We Are / Not Well

When the movie "Snakes On A Plane" opened, the Five Tool Ninja and I were dangerously interested in seeing it, and needed to see it in a theater. We knew the movie was going to be a steaming piece of cheese, and were completely OK with that. We wanted to see it in a place where the audience spoke to the screen and added to the experience, and we got that. It was, frankly, one of the more fun movies that I've gone to see in some time.

In planning our trip, , the Ninja and I went deep into the online content that was generated by the world around the movie; the song parodies, the Samuel L. Jackson hype exercises, the blog posts. And since both of us are prone to speculating about absurd things that we have neither the time nor the stomach to do, we talked about camping out at the theater to see it. (I've never done that, not even for concert tickets, and seeing how I'm on the wrong side of 40, probably never will.)

We imagined this as an absurdist exercise; two guys, dressed in snake costumes, singing folk parody songs on acoustic guitars as the world passed us by to see, well, frankly better movies. The idea of a campout for a movie with no line just seems like something that should happen, maybe for viral video or a skitcom, and there's also something immensely appealing about seeing whether we could recruit others to the weird cause. Plus, there's the very real added bonus of seeing how much we could embarrass our kids, since our kids are old enough to want to be embarrassed about anything we do as dads. I, for one, feel like it's my duty to make their future therapy sessions interesting. ("Your father camped out for movies that had no line. How does that make you feel?")

Which leads me to the news that there are actual students of the actual Penn State University who are... camping out to keep watch over the Joe Paterno statue, lest anything, you know, bad might happen to it. As was hinted at by a recent airplane ad.

No, seriously.

Now, it's not too many people just yet, and it doesn't really have anything to do with anything light or fun or silly... but absurd? Um, hells yeah. Let's recap:

Children are going to camp out to protect the inanimate statue...

Honoring a man who helped to cover up...

the sexual abuse of children.

And given the way that Penn State and its denizens have identified with Paterno over the years, and how these things always attract an end game of people who just won't smell the coffee, no matter how much it's poured on them...

Well, they won't be alone.

Can someone at least make some lovely signs stating why they are protesting, or sing some wildly inappropriate songs?