I'm a Dustbowl Refugee

Background music [Woody Guthrie: Dusty old Dust]

Now, the telephone rang, an' it jumped off the wall

That was the preacher, a-makin' his call

He said, "Kind friend, this may the end

An' you got your last chance of salvation of sin!"

The churches was jammed, and the churches was packed

An' that dusty old dust storm blowed so black

Preacher could not read a word of his text

An' he folded his specs, an' he took up collection

Said

So long, it's been good to know yuh

So long, it's been good to know yuh

So long, it's been good to know yuh

This dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home

And I got to be driftin' along

MARK AGED 96 (V.O)

It was not very often that I got to combine my love of near-future science fiction with my love of Woody Guthrie. 

We used to have students... desks... chairs... lots of chairs... but mostly we just had to do grading. I didn't see the matrix after a while. Just B, fail, C, A, S... 

Oh no. Wrong movie. 

It was April 14th. 

No wait, it was June 27th. I'd been thinking of showing Aliens. Spent a long time trying to decide between Alien or Aliens. In the end it was going to be Aliens, since I figured I could show them the beginning without giving too much away, and they would be encouraged either to go backwards and watch the first movie, or go away and watch the rest of the second movie. 

Sure, it told them that Sigourney Weaver survived the aliens, but they would have been able to guess that from the existence of Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection. 

It didn't tell them about [removed spoiler], [removed spoiler] or [removed spoiler]. 

Anyway, my better half recommended I show Interstellar instead. She kept suggesting all kinds of movies and complaining that I was showing too much science fiction, but I kept telling her that the class was called "the future in movies" and that's what the students had signed up for.  

There are good bits in Interstellar though. Not just the dustbowl references, and the wonderful symmetry between events seventy years before the millennium and seventy years after. 

There always seems to be a massive cop out in the movie about the blight destroying the planet, when most reasonable estimates would pick climate change as the thing that's going to leave us without any means of food production. It also seems to miss the importance of diversity in crops as the best hedge for it. I guess that's just a McGuffin though.

Hedges would be a good idea too, instead of those massive fields of corn the size of English counties. I thought they could have learnt that lesson back in the dustbowl.