So it was about ten degrees below zero a few evenings ago, and since the only people that would be out would be Minnesota people too insane or stupid to come in from the cold, I was contentedly settling back in my living room, fireplace blazing, seeing if there was anything decent on the tube that night.

And on the Bravo channel, I discovered they were airing the movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five, which happens to be a really good book. Now, normally I'm wary of books made into movies, because pretty much without exception the Hollywood people have transformed some of my favorite novels into mediocre-to-poor flicks (e.g. Nightfall, 2010, The Firm, Rising Sun, Jurassic Park, Sphere, actually, insert everything Michael Crichton ever wrote in here).

Nevertheless, I decided to give the movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five a chance. And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the movie was actually quite good, and actually followed the novel pretty closely. Which, as any admirer of Vonnegut writings would have to concede, is a difficult task. Vonnegut's works are often fantastic and very nonlinear on the surface, but in addition also can have themes that can run pretty deep. Slaughterhouse-Five is about a plain, ordinary man named Billy Pilgrim who just happens to travel back and forth in time throughout the events of his life. And whose lifetime also happens to includes a period after he was abducted by aliens and stored as a zoo specimen on the planet Tralfamadore. However, what Slaughterhouse-Five is really about is World War II and the Allied firebombing of Dresden.

Anyway, one of the last scenes of the movie is shortly after the bombing, where more than a hundred thousand people have been killed, and Billy Pilgrim and a bunch of other American prisoners of war have been put to work, clearing the debris, tagging and burning the dead bodies, and so on. And among the debris one of Billy's POW friends finds a worthless little ceramic knick-knack, which he pockets because it's a replica of a statue that his wife had at home but was accidentally broken. And then he's immediately seized by some German soldiers and shot to death, as punishment for looting. Nice, huh?

But the point of this narrative is that the movie ended shortly thereafter, and there seemed to be nothing on television afterward that seemed worth watching. So I decided to slip in a videotape where I had some old, random stuff still on there, and found an old "Voyager" episode that I had once recorded but not yet bothered to tape over.

And one of the guest stars of the show was Eugene Roche, who just happened to be the same actor who had played that guy that had just gotten executed.

And just because of that, I suddenly felt better.

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