At the movies...

Well, kind of at the movies. I am not a "go to the movie" kind of guy. I don't like crowds and like them even less when they yap while you are trying to watch a movie. In fact, I don't even rent movies very often. But this weekend, I did. War of the Worlds and Ladder 49.

So the review...

I saw the original War of the Worlds way back when. It was black and white as I remember and Orson Wells did the voice over. It scared the crap out of me. My little brother Roger was with me and we were both, well little. My parents were somewhere and we snuck off to the Lyric theatre to see it.

When Mom and Dad got home, they found us sitting in the middle of the family room surrounded with butcher knives. We were scared to death.

Maybe that's why I don't go to movies. But anyway, the modern version wasn't all that appealing to me even though I kind of knew what was going to happen. The "new" followed the "old" fairly well, san butcher knives.

Ladder 49 was something different. Powerful. I welled up a couple of times. It kind of made me want to call my fireman nephew John and tell him to get a safe job at Wal-Mart. But, this is Lincoln and not Baltimore so there aren't that many tall buildings here. None the less, one of the young stars fell through the roof on a two story fire and they had to summon the bagpipes. During my CERT training, our volunteer fireman instructor told us..."if you want to know what it is really like inside of a burning building, watch Ladder 49." Lesson understood.

Look close at Lincoln's finest with Ladder 5 as it were. It's truck 5 in Northeast Lincoln. That's a pic I took of a fire in the neighborhood last year. Looks pretty nasty, doesn't it.

Maybe you can walk out of Ladder 49 and say, "it's only a movie." Then again, you may hear a distant siren howling in the night. You may see flashing blue and red lights in the distance. And if you stand still for a moment, Ladder 5 will blow on by on their way to God knows what. Raise your index finger when a firetruck goes by. We don't need anymore young families in the first pew and somebody warming up the bagpipes.

God speed Ladder 5 and all of Lincoln's finest.