Say It Isn’t So!
On June 12, 1981, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” one of the best action/adventure films in the history of cinema, opened and in so doing gave us a hero who, in my opinion, ranks right up there with Jack Bauer, James Bond, Jason Bourne, and you can even throw in some of the superheroes like Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and Wonder Woman. Yes, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is a scholarly professor of archeology at Marshall College in Bedford, Conn., but when he leaves the friendly confines of his classroom to hunt for valuable artifacts, he morphs into a guy who thrives on danger.
Now I recently read an online article by Bonnie Stiernberg in which she reveals that some people who obviously don’t have enough to do have deduced that Indiana Jones was a pedophile. And upon what have they based this incredibly ludicrous deduction? Answer: Five or six lines of dialogue. Let’s have a look.
Early in the film Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) is operating a bar in Nepal, when Indiana comes to visit her after not having seen her for 10 years. (You should know here that Indiana had been a student of Marion’s father, and that’s how she originally met him.) Apparently Indiana did something to upset her back then because when she sees him, one of the first things she does is slug him in the jaw, and then the following dialogue ensues.
Marion: I learned to hate you in the last 10 years.
Indy: I never meant to hurt you.
Marion: I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong, and you knew it.
Indy: You knew what you were doing.
Marion: Do you know what you did to me? To my life?
During the many times I have seen the film, never once as I watched that scene and heard Marion proclaim she was a “child” did I conjure up the picture of her crawling around on the floor in diapers. Nor did I think of Indy’s pushing her for a walk in her stroller or perhaps struggling to make her eat spinach in her highchair. No, when Marion refers to herself as a child, I picture her as a naive young woman who never had really been in love before she met Indy.
Now in composing her piece, Stiernberg asked Karen Allen to comment on the character she portrays, and here’s some of what she said.
“I think I say I was 16. I don’t know. That’s always what I imagined is she was 16, he was 26. And he was her father’s student. And it’s left very mysterious. We don’t even know what it is. I mean, they could have kissed a few times, and she was just completely bowled over, and he could have just not wanted to get involved with someone so young. And maybe my father would have been furious at him.
“I mean, what’s great about it is we don’t know what the circumstances are. So she obviously cared deeply for him. He may have cared for her, too. But, in the end, decided it was a dangerous situation, and he didn’t want to be involved. I mean, I guess, when something is as vague as that, you can color it any way you want to color it. I’ve tended to color it, sort of, that it was quite innocent. When she says, ‘It was wrong and you knew it.’ I mean, I think maybe he led her on in some way. But when she says she was a child, I think she meant she was 16. Something like that.”
Oddly enough when I first saw the film and watched this scene, I pictured Marion as in her early 20s when she first met Indy. Of course, if she were 16 as Allen suggests, 16 is the age of consent in Connecticut. Allen says, “…you can color it any way you want to color it.” And I’m coloring it as early 20s. The pedophile people can break out their own box of crayons.
Why Not?
In a recent story for Lede News, Steve Novotney pointed out that the dashboard for the WV Department of Health and Human Resources shows that in Ohio County the number of vaccinations is both puzzling and alarming. The numbers from the dashboard show that at this writing just 51 percent of the county’s entire population had showed up for one shot, and the number dropped to 45.3 percent for those who chose to get a second shot if needed.
I’m really having trouble understanding why the number of those who are completely vaccinated (two shots if needed) isn’t close to 90 percent. The shots are free, they don’t really hurt, and they are readily available. Why in the hell don’t people wake up and get inoculated? My major fear is that too many people believe that the pandemic is over. If you are one of those, I have a news bulletin for you: IT ISN’T OVER! Not even close. If you doubt what I’m saying, take a trip to the supermarket, and look around. The absence of masks reflects the cavalier attitude a lot of people now have toward COVID-19. Well, check out the following figures.
These numbers don’t lie. Several days ago, worldwide there were more than 400,000 new cases, and the new deaths exceeded 11,000. In the United States alone there were more than 14,800 new cases and more than 400 new deaths. Now these statistics are significantly lower than they have been in the past, and that’s because more and more people are getting vaccinated, but there still are those who refuse to be inoculated. Why? Their reasons range from the vaccine is still too new to they don’t know what’s in it to they don’t believe in it. But the best one out there right now is that vaccine magnetizes people. Yes, you read that correctly. Some insist that the vaccine turns them into a human magnet, and they attempt to prove this by sticking keys and silverware on their bodies. Go figure!
Anyway, do your part to keep the number of new cases on the decline.
PLEASE GET YOUR SHOTS!
Ponder This:
Why is it that no plastic bag will open from the end on your first try?
~ Anonymous
