I always pictured Mongols as small and tough, riding across the steppes of Asia on their hardy little war ponies, each man keeping a vein open and clamped in his horse's neck so that he could drink its blood while in the saddle. These Mongol horsemen were all bowlegged and handled their innovative recurved composite bows with deadly accuracy. However, my son had a friend throughout grammar school whose father was a Mongol. Far from being small and bowlegged, this dude was built like a Tongan. He did have the Mongolian attitude that I imagined, though. When his wife told him that she was leaving him and taking the kids with her, he told her that she was free to go but that if she tried to take the children, he'd kill them all. She believed him. So he raised the kids. We took the boy on a camping trip once. His father gave him some money to help out with supplies. At our first stop - a general store down the road from the Rouge Y Noir Cheese Factory, he spent the whole wad on candy, which he stored away in his backpack and worked on throughout the trip. Anyway, along came The Story of the Weeping Camel and Mongolian Ping Pong and my image of the Mongolian male transmogrified in the direction of, say, the Inuits. But now, with Mongol, I'm back to the image of my son's friend's father, even though the star of the movie, playing Genghis Khan, is Japanese.
And by the way, what is it with Inner Mongolia and Outer Mongolia? I was all scheduled for my Asian Adventure when I noticed that I was only ticketed to Inner Mongolia. No way! I told them. I don't want to be stuck in Inner Mongolia; I want to sleep out under the stars in Outer Mongolia.
For whatever reason, I haven't watch any of those doctor and lawyer shows that deal with a current social issue or two every week. Until Eli Stone, that is. I just watched the first season on DVD. Each episode, a new issue. My question is, given the fact that no one has ever learned anything in their high-school civics or social studies class, why not just show an episode from one of these shows every day in class? It couldn't hurt.
The Hulk movies are entertaining except for the Hulk himself. It would make all the difference if The Hulk, when called into existence, was moved to do something other than rage and break things. Perhaps the big transformation could be triggered by Bruce Banner's extreme hunger, and he would binge on sushi, or get set off by Bruce Banner's powerful thirst, with Hulk do Jello shots to an insane degree. Or, of course, Bruce could get a powerful itch down there.