Terminator Salvation

Saw Terminator Salvation last night.  I kind of liked it; it managed to engage me.  There were several edge-of-my-seat moments; exactly the same amount as in Star Trek, which rx'd nearly 3x the rotten tomatoes value.

Both movies suffer the same problem that many big budget summer science fiction films do: the assumption that once disbelief has been suspended for the larger science fiction devices, it's suspended for smaller oversights as well.  These movies feature a number of striking unlikelihoods: black holes, time travel, further time travel, sentient and malevolent machines, etc.  All of these are fine; if you pay to see a Terminator movie and can't suspend disbelief about future robots, you're .. wrong.  It's the smaller inaccuracies that really tend to break a movie for me.  In the case of TS, John Connor expends a huge effort to infiltrate skynet's San Francisco headquarters secretly.  He calls for backup from the resistance home base.  They dispatch a helicopter, which lands in the very middle of the RnD department completely unmolested.  They then just leave!  

In the case of Star Trek, the planet Vulcan is destroyed by a mining ship, which extends a gigantic laser gun thing into the atmosphere by a ricketyass chain- yes, a chain.  Star Fleet is dispatched from light years away and fails to save the planet.  Much later in the film, the laser beam is destroyed, unsurprisingly, because somebody shoots at the EXTREMELY LONG CHAIN and it unsurprisingly breaks.  Why didn't planet vulcan think to do this earlier?  

Eh.

Mein Kampf

Mein Kampf strikes me as a very bloggy kind of title.  More than that, as a LiveJournal post, written by a middle school student.  

A note; Mein Kampf may be spelled wrong, but I as I'm writing this at work, and who knows what internet police are watching, I don't want to search the internet to see if I'm right.  Because.  

ttteest

teest

Dreams about buildings

I am substantially more likely to remember the shape of buildings than faces, names or events. I don't know why this is- maybe it's because they're often so BIG. This is doubly so for dreams...

I have very detailed memories of buildings in dreams from a really long time ago. Like, even though i have forgotten the context of the actual dream, I recall the great big white marble cube building, the tall and porous building made out of grass, and the home that was one giant room, but that room was made up of a field... that one for some reason reaaallly sticks out in my mind. It had a roof, an unusually shallow roof for a building of this size (it as big or bigger than any warehouse I've been in), but it had a glass roof and it was dreary out. And the field wasn't so much a field as... a grassy depression. There was one tree in the corner. It was as if winter was just coming to this room.

LHC as a celebrity

The Large Hadron Collider has almost become a celebrity.  It is certainly a celebrity within tech news circles.  It's spawned at least two novelty websites: www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com (NO), and some other one of a webcam pointed at it that (quuuite hilariously) depicts a great big purpley black ball rapidly expanding out of it, eventually ending with a 'webcam failure' message.  

I understand that apocalyptic scares are no novelty of this century, but this one has a deliciously futuristic taste.  These are the types of problems that future societies deal with.  I could see it being the end of a bad sci fi movie or the beginning of a good comic book: a society at the peak of its lavishness ultimately destroys itself when it's science reaches too far into the realm of God. Sounds very Kryptonian, minus the God bit, plus superpowers.

The Short Saga of My Beautiful New Old Chair

Last Saturday I tried to go to a guitar class at the community college, LAVC.  

However, my trip was cut short because the teacher is a flake and it's community college and I guess class was canceled or some such bullshit.

WHO KNOWS; I don't.  

Anyway, I decided that I'd stop at a garage sale on the way home to look for a silver lining.  I saw this wooden swivel chair that looked like it was either very old, very expensive or possibly both.  The garage saleswoman was very intent on the fact that EVERYTHING MUST GO at ANY PRICE, so I asked her if the chair was for sale.  

Oof course it was!  But, she said, there was a fatal flaw.  Of course there was!  The chair did not actually swivel, as in some tragic limbo accident, it had gone too low and was never coming back up again.  

Twenty one dollars later (I also bought a number of large wooden consonants at ten cents a piece and rounded up), I jammed this beautiful chair into my car and tossed my consonants onto the driver's seat.

Well, I un-limboed that chair.  While it still showed its age (hard to wheel around) it was most definitely a beautiful chair and did its chair duties largely without complaint.  

Until today, when I came home, and the chair just fell in two.  

It didn't.. break, per se.  It's not like I sat down on it and it cracked snapped or even made a noise.  I pushed on the chair, and it just fell into halves.  As if someone else, earlier in the day (a great fat person, perhaps) had fat down in it, busted it in two, and just sort of rested the new top part onto the new bottom part.  

I guess my chair had two fatal flaws, at least.  One was a fake fatal flaw (a FFF, if you're into acronyms), and a second could be that it only had a finite number of sits left in it before it croaked.  Or its fatal flaw could have been that it doesn't survive being sat in by fat people, or perhaps fat ghosts.  

Snapple

The Snapple advertising states that it is made from the best stuff on earth.

This must not be true.

Firstly, snapple is not that good.

Secondly, if it is made from the best stuff, the best stuff is being badly misappropriated.