"The football! His groin! It works on so many levels!"

After getting word that my readership swelled to a 5th individual person, I feel pressure to start delivering actual "content" (warning - not actual content)...

While the Wife spent most of her vacation yelling "Woooo!" (you'll have to ask her for an explanation), I relaxed with some cheesy summer reading (getting called a nerd for reading), helped a pre-med student with her homework (got made fun of much less after that, because nerds are useful!), and got devoured by vicious swarms of bugs - so now I'm sitting back in Ohio scratching myself...

I also created a new idiom (in the tradition of "bitchcakes" and "asshat," both mine) that I'm going to try to popularize over the next few week. So, ladies and gentlemen, I present:

Southern Gentlemen

As in, "Ow! That football just hit me in the Southern gentlemen!" (just imagine George C. Scott saying it)



While it's definitely a fool's errand to try to follow that clip up with anything substantial, I've got a few minor movie reviews. I just got done watching the Shaw Brothers' 36 Chambers of Shaolin, which is one of the most influential kung-fu films ever made - you can pretty much see Tarantino lifting various scenes and shots. The framing story, about some sort of insurrection in historical Canton, is pretty flimsy, but the movie rocks during the training montage (the really important part of any true "gong-fu" film is the hard work and training of the protagonist that conveniently helps him win a later fight), where we see Gorden Liu's Sun Ta actually work through each of the 35 chambers - each one is a different aspect of martial arts, such as balance, arm strength, peripheral vision, and bo staff fighting.

The other 'movie' I have to whole-heartedly recommend is the 25-minute The Amazing Screw-On Head, which is based on a short comic series by Mike Mignola (the guy who is most famous for creating Hellboy), and has a fantastically dry sense of humor. The story is about Screw-On Head, a secret paranormal agent who is literally a head that screws into various robot bodies (and is voiced by Paul Giamatti) - it's never explained at all how it's possible for a head to move around on its own or control the robot frames, but you never really care, since the storytelling's just that good. The Head works for Abraham Lincoln, and fights his nemesis, Emperor Zombie (formerly Mr. Zombie, prior to his promotion to Emperor). There are plenty of one-liners, and the only downside is that it's only a half-hour long.

(there, that counts as legitimate substance...happy now?)

"I've got sand in my underpants..."

Well, I'm off for the yearly week of floating, drinking, and peeing without leaving the water. I'll come back with a sunburn, bug bites, and more empties than anyone should have to see.

Even though my only consistent reader is going to be with me, here's a random link to keep the site interesting:

I ENJOY YELLING THINGS

Nerds - the good and the bad

I went to see the new Transformers movie on Tuesday, and I've been trying to get myself motivated to write something about it (or at least make a point or two that hasn't already been made by other, better, critics).

Immediately after the movie ended, I groaned about how crappy the logic of the plot was during the last half of the movie. OT, who was sitting next to us (and who drove us to the movie at 52 MPH through Oakwood), defended the film as "just a B-movie," presumably meaning it shouldn't be expected to have coherent storytelling. I don't think you can claim any Michael Bay film as a "B-Movie," between the massive budgets and explicit military support (I especially loved the 3-minute sequence early in Transformers that consists of characters shouting the names of various Air Force planes, then showing the planes taking off and flying in slow motion).

Maybe my standards were too high, but that's only because Michael Bay has demonstrated his ability to tell a decent story in his movies (The Rock is still one of my all-time favorites). It was only worse because the first half or so of Transformers is fantastic - Bay established characters who behave in a logical, realistic fashion and put them in interesting (albeit fantastic situations). By the time we get to the obligatory massive CGI action/fight setpiece, all of this gets thrown out the window in exchange for swelling chamber music and slow-motion robots pulling off John Woo-style shooting flips.

I applaud the programmers who designed the robots for the film - they're all really cool looking (at least I think they were - it's hard to see detail in the split-seconds between explosions and edits). But even the best-looking giant robot semi trailer is a letdown if I, the viewer, don't care about it or why it's fighting (especially when I'm not really clear on what's happening).

One of my favorite TV series was the Beast Wars relaunch, which used the Transformers brand in a new kids' cartoon in the early 90s. It was entirely computer-animated (one of the first shows to do so), and as expected sometimes looked absolutely terrible, like it was running an old 16-bit video game cutscene. Despite the visuals lacking, the writing was fantastic, way above par for a show aimed at children - and I'll take a crummy-looking quality story over shiny, polished crap any day.

In other nerd news, I was directed to this page today - I've watched the simulation 4 times so far, and it's excellent each time. Check it out. I dare you...

A quick joke:

On the streets of New York City, an older man, dressed in a suit that might have looked new twenty years ago, sits with an equally old harmonica in his hand. Every few minutes, the man will lift the rusted instrument to his lips and produce a handful of notes. He sees a sharply-dressed, urbanite couple rush down the street in his direction. When they get closer, the young husband, who has draped his expensive coat over his wife's shoulders, seems almost hysterical. "My wife was just stabbed by a mugger!" he screams. "Can you tell me how to get to the hospital?"

The old man smiles, "Practice, my man, practice."

-----

It's a slow morning already. Between me having trouble falling asleep and the Dog puking at 5:30 AM (damn kids next door feeding her party food), I'm not in any mood to deal with my own students. Online teaching may be convenient (I'm typing this in my pajamas), but I'll take a face-to-face classroom any day.

Over the weekend, we went to Big Tom's wedding, which was awesome - maybe I'll write something about it for all the people who now know this blog's address. Maybe not. Who knows.

"Inventory is boring. In the islands they don't make you do stuff like take inventory. Why do think so many businesses moved to the Caymans?"

So work has been sucktacular lately. I've been working a ridiculous amount of hours while I watch my coworker gallivant around enjoying the beautiful weather and witness my bosses oovoo into the office from the beach to show those of us actually in the office how awesome the water in South Carolina is today. Assholes! I promise when I'm boss I will not torment the peons in such ways.


So anyway, I'm working on this huge project that involves basically justifying our entire economic development (ED) strategy to the Governor and the state department of development in order to secure future ED funding for the region. Which on a surface level seems fairly straight forward. I mean this is the stuff we talk about everyday. This is our bread and butter. This should totally be a cake walk, right? WRONG! One would think that our "strategic industry clusters" were decided on based on some sort of regional industry analysis or ED forecasting or something, but it really wasn't as far as I can figure out. It was essentially a concept agreed upon by the boss and the executive committee as the direction they thought would be good for the region. So now I'm pretty much hunting around looking for data and random studies that can support this concept. I totally agree with the direction we are going in so it's not a stretch for me to find enthusiasm for this project, but seriously... What the hell?


So while working on this project it occurs to me that I've tapped into the fundamental flaw of most public policy. We too often make the decisions first. Someone gets a "good idea" and goes with it allowing someone else to figure out how to verify the course. In my case I'm lucky because the boss's intuition seems pretty on the mark as I'm easily finding the data points that I need to justify what we are doing and I'm anticipating that the presentation to the Governor will go well (hopefully tens of millions of dollars worth of well, no pressure or anything.) I'll just be happy when this whole project is over and I'm the one drinking a beer and soaking up rays.

(testing out youtube embedding)