Tears of the Sun
Went out with my wife to see Tears of the Sun last night. I wasn't expecting what I got. I fully expected another US-soldier-hero movie, with all the bravado and bullet-dodging effects that usually show up in such movies. Instead, Tears of the Sun proved to be a horrifying portral of a civil war in Nigeria. Hearing about it in the news, and seeing it in this movie is probably nothing in comparison to what the people of Rwana (yes, I know the film is set in Nigeria) lived through during their civil war. The brutality of ethnic cleansing was hard to watch. The one line that I liked that Bruce Willis delivered was, "For our sins." He said it when his Navy Seal team had resigned themselves to risk their lives to save a group of Nigerian civilians. The movie was a hero movie. I think it did set out to portray Americans as heroes, and there is nothing wrong with that. The movie was about people make the right choice, the good choice, knowing the risks. The film ended with the Edmund Burke quote: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
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