When I was in elementary school, all the 4th grade classes were taken to see the local yokel version of The Nutcracker (remember, I live in bumblefuck). My sister, who is five years my senior, had a classmate and friend who danced in it and her brother was in my class. He and I sat together and marveled as we watched her. I was in love with that ballet ever since…

Sadly, I’ve never gotten to see it live again… I have, however, watched it on television. There used to be a channel Dish Network had called Ovation and every year in December they would have “The Battle of the Nutcrackers”. They would show various ballet troops performing the same ballet and you could go online and vote for your favorite. Sadly, they ditched that channel and I haven’t seen it in years. But thanks to the magic of the Fire Stick, I was able to buy the ballet from Amazon! They had a lot to choose from, but I’m partial to the Russian performers myself. I mean, it’s originally Russian; they seem to take more pride in performing it.

So, here’s where it get’s more than a little weird…

As I’m desperately trying to find the Bolshoi version, I was also looking at the others listed just in case I couldn’t find it and needed to choose another and, in the process, skimming over the descriptive blurbs they had written. One had actually used the term “budding sexuality” when referring to Clara… WHAT?!? Excuse me, but… What kind of crack were you smoking at the time when you wrote that and why aren’t you sharing because it’s obviously some good shit… Good god! The story was written back during a time when young girls (Clara is a pre-teen at best) didn’t even know about sex! Hell, my great aunt told me the first time she got her period, her mother told her to go ask her sister (my grandmother) because, apparently, in the 1920s, moms didn’t like to explain it once let alone multiple times! How the fuck do you get “budding sexuality” from The Nutcracker?! What I get from it is a young girl’s silly, romantic ideas of what falling in love will be like, dreams young girls used to have… Or they did when I was one… Or maybe I was just weird (because I’m not that old…)

And just when you think people couldn’t get any fucking stupider…

Last night I was engaged in a conversation about music (one of my favorite subjects) and David Bowie came up in topic. While I was rattling off some of my favorite of his tunes, I made mention to one particular song in the movie Labyrinth, “As The World Falls Down”. Of course no one knew which song I was referring to even when I described the scene, so I whipped out my phone, opened YouTube and played it.

Then I did a bad thing and read through the comments… Some jackass actually went off on a tangent (trying to sound intellectual and failing miserably with all the misspellings and missed words) on how this movie was about Sara trying to regain the innocence she had lost and that Jareth, the Goblin King, was grooming her because he was in in love with her, blah blah blah… And he actually had a few idiots agree with him! Thankfully there was one person who pointed out why he was a fucktard so I didn’t have to do it myself. Good thing… I wasn’t really in the mood.

I really don’t know why people always have to read something nasty and sexual into innocent things… Nothing happened to Sara in her past; she was never molested. Her only problem was that she was immature and overly dramatic. She hated that her father and stepmother wanted her to be responsible for one fucking night and babysit her infant half-brother, Toby. Which you can clearly see when she pitches a hissy, tells Toby she hates him and says, “I wish the goblins would come and take you away, right now.” And then they do… which is when she first meets Jareth, the Goblin King, who tells her to go back to her room and play with her toys, forget about the baby. But Sara can’t do that… She suddenly feels that sense of responsibility. So Jareth gives her the opportunity. She has thirteen hours in which to solve the Labyrinth or Toby will remain his. Sara faces a lot of trials and tribulations, a lot of setbacks, and a lot of fuckery on Jareth’s part. He does whatever he can to stop her, including changing time so she has less of it, enlists the help of one of the inhabitants to mislead Sara, all to detain her, but she keeps pushing on. She’s learning to be responsible and, in the end, realizes that doesn’t mean she has to completely give up all of her childish things all the time just because she has to grow up a little.

The scene in question, which this still was taken from, was the masquerade ball scene…

Sara (Jennifer Connelly) was in really life about 14 or 15 when this movie was made (the same age I was at the time). And, as you can see, David Bowie held her very respectfully as they danced since she was a minor. As for the storyline of Jareth conditioning Sara… That wasn’t the case. The “poison” peach he’d had one of the other characters give to her wasn’t to ruffie her. It was, however, meant to detain her. But, by that point in the movie, Jareth was falling in love with Sara. So he trapped her inside a pleasant place, gave her a romantic fantasy to forget all about finding Toby. Mind you, I said romantic, not sexual. Nothing about this scene or the movie was sexual at all or conditioning of any kind. Usually conditioning consists of being nice and then turning asshole. Jareth did it backward. When he finally professed his love, he made sure he pointed out all he’d done just for her benefit and that he was exhausted from living up to her expectations of him. He told her all he wanted was for her to stay, let him love her and he would be her slave. That’s groveling, not conditioning. And she spurned him in the end because she realized that wasn’t what she wanted.

Honestly, this is pretty much why I deleted my Instagram, my Twitter and don’t go on Facebook. Actually, that would be gone as well, but I have friends in other countries and it’s free to call them through Facebook, so… But the point is, I seriously just can’t deal with the fucktards anymore. For Christ’s sake, have these people nothing better to do than to make characters in G and PG movies victims of some horrible, repressed sexual assault when they were a child when no such thing occurred? Have they nothing better to do than to look at an innocent romantic delusion of a teenage girl an say, “Oh shit, look man, he’s grooming her! What an asshole!” Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people?! These movies were made back during a time when that wasn’t a topic in films, get over yourselves! I mean, did I write a post likening the kids in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to the seven deadly sins? Yeah, for shits and giggles… It was just one of my musings I decided to write down. And you can’t tell me that Augustus kid wasn’t gluttony, hahahaa!

So I shall leave you something funny after my tirade…

While playing Animal Crossing yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with Wolfgang. He’s a grumpy type villager, the type that acts like an old duffer who’s baffled by newfangled technology. This time he was speaking, obviously, of a Roomba. His whole issue was that some people can’t afford to have floors and only have dirt floors (in this day and age, I think that only applies if you live in North Korea). That’s when the conversation took an interesting turn. After the first screen shot, here, I literally sat here for two minutes just staring at my Switch, blinking dumbly, because the thought never occurred… Wolfgang had literally blown my mind for a good solid two minutes. What the actual fuck! Yes, a video game character blew my mind so bad I could only sit and stare at the screen… That’s actually kind of sad… But give that some thought. If you had a dirt floor, would the Roomba ever stop?! I’m telling you, it’s going to be the new “what’s the sound of one hand clapping” or “if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear, does it make a noise”. Give it time; it’ll catch on…