Deadpool ... Wham!

            After yoga on Christmas day I only practiced some of my songs, then I played “The Old Revolution” and “Stories of the Street” by Leonard Cohen and the only verse from any Christmas carol that I consider to be good poetry: “Myrrh is mine, it’s bitter perfume, breathes a life of gathering gloom. Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, locked in the stone cold tomb …”

            There was very little activity on Queen Street, but outside of my window, the dishevelled panhandler with the uncombed curly brown hair was making her rounds, or literally making a square. She crossed from under my window to the east side of Dunn and Queen, then crossed to the west side, then back to the north side in front of the CUBE Chinese restaurant, then back under my window to begin the cycle again. She was wearing a pair of dark grey sweat pants, which, though secure at the waist, were several sizes too large for her so that the crotch area was hanging down around her knees. There were more cars than people and she tried to go to the driver’s side windows of every one that was stopped as she crossed, but they all drive on. This day she was crying loudly as she walked in emotional turmoil, perhaps because it was Christmas.

            I started learning a song with music by Serge Gainsbourg and lyrics by Boris Vian called, “Quand jaurais du vent dans mon crane” or “When I Will Have the Wind in My Skull’. It’s about dying. I really like the words and the melody, so I’m going to particularly enjoy learning to play this one.

            I made bacon and eggs with toasted English muffins and started watching “The Man of Steel”.

Superman has become such a problematic character from the perspective of plausibility. I really think they should reboot the original Superman that couldn’t fly but could jump high because the Earth compared to Krypton was like the Moon compared to the Earth. He was in the beginning only as strong as several men combined, faster than a train, only indestructible to the extent that bullets tickled him while a bomb could potentially kill him and he just had extremely good hearing and vision. The only really far-fetched power that he had back then was x-ray vision, but that was kind of cool. I really think they could more interesting things with a less powerful Superman. Get rid of heat vision, super breath, flying and absolute indestructibility. Get rid of Kryptonite. Meteors from a planet that exploded in another star system would just orbit the sun of that system. They wouldn’t make it to Earth or even our system.

The movie spends a lot of time retelling an origin that everybody knows. The baby Kal-El is saved from the destruction of Krypton by way of a small spaceship sent to Earth. It’s really kind of a space age retelling of the Biblical story of how Moses was saved from the baby killing army of Pharaoh. One thing I liked was the idea that Kal-El was a the first live birth in one-hundred years on a planet that had come to depend entirely on test tube babies grown in the lab and designed for various societal functions such as to be scientists, administrators or warriors. But then another implausible situation infected the story. General Zod, a genetically designed warrior, trained after birth to serve that function, in trying to physically prevent Kal-El from being launched into space, meets his physical and martial match in a battle with Jor-El, someone that has been genetically designed and trained to be a scientist. They should have had Russell Crowe’s character fight Zod off with scientific means rather than have him be such a good fighter.

After I’d finished my bacon and eggs, I paused the movie and toasted a couple more English muffins, over which I poured pancake syrup. I started watching the movie again but suddenly I bit into something very hard. Did a pebble somehow end up in the muffin flour? I pulled the hard morsel out of my mouth and saw that my right lateral incisor had broken. That tooth has been repaired many times and it’s always been the artificial part that has broken, but this time most of the entire tooth was gone. It was probably the Granny Smith apple that I’d eaten the day before that had weakened it. I do try to eat things that hard on the left side but sometimes I do bite with that tooth. I should really have considered it entirely cosmetic rather than functional and just cut up apples before eating them. I would have to see my dentist as soon as possible but I didn’t know if there was enough tooth left to reconstruct it. Thinking of that possibility, I looked up those screw-in implants but they cost thousands. Apparently one can get a bone graft from cow bones much cheaper, but no less than $250. I guess there’s always a denture. I’ll have to see what my dentist says. It only hurts when I look in the mirror and see a hillbilly’s gap.

So that put a damper on my Christmas, but I went on with my day and finished watching the way too long movie.

Another problem I have with the plausibility of Superman is the possibility of him having a sexual relationship with a human from Earth. Even if Superman’s body was only bullet proof he would not be able to feel the sensation of being touched by someone like Lois Lane, let alone if he was immune to nuclear warheads.

After a siesta, I started making homemade cranberry sauce and also stuffing for my turkey. For the bread part of the dressing I used corn bread that I made from a mix and some pretzels that had gone hard in my fridge. I cooked the rest of the bacon and fried a couple of onions, then several zucchini and some broccoli flowerets. Then I added thyme, sage, poultry seasoning, paprika, salt, and the cartons of asparagus and sweet basil soup and butternut squash soup that I’d gotten from the food bank the day before. When I got the turkey ready to stuff it, while trying to pull the severed neck out that had been placed inside the bird, the turkey ripped open a bit at the side, making it more difficult to stuff. I’d never experienced a turkey tearing apart while raw before. I stuffed it as best I could and put it in the oven. I roasted it for about four hours and basted it every half an hour. It turned out pretty good despite the problems. The cranberry sauce, sweetened only slightly with brown sugar, also came out great.

I watched Deadpool and that was a real Christmas surprise. It was one of the most entertaining superhero movies I’d ever watched and it was hilarious from the opening credits to the end. The text of the intro does not name the producers but just refers to them as “asshats”; the movie said to be directed by “an overpaid tool”; rather than naming Ryan Reynolds, the star is called, “God’s perfect idiot”; and the female lead played by Morena Baccarin, is just written as, “ a shorter person used as a sex object”.

There is a lot of metatext in the story as Deadpool sometimes stops in the middle of the action to address the audience. When his girlfriend is kidnapped he goes to the X-Men mansion to enlist the help of Colossus and Teenage Negasonic Warhead. As Deadpool is standing in the doorway he notes that the mansion seems empty and comments that it’s almost as if the producers were too cheap to pay for more than two X-Men.

Deadpool definitely cheered me up after my tooth fiasco earlier in Christmas day. It was an off coincidence that Deadpool is shown to be an enormous fan of Wham and that the final song of a movie I watched shortly after hearing about the death of George Michael was “Careless Whisper”.

I highly recommend Deadpool to anyone that hasn’t seen it yet.