... but will it blend?

Will it blend? - iPhone

I find it interesting that you should mention this, because I found the parallel between Avatar and Star Wars to be striking. Unlike you, I don't find the plot of the 1977 Star Wars movie to be original at all. It was simply that a farm-boy found a message from a princess who was captured by an evil knight and imprisoned in a dark fortress. With the help of a good knight and a pirate, he frees the princess and destroys the fortress before the dark knight can destroy the village.

That's about the most unoriginal story ever. It's been done over and over again since the middle ages. That's not why I loved Star Wars, however. I loved it because the visual spectacle at the time it was created was unlike anything that I had seen before. (I was only 9 years old in 1977, but still ...) Fighting with laser swords is cool! Fast moving spaceships with rapid fire lasers are cool! It had never been done before. The feeling was electric.

As I was watching Avatar at age 41, I got that same feeling. I felt like I was 9 years old again and seeing something absolutely amazing for the first time. The 3D effects were awkward for about the first 15 minutes of the movie, and then I stopped noticing them. The simply became the experience. The computer animation sequences were ridiculously good -- fantastically detailed. I think you can tell, I loved the movie.

Movies don't always have to be story-telling masterpieces. Sometimes they can just take you out of life for a while and put you on a visual roller-coaster ride. This movie did that more successfully than anything that I've seen in a long, long time.

Yeah, the ParkMagic is a joke. They could just as easily set up the system so that you park, enter your parking space number and press a big red button on the front of the box and a timer starts indicating how long you've parked. You put it in your windshield to let the parking enforcers know that you're paying. When you get back, you press the red button again and only get charged for the amount of time that you were in the space.

If the spot is two-hour parking and your meter reads 2:05, then you get a passing parking enforcer can write you a ticket. If you enter the wrong number for someplace where the parking is cheaper, you can get a ticket. Otherwise, you only pay for what you use.

Instead they make you guess how long you'll be there, knowing that you're either going to guess too much or get a ticket. Come on ... cut us a break.

The USA initially ran for a long time with the following, too:

- Slave labor, non-union labor and child labor. No need for welfare, if people are forced to work for outrageous hours in sub-human conditions to survive.

- Lots of "free" land to the west. No need for welfare, education or unemployment insurance when poor people just leave to go west.

- Isolationist policies and ocean borders with no air travel. No need for an expensive technologically advanced, global military.

- A complete lack of health care. Nothing to spend our health care money on. And no need to spend lots of money on the elderly, because they died 15 years earlier than they do now.

So, once we eliminate the need for a giant miltary (not necessary against Native Americans and Mexicans), social security (people died young), health care (didn't exist), public education and welfare (not necessary, if poor people go west or are exploited by industry), and debt service ... well I guess you really can live off of tariffs only.

... because then there would only be about 7 drivers on the roads at any given time.

Or perhaps because Judaism is followed by only 0.22% (as in less than a quarter of 1%) of the people in world.

http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html

And there is a home for the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole. It's called Oklahoma. The entire state of Oklahoma. Just move there and you'll never need to worry about us displacing you again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

That is, until we displace you again ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_Territory