2 Thought Trails Taking Up Space In My Head

Through a peculiar set of circumstances, I have ended up watching 3 Tom Cruise movies practically back to back. War of the Worlds, Mission Impossible III, and, The Last Samarai. How could I do it? I played a game of 'good actor/bad actor' while watching them...shouting out 'bad acting' whenever Cruise was centred on the screen and juxtaposed it with yelling 'good acting' when it was someone like Seymour Hoffman. War of the Worlds wasn't a great story to begin with. HG Wells ran outta ideas and killed the aliens off with small pox. On screen, it was even more pointless. The third of the impossible missions? Ok. Diverting but...c'mon....the ending really blew chunks (yes, I have to revert to grade school mentality). Finally, The Last Samarai... despite Cruise, I wanted to enjoy this film. But, alas, just another end of an age, technology is evil, the old ways cannot survive morality tale that attempted depth via flashbacks (I have expected a flashforward to an atom bomb explosion to reinforce the point just that wee bit more that wasn't obtained by the subtle use of the figurative sledge hammer but I guess having the white guy show the emperor the error of his ways was good enough). Blech.

My daughter has a favourite stuffed toy. It is a green and white platipus named Larry. I asked her the other day whether Larry was a boy or a girl. You see, sometimes, she refers to it as a 'she' and other times it is a 'he.'
She looked at me and said, in that overly patient tone denoting that she was speaking to someone just a wee bit slow, that: 'Larry is not a boy and Larry is not a girl. Larry is just Larry.'
Now, my daughter understands the boy/girl dichotomy pretty well. She feels (at times quiet strongly) that somethings are girl things and others are boy things (in part to separate some of her belongings from those of her brother). What really impresses me, however, is that the greyish area of 'other' does not present any difficulty to her. Larry can be just Larry. Larry can be referred to by either 'she' or 'he' and, it doesn't really matter which it is. The need to have Larry defined within a box is not necessary. It doesn't matter what Larry is as long as Larry is Larry. She loves Larry. Larry is her friend. That's that. If only we could all be that accepting.