07-02-02 @ 3:31 am EDT

Yesterday, Monday, there was an actual weather advisory concerning the high temperatures in northern Michigan. I posted that a couple of entries back because usually you have to watch out for the COLD up here. It reached the nineties, with a heat index of around 103-5. We still have the fans going full power, and it's still sweltering in here. (We have no central air.)

And can you believe what some STUPID DUMBASS woman did in my very state? She left her two children--what were they, a baby, and a three year old--in her car (with the window cracked--big deal!)--while she left for THREE HOURS to get her HAIR done.

When she came back, they were dead.

Screw murder two. I say hit her with murder one. If you are an adult, and if you have children, AND if you live in an area that can get temperatures that high, you should KNOW by now NOT to leave them in the car. Cracking a stupid window doesn't help when you're stuck in 100+ degree temperatures for THREE HOURS! Was her hair so very important that she couldn't have gotten a babysitter? (If she took three hours to get her hair done, she COULD have afforded a babysitter.) Or what, they didn't allow children in the hair salon? Did she think she could just sit in that chair, hum-dee-dum, and get a nice wash and perm and not have to deal with the squalling kiddies for three hours?

I wonder if they squalled out in that oven she stuck them in.

I wonder how long it took them to die. How much it hurt. On the Detroit news, a newslady stuck a thermometer inside a closed car for one hour in the afternoon--at five o'clock, when the weather is COOLING. It rose from ninety degrees to 120. Another man told of the symptoms of heat stroke. Cramps, nausea, weakness, paleness. I wonder in what order those two children went through those, how quickly, and what they were thinking as they sat out in that sweltering car, waiting for their "mother" to come back, as they died. If they wondered why she had done this to them. If they wondered what they could have done wrong.

Damn stupid woman. This is one of the reasons I think we should require psychiatric tests and licenses in order to bear children. A three-hour hair job was more important than two kids. Why did she even get pregnant once, much less twice?

She SHOULD have known by now. I am no mother, do not even drive. Don't even go outside much. But even I, for years, was barraged with those ads..."Hot enough to fry an egg? Hot enough to fry a dog's brain." It holds for little kids, too. She SHOULD have known. Ignorance should be no excuse, because in this case, there is NO excuse for ignorance.

She should be hit with murder one.

At the very least, I'm willing to bet she'll be feeling like a speck of dirt the rest of her life, for making her HAIR more important than the lives of her TWO KIDS. We have no death penalty, and I'm against it anyway. Perhaps she'll have a nice long time in prison to sit and think about what her children must have been thinking while they sat out there, dying, waiting for her to come back to them.

Damn stupid woman.

I have to change tracks here now...cool off a bit. Sorry.

Cosmas has learned how to turn off the lights. Uh-oh. He jumps at the switches because they attract his attention, and he accidentally turned on the hall light, which was something, because it requires pushing the switch UP, not down, and it's a sticky switch. Then he went after the bathroom switch while I was in there. He did it TWICE! I had to call a parent both times to turn it back on! (Oh how I wish they would not have removed and boarded over the bathroom window now...) Then later on he turned it ON while nobody was around. Dad said the next morning that he was trying to turn the light off on him. Oh dear. So now when we find a light on, and Dad says, "Who left this on?" and I say, "It wasn't me!" and Ma says, "It wasn't me!"...now we CAN blame the cat. o_O; He's too smart sometimes for his own good. Evil little spore.

I just killed a mosquito. Ugly things.

Oh. That reminds me. (For reasons for which you'd have to see the movie.) I never did comment on Lilo & Stitch. A cute movie. A review I read in EW didn't do it justice. To paraphrase, "Lilo is the most annoying of whiny brats," and "You can't sympathize with Stitch, because his character does not change. He's a pure destructive force." Well...DUH! That was the point! Lilo was whiny and annoying, yes...because she was from a broken home. What do you expect her to be, an angel? Then they would have complained that she was too perfect...always happens. I found her more realistic than they'd described. I read in another journal of a line that stood out for another user here, uttered by Lilo: "I remember everyone who leaves." So do I, Lilo; so do I.

And Stitch...he reminds me of cultists. Brainwashed and raised with one purpose in mind...and then cut loose. What to do, when you have no purpose? There's an actual cult name for this, and it's called "floating." You wander about, with no reason to exist; sometimes you try to switch back into your old mindset, just to find that reason. Even Stitch's creator comments on this. Stitch has destroyed everything in Lilo's room, and stands looking confused and forlorn. He's wrecked everything there is...he has no purpose left. To paraphrase again, "What do you do, when you have no memories, no past life, to think back on? What do you do?..."

I have to say it. The ending of the movie was very forced, contrived, and happened too quickly. It wasn't very believable...but at least it was happy. I really didn't like how one moment the doctor was bashing Stitch's head against the ground, and the next moment Stitch was asking him for assistance--to which the doctor complied, because, quote, "He's very persuasive!" That was a very false note right there. I think the movie just needed more time to make the doctor's transition more believable--I could believe he wasn't TRULY a bad guy, but his switch from "I'm willing to destroy my creation in exchange for my freedom!" to "I'm going to save my creation, AND this girl I've never even heard of!" was too abrupt. The movie should have been longer, to make up for that. More character development was needed.

Granted, it's a kiddie film (despite the violence and the PG rating), and kids don't care much about character development, they just want a funny happy ending...which it had (I REALLY liked the character Cobra Bubbles...Agent Cobra Bubbles)...but I would have liked it much more if, again, the character development were more believable. This is why my own stories run so very long, as I have to make the characters, and their changes, believable. Disney would have done better, IMO, if they'd done the same.

That was one of my main complaints about Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron--Spirit was a static character, unchanged by tragedy. He's beaten and beaten and beaten and still retains every single trace of happiness and innocence, without ever becoming truly jaded. I LOVE The Lion King (to date, STILL Disney's best film) because the characters all change--you can see it in Simba's eyes, before and after Mufasa's death. He's not the same. L&S did better than Spirit because the characters did change. Lilo learned not to be so very self-centered--Stitch learned the same. Oh, how the tears kept welling up in my eyes!! I feel so dumb. When he went out in the middle of the night and stood in the clearing with that Ugly Duckling book, only to be ambushed by the doctor...

Stitch, trying to get the doctor to hold off on shooting him: "Waiting."

Doctor: "For what?"

Stitch, stammering uncertainly: "Family."

...and near the end of the movie--"This is my family. It is small...and it is broken...but it is good. Yah." I'm getting a lump in my throat even now on those lines. :) I agree a tiny bit with the magazine review in that Stitch's character could have used a bit more development itself--how can he so blithely ask for help from his attacker right after getting his head bashed in?--but I don't agree for the same reasons. Their complaint was that he seemed to be bent on destruction, that he had no purpose. My answer is that, that was the point--he was CREATED that way. He was meant to be an empty character, to be filled by something else. He just needed a bit more time, like the movie, to develop a tad more.

So on the whole the movie was good, it was just that the ending was too rushed. And yes, I did kind of roll my eyes at how happy everyone ended up--even the doc and his sidekick got to stay behind on Earth--and Cobra Bubbles showed up at Thanksgiving dinner!--but well, that's how Disney movies end, isn't it? They had a meerkat dancing the hula in a grass skirt, why not an ex-CIA social worker named Bubbles attending Thanksgiving dinner.

I'll give it a B+, but that's as both a movie AND as a Disney movie. As just a movie, it's pretty good. As a Disney movie, it's just good. They've done better, but I won't hold it against them too much. At least it wasn't some mimic of the other animated movies coming out this summer. (You could swear that Disney and Dreamworks have corporate spies stealing each other's ideas, sometimes...I mean, Antz and A Bug's Life both at once, unrelated? Mm-hm.)

Hm. Y'know, I thought I had other things to comment on, but this took up so much space and time, I should leave off. Maybe more English Comp I stuff, but not in this entry.

I need some cold tea. Tar...