Category Archives: Entertainment

(libation) Free baseball tickets

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This is going to be the first time that I have tried to defend myself when I actually know there is no defense… Since I know that going in you would think that I wouldn’t argue it… Damn this blogger script for making posting so simple…

My wife works for a company, I will call it Widgets Inc. That company owns large shares in every damn building in the Phoenix area, or it seems like it anyway. Occasionally they give away their tickets to events through a raffle, such as the V.I.P seating that she won to Ozzfest a couple of years ago, several times she won the “suite tickets” to baseball games (free food, free beer). All good stuff.

This time she won the same suite tickets to the baseball game, nix the alcohol. There is no free beer at the game. You have to watch it, second by second, sober, or likely buy a few beers as the game slowly unfolds…It is slow… The food is still free, the tickets were free, the parking is free. I don’t think I really have much of a bitching leg to stand on, but, come on, Baseball without beer? Might as well be figure skating.

Video game time sink

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Since I got the new Guild Wars game I have been noticing that I have the same ‘missing time’ issues that I used to have when I originally started playing Diablo 2. I am relatively sure that the time is not actually “missing”, it is, rather, horribly spent. Sure the aliens might be abducting me on a nightly basis, the government could be looking into my thoughts with their new satellite technology, but my best guess is that I just get a tad too involved in games, and continue to waste my time on them.

The games don’t really even have to be that good for me to get so involved, at least not as far as graphics, since I still waste a hell of a lot of time on BMX Ghost, regardless of the fact that the graphics are twenty years old and the gameplay is damn near impossible. Though I am pretty sure that the fact that it takes less than thirty seconds per game might play into the scenario. Honestly, if you play a game for thirty seconds you have wasted thirty seconds. If you play the same game fifteen or twenty times you have gone to the 4-6 minute range (all of that not counting the loading and multiple clicking required to play again, of course). Now you are near ten minutes into it. Then, if you happen to have the “I will play until I better my score” syndrome, you will never see the light of day again.

My current time sink is related to Guild Wars though. It actually has the graphics to keep you playing. I can only compare the game to Everquest, as I have never played any other MMORPG’s, and Guild Wars beats it in every aspect. The gameplay is more fluid, the quests are achievable and you don’t have to have a friend (who has already beaten the game) carry you through it. The battles take a lot longer than in Diablo (which is expected since they are in 3-D), but the are way more believable than the fights in Everquest (where two monsters that looked identical could have such different stats that you had to look at them before attacking, else you would die and start all over again, unless you could hire a Ranger to find your body, or a Necromancer to resurrect you).

My current time sink might not be very easy to shake. I like this game as much or more than I used to like DiabloII. It is online only, it is free (less the cost of the game) and it is really sweet with the graphics. It is possible that I will tire of the game over time, which will mean that Diablo II LOD is the current CD in the drive, I dunno, check back in six to eight weeks to find my current time sink.

Guild Wars!

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Have you ever played it? I never had, until just yesterday. Imagine Diablo II, in 3d, without the annoyances of Everquest. I really enjoy this game.

The online play is free, of course, and the graphics are simply amazing. The quests are possible, at least so far, solo or as a group, and the rewards keep the game moving along.

There is not a requirement that you get 6-8 guys, all from the same guild, to do a quest, it is possible even if you have no affiliation. There are a bunch of weird quests that you have to do to improve your armor and the such, but that is all optional (not really if you want to live). This game melds the sprite based Diablo II type game so seamlessly with the EverQuest type game that Iwas amazed at how fluid it was.

The biggest and most persistent complaint about MMORPG’s is that they have a level treadmill, meaning that you can only go up in level if the planets all line up just right: You have to be in the right group when the right monster spawns. I know that is true, since I did play everquest. Guild Wars, however has totally shattered that belief.

Each time you leave town the monsters spawn. I am not sure if party size matters, but even if it does, and there is only one of whatever you are trying to find, you could simply go back to town and respawn the zone. If you leave town alone you can still complete the majority of the quests, provided you do them in the correct order.

The good attributes of the ‘maphack’ that people use on Diablo II are embraced rather than scorned. You can see, at a glance, whether the hunk of crap you are picking up might be usefull, whether it is magical, whether it is a quest item.

The map is displayed on the screen, with unexplored areas blurred out, but, it is displayed, and it shows monsters! Blizzard seems to frown at the thought of showing the monsters prior to them entering the screen, my question is do they assume that a human (with normal vision) can see only in say 1024×768 ressolution, and only in two dimensions? If that is their assumption I have a load of “Star Trek” to watch before I believe that they have a cybergenic leg to stand on.

In summation, Guild Wars good.

Hollywood movie porn names?; Onion horoscopes; Mom’s PC

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• This is something that I have been kicking around, inside my mind, for at least a month. Are film makers really trying to get Hollywood to start giving out Oscars for the worst named film? The summer releases this year seem to indicate that yes, they are. Or at least my assumption is based on the titles of said films.

Cinderella Man is the first up. It is a gay porn take on the original Cinderalla story. The prince eventually tracks down his lover, based on the size of his cock ring? No, it turns out it is a story about boxing during the depression. I know that you can only name one boxing movie Rocky, but come on, Cinderella Man? What the hell were they thinking? Of course the critical acclaim and box office gross for this movie seem to show that everyone other than me doesn’t think it is gay porn, I will attribute that directly to their lack of cynicism.

Next up is a movie called The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I assume that this is supposed to be one of those chick flicks where women cry a lot. I don’t know, I don’t care. The title implies, to me at least, that the sisterhood that they speak of is not friendship, it is lesbianism. The traveling pants is a euphemism which implies that the women take turns being the dominant one.

Yes, I know that this is a very chauvinistic point of view, but it is so not my fault. The movie industry named the movies, they should have known that calling a man Cinderella might not be understood as a movie about a prize fighter trying to keep his family alive, and fighting only to meet that end. Similarly, using the word “Sisterhood” in the title of a movie sort of implies lesbianism, and when you throw in the “traveling pants” part of the title it really seals the deal.

I am certainly not a person that hates homosexuals, that being thin ice to skate when you have family members that are of that demographic, but were there no other titles available? Say, like, Dude That Beats the Shit Out Of Everyone, Helping To support His Family, well, that title seems a bit long, how about, “Poverty to Prince”? Why did Cinderella’s name have to come into this? With the crying chick movie it is not so easy. I can tell you right upfront, however, that most of the women would never fit into those pants even a year after graduation. Had they chosen a small necklace, or something of the sort, that would have been far more believable, and it would have added the bonus of being plausible. By that I mean that the women might continue to send a piece of jewelry around, while the pants that don’t fit would go into the recycle bin.

But, the big question remains. Which is the worst named movie of summer 2005?

It is Thursday, June 9, 2005

• I have been reading The Onion for quite a while, yet have never linked to it. Consider that situation remedied.

If you have never visited the site you should know that it is a must read. It is updated weekly, on Wednesday’s I think, with new content. It is news much in the same way that that George W. Bush is a level-headed leader with America’s best interest at heart: It is utter bullshit, but frequently hilarious. Some of the features may seem a bit campy, but when compared to what passes for actual news these days it’s not really that bad.

The horoscopes are probably my favorite part of the whole site. Not because they are always funny, not because they are usefull, but because they are never vague references that could apply to anyone. There is never anything like “Venus is passing the shadow of Mercury, therefore a difficult situation in your life will become a bit less difficult.” No, no, they are pretty damn specific. I have chosen a couple of samples from this week’s horoscopes to give you an idea:

Leo: (July 23—Aug. 22)
You must learn to stop screaming “Rape! Rape!” at the top of your lungs. Everyone can see perfectly well what you’re doing without the grandstanding narration.
Aries: (March 21—April 19)
You’ll be forced to run more than 50 miles by some cruel bastard who’ll rig your hat with a fiendish device consisting of a candy bar, a piece of string, and a six-foot stick.

The rest of the site follows the same lines. If you have never been, you must go. Funny, funny stuff.

It is Sunday, June 5, 2005

Mom’s New PC

My mother finally broke down and (with a bit of help from me) bought a new pc. It turns out that even people who don’t spend an enormous amount of time online still want their machine to run faster. In her case, having a 366mhz processor and 192megs of ram, it was a fairly inexpensive venture, well in the grand scheme of things anyway.

I went through Dell to order her new machine, hoping to get the cheapest model available (as they have tv spots with 299 dollar computers). Turns out that there is a 99 dollar shipping charge on their pc’s if it is under 400 dollars, so I was forced to make upgrades. Which is good, I guess, since if you buy 100 bucks in upgrades you don’t have to pay for the shipping. The upgrades that I made were doubling the RAM (to 512mb) and adding speakers (so that she could still have sound on her old pc). Of course the advertised 299 dollar PC didn’t have an upgrade option on the RAM, so I had to use a 349 dollar model as a base. After doubling the RAM and adding the speakers, it was over 400 dollars, which qualified for free shipping…Golden…

There is one tiny thing that I misled my mother about though. I was trying to get her a pc for about 300 dollars, and failed by about 100. Yet, the pc that I bought for her came with a free 15″ flat panel monitor upgrade. I asked the sales guy and he said that it would cost 70 dollars for it if you were to buy it outright, so, I just knocked 70 bucks off of the total that mom owes me for her new pc. I was in need of a new monitor anyway, and I could get another one for the same price I am paying on her PC, so it’s really a wash (I also gifted her the 13.2″ monitor that we had been using on our old pc). Yet, I didn’t tell her about it in advance, and I kind of feel bad. But, if she wants that flat panel monitor, I can get it for her for the 70 bucks that I knocked off of the price when I bought it for her, so, no big deal.

I suck

The first week of the new posting type jobby has passed, yet I never added an update on any other day than Sunday. That means that there is no way I could possibly know if I like it better or worse than the old style. Oh well, I am about the only one that reads this anyway.

New refrigerator; Hearts

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We got a brand new refrigerator this week! I have never actually owned a new refrigerator, and for that matter have never actually paid for one in my entire life. The ones that I have always had have been the type that are either too small or don’t work very well, so people just give them away. As I am sure you can imagine they have not been the most effecient appliances.

We currently have two refrigerators (well, three now) that aren’t up to par. One of which is a “Sears Coldspot Frostless” model. It is a full size unit and it works just fine, for about six weeks at a time, after which you have to unplug it for a couple of days to let all of the ice defrost. It should also be noted that this particular machine (by the looks and style of it) is probably at least twenty years old. I guess that the definition of “frostless” in the ’80’s was vastly different than it is now. Or it was just a gimmick name, either way that fridge is just a huge paperweight most of the time.

The other fridge that we have is an apartment sized one with a really odd name brand. I believe it is like “admiral” or “general” or some such, it always puts me in mind of the military when I read the name. It works fabulously all the time, the problem is that it has only two shelves, and all of the bars on the door that let you put jars there are long gone. Not to mention that the freezer space can be nearly completely filled with a single bag of ice, unless it was recently defrosted, in which case, with enough pounding, you might be able to fit two bags in. This one is porbably only ten years old, but it just doesn’t work for our purposes.

The wife and I had been discussing a new refrigerator for literally a couple of years before making the decision to buy one. After the luck that we have had buying used washing machines (we have two washing machines on the patio that were bought used, both of them crapped out long before they should have), we decided the refrigerator would be a new appliance. After having ogled many refrigerators in the stores over the last couple of years, we weren’t planning to be all that picky about it, we just wanted one that didn’t smell like mold even after you bleach the fuck out of it.

I actually did have two requirements for the new refrigerator, 1) It had to be full size, 2) It needed to have an ice maker. The latter was my justification for the purchase in the first place. My wife uses a lot of ice in her drinks, which she buys at convenience stores for anywhere from $1-$1.50 a bag. The ice is usually chunky little garbage that is hardly suitable for drinks in the first place. Now, if there is an ice maker in the fridge, and particularly since I have a 5 stage, reverse osmosis water filter which the water will run through, there will be good, clean ice on hand all the time without additional purchase. That will save at least $30-$40 dollars a year on ice alone (of course I still do need to buy the parts to hook the ice maker to the water system, hopefully tomorrow).

I have never really liked Sears all that much, mostly since almost everything they sell is horribly overpriced, yet this time that is where the appliance purchase was made…Well, kind of. The purchase was actually made on the computer I am typing on right now, but it was through their website. The refrigerator a Kenmore, 18.2 cubic feet, factory ice maker, and it has free delivery, if they make good on the rebate that is.

This brings me to the point of this whole story. If you have ever shopped for a new refrigerator you will notice that there are a lot of apartment sized fridges, and some even smaller, but when it comes to full size fridges there are ten 17.9 cubic feet ones to every one that is larger. Now I know why. It is all about math!

It seems that the advertised cubic footage of a refrigerator is the usable inside space of the refrigerator. Why is 17.9 so prevalent? Doorways. When I saw that I could get the 18.2 cubic foot fridge, with an ice maker, for about the same as it would cost for a 17.9 without an ice maker, since the former was on sale, I jumped on it. I didn’t even bother to look at the energy guide, since there is no way a new refrigerator can be less efficient than one that is a couple of decades old. I also didn’t look at the dimensions of the machine, that is where I ran into some problems.

If you have ever read this page before, you have likely seen me mention that nothing about my house is standard. The 18 inch thick walls are great for insulation, yet they make it difficult to standardize doorways; you try cutting through 18 inches of mud and stone to make a doorway one inch wider and tell me how it goes. A quick count while walking through the house shows that we have 16 doorways, of course only about half of them have doors on them, else you would have to open four doors to get to the toilet (no kidding). Only two of the doors are the same size, they are both outside doors (the front and side doors) and they are both exactly 32 inches. The rest of the doors vary from 26 inches (on a closet) to 36 inches (entrance to Arizona room). Keep in mind that the measurements are the actual openings, not subtracting for the trim molding.

If you have a standard tape measure around your house you can look to see that the numbers 16 and 32 are in red. 16 is in red since that is how far apart studs have to go when building. 32 is in red since that is the width of a standard doorway. It turns out that that is also why the standard refrigerator is 17.9 cubic feet, any larger than that and you can no longer slide it sideways through a doorway. My old refrigerator was 31 inches wide and 29 inches deep. I was able to turn it sideways to slide it out the door. The new refrigeratorw was 31 inches wide and 33.5 inches deep. My doorway is only 3/16 wider than 31 inches, and that is not counting the inch thick door or the hinges. There was no way to get it into the kitchen without some work. Thankfully, after taking the door off of the hinges and moving it aside, I was able to line the machine up in the doorway, leave through a different exterior door, come back in behind the machine and push it through. If it had been even 1/10th of an inch wider I am not sure if I would have been able to get it into the kitchen, even with a generous amount of vaseline.

Let this be a lesson to me. I should always measure my non-standard doorways prior to new appliance purchase.

• If you are not a fan of the card game Hearts you might as well quit reading now.

I have been playing the game Hearts (link neglected since I couldn’t find a site without a bunch of pop-up crap) for years. There are a lot of variations of the game, but they seem to follow the same guidelines. You want to take zero points. If you take a heart you take a point. If you take the queen of spades you take 13 points. It is possible to lower your score by taking points, however it is difficult since you have to take them all. This quote on the scoring of the game sums it up pretty well:

Winning the Game
When one or more players reach or surpass a score of 100 points, the player with the lowest score wins the game.
Shooting the Moon
Shooting the Moon is a special strategy in which a player tries to take all 13 Hearts and the Queen of Spades. If you manage to Shoot the Moon you can either add 26 points to everyone’s score or subtract 26 from your own.

Shooting the Sun
Shooting the Sun is even more difficult than Shooting the Moon: If you take all 13 tricks – that is, every card in the deck – you can either add 52 points to everyone’s score or subtract 52 from your own.

While my normal strategy in the game is just to not take any points, I have shot the moon a few times. I had never actually shot the sun though, and thought that it would be impossible. Again, if you do not know the game, you may not understand the difficulty. I have probably played tens of thousands of games without shooting the sun. Until today.

The sad part is that I didn’t have any idea that I was doing it as I played. I just wanted to make sure that I kept control of the cards so that I wouldn’t get stuck with the queen of spades and end up adding 13 points to my score. Oh well, I guess we takes ’em when we can get ’em.

Tune in next time to find out such fascinating things as how to treat a wart on your dog (use wart off), how to boil water (a pan and heat), possibly even how to cheat people out of a lot of money (email scams). Damn, I just gave away my next post…

Country Thunder; Games

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The virus that is Country Thunder descended on our little town again on Thursday. To be fair, I really shouldn’t call it a virus (not only becuase that is disrespectful to viruses either), since it really does pump a ton of money into the local economy. While the event is in town for those four days every single restaraunt in town is filled to capacity most all the time, every store that sells food, water, liquor, ice, sunscreen, etc. is frequented by hundreds of people who are all to willing to part with their money. I suppose it really is a good thing.

The real problem with the event, in my eyes, is that it runs 24 hours a day for those four days. There are not performers on stage all the time, but the event is set up as a four-day campout type thing. If you have paid for camping you get a wristband that lets you come and go as you please over the four days. If you just buy tickets for a single day you get a wristband that lets you come and go as you please for a single day. The astronomical prices that they charge for refreshments at the event leads the people to leave a couple of times to go get them at better prices, then return to the show. It is all good in theory.

The problem is that a lot of the people who are camping at the event (since they are allowed to have alcohol within their RV’s) wake up horribly hungover, then do the ‘hair of the dog’ thing to take the edge off. After they have finished yesterday’s alcohol supply, they drive into town to buy today’s alcohol supply. I am sure these are all seasoned drunks that can hold their liquor pretty well, but the last thing a town this size needs is a bunch of half drunk cowboys heading to town for more beer.

Thankfully there have not been any accidents resulting from this so far. I fear that there will be though. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but the festival has a twenty year lease on the venue and the odds will have to eventually catch up. Of course not everyone that attends the festival drinks liquor, many who do drink probably wouldn’t even consider driving after drinking, but there is gonna be that one guy…

My only point here is to say that there should be a rule about coming and going from the event. If you are camping there you should be able to come and go during the early morning hours, maybe even up to the time that the music starts playing. If you are not camping there you should not be able to enter until just before the music starts, then once you leave you can’t come back in (again, to be fair, they might have this stipulation already for people who only have day passes, I didn’t really research this extensively).

I have only noticed a couple of people coming into the store that had obviously been drinking, they did smell of alcohol yet seemed pretty coherent. The majority of the fans show up early in the morning and buy a lot of beer, one group bought 3 30packs of budweiser! They did have the four day wristbands though, so I can assume that they are gonna sleep it off out there. As it should be. I guess the folks out there are handling it pretty well.

I would just hate to see this financial windfall for the community destroyed by the one jack-ass that tries to drive home drunk and kills a minivan full of children. Note that I think a lot of people are driving home drunk, just none of them has yet to cause an accident. When that does happen (it will) there will be statewide news coverage, if not nationwide, since this event is also held in Wisconsin.

Upon further reflection about this issue I have found that I kind of like the way that they are handling it. The people who buy the four day camping passes are the ones that are likely to get horribly drunk every day of the event, they are also the ones that can sleep it off right there. The people who buy the day passes are more likely to be people/families that just want to see one particular band and that’s it. So, in the grand scheme of things, the day pass people are likely in no worse condition than the people who leave major sporting events, hell probably in better condition than most of them, since it is damn hot outside (94 fahrenheit today), and they are walking around all day. You would simply be amazed at the price a drunk will pay for a pint of water, after a few beers, on a very hot day.

…Yet…There will be that jack-ass…Eventually.

• Check out this Fun Test that my mother sent me. It is so deceptively simple that you may miss a couple.

In My last post, which did not display properly for the first couple of days due to missing html tags (so the top all looked the same if you had clicked to it again, but it would have been several paragraphs longer). I talked about the game Chuck, but I failed to link to the actual page, so there is your link.

As I mentioned in the other post, the first and fourth events in the game I do not know how to do well. I can chuck the guy over 100meters nearly every time in the first event, and can get about 40 of 50 stars in the last event. The second and third events are the ones that I am really good at. The photo you see here is my best yet on the cannon stage.

The third event is also pretty simple since there is an actual goal. The fourth event you have to get all fifty stars to get a good score, so I understand that one at least. The first event, however, I really don’t know what is good on that one. My scores are in the 100-110meter range, I don’t see a way to improve on that score, and it doesn’t really tell you how far the best players are getting. Try that first event, let me know how you do, and tell me if you get an “incredible” dialogue when you make the throw. I am currently wondering how I can shave out 300,000 more points to get onto the leaderboard.

Leaving your car running; Games

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First off today is a bitch about gas prices. Not a traditional bitch about them either, we all know that the price is too damn high so there is not point in ranting on that subject. What I want to bitch about are some of the most wastefull people on all of the planet: The people who leave their cars running while they go into a convenience store to “pick up a few things”.

The biggest argument that the people who do this have is that it takes more gas to start the vehicle than it does to leave it running for five minutes while they are in the store. This has been debunked so many times that I am not even going to look for one of the thousands of reports that did the debunking. I am also not going to go into people leaving the car running for a few seconds because they forgot to grab a letter that they wanted to mail, that is something that we have likely all done at least once and it only take a few seconds. The people that I am going to rant about all seem to fit a certain demographic, and I see it far too often.

If there is a vehicle left running in the parking lot of the local convenience store, I am going to guess that at least 90% of the time (and I have no evidence whatsoever to back this up, only my own personal experience) it is either going to be a diesel truck or a really old car/truck. I notice it, and it sticks out in my mind, because it is always the vehicle with the most horrid exhaust fumes that gets left running.

I am sure it is possible that some people leave smaller cars running when they go into convenience stores, say to keep the AC on so that their child or pet doesn’t get extremely hot, or to keep the heater running when it is really cold. I don’t even think that that is all that wastefull. I can understand the practice when viewed in a very specific light. That light just never seems to be the one I am viewing when I see the vehicles that are running in the parking lot.

The vehicles that people leave running in the parking lot are usually older cars, like from the ’70’s, that are lucky to get 8 or 10 miles to the gallon in the first place. They are usually junked-out, shitty cars that shouldn’t be on the road in the first place. These cars (which I call them for lack of a more descriptive term) would not be legal to drive in several states, most metropolitan areas, regardless of state, and anywhere where they make vehicles undergo emissions tests before they are registered. They are likely driven by people who have more fingers than teeth (depending on their prowess at woodworking), and should be taken off of the road both for the foul smell that they emit as well as the horrible fuel economy.

I am being a bit hypocritical here as I did once own a 1963 Ford Galaxy, however, it had been impecably restored. Even with its 352 engine and an automatic transmission it got better gas mileage than the vehicles I am calling into question. There is a pretty big difference between a fully restored ’69 Camaro and a ’73 Chevy Truck that has had no work on it except bondo: One works as well as it did the day it rolled out of the factory, the other works occasionally, usually billowing black smoke as it goes.

This whole rambling and pointless story is due to the fact that I pulled into the Circle K pparking lot last Thursday and noticed that the gas price was currently at $2.33 a gallon. There was a newer Diesel truck sitting in the lot with the engine running, as well as a ’70’s Chevy truck also idling there. I was annoyed by that. I was far more annoyed when I went into the store and saw the two drivers (trust me they were the ones; they were both dirty and smelled really bad) trying to chat up the cashier. It is just so aggravating!

It has made me think, though, that maybe I should start printing out little labels, maybe business card size, that say something like, “Thank you for leaving your engine running. Your wasteful nature has already killed over a thousand Americans in Iraq. Their only job was to secure the oil fields so that you could leave your car running all day long. I am sure that the dead soldiers (and their families) appreciate your wasteful nature.”

•Online games!

Due to a missing html tag several paragraphs of this post were not visible on initial posting.

My online gaming had been confined to pogo.com for quite some time (not counting diablo II). Then, Flux, of Blackchampagne.com sent me a link.

The link that he was trying to plug was the BMX Ghost game. I tried that one, even got some of the boards done, but hated it. This screen shot is from a completely different game, the name of the game is ‘Chuck’. You just throw around this guy, and he moves as he should, your movements being requisite, and it makes him fly all over the place. Three of the four events you are literally just throwing around a little crash test dummy, the fourth (second in order of play) actually can use skill. The photo that you see here shows you the exact place the you have to have the mouse cursor to get the “Incredible shot”, which will follow. The smaller mountain in the background (just below the ‘x’, is the important spot).

It must be noted that you can do three shots in exactly the same place and get three completely different results. The body doesn’t ever fly the same way twice, sometimes the head will strike first like a javelin, other times the entire torso will hit making the shot count as far less accurate. Still, it is a heck of a good time.

The rest of the ‘Chuck’ game is pretty much hit and miss. You want to let go of the “spacebar” while you are still moving the mouse left to right, if you let go too late you fall short, if you hold on too long you fall short. The distance is seems to be related directly to how fast the mouse is moving when you let go of the spacebar, so make sure you don’t run out of mousepad before you huck chuck.

The angle of the throw is also quite important in the first event. I have found that if I hold chuck with his feet barely touching the floor and move the mouse up about an inch while travelling to the right I am able to get the longest throws. This does make him bounce off of the ceiling occasionally, but that doesn’t slow him down nearly as much as repeated bounces on the floor. The third event you have to land him as close as possible to a flag which is easily reachable in a single throw. You can try to high arc him or do a soft throw, but it seems easier to just throw him pretty hard and bounce off the tree that is twelve meters past the flag. The tree slows progress quite a bit so the rebound isn’t quite as you would expect but it still has yielded me more throws within one meter of the flag than any other approach. Who would have ever thought that throwing around corpses would be so hard?

The fourth event you have to collect all the stars on the screen in three throws. I have never gotten all of them. I think my best is 40(I think there are 48 total), so I am not gonna comment on that one.

The leaderboard for the game shows a few people who have scored over a million points, while the rest of the leaders are in the 900,000 range. My best so far has been just over 400,000, so I really suck at the game. The thing is that on this one I don’t care that I suck. It is just so much fun to pretend that you are throwing around Dubya -or insert any person of your choosing- that it more than makes up for my ineptitude.

If pretending that you are throwing around the leader of the free world makes you uneasy, just remember that there are leaders, from many countries, that have died from much less than a little intellectual competition. Bring it on. Of course, Dubya might be the only leader that would consider the game intellectual in the first place…

The Pacifier; Alex Winter

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Today’s post is going to be pretty mundane, feel free to read it in its entirety!

Today we took in a movie, The Pacifier, which I had seen the trailer for at a different movie and thought would be enough fun to pay for matinee tickets for. It was actually far better than my wife or I had expected, though you wouldn’t know that from the 18% rating at rotten tomatoes.

I have never seen a film with Vin Diesel in it before, mostly since I really don’t like the huge-action-film genre (I just can’t seem to suspend my disbelief in those type of films and it leads me to annoying everyone within earshot when I start picking apart the movie for the obviously fake things happening. Once, while watching Mortal Kombat with one of my closest friends, on tape, he actually just turned it off and said he couldn’t watch it with me. At least I know that I will be disappointed by those movies though, and don’t go watch every one thinking that maybe this will be the one that doesn’t piss me off). This may well have worked to my advantage while watching Pacifier. I knew who Vin Diesel was, but only enough to recognize his face, that character could have been played by any of countless thousands of buff men. I really think Diesel pulled it off pretty well though.

The movie does start off with a huge action sequence, and I could start picking apart all of the impossibilities, but, quite thankfully, that scene was very short and only there to show the limitless capabilities of a trained NAVY S.E.A.L. (which I am sure would piss off an actual Navy Seal if they watched the film, but that is a whole different story).

As a quick aside, while I am thinking about it, Mr. Cap Reports gave this film only his third R-PG rating ever! I can never thank Flux from BlackChampagne.com enough for getting me that guy’s website, the “cap reviews” are frequently more entertaining than the movies. In this particular case, however, I can only find one point to really question in his review of it. Mr. Cap Reports said, “positioning and movement of a teen and preteen girl to cause exposure of their underwear while wearing dresses “. I watched the film, and I look for that kind of thing, and I never saw teen or preteen underwear, at least if I did it was in such a nonprovocative manner that it completely went under my radar.

The movie actually works pretty well in its situational comedy. Of course a hard-nosed military man is going to be out of his element when dealing with common household problems, of course the situations are going to cause friction between the military man and the kids, of course all of the comedy is going to lead to an eventual happy ending. It is a Disney movie FFS. You knew long before you went to the theatre that this was meant to be disposable entertainment, while the PG rating suggested that it was more geared for children. I think that is where the major movie critics get it all wrong on this type of film, it seems that they know that it is a kid’s film, yet they expect it to have a lot of humor that kids just won’t understand. This film didn’t have any of that so the critics are pissed, of course as I look at my track record I notice that I disagree with the critics in damn near every instance so maybe I am just stupid?

I found myself pretty sympathetic to the Vin Diesel character, even though there was never a doubt as to how the movie was going to end. I laughed out loud several times, and had to fight it back a few others. As far as the film being too formulaic, of course it was, but if you didn’t know that from the trailers then you really have no business bitching about it. It is made as a kid’s film, and while it does show it mostly from the adult angle, it is still a kid’s film. The theatre where we saw it was almost evenly split between adults and children and everyone laughed, though the kids laughed at the fart jokes, while the adults laughed at some of the jokes that would really go over the head of a child. The 90 minute film went by pretty quickly, and I am glad that I watched it.

The critics that didn’t like it all seemed to think that it should have been a more ‘adult’ film that would have been okay for the kids to watch. I really wish that the critics had to review the film that they actually saw, as opposed to the movie they wanted to see. Just because Vin Diesel is in the movie doesn’t mean that it has to be the next action hero movie. There is a very simple plot, but were it much more complex the kids wouldn’t understand it. I think they did a pretty good job of balancing the humor for adults and children. Critics suck.

• Today I decided that I had to answer a question that his been burning in my brain for the last couple of months. That question: What ever happened to Alex Winter. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter were the lead roles in the Bill and Ted movies, but it seems that you never hear about Alex Winter anymore. Why? It isn’t like he got completely out acted in the Bill and Ted movies, I bought both of them as complete skater dufuses. Yet, for some reason Reeves went on to bigger and better things, while Winter seemed to simply vanish. I know that some of the ladies think that Reeves is ‘hot’, but is that alone enough to explain it?

Researching the two actors was actually a bit of fun. It turns out that Alex Winter had actually directed a film before the runaway success of the Bill and Ted movies. Not only that but he went on to write, direct, and star in the movie Freaked, which Keanu Reeves also starred in. Wow, who knew.

Between the release of the first and second Bill and Ted movie, Alex Winter also had a starring role in the film Rosalie Goes Shopping. While it seems that no one really watched the movie, Ebert did, and he gave it three stars.

Alex Winter is now writing the script for a bipoic about Sean Fanning, the founder of Napster, and his life and times. All of this was happening while I thought that Winter had dropped off of the face of the earth…

Keanu Reeves, on the other hand, he has made a lot of horrible films. I guess his looks just carry him from job to job. One of the films that he was in, Chain Reaction, is the only film that I have ever seen with a 0% on rotten tomatoes. That was based on only 19 reviews, but come on. That movie had Reeves and Morgan Freeman in it. How can 19 critics all give it bad reviews?

Searching a bit more into the film career of Keanu, I noticed that he also has a lot of less than 50% positive reviews, and I mean a lot. A couple of 13’s, a 14, a 16, and so many under 50 that I am not gonna waste the time counting them. In fact, Alex Winter has a better ‘fresh rating’ the Keanu Reeves does. Of course the IMDB rates all of Reeves films a lot higher, thus proving that critics are not in tune with the general public.

I am sure I will sleep better tonight have finally answered this question.

BCS; Survivor

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Just when I was starting to get back into a semi-regular posting schedule, basketball happened. I had completely forgotten about the College Basketball tournament (the brackets as my wife and many others call them) right until my wife got home earlier than expected on Wednesday. It turns out that since the ‘brackets’ had bumped Survivor from Thrusday to Wednesday, the wife was not nearly as inclined to ride her horse on Wednesday. That is, sure she loves to ride the Horses, but when that interferes with Survivor, Fuck ’em.

I am no better than the wife when it comes to revolving my schedule around that silly show. I didn’t even get to complete my daily surfing activities before it was time to go and watch the show. I know that is not such a big deal since I can visit a website at any time, day or night, while her horse riding activities don’t share the always available quality. But, It did screw up my day a little bit. Damn those Collegiate Athletes!

I really don’t care for college basketball at all, of course I really don’t care about the NBA either, so I suppose that isn’t all that surprising. I do like that they have a playoff system in place for the NCAA, however I really think that the system they use for basketball is at once too inviting and not inviting enough. I am not completely sure of the logistics involved, but what I do know is that in any given year there are teams who should have a legitimate shot at the national title that end up playing in the (secondary) NIT competition. As I say, I don’t follow college basketball so I don’t really know why it ends up this way. I would speculate that they are trying to make sure that they don’t end up with too many teams from a specific conference in the ‘Big Dance’, since, like everything else, this is all about money and too many colleges from a specific region would likely sour the viewing audience, thus leading to less revenue from advertisers. That is all speculation of course.

It is pretty sick of me to bitch about the way the NCAA handles this tournament though, since I really do enjoy college football. NCAA football, of course, has absolutely no playoff system. The national champion every year is picked by a combination of Coaches votes and a computer model that sends teams to face each other in the BCS. I would link to something to try to make sense of this all, were there anything on the face of the earth that could make sense of it. There is no playoff system at all in college football, the ‘Bowls’ (be it the Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl, etc.) are alternated every year in respect to which one is hosting the actual title game. The teams that go to each of the ‘Bowls’ is somehow chosen by a computer. One of the many problems with that approach is the “Margin of Victory” category (which is one of the weighted categories in the BCS model). So, if your team is up by 24 points in the fourth quarter and you just try to run out the clock, you may be screwed later by a team that continues to humiliate the other team for the duration of the game. The computer can’t factor in humility.

I am going to try to piece together a scenario to prove the inherent flaws with the BCS right now. Bear in mind that people have been doing this for years and we have yet to see a change in the way it is handled. All information I am about to present is fictional and for the sole purpose of making the fallacy that the BCS is fair more obvious. I am going to use the teams Florida, Arizona and Texas in general terms and not related to any team from any of those states.

Let’s pretend that Texas has only won 3 games in a season. They have a mediocre offense, but a pretty darn good defense. Further, we must pretend that Arizona has an amazing offense, but a useless defense, while Florida has an amazing defense, but a useless offense. Now I have to pretend that both Arizona and Florida played Texas, and for the sake of this post I am going to say that they both won the game. The Arizona vs. Texas matchup (in my scenario) is going to end with Arizona’s amazing offense beating the Texas defense pretty handily, but, the useless defense of Arizona allows Texas to get some easy points. I’ll call it 37-24 just in case you are nitpicky, so a 13 point win. When Florida plays Texas (in my scenario) it is going to end with Florida’s offense unable to score against the mediocre Texas defense, while Texas can’t score against Florida either. The points that are scored are all on defense or special teams. I’ll call this one 16-7, so a 9 point win. What we learn from this is that, for one team, their offense alone won the game, while, for the other team, their defense alone won the game. If Arizona never plays Florida how do you really know which team is better? The computers will tell you that Arizona is better since they won by 13, but, the same computer is going to tell you that Florida is better since they only gave up 7 points. (not that playing a worthless team really matters all that much in the grand scheme of the BCS, I was just trying to explain it in a logical manner.)

If there were any type of a playoff system in college football the majority of the variables would be sorted out on the field. Of course the second anyone tries to modify the system to a playoff format there will be teams that want to be involved, regardless of the fact that they simply don’t have the players to win big games against good teams. I do understand that football is a sport that is a bit more draining than basketball; not a game that the players can play two days in a row. Yet, somewhere in my mind, I have to wonder why they don’t have all of the teams that have ‘Bowl Bids’ set into a playoff format. It would add a game or two to some of the teams’ schedules, but only the winning teams. That would also result in a lot more revenue for the colleges, with the extra ticket sales. Not to mention giving NFL scouts more opportunities to see all of the top players.

Perhaps the NCAA enjoys the controversy in college football since it allows many teams to believe that they were really the national champions?

• Survivor was what I really wanted to talk about today. It turns out that someone over at the studio had read my latest bitch about the show and bought a Time Machine, then went back in time to alter the episodes that they already had on tape. Sure, it is possible that they just realized it was all getting a bit too predictable, but what would be my stake in that?

The latest episode of Survivor featured yet another loss by the “Ulong” team. This one was a bit different though, for two reasons. The first reason is that both teams were going to have to vote out a player, the second is that I have never seen (in my survivor watching history) a team so easily and adamantly agree on voting someone. The guy that the strong tribe (Koror) was going to vote out has been obvious since day one, however they had never lost an immunity challenge so they never had to think about it. There was a twist, as there always is, that made it so Koror got to give immunity to a single player from Ulong. The winner of immunity was the guy that everyone in Ulong was going to vote off. So, instead, they voted off the only player on their team that excelled at anything…Survival of the weakest I guess.

I really have to hand it to Survivor, they took an impossible situation and made a nice spin out of it. Unfortunately the teams are now at 8 and 4. If they merge the first four to go are pretty obvious. Yet, the team dynamic is so precious to the game (at least to ratings) that I don’t know if they should try to screw it all up.

Half of me thinks that they should let the losers continue to lose. The losing tribe has shown over and over that they don’t really want to win. Perhaps, this time, they will let them all just get voted out. The other half of me wants them to mix up the tribes. Some of the alliances on Koror are getting pretty strong, strong enough that they may never break. If they mix up the tribes at this point, the are doing it only a couple of votes from the merge. If they leave the one team to kill itself it will be a whole new game. The other team has already shown, on several occasions, that they don’t really want to win. I really think that the best way to shake up the game right now is to leave them alone.

The people in the game are expecting a merge so much that they never stop to think about what would happen if they never merge. Which would lead pretty nicely into the winning tribe having to vote out people that they have very strong alliances with. Hell, with one team having only four people, while the other has eight (and they would have been 9 strong were it not for one screwy challenge), I am not entirely sure if the other team really should have the salvation of the merge. Of course with the one team doubling them in numbers it probably doesn’t matter anyway.

My vote is going heftly to the “no merge” theory. That would make for a much more interesting game.

It is possible that they would allow the losing tribe to pick two of the people from the winning tribe (or try to redistribute the members and end with the same result), but I really think the losers have chosen to lose. It was their choice to vote out the most athletic and intelligent players first. This is their Titanic, they should go down with it.

[Adult Swim]

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Being that I am becoming pretty bored with playing silly little on-line games, I am gonna throw another post up here -Possibly a week before anyone is expecting it-, which is the great thing about actually paying for your own website. I don’t really have a deadline, I don’t really have a lot of fans, I just type something out when I feel like it, and stay silent for weeks when I don’t. That is not really a good path to follow if you ever do want to develop a readership, but, I have given up on that aspect of this whole ‘blogging’ thing long ago.

• On tap today, I offer you Robot Chicken. This is a really bizarre show that they show on Cartoon Network as part of the late night edition that they call Adult Swim. Since that seems a little bit confusing as I write it, I will elaborate in a moment. But first, I must elaborate on the aforementioned show.

Robot Chicken is basically a show that comes on, lasts for fifteen minutes (it plays straight through for twelve minutes with no commercials, followed by three minutes of commercials leading into the next show) then is gone. The airtimes for the show (as listed on the website) may differ by region. Since I live in Arizona, which is sometimes on Pacific time and sometimes on central time, we get some of the cable feeds hours early while we get others hours late. That is kind of screwy in and of itself, but I was wanting to talk about Robot Chicken so I will forget that all for now.

In a nutshell, Robot Chicken is twelve minutes of short sketches. Some of the sketches are as short as two seconds while some of them play out over several minutes. They are all done in animation, claymation, or using action figures (at least the several that I have seen), and they run the gamit from being dopey to outright hilarious. I am not even sure if it is possible to explain the show’s premise, not that I really think it has much of one. I really doubt that anyone much under the age of thirty would/could understand a lot of the parodies, some of them are contemporary, but the majority are spoofing stuff that I watched as a child. Things like G.I. Joe, Thunder Cats, He-Man, Voltron, and other cartoons or action figures that were popular in the early-mid eighties.

This is a show that is certainly not meant for children, yet it doesn’t seem to be specifically aimed at adults either. It is frequently hilarious, while being boring or confusing at other times. You really would have to watch it to get a sense of the weird fascination I have with it. To give you a sense of the humor involved, I must tell you about one sketch where they were spoofing Voltron. One of the lions was mounting (for reproducing purposes) another of the lions, while they were trying to build Voltron. Though when spoken (typed) it might not seem that funny, in the context of the short it was hilarious.

Seriously, if you have the cartoon network on your t.v. you should check out a couple of episodes. Hell, it only lasts for ten or twelve minutes and you will likely laugh a couple of times (if remember the cartoons and action figures from the eighties).

• The Adult Swim thing is what the cartoon network is doing after the sun goes down. It is far from porn, it has nothing in it that your average teenager hasn’t seen, but your five or six year old wouldn’t understand a word of it. They use the show Family Guy to lead into “Adult Swim”, after which you should not have children viewing, at least not if you don’t want to warp their fragile little minds.

I was thinking about Cartoon Network’s dilemma today, which was why I typed this out actually. They made a channel that you can sit your kids in front of so that you don’t have to take care of them all day, yet, when the kids go to bed at nine, the Cartoon Network is a Ghost Town. I really doubt that many infomercials would be willing to buy time on the Cartoon Network at two in the morning. They took the only logical step; cartoons for kids in the day, cartoons for adults at night. What were their other options?

Funny aside here. The cable company where I grew up showed Nickolodeon from 6a.m.-6p.m., then switched it to A&E from 6p.m.-6a.m. I am not even entirely sure if that would be legal in today’s market, but it worked for that cable company. It was very specifically targeting the consumer. I only noticed it since I woke up late one night and turned on Nickelodeon. I was expecting to see more green slime getting dumped onto people, instead I saw the last half hour of the movie “Deliverance”. I have never been quite the same since…

Anyway, Robot Chicken, watch it once. You will either like it or hate it, there is no in between. Sort of like porn, only less gender-biased as to the likers and haters.

Funny puppy story to come later today or on the next update, I am not yet sure which.