If a tree falls in the woods…

There is a great line in an even greater movie that goes something like this:

John Hammond: All major theme parks have had delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956 nothing worked.

Dr. Ian Malcolm: But, John, if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists!

I’ll resist the urge to write an entire post about exactly WHY Jurassic Park is the greatest movie of all times and simply explain the reason why I opened with that quote. I think I may be having a Disneyland opening day. That is, I think this blog is defective. Since yesterday’s launch I sat and watched my hit counter, expecting the numbers to roll past as people flocked to this new attraction. And nobody came! No one is even reading this sentence right now, because no one is coming to my new blog!

Or possibly the failure lies in another area: the hit counter. I can’t be sure. I suppose that would be the more likely issue, since my counter is telling me I’ve had 43 visits since yesterday, and that all of them come from the same location in Madison (mine) and well, I might be a doting owner of a new blog but I promise I haven’t visited myself that many times. I guess a defective hit counter isn’t quite as thrilling as an unleashed man-eating T-Rex, but maybe with the help of your imagination you can see the connection. I’m currently negotiating with John Williams for the score.

Oh what the heck, if there’s a chance no one is reading this… I was ten years old when Jurassic Park was released, and it was probably the first PG-13 movie I was allowed to go see, because I was the kind of child who played with plastic dinosaurs and such. We spent the day at the beach, and that evening my dad took my sister and her friend and I to the theater. I was terrified and entranced, and when that raptor jumped at the girl’s leg as they were escaping through the ceiling I was one of a million Americans who simultaneously clutched at our hearts and hung there together in terror–she’d come so far! That night and every night for weeks after I laid in bed and replayed the entire film in my head, from the opening credits to the closing, and I grew frustrated as the details slipped away from me. I have seen a lot of movies since then and not a single one has grabbed hold of me in such a way that I was held as a wide-eyed ten year old girl. There, I went ahead and said it. I love Jurassic Park. And I love dinosaurs!