Armageddon it...

Tuesday, April 19th, 2005

6:00

Armageddon - FX

Bruce Willis stars as the leader of a rag-tag group of eccentric oil drillers sent up in space to save the world from a killer asteroid. In typical over-the-top blockbuster style, the asteroid is going to hit in about 30 days. On top of that, the asteroid is the size of Texas, which has to be blown up by a nuclear weapon, but only a nuke that's inserted 1000 feet into the Asteroid.

There are many head scratchers in this movie, but the one that always kills me happens early on in the movie. Harry, played by Bruce Willis, owns an oil rig business. He finds out that AJ, played by Ben Affleck, is sleeping with his daughter, so he chases him around the oil rig with a shot gun. He's contacted by the US government, so he fires AJ and orders his crew to clean up the rig. 18 hours later, Harry he agrees to do the impossible job of flying up the asteroid and blowing it up, but only if he can use his own crew. There's a snag, however, because they just got paid and they could be anywhere! In the short day after they've gotten paid, all of Harry's guys are scattered around the country. One of them is even as far away as South Dakota on his motorcycle. Hell, AJ even had time to start his own company and be in the process of oil drilling when Harry comes to see him!

Some of head scratchers in this movie:

• When the astronauts are on the surface of the asteroid, they feel almost no gravity. When they're inside the shuttle, there's full gravity. Must be that new gravity feature on those experimental space shuttles.
• The asteroid seems to have earth gravity as evidenced when they are pulling the drilling pipes out of the asteroid when they struggle to pull the pipes out. The asteroid only has no gravity when they need to fly off the asteroid.
• Truman, played by Billy Bob Thorton, is seen in Florida talking with the astronauts prior to their lift-off. Mission Control in Houston takes over once the rocket clears the tower, which begs the question as to how Truman can be in Texas just a few seconds after being in Florida.
• In the shuttle, the seats are too small for the astronauts. There are no head supports for the seats, which would cause their heads to snap off when they hit 12 Gs around the moon.
• After the first shuttle crashes, the crash has fire crackling around the wreckage. Fire needs oxygen to burn, which is unavailable in space.
• The shuttles take off during the day. Everyone in the world is watching it take off on TV and its day everywhere no matter where they are.

Apparently, the TV Log isn't going over too well among my fans, all two of them...

In my attempt to give myself an excuse to update the site on a semi-regular basis, I tried to be funny and write some funny observations about TV shows. It's not as easy as it looks. My brother Bill told me that he and Joe (the oldest brother) didn't particularly like the TV log since it wasn't really funny. That said, Bill did like the story about Starship Troopers. I think I'm going to concentrate on one movie or show per day from now on since that was one of my original intentions with this blog anyway. One was to share humorous stories and the other was to do my critiques on movies or shows.

Bob's TV Log - Monday, April 18th, 2005

7:00

Easy Rider - AMC

I haven't seen the end of this movie because I was really bored when I rented this one night. This is the movie baby boomers were inspired by? Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper star as two motorcyclists that ride across the country for who knows what reason. With a gas tank full of cocaine, they switch between a dramatic scene and a scene of them riding to music. Back and forth.

I do remember that they happen upon a hippie colony in the middle of the desert. The hippies are stupidly trying to grow seeds on very dry land, to which Dennis Hopper points out that it's a waste of time. Peter Fonda disagrees and says something like, "No man. They're going to make it." Yeah, sure they are. I really hate hippies anyway, so I was rolling my eyes during the entire hippy scene. I guess since this was set during the Summer of '69 that this was a prevalent attitude among young people.

It's just perplexing to me that this movie inspired people. Maybe I need to watch the rest of it to see what the point is. Like I said, I got bored watching it and stopped.

Bob's TV Log - Friday, April 15th, 2005

7:00

The Matrix Reloaded - HBO Plus

This movie was okay. I had some decent action sequences, but then when everyone started defying their abilities in the world, like the shootout on the ceiling, I began to have my doubts. I could have done without the whole rave sequence during the middle that seemed to drag on forever. What the hell was that all about? Machines are coming to kill us, let's have a party!! Shouldn't they be getting ready?

Serial Mom - HBO Comedy

My favorite John Waters movie. Check that. It's the ONLY John Waters movie I've ever had any desire to see. What's not to love about this movie? Kathleen Turner starts the movie off by terrorizing her next door neighbor with graphic screaming phone calls (IS THIS THE PUSSY RESIDENCE? HAVE I DIALED 555-FUCKYOU!) for the most important of reasons, her neighbor took her parking space. Soon her terror antics turn to killing, which is horrific and tounge-in-cheek at the same time. Notable for the appearance of Ricki Lake when she was fat. The female rock group L7 makes an appearance as a tight-pants-wearing rock group appropriately named Camel Toe. I'll give you one guess as to what it refers to.

7:30

Gremlins - MoreMAX West

Zach Galligan stars as a young man whose father gives him a Mogwai, which has three simple rules: Don't expose it to light, Don't give it water and Don't feed it after midnight. Of course, he fails on all three counts and chaos ensues as the Gremlins take over the town. Notable for a short appearance by a young Corey Feldman before he got all corrupted by Michael Jackson. Also notable for the deaths of two townspeople by way of a tractor, but mysteriously are alive in Gremlins 2.

The Core - Showtime West (actually on Thursday)

Hillary Swank stars as a hot-shot pilot that navigates a ship to the center of the Earth to explode 5 nuclear bombs to get the Earth's core spinning again. Before that happens, people with pacemakers die, birds go crazy and people on the Golden Gate Bridge, in the exact center no less (what are the odds?) get cooked by microwaves from the sun. Laughable for it's short time line to build a prototype ship with a made up metal called unobtainium. Get it? It's a metal that unobtainable to the screen writes just used that name. It supposably gets harder the hotter it gets. Things go wrong. People die. And of course, some important safety features have to manually turned on in places that will kill the person that goes. Thank you sacrificial black guy! Not a bad adventure movie, but you'll be scratching your head a lot in this movie. I was after DJ Qualls, who stars as the best computer hacker in the world, borrows someones cell phone, dials a number, blows into a folded up gum wrapper and announces that now that phone has long distance for the rest of its life.

8:00

Hope and Faith - ABC

Nothing special here, but I'd just like to say that I can't believe how an unbelievably corny and unfunny show like Hope and Faith can stay on the air, but Arrested Development needs to win an Emmy to save it's ass.

50 First Dates - MoreMAX

Adam Sandler proves again that you can take a flimsy premise and make a movie out of it. Drew Barrymore plays a lady that loses her memory every single day after an accident on her Dad's birthday. I'd recommend it only to see the sequence where her Dad has to celebrate his birthday everyday by watching the Vikings game on TV and then watching Sixth Sense, which she gives him for his birthday. The thought of them bored out of their minds watching the Six::th Sense while she's engrossed and scared is pretty priceless. Oh and the Walrus totally steals the movie.

The Dead Zone - 5 Star Max

Christopher Walken stars as a man who wakes from a coma with powers to see into the future. Go figure that Walken plays a creepy guy.

8:30

Almost Heroes - Starz Family

One of the worst movies that I've ever seen in a theater, but not the worst. That title goes to Escape From LA.

9:00

Starship Troopers - Showtime Beyond

I saw this movie when I was recently married. We had bought a new bed from the Nebraska Furniture Mart and we were waiting for it. It was supposed to be delivered between 10 am and Noon. Noon came and went. No bed. My wife went to work later that day. Still no bed. I waited and waited. Still no bed. Finally, 7:00 rolled around and Bill showed up to see Starship Troopers. All I could think of was that I couldn't leave, what if the freaking bed showed up? Bill told me not to worry about it because it's probably not coming. However, because I knew that Laura was going to come home while I was at the movie, I had to do something. I wrote a long note about how I waited and waited, but no bed came. Then I had to put our old crappy mattress back on the bed frame. Then I made the bed. I went to the movie with Bill and all I could think of during the whole movie was "I hope to God the delivery guy doesn't show up with the bed while I'm gone." I get home and check the caller ID. Thankfully, no bed showed up and I was free from any possible blame. This was all the stores fault. Oh and the movie was pretty cool. Starship Troopers shoot tons of armored bugs. Which reminds me, why didn't they just uses small ships on the ground instead of ground troops?

9:30

The Shining - Thriller Max West

Steven King openly hated this adaptation of his book, but it's miles scarier than his piece of shit miniseries that was on ABC. So Stanley Kubrick botched up your vision of the book. It's still one of the scariest movies ever filmed that just oozes creepiness. Also, as a twin, the dead twins freaked the shit out of me when I was a kid. I was always scared that I was going to round a corner in a hotel and see dead twins.

Kids apparently eat too many sweets, which is a shocker...

A mom has had enough in New Jersey. Apparently, because she's concerned that kids eat too many sweets, that everyone should ban kids bringing in sweets on their birthdays.

In this article about this crazy parent, it says that this lady has fired off mass emails to other parents and complained to the parents teachers group about the practive of bringing in sweets for the kids to eat on birthdays. In the fall, this lady also organized a monthlong pilot program with Whole Foods Market in which veggie Lasagna, turkey sloppy joes, organic turkey hotdogs and black bean burritos were on the new menu, which did not prove popular with the students (go figure).

I guess she never realized that parents need to actually parent and to stop trying to force your beliefs on other people. Actually, it's not just parents. Ever meet a vegetarian? Many of them will try to make you feel guilty about eating an animal, to which I say bring on the chopping block because I love tasty animals.

I realize that kids are getting fatter, but guess why that is? Because kids used to go outside more. They used to work outside with chores and they played games. Now with video games and cable TV, kids have less incentive to go outside.

This lady is going at it all wrong. She needs to organize some fun physical events. When a kid has a birthday, she could organize some physical games with incentives to do well. They could have shuttle runs with the loser eating an organic turkey hotdog. How about musical chairs with the losers having to eat some soy dipped carrot sticks? Maybe she could have some turkey sloppy joe tosses? The last team that wins doesn't have to eat them. I'd say that's incentive enough.

Granted, I think the townspeople are little snobbish in that she's a "renter" and therefore shouldn't be allowed to have that much of a say, but still I can smell a psycho a mile a way, and she's it.

You can learn a lot about life from CSI...

by Bob and Bill

I'm giving Bill a little credit since he thought up this topic and a few of the lessons.

• If someone has committed a crime, chances are good they had their apartment or car detailed prior to the crime.
• If you're into something freaky (a la dressing up as an animal or sleeping with fat chicks), you're going to die.
• If you cheat on your spouse/lover, chances are pretty good that you're going to die.
• If you try to help someone out by being nice, chances are pretty good that you're going to die.
• If you are mean to someone, chances are pretty good that you're going to die.
• If you have a business partner, look out because he/she is probably going to kill you!
• Don't have Sara on your case if you're a suspect in case in which the victim is a woman, she'll almost always be wrong, but that won't stop her from trying to prove you did it.
• Your CSI supervisor will usually remind you to look for the evidence.
• If you're in a semi-competitive sport and you live for the glory and not the sport, someone will kill you because you were about the glory, not the sport.
• If you're in a semi-competitive sport and you're good, someone will kill you because you were a threat to win it.
• It's perfectly acceptable to use giant LCD wall computer monitor screens in which to display suspect breakdowns when a magnetic map on a wall could do the job just as easy and probably faster.
• While you use your giant LCD monitors, you can be sure that someone will complain about a piece of equipment that they're using that is on loan, but CSI won't buy it because it's too expensive.
• Apparently, it's possible take a fuzzy, grainy surveilance video and then enlarge certain sections with not only no loss of clarity, but a huge increase of clarity!
• CSI has super computers in which surveilance video can be enlarged, reversed, twisted, manipulated and rendered with no lag time.
• It's easy to get a court order to search someone's house on the flimsiest of evidence, but if you were a teenager raped during a home invasion, good luck trying to get that DNA evidence from a guy tied to the crime with a record. That's against his rights.
• CSI will usually spend their time trying to prove that the most obvious guy pulled a crime when it almost always someone that I've pegged from the minute I met them. Just ask me first, guys.
• Semen seems to be more common than blood.
• Surgery on burn victims requires none of the surgeons to wear masks or face shields.
• Every family member that's a suspect will act disgusted that they have to be ruled out as suspect.
• Any activitiy or hobby you enjoy (like word games or robot wars) will be critiqued and demonized by the CSI crew no matter how harmless it is.
• Don't ever make fun of a family member with an embarrasing condition like bed wetting, they'll kill you with no remorse.
• Don't ever get rid of some friends and act like you're too good for them, they'll kill you, especially those that listen to Vertical Horizon!
• If you're black and not a cop and you're not a victim, you'll be cast as an angry gang banger, an angry teen mentor, an angry athlete or an angry rap mogul.
  

And lastly, from CSI - Miami

• You can talk to dead people all day long and no one questions your sanity.
  

Entirely possible heists...

There's a new show on Court TV called Impossible Heists on Sunday nights . More like, it's entirely possible. In the intro for this show, they say they've combed the country for 8 "experts" in their respective fields to help pull off heists based on real heists from the past. There are two teams of 4 who both compete to be the fastest team to pull of each heist without getting caught and leaving the least amount of forensic evidence. The best out of 5 heists gets the cash prize.

Now this sounded like a really cool premise to me. I love movies like Ocean's 11 and the Italian Heist in which a diverse group of specialists work together to pull of the impossible heist. In the meantime, they wear cool clothes and say cool things to each other that all adds to the coolness of the impossible heist.

Sadly, none of the people on this show are that cool. In fact, almost all of the people on this show have huge egos, which makes them unable to take directives from their team members which means they spend a lot of time bitching at each other during the heists.

The episode that I watched was based on a heist from the sixties in which a guy stole a rare jewel.

That heist seemed impossible. This heist was very possible.

At the beginning of the heist, 3 of the team members are stuck in 3 dumpsters and are wheeled into place by the fourth team member that stays behind. They're right next to the guard station. One team member that isn't in view of the security camera must get out and disable the camera. This is where the easy tasks go wrong.

For the blue team, the one lady that is out of shot of the camera gets out of the dumpster to disconnect the camera. She's told by another team member, "Don't walk straight across. Walk next to the wall out of camera range." She says "OK" and proceeds to tiptoe straight across from her position to the wall in full view of the camera! The red team fares no better, while the team member that gets out to disconnect the camera manages to avoid being on camera, she doesn't have a screwdriver to open the box! So she improvises to open the security box by using her finger nails. So you start with a really easy task and they both screw it up.

The "impossible" tasks continue.

They go to the adjacent guard station and install a security spy camera in which to spy on the guard. Thankfully, the guard has thoughtfully left a notebook on the shelf with a hole the exact size of the spy camera. Whew, that might have called for some ingeniuty on their part.

Next, they need to find some keys in which to turn off the floor alarms in the vault room. Again, thankfully the guard left the needed keys in his desk drawer. It's not as if a competent guard would keep the keys on him for safe keeping.

A four-digit code is also needed to turn off a 6000-volt grate blocking the team members from climbling up the air duct to the skylight over the vault room. So they look for something personal in the guard station. In a move that seems totally plausible (kidding), the code is on a poster for the 1986 New York Mets. The numbers are qouted on the poster like this "1986" with an arrow pointing to the number with the words "THE BEST YEAR EVER!!" next to it. Let's not make this obvious or anything!

They're in the air shaft and have to cut a large square through the air shaft into the other one. This takes an hour. An hour of grinding and cutting during with the "guard" walking around and never hears anything. Hearing tests must not be a requirement for becoming a guard.

While in the airshaft and almost to the top, a member of the red team remembers that she left the alligator clips that she used to disable the camera security box. Sure enough, the box is open with the clips and wires still hanging on it. She shuffles down the shaft, retrieves the clips and climbs back up the shaft just in time to avoid being seen by the guard that's just came back to the station, who is also blind since he cannot see her helmet light reflecting off of the air duct walls while she's waiting for him to to leave.

In the vault room, both teams used the team member with climbing and rope skills to hang upside down over the jewel case to drill a hole. Neither team bothered to actually practice showing the person how to use the drill on bullet proof glass so both teams ended cracking the glass over the case.

In the end, the blue team did manage to get the jewel even though they had a member caught on tape. The red team ran out of time and had to ditch the attempt, but of course forgot to leave an escape rope for the person hanging upside down. So that person was caught by the guard.

It's an okay series with a lot of challenging obstacles like repelling from ceilings and down buildings, but I think it might make a little more sense for the teams to not have things spelled out for them like it is for half of the obstacles.

Can't a man ask another man for some help with his back???

It was my birthday on Tuesday, so I treated myself with a deep tissue massage. My friend, Zack, said that he had a deep tissue massage before and that his back was really sore afterward, so this time (he got one on Monday), he got a Swedish (full body) massage. My deep tissue massage lasted about 55 minutes in which the lady went to town on my whole back and neck. I didn't feel sore. In fact, I felt fine.

It wasn't until yesterday, however, when I started to hurt really bad in my upper back. Normally, when this happens, it means that I have something out of alignment and either a visit to my chiropractor or a push on my back helps.

I was in a lot of pain, so I went over to my co-worker Scott for help.

"Scott, my back really hurts. Do you think that you could maybe push on it or squeeze my chest so that my back pops?"

Scott stared at me with wide eyes and said nothing. It was like waiting for a pin to drop.

I then slowly asked, "Do... you have a problem with that?"

Scott exclaims, "Yeah! I've got a big problem!"

I then started to stammer something like, "Oh. Sorry. I didn't mean to... It's not as if... Oh... well... I'll just deal with it. Sorry for asking."

He then said, "I'm surprised you even asked me!"

I started to leave and said, "Hey, if you're not confident enough to help. That's cool."

I left his cube and asked my friend, Jim, for help. He immediately jumped up no questions asked and followed me to an office, in which I laid down and he pushed hard on my back. I felt nothing pop and assumed that it was just sore muscles. I offered him my thanks for helping and understanding and he said it was no problem at all because his wife has back problems.

It was then that I started to chuckle at Scott's reaction.

You could have thought that I had dropped my pants and asked, "Scott, do you think that you could make love to me like only a man like you can?" You would have thought that I had just shit all over his cube with my barbaric request. A man helping a man with his back? What age are we living in? Next thing you know, there'll be male nurses in hospitals do all sorts of... well, it's just too horrifying to think about.

I understand people having trouble with gay people. If you've never been around one, you might feel uncomfortable, but I'm not gay! I'm just a guy with a sore back! It's not as if you're going to push on my back and contract the gay virus that's been going around. First it's helping your friend with his back, then you're getting massages of your own and finally you're visiting a bathhouse!

Where will it end? Women can dance with each other, braid each other's hair and even touch each other with no inkling or suggestion that they've switched teams. You just don't assume it.

The only way a straight guy can get away with touching each other is in sports where it's perfectly acceptable to hug each other and slap each other's behinds. Why do they get all the fun?