I’m not a blogger. I wanted to be a blogger, my website is built with blogging software, so I started this page called “Today’s Rant” but it turns out that no one pays you to blog, so Today’s Rant has turned into This Year’s Rant.

Somehow it doesn’t feel like ranting when you only do it once a year. And besides, most of what I’ve written here isn’t very hysterical. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an angry, angry, angry guy and I’m not going to take it anymore. But somehow, when I sit down at my keyboard, I often can’t remember what I’m angry about or what it is that I’m not going to take anymore.

So I go on taking it.

But all right, I’ve got something to rant about today. Something trivial, but there it is. A number of friends said I should go see the movie Ironman because “a lot of it is set in Afghanistan.” Well, I sort of knew what I was getting into, but I went ‘cuz I’m a sucker for superhero movies.

This one is about Tony Stark, billionaire-industrialist arms manufacturer, who has an awakening of conscience when he’s caught by Bad Guys in Afghanistan and discovers that some of the armaments his company builds have ended up in their hands. (Ironically, the Bad Guys use waterboarding and keep their prisoners hooded, exactly the interrogation techniques U.S. forces have been using in Iraq.) Stark comes home and vows to get out of the weapons-business. From now on, he announces, he’s going to work for peace, not for war. He contributes to peace by making a metal suit that protects him from bullets, fires missiles, throws bombs, and emits sheets of flames. It also enables him to fly.  He puts on this non-weapon, flies to Afghanistan, and kills all the Bad Guys just before they can hurt Innocent Villagers. Then he flies home only to find that a local Bad Guy has stolen his design for a peace-suit and built one of his own. So the Good Guy and the Bad Guy battle each other all over the city in their iron peace-suits, crushing cars, setting fires, and breaking buildings. We don’t see any bystanders dying, but you can’t have this much burning, bursting, and crashing in a crowded city without casualties, so I assume hundreds of innocent people were killed. Thank heavens no weapons were involved: think how much worse the destruction could have been.

Perhaps they should have called it Ironyman?

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