Sunday, April 19, 2020

Some random thoughts about the Oklahoma City Bombing, my wife, Chuck Norris, and a spectacularly ill-timed Top Dog


On April 19, 1995, one day after the closing of The Houston Post, at 9:02 am CST, there was a terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City. Sixteen Social Security employees were among the 168 people who were killed. My wife was working for Social Security at the time.
I feared this would be the first in a series of terrorist attacks on federal offices across the entire nation. So, the next day, I begged my wife not to go to work. Her reply: “Fuck it. You lost your job. One of us has to be making money.” I couldn’t argue with that, so I stayed home and cooked dinner and washed dishes.
 Less than two weeks later, I covered for Variety “Top Dog,” an unfortunately ill-timed Chuck Norris dramedy about a San Diego cop, his love-hate relationship with a bomb-sniffing K-9 and, as I said in my review, “right-wing extremists who plant bombs in public buildings as part of their campaign of terror.” The movie wasn’t half-bad, and it certainly wasn’t Chuck’s fault that I got creeped out, but…
BTW: Note in the review the reference to April 20 as Hitler’s birthday. I wonder what fresh hell might await us tomorrow?

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