The Radio-Active Divorce

So, there is a particular female in my environment who was not-so-recently divorced. I think the ink on her divorce papers is about a year or so old now. She dresses very provocatively. Every guy looks. She has let it be known that she is on the market, and she is entertaining all offers. She is very pretty. She is under 30... I think.

Yet she lacks company. She has not been able to get herself into anything resembling a stable relationship. She has spread some interesting rumors about herself. We all wonder how much of this true. However, all of us are certain about one thing: She is radioactive. She's been engaged in plenty of self-destructive behavior since the divorce, and we all know about it.

So why does she lack company? Because she is radio-active. Despite the stiff-upper lip and the fake smile, we all know the divorce was very, very, very messy. It left tons of damage in its wake. This is almost always the case. Seldom will you see any other kind of divorce. If you do find something else, it begs the question: Were they ever truly married in the first place? Is this more a case of annulment or divorce?

This girl doesn't want to tell us anything about that damage, but she is showing us everything. The younger guys in my group are all interested in taking a ride on that pony. Many of them have scored a few runs. None of them are interested in obtaining "home field advantage", though. These are simple flings. Why? Her reactor has been damaged, and its leaking nuclear material. She's radio active.

I am not involved in any of this. The dudes all marvel that I, an unmarried and unencumbered guy, would not be first in line. What they don't get is that I don't want to be in line at all. If the girl has an on-deck circle, you won't find me in the batting rotation. I am not playing that game.

My dad is in the midst of his second divorce. His health program requires that he seek a bit of counseling in this regard. The information he has obtained from this program is remarkable. The current state-of-the-art psyche doctrine stipulates that it takes 5-7 years for the typical ex to heal-up from the divorce.

You should not get involved with anyone for a period of at least 3 years after a divorce. During this period, your reactor is damaged and you are leaking radio active materials. The chances of getting caught off the rebound are extremely great. The odds are greater still that you will unconsciously pick a mate just like your last one, and re-run the last divorce in the future. It will take you 3 years to digest why your last round of choices didn't work and why you should do things differently this next time.

Jumping back in the game quickly, and trying to get married again--quickly--is the leading reason why there are now so many women who have been married 5 times. This used to be a scandal fit only for Elizabeth Taylor. It's not particularly uncommon these days, among those who still bother to get married...

Many men don't want to get married again after getting divorced. They know they need time to lick their wounds. Some are all done after the first one. Phil Jackson is such a man. He was all done being married after his one and only divorce. My dad claims he is all done. He said that after his first divorce also, but he was considerably younger in those days. He allowed 9 years to go by before he got married again.

For some reason, this is not true of women. They want to get married again... quickly.

Yes my friends, Miss B is radioactive. She's making a lot of bad moves due to the fact that she is badly damaged from her divorce. She's nowhere near mentally healthy or fit to make big life-choices, like who her next husband will be. Most of the guys don't care about that. I know better.

In my case, chicks have never been willing to fling. If they are interested in me, they are invariably interested in getting settled. Perhaps this is because I am a fat guy. Perhaps this is because I show no signals or signs of being a player. Perhaps this is because I make a decent middle-class living, and have a nice place. In any case, flings are not part of my playbook, nor should they be. I don't have the arm for that passing-scheme.

A guy in my position has to be careful of radioactive females. Nothing will mess up your life better than getting sexually involved with someone who is either mentally unstable or an asshole. Recently divorced and damaged women can generally fall into both categories.

In any case, I am steering well clear. No matter how appetizing the picture on the package looks, the food inside is frozen, and contains both contaminants and spoilage.

Ain't Nobody Gonna Say Hooray for Hollywood this year.

The Motion Picture Academy has completely lost touch with the sensibilities of the common man, and they have become totally locked away in a pseudo-artistic Ivory Tower. The is a dangerous cleavage (and I am not talking about the fake tits on the red carpet) which is damaging the so-called Female Super Bowl. The Oscar broadcast is often called the Female Super Bowl because--at least in times past--the ratings were gianormous and the price of advertising during the broadcast was ungodly.

Now I am looking at the list of highly nominated films, and I see the weakest field I have ever seen. Hardly an entertaining or memorable movie in the lot of them. This field sucks.

This former institution is diminishing rapidly, and it is all because of one thing: The Academy has gotten locked in an artistic ivory tower, and they have lost touch with the people. So why is this true?

• One Oscar boss observed "This ain't the people's choice awards." He is certainly right about that... and it's not a good thing.
  
• There is now a describable type of film that can be nominated for and win an Oscar. These films are usually off-beat and on bizarre subjects. Frequently, they challenge common morality. The are loosely typed as "Prestige Pictures".
• Prestige Pictures suck: They are almost never entertaining. They usually don't make money. Rubbish like American Beauty, The English Patient, Million Dollar Baby and Crash are already well forgotten. I never liked any of these films in the first place, and I would not have voted for them.
  
• The big studios aren't supporting prestige pictures anymore: The hardened pragmatist inside the 5 major studios wonders why the firm wastes big money on movies that win Oscar gold but don't entertain or make money. They aren't even remembered well in retrospect. The result is that movies like The Wrestler, and Milk have been put out in extremely limited release. The studios know full well that these movies won't make money, even if they win the gold. The consequence is that very few people have seen these highly nominated films, and very few ever will.
  
• You can't predict victory: Odd ball movies frequently walk off with the title. How about last year's winner No Country for Old Men? That was an odd victory. A studio in financial trouble like Paramount may intentionally engineer a film like Benjamin Button with the objective of winning Oscar gold, but this is no recipe for making money or getting out of financial trouble. Further, Paramount is not guaranteed to win an Oscar this weekend. It could well be Slumdog Millionaire.
  
• When you nominate Milk instead of Wall-e, you have committed both an artistic and a marketing blunder. Milk has less than 2% of the artistic merit of Wall-e, and it has 1.0e-23% of it's long-term commercial value in terms of residual income. Wall-e will be popular for the next 50 to 75 years. Milk will be totally forgotten in the next 2 or 3 weeks.
• On the 2/20/2009 edition of All Things Considered, NPR's evening news broadcast, film critic Bob Mudello openly declared that if the Academy wants to reverse the negative slide in Oscar ratings, they are going to have to start nominating movies like Wall-e and the Dark Knight. You can listen to that audio HERE. Nominating these films would drastically increase the number of people who had seen one of the nominated films, and give the people a sense that they have a dog in this fight to cheer for.
• Speaking of not seeing any of the Oscar nominated films. MarketWatch.com printed a very nice piece in which they showed that the films nominated for Best Picture have the lowest combined box office total in the 81 year history of the Oscars. This is the pure effect Ivory Tower made manifest in dollars and cents. People don't like the shit that has been nominated. They won't pay money to see it, regardless of what the critics and the Academy says. You can read that story HERE.
  

So what have we learned?

1. Prestige pictures suck
2. The studios know it.
3. The people won't buy tickets for that crap.
4. The studios won't market that crap
5. The Academy nominates these crappy pseudo artistic, pseudo important, pseudo intelectual films and gives them the gold
6. Ergo the rating of the Female Super Bowl are sliding.
7. A lot of women are just going to watch for the fashion show.