Rant #2,536: Good Clean Fun

No, yesterday was not good clean fun at all.

We went to the doctor for my father, and yes, he is anemic, and although it is not an emergency--for an 88 year old, he actually is in very good shape--he is going to need a double blood transfusion, which is scheduled for this Thursday.

His red blood cells are not where they should be, about one-quarter down from the optimum level, a level that he had just a year ago.

But his white blood cells are fine, everything else is fine, so the transfusion is being used as a precautionary tool, and also to find out why he is so anemic.

Again, it is not an emergency, because if it was, he would have been rushed to the hospital yesterday to have it done.

I am not saying it is all a bed of roses, but for an 88 year old, he is in pretty good shape.

He will be OK.

Me, I am not so sure. Dealing with all of this, and my own hazerai, is starting to get to me big time, but I guess I will be OK too.

Funny, but in between all the craziness that completely revolves around my life right now, I have had some time to watch some movies. I usually cannot sit and watch them all in one fell swoop--I have to break them up, watch them here, there and everywhere, over a period of days, but when I am in down time, I have been watching films of every level of cleverness, and every level of stupidity, and every level of somewhere in between all of that.

One of the films that I watched this weekend was "The Monolith Monsters," a 1957 sci-fi flick starring a bunch of grade-Z actors of the time, including Lola Albright and Grant Williams, and narrated by the legendary Paul Frees, who did similar duties on the "Rocky and Bullwinkle" show. The film was shown on the "Sevengoolie" show the other day, I fell asleep in the middle of it, so I figured that I would watch it on my own, so my wife and I watched it on Sunday night.

This is a little different type of sci-fi movie of the time, not dealing with "monsters," per se, but "things" that are growing and pummeling everything in their path. The story by Jack Arnold and Robert M. Fresco and directed by John Sherwood involves a meteorite that fell to earth just outside a small California town. It broke into pieces, and scattered in the desert.

The town is sun drenched, and rarely gets rain, but when it does rain, it rains cats and dogs. But before the rain comes, various citizens of the town come across the smaller pieces of the meteorite, and through no fault of their own, these stones get mixed with water, and multiply, not only destroying everything in their path but turning people who get in its way to stone.

The local geologist (every town has a local geologist, don't they?) gets involved, as does the school marm that he loves, the local newspaper man, the local doctor, and various other townsfolk, and through meticulous trial and error--more so than just about any such movie I have seen from that era--they fight off these rocks, which when wet, can grow to the size of skyscrapers, which they are doing at a quick rate, having been saturated by a tremendous rainstorm.

These skyscrapers fall apart under their own weight and height, and since the "monoliths" are moving forward and multiplying, that could mean doomsday for the small town and its residents. But the geologist and the doctor find a way to stop the onslaught, and everything is hunky dory by the end of the film.

There is a lot to like about this film, because again, it doesn't deal with "monsters" as we know them, but of "things" that are creating havoc. There seems to be some scientific basis for everything that is done to thwart off the monoliths, or at least everything sounds good to these ears.

There is one funny sequence where paper boys--and girls!--are needed to spread the word that the town needs to be evacuated. The monoliths have wiped out all communication, so the kids are needed to tell the townspeople that they need to leave.

The newspaperman gets one kid to lead the charge, telling him to get "every boy, and every girl" mobilized in this effort. The kid is ready to go, but then he tells the newspaperman, "I don't know how to say this, but when we kids do a job, we want to know how much we are getting paid."

The newspaperman looks at the town sheriff standing next to him, and then stares right into the kid's eyes. "When you understand the gravity of what you are doing, that will be payment enough!"

The kid runs away to get the other children to do the job without further questions. The newspaperman turns to the geologist and blurts out, "Kids today, All they think about is money!"

Anyway, it was a quite enjoyable 77-minute movie, one that I would highly recommend. You can find it at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3z0rz8 and it is a real find, as I don't know if I had ever seen it previously.

I have a couple of other movies to tell you about, at decreasing quality, and let's see over the remainder of the week if I can fit them into whatever I am talking about.

Maybe, maybe not, and believe me, once we would get to the last one on the list, the quality has gone from the pretty good of "The Monolith Monsters" to really, really, really bad.

I was almost hoping that one of the monoliths would fall on my TV as I was watching these other films, and putting both me and the TV out of our misery.

Not quite, but it is all good clean fun, something that I need right at the moment, and something that I think we all need from time to time.