I'm a dolt, but I'm not the only one

I went over to Home Depot today to see if I could pick up some fuses in hopes that new ones would make the air conditioner work again and I forgot to put my handicapped placard up in the window and when I came back I had a five hundred dollar ticket. The most annoying thing is it had only been there for four minutes, about the amount of time I was sitting in Home Depot moaning and clutching a ladder trying to throw up or faint. Is that irony? I don't know. And of course they didn't have the fuses because Westinghouse went out of business 17 years ago. Hooray!

It was 97 degrees today with very high humidity. Thankfully we got a nice thunderstorm just a little bit ago and things have temporarily cooled off.

So I'm sitting here catching up on my Variety newsletters and I see this. You have to read it. And the comments. The best comment is the pitch for the flying monkeys script - I think the thing should be activated when someone says "When monkeys fly out of my ass."

Anyway the deal is Todd McFarlane, a man I have zero respect for ever since his legal thing with Neil, is going to remake The Wizard of Oz. Now I'm all for mashups and retelling of stories and all of that, after all I've done it myself and it can be great fun, but I have to cringe when I read his quotes.

"My pitch was ‘How do we get people who went to ‘Lord of the Rings’ to embrace this?’ " McFarlane said. "I want to create (an interpretation) that has a 2007 wow factor. You’ve still got Dorothy trapped in an odd place, but she’s much closer to the Ripley from ‘Alien’ than a helpless singing girl."

See right there he shows he knows nothing about the source material. Dorothy was never helpless, she killed witches and she escaped from slavery and didn't she rescue all of Oz from the Nome king at one point? And you know I've got nothing against Ripley but she's kind of a cynical killing machine. Who exactly does Dorothy need to cynically kill? I Just Don't Get It.

Luckily it looks like Josh Olson (A History of Violence,) who is writing this masterpiece, is going to be putting the brakes on McFarlane.

McFarlane has a vision of Oz that is a dark, edgy and muscular PG-13, without a singing Munchkin in sight. That was clear with a toy line he launched several years ago that featured a buxom Dorothy and Toto reimagined as an oversized snarling warthog. Olson has something a little tamer, and PG, in mind.

"I saw those toys, and Dorothy as some bondage queen isn’t something I want to do," Olson told Daily Variety. "The appealing thing about the Baum books to me is how wildly imaginative they are. There are crazy characters from amazing places. I want this to be ‘Harry Potter’ dark, not ‘Seven’ dark."

Saints be praised.