DLD 4/7/09: Cahill, lineups, Hilary Duff on the run

1. Cahill tonight! Excited about that, but sad to read this:

Roy Steele, the A’s main public-address announcer since the team arrived in Oakland in 1968, is unlikely to handle PA duties the first month of the season because of poor health.

Roy Steele anchors my baseball memories in the same way Bill King does. The soundtrack of my youth, so to speak. Bill King, Roy Steele, REM, and the endless procession of guidance counselors lecturing me about the tragic gap between my “potential” and my performance. (Maybe this is premature, but I’m going to call it anyway: that D in 8th grade World History did not actually derail my hopes and dreams)

2. Wherein Bob Geren’s alleged affinity for The Book is discussed. Tango posts lots of numbers I did not read. MGL gets huffy. Etc.

3. Another tale of monkeys on the loose, this time in Oregon.

Famed Hillsboro rhesus include ANDi, the first “transgenic” primate, born in 2001 with jellyfish genes inserted into his genetic code

Movie pitch:

So there’s this monkey. Rhesus Macaques. Cute little bugger but we can make it fierce, don’t worry, that’s what CGI is for. It’s in a lab. Cages, guys with glasses and white coats, clipboards, computers. There’ll be a hot young lab assistant – I’m thinking Hilary Duff in a breakout role – and a kindly elder statesman professor-type, Anthony Hopkins maybe. With a beard. Has to have a beard. We’ll have a love interest, obviously, and an evil scientist (Magneto to Hopkins’ Professor X), maybe a slightly less hot but dependable – and wry! – girlfriend for the lab assistant.

So what do we do? We combine the monkey with a jellyfish, that’s what! So now it’s a transgendered monkey. No, wait transgenic. Shit. Sorry! It’s not a bisexual monkey. Not that that’s what transgendered is, but you get what I’m saying. It’s got jellyfish genes, is the point. In any case, the monkey is translucent and kind of glowing and it has these tentacle things sprouting everywhere. Pretty soon they have to put wet sand and water in its cage, and Anthony Hopkins is warning everyone about all the ethical dangers. Violation of nature, stuff like that.

This is where Magneto comes in. He wants to push it further. He won’t take no for an answer. Pretty soon, this monkey has giraffe genes, starfish genes, labradoodle genes, even human genes. Now it’s a wild-eyed jellyfish/giraffe/starfish/labradoodle/human/monkey beast of a thing, all the other lab monkeys are going batshit crazy, screaming, jumping around, but Magneto won’t stop. And now the Pentagon is involved, Professor X is killed in a mysterious lab accident, Hilary Duff is on the run, fleeing special ops forces and Magneto and terrorists – you don’t think al-Qaeda would want to get their hands on a mutant rhesus macaques? – and obviously the monkey itself, which has broken free from the lab and is terrorizing downtown Chicago.

We’re not sure how it ends but that’s why we need an advance – to finish the script. We know the monkey is gonna have human traits, it might even talk at some point, it’ll have emotions but it’s still a killer, maybe King Kong crossed with Deep Blue Sea crossed with Marley and Me crossed with Terminator. Hilary Duff gets captured but escapes, there’s some kind of antidote or serum involved – hey, we could do that scene from Temple of Doom where Indy gets poisoned and there’s chaos in the ballroom and before you know it they’re tumbling down a waterfall in raft and people are getting their hearts ripped out of their chests – anyway, she saves the day and gets the guy and we either kill the monkey – but in a sad, wrenching kind of way – or we un-mutate it, reverse the transgendering, transgenicing, whatever it’s called, and release it into the African wild where it rejoins its natural monkey clan. Maybe Hilary Duff moves to Africa, becomes, shit, what do you call those people? You know what I mean, like Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist, except hotter and blonder and always in a tank top, plus the love interest and the girlfriend move out there with her – they just want to get away from the rat race, right? And maybe Professor X didn’t get killed after all, maybe he was just in a coma but recovered thanks to the healing properties of that anti-transwhatever serum.

There you go. It’s gold. Last shot, camera slowly pans back, and you’ve got Hilary Duff and the love interest and the plain girlfriend all surrounding Professor X on a wooden porch in an African game preserve, everybody is grinning, the sunset is beautiful, the music is swelling, and hey, what’s that? Why it’s the monkey, goddamnit, back to normal, scuttling around gaily, eating apples from Hilary Duff’s hand. Fade to black, do not pass go, collect $300 million.