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I went to see Titan AE today with Kidsis. Hopefully I'll get around to writing a review for it tonight and posting it to Epinions. Briefly: I wanted to like it, but it has some major flaws.

Trapped With a Crazy Man

Earlier this afternoon, I worked a fair for my company. We're still trying to raise awareness for that damn levy, so they want us at every podunk fair between here and the county line. I was supposed to drive the parking lot shuttle. Bonus: the bus I had is air conditioned, so I could relax in the cool.

Unfortunately, the parking lot was so close that no one wanted to ride to the gate. What I ended up doing was giving people rides around the parking lot while my coworker blew up balloons at the table for the kids. The kids loved riding around in the bus, even at 5 miles per hour, and the adults enjoyed sitting in cold air for a few minutes. It worked out well.

Unfortunately 2: the fair was pretty dead. It was sponsored my MADD, and by the time I got there things were starting to wind down. A lot of the booths had already shut up and gone home, and people were starting to clear out. We didn't have a lot of traffic at our table, so I had to spend some time chatting with my coworker.

Those two hours were so slow.

Don't get me wrong. He's a nice enough guy so long as you only talk to him for a few minutes and don't bring up certain topics. But I was there for two hours.

See, the guy is a born-again Christian. I don't have anything against born-agains, so long as they don't try stomping on my shit or trying to "save" me. But they invariably do, and so I try to avoid them. I've even tried the No thanks, I already got religion thing; doesn't work. And when I've tried explaining that I have already intellectually and philosophically examined fundamentalist Christianity (only to find contradictions, hypocrisy and other major problems), they try to save me even harder, since they think I'm "almost there."

Anyway, you can see why I avoid certain topics around this guy. I overheard him telling another driver a few days ago that AIDS was the gay plague and it was sent by God to punish the sinners. (I stopped listening after a few minutes because I was just getting mad.) But in addition to that, he's also a know-it-all. No matter what topic you pick, he knows all about it (better than you, of course), and can top whatever you tell him.

For example, today he showed me the proper way to tie balloons. He corrected the way I strapped the helium tank into the bus when we were getting ready to leave. He asked every kid what their name was, and told them what their name meant. (Most of the kids just looked at him with a Just give me my balloon, you weirdo look.) When I told him I've done some writing, he asked if I did poetry. I said no, and was informed that real writers always write poetry as a warm-up exercise.

He told me how to set up a pension fund, when I should get the brakes replaced on my car, where to get the best burger in Ohio, why the other drivers are slackers, how I should go about moving my belongings to Canada, and what poetry books I should read in order to improve my writing.

Yup.

Like I said, it was a long two hours.