Another Brick in the Wall

Kids played their first games of soccer today, on fields roughly the tempurature of the SUN. I had bench duty for kid number #5 team, since the S/O is a masochist who loves to try to get tiny demonic children all to run in one direction.

Kid #4's team lost 2-4. Kid #5's team won 5-3. By all rights, it should have been 5-1, but it's hard to get 5-year-olds to remember that you switch ends of the field at the half. So we scored more goals for the other team than they did for themselves.

The other team was diving like Portugal in the World Cup. One kid went down, untouched, and proceeded to scream until he was carried off the field. Another little girl sobbed the entire game, even when running the ball down the field. There were two kids on the other team that I swear -- I swear -- looked just like the little planitum-haired kids off Village of the Damned. I half-expected them to just stop in their tracks and start staring while all the grownups lost consciousness and dropped to the ground.

Village of the Damned was one of my favorite movies growing up. (Also loved the source novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham -- one of the best spec fic writers of all time). The scene that stuck with me the most was when George Sanders was in the classroom with all the children, waiting for the bomb to go off and destroy both him and the children and knowing that they can see his thoughts, so he builds a brick wall in his mind. As the time ticks off, the children start probing and the wall starts to crumble. I can remember being probably 8 or 9 and just being amazed at the elegance of the whole concept, and the execution of the scene.

At least I can rest easy knowing that those kids at soccer weren't actually telekinetic little sociopaths. Probably not, anyway. Most likely not. Well...