A Dixie Carpetbagger

One of the things I love about having a DVR is the fact that falling asleep during a movie no longer means a big inconvenience.  I love my DVD player (and I now have an awesome stockpile of viewing material for it), but after a set amount of time, it turns itself off– which means I have to go through the whole process of turning it back on after I nod off.  Not to mention the fact that I don’t have a recliner in front of the home theater TV, and falling out of your chair ruins a nap.

Plus, with the quality of movies these days, it’s easier to stop and delete a DVR recording than burning a DVD.  More “green” too, but I can live with that…  So, what have I been dozing off to?

Snakes on a Plane

Why are these monkey-fightin’ snakes on this Monday-Friday plane?  (Thank you, network censors.  “Mile-high Club” scene?  Perfectly okay.  Money quote from the movie?  Not so much.)  Seriously, who uses snakes?  What’s worse is that every contrived plot twist after the titular snakes are released onto the titular airplane is so bad it’s not even funny– even for a B movie.

You have cold-blooded reptiles invading your aircraft?  Turn off the cabin heat and pressurization– the switches are right there in the cockpit with you.  Nope, no can do– oh, and that switch magically moves itself to the rear of the cargo deck and becomes a home electrical breaker box.  Also, in one scene, the 747 is seen to move at almost 5,000 knots.  That’s around Mach 7.3 (assuming that they’re at around 30,000 feet, which means that 4,960 kts / 678.1 = Mach 7.3) .  Then the plane is landed by a guy who flew a couple of PS2 flight sims.

Somewhere in between the hyper-sonic 747 and letting Little Gonzo Gamer have the controls, I’d have been looking for a parachute.  Sayanora, suckers!

Westworld

A show with everything… including Yul Brynner.  Robots?  Check?  Gunfights?  Check.  Sex?  Check.  Robot sex?  Check.  Robot gunfights?  Check.  Robot snakes?  Check.

The one thing that bothers me is the fact that the robots aren’t supposed to have a body temperature.  (It’s explained that the guns in Westworld cannot fire on a target that has body heat.)  So, what about the robot brothel girls?  Do they have a body temp, or is… okay, I don’t wanna know.

Hardwired

Decent lightweight sci-fi movie.  Only really notable part is the the gunfight where the main character is aided by the computer geeks in the form of a HUD broadcast directly into his brain.  I expected him to put on sunglasses and a trench coat and begin answering to “J. C.”

Rambo

John Rambo is an old, tired man.  Then the outsiders kick over the ant’s nest in his backyard.  John Rambo is now an angry, old, tired man.  Who happens to be more lethal than some strains of Ebola.  This gives me hope for The Expendables.

1984

Remember the despair you felt when you read the book?  Cube it.  I don’t know how the film crew found so many places to film– I didn’t know you could rent condemned buildings.

The War Wagon

Nobody puts John Wayne in jail… and lives to brag about it.  Best sales pitch I can make for the movie is the title scene.  Enough said.

Doomsday

Viral epidemic breaks out in Scotland.  British ki-nig-its seal off the country along Hadrian’s Wall.  Years later, they find out they sealed the only man who could cure the disease in Scotland.  Oops.  Time to send in a team… lead by a cross between Lara Croft and Big Boss.

Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid

Ah, classic movies.  For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble…  Great movie, from the beginning bank scene to the final gunfight.  Best moment– Butch trying to hold up a bank using a Spanish crib sheet.

Patton

Decent, but memorable for Patton, not the acting.  Most interesting scene is where Patton takes his staff to the site of the Battle of Zama and expounds on his belief that he was at the battle in a previous life.  Patton (who was a Christian) believed he had lived six previous lives– and was a soldier each time.  He even wrote a poem about his belief.

The Fifth Element

Take Die Hard With a Vengeance, add in equal parts Star Wars cantina scene and The Mummy, and you’ve got this movie.  Decent, but not great– good campy, sci-fi.

The Professional

Come for the gunfights, stay for the humor and sexual tension.  The director who made this movie wrote the script in 30 days and shot the movie in 90, so that he wouldn’t be out of work before he shot The Fifth Element.  So, all this guy needs to do is limit himself to 4 months a movie, and he’ll become an Academy Award factory…

Which is what I first said when I read this at Miguel’s:

And Catalonia bans bullfighting.

What… the… hell?  Spaniards… giving up the dance?  (shakes head)  Next you’ll tell me that the Irish have closed the Guinness factory.  One thing I want to point out from Miguel’s take, though.

Bulls back then were humongous animals with a bad attitude, specially the Miura line who probably killed more bullfighters than all other lines combined.

This is happening across the cattle world– bigger, more capable animals are being “bred down” to a level that their owners can handle.  As a personal example, back when we kept cows on the family farm, we had a Beefmaster/Black Angus mix bull we called “Little Man.”  People would see the bull, hear the name (or vice versa), and think it was a purposely ironic name.  It wasn’t– compared to his sire, Little Man was tiny.

At a mere 1,600 pounds.*  Standing on level ground, Little Man was eye level with the barbed wire on a fence.  He could also wrap his tongue around the electric fence wire and absorb the shock with no visible reaction.  His sire, however, broadsided a Chevy and put it into a pond– “no gasoline engines” means exactly that when you’re driving through a cattle pasture…

*Please note that it wasn’t my family that bred down Little Man.  We got him from the owner of his sire, “Big Man.”  (Also known as Brontosarco Rex… King Thunder-Flesh).  1,600 pounds is nothing to sniff at– his offspring tended to be 50% heavier than their mothers– but he was… small compared to his sire.

Why aren’t all of our troops outfitted like this?  A good balaclava and pair of goggles or sunglasses would only be a hundred bucks or so… and imagine the psychological impact of a few thousand troops dressed like this…

(H/T The Firearms Blog)

All of the science fiction authors of the past looked forward and saw a rosy future– man expanding to the Moon, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, the Outer Planets… then outward still.  (“Out ride the sons of Terra / Far drives the thundering jet, / Up leaps a race of Earthmen, / Out, far, and onward yet —”)

Instead, we’re perpetually “a decade” from the Moon.  Returning to the Moon, not going there in the first place!  Our second Space Station is behind schedule– and when we do finish it, it’ll be a mere five years from the scrapheap!  (Next year, the last Shuttle lifts the last component, and retirement is looking like a 2016 timeframe.)  By the Nine Divines, we were supposed to have spinning wheels in orbit that would make von Braun envious from beyond the grave!

Instead, we have a billion-dollar showcar that’s cross-dressing as a truck, kills a high percentage of its passengers, and can’t live up to any of its original performance specs– turnaround time, cost per pound to orbit, man-hours of maintenance per flight…

Instead, the last NASA Director who knew his rectum from a mine shaft lies in a hospital because he was flying in an aircraft as old as he was.  Where’s “No Sparrow Shall Fall” when you need it?

Instead, our space agency has been told that their new focus is outreach to the Islamic world.

Help us private industry, you’re our only hope…

Well, well, it’s my blogiversary…  one year, today.  Well, one year tomorrow by the date, but I first posted 52 weeks ago…

Oh, and to my NRA handlers– I’m still waiting for my truckloads of cash.

Just finished watching AvP: Requiem.  All I have to say is: dadblame, but directors can screw up a good movie.  Hot blond in her undies at a pool?  Have the scene interrupted by her ex-boyfriend AND the alien!  Aliens taking out the rescue force?  Don’t show the actual firefight– just cut to it in one second bursts!  Government sets up a trap for the survivors?  Have them walk right into it!  (The film’s set in Colorado… the Red Dawn state.  Worse yet, one character even whines, “That’s crazy. The government doesn’t lie to people.”  She was not thrown from the vehicle.)

Overall, it was enjoyable for the sheer carnage, watching those untrained in self-defense perish*,  and the cheesecake (even though she magically found her clothes again in the midst of the horror and carnage).  One pinkie up.

* At one point, a woman is getting off late at night, hears the chef screaming bloody murder in the kitchen, and calmly and totally Condition White walks right into two Aliens.  She then sits down and waits for the end, surrounded by knives and stainless steel.  Oh, and at one point a hunter uses the butt of his rifle to tap on something, thereby pointing the muzzle right at his own face.

Ever get a telemarketer that’s so stubborn you find yourself liking them… just a tiny bit?  I kept getting calls from these people yesterday, “getting out the vote” for Jeff Greene.  I say “kept” because at one point, it was a call every 30 minutes.  Solution:  I turned the phone on and let Mr. Tenacious listen to a 505 watt sound system pump out heavy metal and Modern Warfare multiplayer.

For 45 minutes.

Less than 20 minutes after I hung up, he called back.

I am… impressed.  He is either determined as all get-out, or he’s a slacker with the same taste in music and games.  Either way… he did better than the last phone hack who caught me in the middle of a match…

(By the way, this tradition started back when Opposing Force was new.  PC Magazine would never call me or send me a renewal letter after that… I had to call them.)

Bob S. shares a personal story about awareness.  Personally, by about Awareness Point #3, I would have taken action to put distance between myself and the other vehicle… but that’s just me.

Awareness is important because the best way to survive a bad situation is never to get into it in the first place.  Is that guy driving behind you (while perfectly mimicking every speed change and lane change) following you or is he just going to the same place and keeping with the flow of traffic?  Well, take a random turn and find out.  Is that guy eying you in the Quickie Mart sizing you up or just seeing if you’re Cousin So-and-So?  Slip down an aisle and get closer to the clerk… and then wait him out.

*Note: this is a tad freaky.  I chose the title for this post to point out the fact that is you get caught unaware, you get caught, period.  Then I remembered that the title sounded… familiar.  So I Googled it.  First result: Hackworth article.  Second result: recent post by Tam.  It’s also the name of the old FBI training video (Part 1, Part 2) on awareness during an arrest.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go file the serial numbers off some more material…

So, lets talk 380 ammo. [...] What do you carry? –Uncle

The words “what ammo for my Back-Up Gun (BUG)” usually start a flurry of comments, the volume of which is only surpassed by a good “Glock sucks/Glock rocks” or “AR-15 vs. AK vs. M-1″ discussion.  (By the way, Glock sucks and you can pry my AR from my cold, dead hands… but can you pass me an en bloc clip?)

With a .380, you’re going to have to make a choice: utter reliability or a chance at expansion.  In the far distant past (say, the late 1980s), the wisdom was that no .380 ammo would go fast enough to expand… so just use FMJ, it’ll feed better anyway.  In the modern era, there’s a bit of choice in .380 ammo… and the hollowpoints expand now!

The problem is that all guns vary.  Just because your buddy uses Magtech 180 grain .40 S&W in his XD, it doesn’t mean you can, too– you must check for compatibility.  Also, that brand new Lightning-bolt Super-Penetration Hyper-velocity  ammo that just came out might not work for you– check it out first.

Case in point, in the comments from above linked post.  Here’s my contribution:

90 grain Speer Gold Dots.

I love ‘em.  I have a supplier who keeps some in stock always (he’s the Speer distributor in my area), they are pretty zippy, and my LCP loves them.  But just a few comments later, Diomed comments:

Since my LCP chokes on Gold Dots, I stick with ball.

Okay, two guys with Ruger LCPs… one LCP works perfectly with a certain round, the other chokes on it.  Now imagine that Diomed was a buddy of mine who didn’t check his gun/ammo pairing, and found out that the two didn’t play nice with each other at a bad time… like in the middle of a self defense situation.  Is ammo expensive now?  Yep.  Is .380 had to find?  Oh yeah.  Was it worth it to put a box of Gold Dots through my LCP to make sure it liked them?  Oh, yes.  (My LCP will feed Gold Dots reliably, but you cannot use the slide lock to put the first round in– you have to slingshot it.  But since I load the same way every time…)

As to why one guns likes X and the other doesn’t… (shrug)  I have no idea.  Maybe Diomed’s LCP has microscopic burrs on the feed ramp.  Maybe the guy who worked on the feed ramp on my LCP made of more pass and polished it a bit.  Maybe the person who took the barrel out of the machine was the first son of the first son of a first son who was born during a solar eclipse.

Oh, and that Magtech ammo I used as an example?  My XD loves to eat it.  So much that the slide unlocks a split second before the pressure fully drops, which causes some wonderful flashes in low light…

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said that Jesus’ Golden Rule inspired him…

Well, that’s good…

… to vote to confirm Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court…

Lindsey…