"Don't call me junior." - Indiana Jones, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

 

Alia Wilder and the Poster of Enormous Hugeness. You can see our fireplace in the background. Alia Wilder is invisible due to the gravitational lensing effect of Harrison Ford’s massive head.

As I have written before, besides his father (well, duh, me) The Boy has no better friend and role model than Indiana Jones®. Oh, sure, essentially everything Indiana Jones© does would nowadays be considered looting of cultural artifacts, destruction of prime scientific data and theft of national heritage, but he hates Nazis, killer religions, Nazis, and Commies, so that makes it okay.

Besides, if Indiana™ didn’t go get all that cool stuff, all he could do legally would be to go and unearth Swanson’s® frozen dinner tins from the 1950’s from the local landfill and attempt to escape the clutches of the EPA and the vegans who were unhappy that it was a turkey dinner, and that the turkeys should have been given several million years to evolve thumbs, language, and Turkey Idol© so that we could consider them to have culture. Thus, eating them isn’t good, it’s some sort of murder. But, it’s a tasty, tasty murder. With gravy.

Anyhow, Alia came home late last night, toting in sections of cardboard that were longer than she is tall. (Alia is fairly short, like 2’1” tall, so most Amazon.com cartons are bigger than she is.) She began assembling with some sort of parts that she had ferreted in various pouches secreted about her clothing.

While she industriously worked away, The Mrs. and I watched the old cast from MST3K skewer The Matrix, (you can buy and download this stuff from rifftrax.com) and, like usual, ignored her patently strange goings-on. She hasn’t attempted to burn our house down in a while, even accidently. If Alia wanted to tell us why she was assembling a huge cardboard structure in our front room, we guessed she’d tell us.

Eventually Neo© rescued Morpheus™ from Elrond®, and The Mrs. and I paid attention to the Great Construction Project going on behind us.

Alia S. Wilder stood the structure up.

There, before us, was the looming, obelisk-like visage of one Dr. Henry Jones, Jr.™

Eight feet tall, Indiana Jones® had now rescued our family from, oh, I guess it’s communists this time.

Alia S. told us, “I got it for The Boy. He likes Indy.”

Did I weep Internet? No. But I did have another beer, which is exactly like weeping, if you replace “weeping” with “having another beer.”

This was a very thoughtful think that Alia S. Wilder had done – she’d gotten this from work. Alia S. works at a movie theater in the entertainment industry, and had been given this massive, massive picture of Harrison Ford’s enormous head, surrounded by a sword-wielding androgonous person, Karen Allen, Mario (from Mario Brothers™) and a young Marlon Brando.

Is it just me, or is Harrison Ford’s head way bigger than Karen Allen’s head? Maybe they made Harrison Ford’s massive head look smaller in the first few movies through some sort of Hollywood® magic? Dang, that’s one big melon.

How did The Boy react, groggy after just waking up on a school day when he saw his idol taking up most of the living room?

He danced. The Boy danced the dance of a seven-year-old delirious with joy (but still well enough to go to school).

I imagine what he’s thinking: Crushing Nazis, getting The Girl, stealing really cool gold statues from Nicaragua.

Brings a tear to my eye, and by tear I mean “another beer,” and by eye I mean, "mouth."