>Spending some time in the military will do you some good and teach you that every one of your actions has a consequence.<

And what about the fellow soldiers her irresponsibility (and self-destructiveness) might put in harm's way? LW has something so wrong with her she has to screw up even the most promising situations. She's not the kind of person who should be taking care of a goldfish, much less having someone's back in a Fallujah alleyway. Maybe she can get a psych exemption--she certainly sounds unreliable enough...

>She sounds like a sweet, smart girl.<

If she were truly smart, she would have stayed in college--and she wouldn't screw up every opportunity she's had to make something of herself. And she wouldn't be getting herself into a place where her self-destructiveness and self-centeredness can get others _killed_. She needs therapy to settle her issues and time to figure out what she wants out of life. She hasn't messed up anyone but herself yet, but if she doesn't get help, she most assuredly will.

...why do people think she'll learn discipline and duty there? This is not a front-line war--fighting is everywhere, and even now mental-health professionals are saying they don't even have the resources to deal with the number of messed-up soldiers that will be coming back. If LW isn't thriving in relatively stable situations, why does anyone think being in the middle of this will automatically straighten her up. Odds are, it will make her problem worse. And, _again_, she could easily get other people killed by not being up to it.

>Why didn't someone look at this script and say, 'Lots of great ideas! Pick one and we'll have our movie!"<

Because Hollywood believes the audience members who will put out the crucial WOM on AWE are stereotypical vid-game/iPod multitaking teenagers who must never, ever be bored. (Which is a very silly assumption--my college-student cousin is an ace multitasker, but she knows when a flick is all stuffing and no meat, as it were. :)) As well, the writers and producers are under pressure (or pressure themselves) to top what they've done before. The ironic thing is that the stuff they've done before caught on because it was fresh--or rang changes on old pirate-movie tropes. But because of the ferocious deadlines on projects this big, they don't have time to let ideas simmer--or come up with much that's new. Result--they multiply what worked before, to diminishing effect...

>there were some genuine and emotionally powerful moments, such as the part where Norrington returns Will's sword to him.<

Relatedly, it was a mistake for the writers to lose sight of the heart of this material and have every single character turn out to be a triple-crosser with a thousand agendas. That pretty much blew Elizabeth and Will's characters out of the water, because if they reduced everything they cared about to yet another bargaining chip, why should we care about them? One can be a good person and still use the pirate in one, y'know?

>Then, after its success, it was unavoidable that the magical aura of the first film would be grabbed by the horns and gutted, any scraps that could be fashioned into some semblance of the charm of the first movie dragged out for 3+ hours, twice.<

Yeah, I would imagine the studio committee notes/multi-production-executive imput was fairly intense. :)

Even the judges looked stunned at how much these two let their dislike show. And if you can dismay judges who see nuclear- temperament blowouts on a minute-to-minute basis in RL, well...:) In any case, one of the major points of SHEAR GENIUS seems to be it's great if you're talented, but you also need to be easy to work with and care about your customers over your own ego. The show is fascinating to me because I never knew just how much technique, skill, and knowledge goes into hairdressing.

...is very good here. Unlike too many reality-show hosts, who can't see beyond the show being a stage for their "charisma," she really seems to care about judging well and giving contestants their just rewards. I always thought she was a bit held-back as an actress, but judging by this, her basic personality is fairly cool.

>I exchange lovely emails with Internet guys who stop emailing when they see my picture. Friends fix me up with guys who disappear after one date - once they've seen my face.<

Well, then, you lucked out. Would you really want any of these men as a husband/fellow parent? And will your life come crashing down if you don't get to be a wife/mother?

...really resent that women act like individuals and refuse to see themselves as "guardians of the world's morality," or "gatekeepers of sexuality." God forbid women might want to live their lives and exercise their talents _just_ like men do instead of being wifey and mother their entire lives. Stepp reminds me of this poster on an author board I frequent who was always whining that feminists "scared" all the "good men" into being wimps so "real" women like her couldn't find no hubby. If women like her and Stepp believe this, why on earth don't they restrict themselves solely to house and kids instead of making money? That's one of those mysteries no one has ever cleared up about women like them and O'Beirne and Flanagan and...

>When do you think it'll get acknowledged that demanding special compensation for white women's 50 million years of oppression was a form of wrongheaded overreaching which is currently feeding a backlash?<

In what way is demanding that women get an equal shake demanding "special compensation?" This is a bullshit argument that essentially translates into, "Some of us men don't want to give up a damm thing no matter how unfair the system is to everyone else." Go cry your river elsewhere--you've got no leg to stand on here.