Lebanon Stuff
So here I was on travel. Among the things I saw on TV waiting for jet lag to let me sleep was:
- CNN and BBC repeating the same three to five stories continuously. You’d think they would notice the bigger world out there allowed them to, like, report things.
- The single worst submarine-related waste of videotape I have ever seen. Remember the dismal movie On The Beach, where mysterious radiation made everybody die horribly so that the heroes commited suicide? That happy-go-lucky flick? Well, some cheapo Australian production company made a remake. Oh it was horrible. I think the worst part was the beer party on the SSN with the guys dancing to Boomer Rock Music on the enormous grate thirty feet above the viewer. Or maybe the guy turning on the power in the house in San Francisco (Friscans may be weird but they don’t turn on the “mains”). Or the SSN CO talking about “radiation in the blood stream”. For crying out loud.
- One channel up, as I surfed to relieve the unrelenting pressure of The World’s Most Depressing Movie, was Spice Channel porn during Fetish Week, apparently. Not the most smooth channel transition, I tell you.
Anyway, the reason I bring TV up was that I got reminded about a really terrible TV ad running on CNN/BBC. Some clowns wanted me to Rediscover Lebanon, using the TV ad (long version) here. At least they mention the war once, at the end, when everyone tunes out anyway.
All I know about Lebanon is that my friend H. goes there because the internet in Beirut doesn’t block as much as it does in her native Syria. That and two hundred and some trees on the highway in Cherry Point I passed by back in 1986.
Lebanon might be a nice tourist destination. After Syria gets its hands off of it.
One Response to “Lebanon Stuff”
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April 26th, 2004 at 10:13 am
Your movie description reminds me of the horrid Fifth Missle, where the boomer defied both space and time to the degree that there was one of those huge four abreast tender-sized ladderwells in the middle of the boat. In a similar vein, I once laid hold of a book that obviously hoped to ride the coatails of Red October, where the crew more closely resembled Star Trek than any submarine I’ve ever heard of (i.e. this-Officer, that-Officer). I suffered through until they were tracking some Soviet boat at about 100NM and detected a “temperature rise onboard”, meaning there was either a fire or “their reactor had gone critical”. The Radiation Officer looked at his monitor and knowingly said “Fire.” That was the point at which I taped the cover shut and wrote warnings on it. In retrospect, wish I’d thought to tag it shut.