Am I the only one disturbed that the “gourmet Chinese” restaurant, Panda Express has decided to name their newest dish after a Japanese warrior? I mean, I know, I know, it’s a stretch to call Panda Express Chinese food anyway, but c’mon… Weird vegetarian pandas getting excited over a mostly meat dish named after a Japanese warrior ad...

Last night I forced M to watch Stand by Me. I say forced because, it was already 10 pm, and we’d just watched Pirates of the Caribbean, At World’s End, full of squid-faced special effects and swashbucklery. But after that I wanted something, I don’t know, familiar? If I had been in the states, I would have been happy to turn on the TV and sit through a rerun of Law and Order, but in France, I went to my pile of DVDs from the library. Knowing nothing about the film but what he read on the DVD jacket (1959, four boys go on a camping trip to find a dead body in the woods), M wrinkled his nose and said “Okay, but don’t be mad if I fall asleep.” I said we only had to watch half of it, I was just craving something familiar. Stand by Me, directed by Rob Reiner, tells the tale of four, twelve year old, small town boys who walk 20 miles on train tracks to see the body of a dead boy in the woods. It came to theaters when I was twelve years old myself. It was especially popular among twelve year old girls for its casting: Will Wheaton as the thoughtful future writer boy, River Phoenix as the misunderstood hoodlum with a heart of gold, Corey Feldman as the war obsessed son of a crazy WWII vet and Jerry O’Connell as the wimpy, fat kid who knows the location of the dead body. A young, hot, Keifer Sutherland is their nemesis, and Richard Dreyfuss’s gravelly voice narrates the thing. The issues these boys were struggling with were far beyond anything I would ever know, but I still cried with them, and there is enough suspense...