy little bodies off my kitchen surfaces.  Waste of paper towels.

Next step is to buy some kind of small mammal or reptile whose life is dependant on consumption of ants. The landlord asked me how many cats and dogs we had – it’s not my fault that he never mentioned anything else!

So lately, some things have happened.

My brother got out of jail. He went in days after his son was born, causing a flurry of “is it my kid” and “oh shit, he’s got a bundle of birth defects” thoughts, which in turn led to drinking, driving, and getting caught doing it. He’s out. He says…well, he says all the things he’s supposed to say. He had an epiphany, all is now clear, he’s going to do better. I hope it’s real.

My nephew, son of the above brother, went home from the hospital. He’s had multiple surgeries, and from what I hear he still is eating through a tube and needs oxygen occasionally. But he’s home, for the first time. I have no idea what will happen as far as his connection to this side of the family, since above brother is not really connected to the mother of the child. Time will tell.

Mom cut her hair.

I think that’s it.

I had a thought.

I was reading a review of the movie Crude Awakening, and the final line was this:

chilling closing thought: there is a chance that our grandchildren will not know what it’s like to ever fly in an airplane. ’cause in the future, fuel will be so expensive only the super rich will be able to fly.

This made me think: If fuel really does become that expensive, it will be harder to come by. It may well be that in a future not too far off, petroleum based fuel will be restricted to mass transit and vital services. It could happen!

In any case, thinking about that made me think this: If this does happen, we may end up isolated geographically, as we were in our past. Cities and towns will have to become more self-reliant, etc.

But the over-riding thought was this: We will still have the internet. Those of us who have made connections on social networking sites, be it Myspace or Tribe, Second Life or any of the MMORPG’s out there, we will be able to keep the connections going better than the rest. I can imagine issues arising where the more xenophobic types could try to restrict free communication. I can imagine small towns turning into Jonestowns. I can imagine huge gaps in the quality of life, not to mention the lifestyle, between larger cities and small towns. I can imagine huge leaps in communications – maybe we’ll finally get the holographic telephones and VR chambers we’ve been reading about for decades.

I guess my point here is this: We are approaching a science-fiction future that I have never read. Of all the books and short stories I’ve read about possible futures, whether fantastic or mundane, I can’t recall fuel being a major player. Food, space, land, population, a plethora of other causes for the given situations, but not fuel. Maybe it’s just me, and there are books or stories out there about it, but I don’t know of them.

Makes me wish I were a better writer, so I could write a story about the near future.

Oh man – I just had another thought. We all have heard about geographic isolation producing some odd species…would that happen among humans as well? Hmmm.

This morning, I was reading through my iGoogle home page, and there was an article about a creepy, white, flesh-eating slug found in Wales.  Now, I’ve wanted to go to Wales for years.  Now I have even more reason!

It got me to thinking though. I’ve just moved into a house, so there’s no reason that I shouldn’t have my own flesh-eating pets! That’s right, I want me a colony of Dermestes maculates.

I mean, why not? Take a look at these lovelies.  What do you think, should I ask my mom for this for my birthday?