Tuesday, March 24, 2009

pAriAh


Yea, I know; that looks a bit off, and I did it for a reason. The classic definition of pariah would indicate a person in exile or someone to be avoided; perhaps the character from Lil Abner, the one with the black cloud and lightning following him where ever he went would fall into the category.

One fun movie to watch is Pure Luck with Martin Short playing an unlucky soul who learns to live with it; just don’t stand too close or it might rub off. There really are people who have incredibly bad issues to deal with.

I read where a fellow in Japan is the only certified survivor of both Atomic bombs during WWII. I was a member of the science club back in high school; but how many folks would hold up a hand signifying they were Atomic bomb survivors, much less double dippers?

“Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki just in time for the second attack, city officials said.”

This is the kind of stuff Sci-Fi is made of, poor quality faded color films made in Japan showing cardboard cities, model railroad track with toy trains zipping towards the ocean with a backdrop of mountains painted on a sheet of canvass. There are at least two American scientists to aid the research team who stumbled upon the “monster” while drilling into the deepest regions in search of renewable energy supplied by the molten core.

At some point in the movie, in case you’re wondering where all this was going, a voice from the past reminds everyone of the horrors of war as “grandfather” speaks to the ever present newspaper and local news station announcer; usually grandfather is blind, in a wheel chair or sitting in an old folks home set aside for WWII survivors missing arms, legs and skin worthy of the poor color film. His voice carries a hushed story of the day he lost his wife and pet goldfish as their house erupted in flames leaving him the way he is today.

Then the camera shows the ground cracking and the wing tip of Rodan, Godzilla or Mothra; panic strikes and hundreds if not thousands of citizens attempt to flee the city into the pastoral refuge of the nearby hills. Some get stepped on, others incinerated by the radiation blasting from the beast's mouth and the never ending tragedy of war is presented for our entertainment. Eventually science wins the day; but it is only a temporary victory since man has forever altered the natural environment when he unleashed the atomic virus on what lies below.
(Photograph is of a Hydrogen blast off the Bikini Atoll)

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