I've decided to call this blog tangents. Almost entirely because its a math pun and that's how I get off but also because it was always my favorite part of class as a student to get the teacher going on about their lives or the news or anything that wasn't task oriented. As a teacher, these little asides break up the monotony of a classroom and give us a chance to meander off onto topics that I find more interesting or important than calculus, like cartoons.

Coyote vs. Acme: A Review

My childhood was spent lying on the carpet, staring blank faced at the tube close enough the hair on my arms rose and stuck to the screen. I oscillated between catatonic states and laughing fits watching Monsignor B. Bunny thwart Daffy, Elmer, and the whole mess of looney tunes singing the hymns of merry melodies. Like many children of the 90's I had Space Jam on VHS. I would watch it all the way through then scurry to the VCR to rewind the spool of tape using the intermission as a chance to hit the head and grab refreshments from the pantry before returning to my slack-jawed position on the floor for an encore showing. Each rewatch another run of my parents' patience over the grater. Even now, when I'm ill, I'll stick some compilation on YouTube and chuckle my way through convalescence. My wife brings me soup and medicine and I ask "whats up doc?" She gives me white eyes and leaves.

My favorites always featured Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner. You didn't have to work at ACME to understand, coyote (Semper secondfiddelus) hastened after bird (Fastus furiousus) in the endless hunt, perpetually hoisted by his own petard occasionally through ill-devised schemes but more often than not by myriad temperamental convoluted or downright faulty contraptions he purchased from the ACME corporation. Each wayward scheme punctuated by a plume of smoke or a tongue waggle and a witty "beep beep" adding insult to injury. Naturally, as a child (Ignoratium estblissus) I wanted to be the Road Runner.

Now as an adult (Lifus suffurus) I was excited this past week to sit down and watch Coyote vs. ACME. After years of endless pain and suffering resulting from defective ACME products, Coyote decides to double down on the American legal system as his best course of action. With the reluctant help of Kevin, a dispirited and demoralized personal injury lawyer constantly seeking to settle, the unlikely duo set off to take on Goliath.

Eventually, the plaintiffs testify before a congressional hearing, chaired by Elmer Fudd notably spry for his age (more so than the rest of our octogenarian political elite and fun fact younger than sitting senator, Chuck Grassley born 1933 to Fudd's 1937). They plead their case: the ACME corporation has been secretly testing inventions on cartoons, thats why they're constantly malfunctioning. They have them dead to rights. (Pausus dramaticus). Foghorn Leghorn, once a simple southern Roostah, now corporate oligarch, accepting that the chickens have come home to roost, goes full A Few Good Men admitting the whole scheme. The panel determines that while reprehensible it was not technically illegal and dismisses the case. The name of the scheme was project Sisyphus.

Sisyphus was a man who cheated death. His punishment: to push a boulder up a hill. Each day he pushed it up the hill. Each night it rolled back down. Rinse. Repeat. Ad infinitum. His punishment is meaningless and endless. Absurd. Looney even. According to Camus, french philosopher, cigarette and all, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. In his analysis the only real philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide. Whether or not to surrender to the absurd. Whether or not to quit pushing the rock. Every day Sisyphus pushes the boulder up the hill. Every day Sisyphus stands at the apex. Every day he watches the rock roll back down, recognizes the act for what it is, its implicit purposelessness. In defiance of the gods, he doesn't hope; he knows his fate. He revolts by walking down the mountain and toiling on, because he's stronger than the boulder.

Shh...Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting for a point.

Waking up can feel absurd. Riding the bus. Sitting in math class. Prepping for an exam on a subject you probably don't care that much about and what does it even matter because Ai is going to do all the math anyway but you want to go to college or are told to go to college because well thats the next rung in the ladder and its got the benefit of not being here, nervous as you may be about it you and your friends boast like virgins about all the ones you got in. Staring at the clock thinking about eggs, all the atoms that once came from exploding stars traveling for billions of years forming bonds and breaking them, slowly accumulating mass bit after bit forming the earth and carving the mountains over eons and the life that came from tepid waters arose and left the seas and conquered the lands and multiplied and grew and died and decomposed and millions of years later in Pennsylvania, a guy named Colonel Drake made the Dino juice gush from the ground and a hundred years later the world runs on the stuff and some of the Dino Farts that come up with it are siphoned off to some power plant down the way that burns it to spin a turbine and they do all this so they can push some electrons in a wire and then they send some of those electrons over to your house that show up every time you flick the switch always on time and always available just so you can run those electrons through a resistor and as those electrons shove themselves through too tiny of a tube they get hot and you know it because the coil glows red and specks from yesterdays dinner smoke off and you take two, well it was three because you're trying to bulk, three unborn children from a chickens ass to make breakfast. And you're hungry again.

At the final curtain, Wile E. (Heroicus adabsurdus) bids adieu to Kevin (Lessonus lernus), returning to the desert and to the chase. One doesn't have to imagine; Coyote is happy.

The film has plenty of side gags and visual shtick, and a soupçon of nostalgia peppered in without overburdening the soup. Funny, heartwarming, very much in the cultural zeitgeist with the anti-monopoly message, apropos considering its production.

8/10 recommend

That's all folks!