And?

Emmy is back from the vet, sitting now on the living room rug, busily cleaning herself after her morning's unhappy adventure. All of the tests were negative, nothing they could find to explain her weight loss other than she's allergic to something or things in our, I guess, apartment. My gut feeling, through all this, has been she's OK and, since she seems to be eating noticeably better over this last couple of weeks, that she's turned the corner, whatever that corner might be. Six hundred bucks to find this out, however. I'm allowed an “ouch!”, but no complaints.

They're saying twelve-hundred bucks to clean her teeth, a procedure where they have to put her under to clean and then extract at least one cavity riddled molar. Is this cavity causing her pain? I have to think it is. No way to tell from the way she acts as cats hide these things well (the vet was firm in saying the molar cavity has no bearing on her weight loss or eating habits). I really don't like having her go down under an anesthetic, perhaps a reaction on my part to my having been much too willing in the past to let the doctors have their way with me. That and the twelve hundred bucks. Anyone have any experience with this?

Oh, and my own run to the dentist this morning: I walked over to the Grand Lake Theater, yesterday afternoon, to watch Tropic Thunder while eating a bag of the free popcorn they advertise if you attend a weekday matinee. No big deal, except I felt something stuck between my teeth as I was walking home, so I flossed. And then I flossed again. What in the hell was it, exactly? It didn't want to come out. A light dawned much later, the edge of the tooth in question feeling jagged. I'd obviously lost a filling. Lost half the tooth, actually, from what the dentist said this morning, so now I have a temporary filling in place with the first fitting for a new crown scheduled for the middle of next week.

Tropic Thunder, by the way, is extremely uneven, but worth the see for one or two of the individual performances. Tom Cruise as the studio boss is excellent. Whatever I may think of Tom Cruise - and I admit to thinking very little about Tom Cruise in my day to day existence other than as an actor - he gives a pretty damned good performance. Same with Robert Downey, Jr as an African American. Think about pulling that one off.

The movie starts in a novel and interesting fashion before settling into an over the top send up of every war movie that's ever been made. Ben Stiller does Rambo reasonably well (over and over and over) and manages not so much to offend as make you wince with his lame “retard” bit. I would suggest, if you're going to make a movie with something to offend everyone, you'd best be really fucking brilliant in doing a “retard” character riff. Still, overall, when the dialogue and the performances hit it, they hit it out of the park.

So you recommend it?

A noble effort: maybe a third of it's great, the rest is painful to watch.