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What the flagnard?!

I’ve written about the NFL’s blackout rule before. The main problem with the rule is that it ignores the slight possibility that maybe, just maybe, people aren’t going to the stadium because ticket prices are way too fricken high.

Well, two NFL teams, including my home town losers the Lions, have decided that maybe I’m right. They’re actually lowering ticket prices.

I’d guess that after you add up the ticket prices for your family, pay for parking, replace the radio stolen from your car, and the glass that was broken to get the radio, plus pay for the ridiculously over-priced food at the stadium, it’d probably still be cheaper to take your family to Hawaii for a week.

But it’s still nice to know they’re making some effort. That’s more than we can say about the effort they’re making on the field.

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When going green means it’s someone else’s problem

Someone recently dropped off a bunch of old magazines to my work so the public could read them while they wait. He was very proud of himself for not throwing these magazines away. No use filling up the landfills, right?

Does this guy seriously think that shifting his garbage to someone else to throw away actually solves anything? Certainly these magazines will not stay here forever. Eventually someone will throw them away. (Me, actually.) So it’s only a matter of time before they get tossed in a landfill.

I see this sort of BS directed to kids. You know, the whole recycle, reduce and reuse mantra. I see nothing wrong with recycling and reducing. But reusing is merely delaying the inevitable. Kids are told for example, instead of throwing away a jar, use it to store your coins. That works if you need a jar to store your coins. If you don’t, you’re only delaying the inevitable. Heck, come to think of it, even if you do need a jar to store coins, you’re still only delaying the inevitable. Someone somewhere is going to throw that jar away.

And what about the next jar? Or the jar after that? How many fricken coins do kids have nowadays? Don’t they buy candy anymore?

Sure we could recycle those jars and the magazines that get dumped on us by rude fucktards who thought they were saving the planet by delaying the inevitable. But why didn’t they do that in the first place? Why should it suddenly be my responsibility merely because they’re too fucking lazy to do it themselves?!

To me anyone who dumps his garbage on someone else under the pretense of “reusing” is at best being a prick. At worst being an idiot.

“Look at me I’m saving the planet by forcing someone else to do my recycling for me!”

La de fucking da!

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Sex sells everything but sex

Apparently there’s a controversy brewing about the 2010 Miss USA Pageant. Believe it or not (you might want to sit down for this) they’re actually using gratuitous pictures of scantly clad hotties to hype a show about scantly clad hotties. I know, I know… I’m as shocked as you are.

Anyway, I’ve been viewing and reviewing the pictures for the last several hours and I simply do not understand the controversy.

Is it because they’re in black and white?

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It’s a problem when you think it’s a problem

I’m in the middle of writing up a long post on addictions when I came across this piece of shit from Ask Amy.

In a nutshell a wife wrote asking whether her husband is an alcoholic. He drinks when he first gets home. He never drinks after dinner. He rarely gets drunk. His drinking has never affected his employment.

Ask Amy’s response in a nutshell: If his drinking is subjectively a problem to you, then it is an objective problem he should fix.

That’s fricken asinine. Imagine if I wrote Ask Amy with the following question: My wife makes really good money but spends a lot of it on clothes, new shoes, and things around the house. We have plenty of money saved. And we have plenty of money set aside for our kids’ college. But I subjectively do not like it when she’s shopping because she’s not focusing her attention directly on me. I’m what’s important in our relationship, right? Shouldn’t she be focusing on me rather than buying and trying on clothes?

Would Ask Amy ever suggest that my wife should go to counseling to seek treatment to overcome her “shopping” problem? Does my wife really even have a problem merely because I find it annoying? Would Ask Amy ask,

Did your wife always shop or did it develop recently? This might be a sign of some medical problem that she should discuss at her next check up.

People do innocuous stuff all the time that we don’t like. Some guys watch a lot of sports and their wives don’t like it. Some women find a need to vacuum whenever men decide to watch TV. Neither of those are medical conditions. They’re merely quirks which define who we are.

If I were Ask Amy my response would have been:

Why do you feel a need to be the center of attention? Can’t your husband have two hours a day to do something besides worship at your fucking feet? Do your husband a huge favor and divorce him so he can have more than two hours of peace and quiet every day.

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Thoughts on Iron Man 2

I saw Iron Man 2 yesterday in Imax. (Real Imax, not fake Imax.) This isn’t a review as much as some comments about it.

* So is Scarlett Johansson incapable of faking a Russian accent? I can understand why she wouldn’t use it when she was undercover as Natalie Rushman, but Black Widow is not Black Widow without the accent.

* And speaking of Black Widow, why wasn’t she called Black Widow? Why wasn’t Whiplash called Whiplash? And why wasn’t War Machine called War Machine? I got the impression they didn’t want to use the cheesy comic-book names to distract from the seriousness of the movie. (BTW, that was sarcastic.)

* If Black Widow really was undercover trying to infiltrate Stark’s company, why would she risk blowing her cover by kicking the ass of Stark’s body guard for no good reason?

And speaking of Stark’s body guard, exactly why does Iron Man need a body guard?

* I don’t think it was worth it to see in Imax. What directors (other than Christopher Nolan) don’t seem to understand is that Imax is a different medium than normal cinema.

Have you ever seen a very large waterfall? The water and objects flowing over the fall appear to do so in slow motion. The same is true of very large flags. They too seem to wave in slow motion. Another good example would be large rockets being shot into space. They’re moving ridiculously fast when launched but appear to be barely moving when compared to the background.

Nolan seemed to recognize that when he directed the Dark Knight. The scenes he shot with an Imax camera moved very slowly.

However, Michael Bay made no changes to his direction when he made Transformers 2 for Imax. He used the exact same hyper-fast edit/wiggly camera approach he used in all of his movies. And that’s, unfortunately, the trend most action directors follow.

That type of cinematography simply does not work on an Imax sized screen. First, it becomes nothing more than a nauseating blur at points. Second, because of the size of the screen, the action appears to be moving at an unnatural fast-motion. Like it was sped-up.

* I’ve said it in regard to Iron Man 1, Robert Downey Jr. may a great actor, but he’s simply too old to play Stark. Even though he’s only 45, he looks old. I mean old old. I’m talking grandpa old. There are scenes with Downey making eyes at 26 year old Johansson and it was completely unbelievable and a little disgusting. Partially because Johansson looks a lot younger than 26, with her angelic face she could easily play a teenager. (Unfortunately she cannot play a Russian mercenary at any age.)

* Although my nearly 9 year old son and his 9 year old friend liked the movie, I thought it was too long and too adult for most kids.

I’m not talking about the violence or the gratuitous cleavage. It’s that they didn’t catch on to stuff such as: Stark was dying, and that was the basis for his erratic behavior, why Whiplash wanted revenge against Stark, the significance of Pepper Potts becoming CEO, etc. All they remember from the movie was the fight scene at the race track and the last 20 minutes of CGI rock ‘em/sock ‘em robots.

* The entire movie was basically a product placement for the upcoming Avengers movie.

* Samuel L. Jackson looks ridiculous as Nick Fury. I’m not sure anyone could play Nick Fury without looking like a ridiculous caricature.

* This installment had a weird continuity error just like the first.

The first movie had Tony Stark watching the news and recognizing his weapons being used in the middle east. He wonders whether his propulsion units on his suit could be used as weapons so he can go and destroy them. He starts shooting around the room with his propulsion units destroying everything in his path. Satisfied that they can be used as weapons, he flies to the middle east.

Suddenly upon arrival in the middle east his suit is fully armed with missiles and bullets. He’s able to blow up a tank and shoot a number of bad guys with pin-point accuracy.

If these weapons were there all along, why did he destroy his mansion testing whether the propulsion systems could used as a weapon? And where did those weapons come from? We saw the entire process of the building of the suit in excruciating detail, why did we never see weapons installed? And the fact that Stark included weapons contradicted the whole point of the movie that he wanted to get out of the weapons business.

I get the impression that the scenes with the weapons were added late in the process to give the movie more action. Maybe someone thought the middle was dragging a bit and needed more explosions. Maybe Michael Bay visited the set for a day or two.

Anyway, the weird continuity error in Iron Man 2 was that Stark was specifically told by Fury/S.H.I.E.L.D. that he could not leave his house. There were S.H.I.E.L.D. guards all over the place to ensure he couldn’t leave.

But yet a couple of scenes later he was nonchalantly driving to his company’s office to see Pepper. He did not escape his house with his suit, he apparently just got in a car and drove away. So either Stark is the Houdini of his time or the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are complete idiots.

* The whole plot point of Stark being confined to his house was contrived and unnecessary. It seemed like a set up to something that never happened. Maybe the scene of him escaping got left on the editing room floor.

* How much power does S.H.I.E.L.D. really have? They were on Stark’s side the entire time. But yet they’re also a government agency. Do they have more power than the US military? If so, why didn’t Fury tell the military to back off? If not, why didn’t the military tell S.H.I.E.L.D. to back off?

* Is thinking about the essence of S.H.I.E.L.D. any more asinine than thinking about GI Joe and Cobra? (I already know the answer to that one.)

* I think I’m too old for super hero movies. Sure, the Dark Knight and Spider-Man 2 were great superhero movies. But when you limit praise to a specific genre, that’s not really a compliment. It’s like saying, “That’s the very best polka song I’ve ever heard.”

My favorite movies are dramas and slice of life movies, e.g., Ghost World, Buffalo ’66, Lars and the Real Girl, the Station Agent, the Accidental Tourist, to name a few. I can watch such movies over and over again without ever seeing plot holes large enough to drive a truck through. Without having to completely suspend my disbelief. Without having to cover my ears to drown out the clanking of metal against metal. I should watch more of those types of movies.

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How can people afford cell phones II

I thought about getting my wife an iPhone for Mother’s Day. I researched getting a smart phone when the Droid was released. So I was sort of prepared for the cost, but even so I was still shocked.

The 16gb iPhone costs 200 bucks. That doesn’t sound too bad. But you also need a voice/data plan. That’s about $70 per month. Despite the fact that texting is nothing but data, you also need a separate texting plan for about $20 per month.

So adding it all up you’re paying about 100 bucks per month for nearly $2,400 in total over the two year plan.

I realize I’m an old fart. I realize this post makes me look completely out of touch. But I used to pay less than 100 bucks a month for rent back in the 90s.

I remember back in the bad old days when AT&T was a pure monopoly. Back then you paid a nominal amount for local calls. However, you were utterly reamed to call long distance.

AT&T’s monopoly was broken up and suddenly it became real cheap to make long distance calls. VoIP made it even cheaper.

Yet after deregulation AT&T is still reaming us. In the bad old days you could always lower your bill by making fewer long distant call. You can’t do that any more. You’re paying a ton each month even if you leave your phone turned off and never use it. And the worst part is that people are lining up to be reamed. It simply makes no sense to me.

I think a good definition of “being old” is when you’re utterly perplexed by the activities of the young. That fits me perfectly.

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Court Quote of the Month: “Unacceptable heterosexual behavior”

According to a news article at WNEM, a female CMU student sued the school for discrimination. She alleged that she was singled out and lost her basketball scholarship because she was not a lesbian.

The plaintiff alleged that because she identified herself as heterosexual and wore make-up that her coach singled her out for “unacceptable heterosexual behavior.” Got to love that.

Heike v. Guevara, Slip Copy, 2010 WL 538300 E.D.Mich.,2010. (February 09, 2010)

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