Parking Tickets & Redheads

So this morning I wake up around 7:10 am. I figure - "ah hell, I've got nearly an hour to go before the ticket-man comes to deface my front car-window with a painful $45 fee ..."

I return to my stack dump sleep mode. Soon, I stir again. This time it's 7:40 am. "Ah shit, man ... you really should be getting up."

A few minutes more.

A few more.

Attention snaps to the clock. It is now 8:03.

Slide trousers into non-offensive position, begin exiting apartment. Temperature low outside.

Return to apartment. Put on coat.

Trot, then run, to car parked up the hill, on the same side of the street. I thought parking here would buy me some time. This assumption turns out to be incorrect.

As I approach my car, screaming "Nooo-oo," in my best Revenge of the Sith
Darth Vader voice, the parking pig is mid-ticket.

He's halfway through punching this thing in, and there's a glimmer
of hope.

As I make my final strides to reach him, the damned ticket prints out, and I blurt out a plea for sanctuary. He doesn't acknowledge my presence, instead moving on to the car two feet down from mine to deliver to it a similar bitter fate.

Then he turns and says, "I can't change it once the ticket is printed."

Furious, I open my car door, plunge in, and sit, with the word, "Fuuuuuuck," exploding in a gust of exhalation from my lips.

...

It is not until several hours later that I ponder the strange happenstance that has befallen the Spider-Man movie franchise.

You see, Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard's daughter, and a natural redhead) has been cast in the role of Gwen Stacy - Peter Parker's first true love in the comics. The thing is, she's a natural redhead, and Gwen Stacy was a vanilla blonde.

They've died her hair for the role, and there's something amusing in this, seeing as the first movie Spider-Man girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson (in the comics, his second or third girlfriend, depending on if you count the Daily Bugle's Betty Brant*) has natural red hair, which necessitated Kirsten Dunst's dye job for the first two Spider-films.

Howard looks good, though. Hopefully she won't fall from a bridge, and have her neck be snapped by Spidey's web (as he attempts to save her), as happened in the comics.

Maybe they'll off Dunst -- errr - Mary Jane instead. Her team-up with Orlando Bloom in Elizabethtown irritated me. I really wanted to like that film, but they had no charisma, and didn't seem to have a good feel for the roles. I don't know, maybe it was the editing. I wish they had cast Zooey Deschanel and Mark Ruffalo instead.

Crazy, man. Cra-zee.





* Betty Brant, the longtime-Daily Bugle secretary, has appeared in the two Spider-Man films, portrayed by the lovely Elizabeth Banks, who's also appeared in Seabiscuit - another Tobey Maguire flick.