A carnival of technology

I’m too lazy to come up with my own material anymore, so I’m just going to post the news.

Ms. Willbanks, everyone’s favorite missing person case, has agreed to pay the confusingly exact amount of $13,249.09 to the City of Duluth, and Duluth is agreeing not to sue for the rest. The thing that confuses about this whole case is not her motives, or her past, or even why her eyes always point in different directions in the news photos (ok, so that confuses me a little bit), but rather why Duluth spent so damn much on her in the first place. Suppose that I went missing, whether due to kidnapping, alien abduction, or a last minute effort to escape my own wedding; how much time and effort do you think the City of Smyrna would spend to track me down? I’m not rich, and I don’t have access to the white-woman-in-trouble alarm, so I suspect it would be not quite so very much. And that’s what upsets me about the whole thing.

In other news, there was another crane guy over the weekend. Seeing the success of Mr. Roland’s journey from Florida in order to escape murder charges , a South Carolina man embarked on a similarly short-sighted plan to escape the CIA’s flying saucers. He didn’t stay up there quite so long, though. He came down when he ran out of smokes and was treated to a breakfast of champions from the APD—cigarettes, coffee, and a Krispy Kreme doughnut. I love a happy ending.

I suppose I should provide an update on crane guy, since I have been informed that some news outlets are already offering a revisionist account, making certain details more palatable to those who recoil from accounts of treachery or the use of force. This whole situation had taken on a rather comical aspect, and it’s finally over, with crane guy safely and healthily on the ground.

Crane guy first climbed up on the crane around 4pm on Wednesday, and he was taken down from the crane a little after midnight on Saturday morning. The APD continued to offer him food and water throughout the ordeal, and my assumption that this would prolong his stay atop the crane may have been hasty, since it turns out that the police may have a bit duplicitous in their gestures of hospitality. I was told by someone that his descent was described as “[coming] down for a glass of water”, but this isn’t the whole story. He did accept a glass of water, but was still on top of the crane when he did so. When he reached for it, they tasered him. And thus ends this season’s first high-profile threat to jump off of something over a major road.

Mac & Me is a classic example of 80’s pulp: it’s an obvious ripoff of another, better movie, right down to the product placements; it has a differently-abled character to make the cast more diverse, but presented in such a way to make it totally meaningless; and the plot completely stops about two-thirds of the way in for a dance scene. Mac, the Mysterious Alien Creature, attempts to capture the charm of E.T., but fails to do so from the very start with two very unfortunate features: he’s hideous and he’s dumb. The aliens have a more human appearance, possibly to make the costumes cheaper, and the result is a grotesque caricature of E.T. The unchanging goofy expressions permanently plastered on their rubber faces does nothing to make them more appealing. The movie opens with one of these monstrous members of Mac’s family walking through the barren landscape of Mars and sticking a straw into the ground for water. Apparently this comprises most of their days. These primitive E.T. rejects can’t even get to Earth without the help of a NASA rover.

In all, the memorable parts of Mac & Me are all accidental. Wheelchair-kid falling off the cliff was a good scene. The unending use of Coca-Cola was amusing, right up to the scene where Coke saves the aliens. The explosion towards the end was kind of cool, but confusing, since the building they blew up, unlike the gas station next to it, didn’t seem particularly explody. And, of course, the almost threatening “We’ll be back!” at the end was hilarious, since they almost certainly will not.

Oh holy jesus. I knew not to expect much from an obvious ET ripoff, but this was much more painful than I could have imagined. The alien suits were really creepy. Wrinkly skin, belly pooch ala starving Ethiopians, puffed out cheeks, and enternally pursed mouth-hole. This is the stuff of nightmares, I tell you, and we’re supposed to think they’re cute? Seeing them dressed up in human clothing at the end was the most disturbing thing of all.

This is pretty much your standard “kid and friends help wacky alien/animal/fairy thingie find family/home/dream car” fare. Only on some kind of psychoactive drug. Highlights include a sing and dance number in McDonald’s, useless 80’s power ballads, a kid in a wheelchair going for a jog with his mom, and shameless product placement. I give this one a 1/10, purely because no one ever drank anything other than Coke.

How two boys worlds apart became the best of friends

Rated PG.

Starring a bunch of people never heard from again, some freaky alien puppets and suits, and a billion corporate sponsors.

Viewed 2005-05-17 by dshea, dcantrell, mimamura, susi, and dane.

What starts out as a modern-day Grapes of Wrath adaption turns it to a whirlwind of plot holes and disjoint scenes. The family is moving from the dustbowl that is Chicago to California because mom has landed a dream job at Sears. Back up a little more to get the aliens to Earth. NASA sent a probe to a planet to apparently collect things. The probe sucks the aliens through its vacuum hose (we learn here that they have no endoskeleton) and starts to malfunction, so it launches itself off the planet and heads back to Earth. OK, so we have aliens on Earth now.

At NASA they manage to break out and run all over the place. Most of them head to the windfarm in Livermore, CA (probably) and the tiny nameless one heads to the other side of suburbia to look for a family. Hilarity ensues.

The acting is mostly absent, but that’s to be expected with kids. It’s obvious the goal of this movie was to promote ice-cold delicious Coca-Cola and hearty nutritious McDonald’s meals. The kids’ lines are forced and timing is off. Not to mention to absolutely scary scene involving the wheelchair kid rolling off a cliff and in to water about 50-100 feet below. This is a family movie? What were they thinking?

Most of the rest of the movie involves fish-out-of-water scenes. They take the alien to McDonald’s where there’s a huge birthday party going on. The alien family goes to the grocery store. And so on.

Some confusing things about the movie… why does moving in to a new house involving using power tools? Not just drills, but saws and such? The alien planet is a wasteland, like Utah, but the tiny alien brings nature in to the house which one would guess is his attempt to make it more like home. But his home didn’t have trees or shrubbery.

I give this movie a 1/10 because it was better than Cat in the Hat, but not by much. Nothing happened and it ended with a giant, “what the hell?”

This might not be a good time to drive through Buckhead. Besides the water main break on Peachtree a bit north of Collier, a section of Peacthree near West Paces Ferry has also been shut down due to some guy up on a crane. So, besides Peachtree being totally screwed up, the subsequent traffic shutdown in the area is going to be further worsened by the fact that everyone’s looking up.

Besides the traffic impact, this situation is fun just by being so ridiculous. Crane dude, at the time of this writing (2:30ish) has been up there for around 46 hours, and the strategy of the APD appears to be a really sucky seige. They’re trying to keep him awake by blasting an air horn at him, moving a mechanical bucket up and down the crane arm near where he is, and buzzing him with a helicopter, in the hopes that he’ll eventually come down to get some sleep. “But what if he gets hungry?” you might ask. Don’t worry, fair citizen, your faithful servants and protectors have considered this situation and offered the guy food. That’s right, they’re trying to feed him. He’s refused so far, though, so maybe he’ll get hungry or thirsty at some point.

Watching the news videos has been amusing in a morbid sort of way. The guy looks like he’s trying to dismantle part of the crane, and the cops keep playing with the bucket, keeping it near the guy as he moves along the arm. The police negotiators, though they refuse to climb out onto the crane arm, are often close enough to this guy that they could just grab him. He’s allegedly armed with a knife, but who cares? They’re in full riot gear. I think they could take him. Or just blow him off with a helicopter and onto the air bag they set up below. Or just shoot him down. He’s a murder suspect in Florida, so there’s at least some chance that he’ll be brought down and then put to death by the state. Obviously I’m not the guy who is or needs to be calling the shots, but it really seems like there are better options in this situation.

I threw together a photo browser of sorts at http://photos.gophernet.org/. I hate PHP, but I was able to code something fairly quickly when I wasn’t shouting to the empty air about what a dumb language it is. As is my wont with web projects, it looks horrible, and I have neither the skill nor patience to fix it. So, if anyone out there wants to make my site look pretty, let me know. I might even be willing to offer a sock full of quarters.

While at my parents’ home in Alabama over the weekend, we made a trip to Walmart in search of some assorted tools and office supplies. My parents didn’t find what they wanted, but we did raid the $1 bin full of strange, old DVDs in curiously thin cases. I got a DVD with three episodes of Flash Gordon, and, upon viewing it, I noticed that one of the explicit non-home uses mentioned in the copyright notice, along with clubs, prisons, and hotels, is “oil rigs.” I just thought that I would share this.

My search for coffee these past few days has been a rough one. Port City, of course, is closed, and the Caribou Coffee that I thought was on Holcomb Bridge apparently is also close. Coffee isn’t terribly hard to find—every gas station, fast food restaurant and Brazilian deli between me and the office serves coffee—but there’s something about the coffee shop environment that makes it special, that evokes visions of Juan Valdez watching the sun rise over green, misty mountains.

Day one, after a failed search for Caribou, ended at Racetrack. They, like other gas stations have of late, offer multiple coffee choices, though, unlike BP’s futile attempt to seem classy, all the countries listed on the coffee names are Columbia, and the choices are light or dark roasts. I went with the lighter roast, and it was fairly unexciting. Tuesday found me at Chick-fil-a. I’m not sure if it was just my imagination, but I could have sworn there was just a hint of chicken taste in it. It sure was cheap, too. $.95 for what cost $1.87 at Port City. Chick-fil-a also brought me a step closer to my goal, since it gave me warm fuzzy feeling from the curious regionalism that I’ve adopted through supporting a southern company (not to be confused with The Southern Company). On Wednesday, however, I think I’ve found my new morning haunt. I had forgotten that there is a close cousin of the coffee shop, perhaps even superior to the coffee shop in their tasks of delivering tasty coffee and friendliness, and there is a particular choice on my way to work that satisfies both my needs for a variety of brews and a heart below the Mason-Dixon.

I’m going with Krispy Kreme.

Five thoughts that came to mind while watching this movie:

• What’s going on?
• What year is it supposed to be?
• ACTING!
• The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has more gold than Fort Knox.
• “And then star wipe to…”

This movie blew. The plot sucked. The acting sucked. And that wipe. Every scene transition used that damn dissolve wipe. It was like watching Unsolved Mysteries without Robert Stack’s narration. Oh, and without a freaking plot.

I give this movie 2/10 because it had that crazy guy from Waterworld that wanted resin and because the boots the aliens wore looked like something out of Final Fantasy <pick your favorite number>.