SpongeBob!

BTW, I went to see the SpongeBob SquarePants movie on Saturday. I went with my older brother Jesse, his girlfriend Kate, and his best friend since high school Jimmy. Kate was the youngest among us at 22. :) We saw a Saturday matinee. There were a lot of little kids there. One of the funniest things though was to hear when the adults laughed vs. when the kids laughed. Usually they were at completely different things.

It was a really funny movie. I highly recommend it to anyone else with young kids and/or a "Peter Pan" complex like all of my family and most of our friends.

I "got into" SpongeBob without really intending to. I know I'd heard of him prior to going to orientation, but I'd never watched any and was almost to the point of considering it juvenile (yeah...I'm kinda surprised at myself too). But when we got to orientation, we had this thing where we were all supposed to get up in front of everyone else and say who we were, where we were going, and what we expected to get out of our experience. A guy who later became a good friend counted. Out of 108 people, 13 said that their sole purpose while overseas was to "be a sponge."

Now, obviously, they meant that they wanted to soak up the culture and learn all they could....but all they said was that they wanted to be a spineless sea creature that, at its death, is used on dirty humans to make them clean (or to water hermit crabs).

Anyway, that became a bit of a joke at our orientation...which then spread to my family...and so some of the "joke" gifts from my mom and my aunt have been SpongeBob-related. And then, my second roommate Jaime brought some SB (that's SpongeBob, not Southern Baptist) DVDs with her to Baghdad, so I watched....and especially when you're really bored with nothing else to do, they're pretty funny. :)

What's funny is that Jesse wasn't really into SB, Kate wasn't really into SB, I wasn't really into SB, and Jimmy knew nothing about him. And yet four completely legal adults, none of whom were really interested in the cartoon character in question, went to a matinee the day after said cartoon character's first movie opened.

On the plus side, we all enjoyed it. :)

And there _is_ something funny at the very, very, very end of the incredibly long credits, at least half of which we believe were made up. Either that or there are some rather oddly-named people on the SB SP team.