Movie Review: Man of Steel

IT'S GOOD! I honestly didn't think there could be a good Superman movie as long as Jon Peters was involved. I'd go as far as saying that it's the best Superman movie yet. Alas, that's a bit like talking about the best Fantastic Four movie. Don't get me wrong, I liked Christopher Reeves as Superman. But I know you and I have the same problems with those first two movies. Spinning the Earth backwards to go back in time, holographic Superman projections, a tractor beam from his finger, Lois's spoken word song (bleh)... these screwed up an otherwise good movie.

My biggest issue with this movie was the music. It's alright music, but not in any way memorable. There's no theme song. No recurring series of notes to stick in your head. Nothing to hum to yourself when trying to pump yourself up. Nothing to get pulled over for because you were playing the soundtrack in the car and accidentally started speeding. It might make good soothing music for PTSD patients. But I doubt they'll make a dime from the soundtrack.

They do manage to skip what they can of his origin story. It's Superman. We know the story. But they do spend a good amount of time setting up the back story for Jor-El and Zod. They don't spend as much time on Clark's childhood as the trailers lead you to believe.
I like that some reporter worked out who he is. If anyone was going to do it, it'd be Lois.

Lots of Jesus allegory. I laughed out loud when they said Clark was 33.

I'm told there's no short clip at the end of the credits. Someone looked it up on their phone while the credits rolled and told the audience. Most of them got up and left immediately. Come on, DC, are you challenging Marvel for the crown or not?

I'll be getting this on DVD.

I'm going to a gardening party

It's a gardening party of one, but still...

Yummy and I and her parents are still on good enough terms that I was allowed to raid the raspberry bushes at their house. Last summer I noticed that a lot of what was growing along the edge of their lawn were raspberry bushes. Dodging the thorns we managed to pick quite a few. The deer came for the rest. Wednesday I went to take a few before Yummy's dad starts a culling of the bushes. I hadn't realized just how invasive raspberries are. There's a lot more than there were last year. As I worked at digging up eight small ones I found runners just under the surface that were running all over. Seriously, their patch seems to have tripled in size over the course of a year.

I picked eight small raspberry plants that were growing in the middle of a path I'd been trying to cultivate in a fenced area behind the house. Not that they have any interest in going back there, but I think they need a hiking trail. I've already killed off their poison ivy. I can't do anything to calm their tick concerns, though.

Six of the poor tortured plants got planted in the yards of abandoned houses on my alley in Baltimore. Five of them look like they'll live. Two others got traded to my contractor in return for some blackberry bushes from his place. One got put in the tire that I turned inside out to see how that effects runner development. I'll be trying to develop the raspberries in rows so that people can walk down them  and pick easily instead of having to hack their way in or get cut up by stickers.

I also took my trusty bottle of RoundUp and walked the alleys that run between Norman's House and the Annapolis Bog. In my alley and around my block I kill everything that might collect trash or is growing through the sidewalk. Down these new alleys I was targeting poison ivy and curly leaf dock. Dock is very invasive and all over Westport. Poison Ivy I'm highly tolerant to and only break out if it gets in a wound. So, as a kid, I was the go to guy for killing the stuff. I've developed a grudge against it and kill it off wherever reasonable.

After spraying those alleys I used the rest of my bottle treating the more persistant things in my alley. Once I reached the bottom of the alley I had another look at the building across the street. That wasn't english ivy or virginia creeper going up that wall. No, poison ivy had covered about 1/5 of the building. And the lawn was a mix of poison ivy and a fresh blanket of curly leaf dock I intended to wait a week before attacking it. I try to keep down to a bottle a week. But by Sunday I couldn't take it anymore and attacked. I could only do so much since I was unwilling to wade into the poison ivy. But I shot up the wall as far as I could and into the yard as far as pressure would allow. Next week I check on it to see what's sick and what I've missed. The week after I should be able to wade out further and kill some more. And hopefully reach the trunk of the big vine and cut it.

I continued down the alley with what was left of my bottle and found the alley heavily overrun with poison ivy. Alas, I also found many garbage piles. If anyone doubts that my actions are doing any good they can just look at the alleys on either side of mine and compare.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned that I've been fencing off the yards of the abandoned houses in my alley. $3 fence posts and cheap plastic fencing held on by zip ties. It's not my yard and there are metal thieves in the area so I'm not sinking too much money into these places. But I'm trying to discourage dumping. After nearly two months the city finally cleared out the dumping in a yard across the alley. That was the last yard that needed a fence. They also mowed that yard and one other. Now I claim those yards as mine. I got a 100ft extension cord so I can get the weed whacker over there. In one of the yards I'd been putting dirt that I'd shoveled out of the alley. I'd planted some pumpkins and hyacinth bean in that dirt and they are coming up. Free pumpkins for the neighbors this Halloween!

Inside the house I finished mortaring one wall, cut down the ceiling joists in the hall and demoed room, and started cleaning the sloppy mortar off the bricks. That last bit is being slowed by the limited life span of the batteries for the drill that runs the flapping sandpaper thing.

Friday Links: June 14

In light of recent events, They Might Be Giants has a ringtone for you.


Tornado mod for Minecraft.


RFK Jr is an anti-vaccination loon. [link]

Regional dialect survey. [link]

Town in Spain mails unscooped poop to owners. [link]

Prosthetic fingers for former Yakuza. [link]

He gave up a $200K job in Hawaii and a ballerina wife for a life in exile. That's how much he loves his country. [link]

Bridesmaid required to get a date. So she gets the most inappropriate one she can find off Craigslist. [link]

How common is your birthday? [link]

Reinvented wheel. [link]

The lie of "Right to work". [link]

Timelapse footage of a supercell. [link]

"Fun" with Texas gun laws. [link]

What happens to CEOs who refuse to cooperate with the NSA. [link]

The untold horrible truth about running. [link]

How to use the internet without Prism (posted without reading... yet) [link]

"You are the worst person I've ever interviewed." [link]

What happens to women denied abortions? [link]

Bad movie night: Chillerama

It's horrible movie time again, boys and girls. You've seen "Dead Alive" and "Rubber" and your friends are still investigating what really killed Roger Ebert. Have a look at "Chillerama". 

"Chillerama" is a series of bad movie spoofs stitched together with a storyline about a drive-in theater going out of business and being attacked by sex zombies. It starts with some guy sitting in the open grave of his wife who has been dead for a year. He want to get from her in death what she wouldn't give him in life. Ss he takes his pants off she sits up and bites his crotch. He starts bleeding blue and goes off to work at the drive-in. We meet our cast of characters and see that some people are getting blue topping on their popcorn.

The first of the bad films is "Wadzilla". A guy with fertility issues starts taking experimental medication to produce more sperm and give them more pep. Instead it takes the one sperm he has and makes it start to grow. It gets loose and goes on a rampage in the city eating people until it tries to mate with the Statue of Liberty. 

Next up is "I was a Teenage Werebear". Set in the '60s, this should remind you of Grease or Beach Blanket Bingo or ... I don't know, I hate that crap. It's about a young man who breaks into song when things start to get interesting with this girlfriend. He develops an interest in these greasers who also develop an interest in him. So they bite him and turn him into one of them - a werebear. When they get aroused they put on about 100 lbs, become hairy, and kill. 

"The Diary of Anne Frankenstein" didn't go as expected. In it Anne's family is descended from the infamous monster maker but they've changed their name to Frank. But they still have Victor Frankenstein's diary. Hitler comes and takes it. He uses it to try to build the ultimate soldier, but ends up with a very jewish monster who turns and kills him. Pay attention to Hitler's German. It gets worse and worse over the course of the movie until he's just naming Star Wars characters. 

They're just starting "Deathication", which is a very feces intense movie, when things go wrong back at the drive-in and you're glad of it. The blue popcorn has finally turned everyone into zombies that go around biting and screwing everything. 

Do not pay a lot to see this movie. It's available via NetFlix streaming and probably in the horror section of your most independent movie rental store.

Book Review: Year Zero

Before I go any further I need to clarify that I'm talking about "Year Zero" by Rob Reid. Not Jeff Long's book. Not Kiara Windrider's book. Not a book of poetry by Brian Henderson. Or an audio drama by Bernice Summerfield. Certainly not any of the songs by the same name. Despite the lack of originality in the title, the rest of the book is a bit different.

In 1977 an alien race, one of millions (at least), found picked up a transmission while passing near Earth. It was an episode of "Welcome Back Kotter". Compared to their own sitcoms, Kotter sort of fell in the "so bad it's good" category. Only without the "...it's good" part. Then the end theme song came on. It was one of the most beautiful pieces of music they'd ever heard. Several crew members died of brain hemorrhages and died in ecstasy caused by how wonderful they music was. See, if your species doesn't self destruct you get to join a galactic society based around the arts. Most all technology that could be invented has been and your planet gets access to it all immediately. Then your society gets to work on it's arts and culture. A view of even the most gaudy city would bliss out a human. Many apartments would put one of us into a coma. But they can't do music worth a damn. So they started listening to Earth. Mostly a few stations out of New York City. And they started recording and sharing. Today each and every intelligent being in the galactic society has about 25,000,000 songs. I should say that the survivors do. Just like on that first ship, there was a doozy of a death toll.

Then one day they realized that American laws state that the fine for music piracy is $150,000.

Per song.

Earth is now owed all of the wealth that could be created between the beginning of the universe and the end. ALL OF IT! So it's time for the aliens to lawyer up. Not just to save the galactic economy, but to keep someone from destroying the Earth.

Many of the reviews compare this book to the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (HHGTTG). I think the reviewers are being a bit lazy. I know a few weeks ago you saw me compare the latest Agatha Heterodyne to HHGTTG. The difference being that every sci-fi comedy gets that comparison just for being funny. And "Year Zero" is a funny book. But Douglas Adams had a gift for turn of phrase that made HHGTTG funny. I saw much of that in the Agatha H novels. Rob Reid's book I'd compare more closely to John Scalzi's stuff. Specifically "Agent to the Stars". I'll admit that it seems I'm suffering from a similar laziness to that I accused other writers of suffering from. Because "Agent to the Stars" is also a sci-fi/comedy/legal book. But the word play is closer to Scalzi's style than Adams'. But there are explanations of alien species and societies that will remind you of entries in the HHGTTG. With some hints of Terry Pratchett thrown in, too.

This is Rob Reid's first fiction novel. Before this he was the founder of Listen.com which launched the Rhapsody music player. So you'll see where his experience there comes through in this book.

Trust me, you'll enjoy this book.

Weekend update

Most of my work on my house has been focused on one particular wall in one particular room. Last weekend I spend 6.5 hours scraping crap mortar out from between the bricks. This weekend I put new mortar in that scraped area. Once that was dry I scraped out what I hope will be the last. I'll fill that in next weekend.

Let me tell you a bit about this wall. It's brick. But there are three board about an inch thick that run horizontally and are embedded in the wall. I'm really not sure what the thinking was. But I'm leaving the brick below the bottom board alone. Largely because there's a vent coming out of the brick and lots of really hard concrete around it. The vent was covered in plaster. This indicates that there was a forced air system that predates the radiators. And that different concrete was used around the vent than was used in the brick. So it's going to be easier to just put some decorative paneling over the vent and brick. And it gets me out of scraping that area out.

About chest height there are three rectangles cut out of the brick. Or, rather, bricks were built around something that's now gone. They look like pockets for joists. I may find matching pockets if I took the plaster off the far wall (HELLZ NO!). But the placement is weird for that. I'm considering putting some boards in there and using them to support a shelf.

Above the old ceiling is some brick that was never plastered over. Nobody was supposed to see it so they never knocked off the mortar that squished out between bricks. But I'm planning to raise the ceiling to just under the roof once some 6" of insulation is sprayed up there. I don't want to scrape that area if I can help it. I've got this sandpaper flapper thing that goes on a drill. I'll be using it to clean up the bricks I've repointed and make them prettier. I'll take it to the mortar that's squished out, too. Grind it down level with the brick. If it looks alright I'll go ahead and seal it. If not... another couple of weeks of scraping and mortaring.

With luck, the weekend after that I can frame up the front wall. Then the insulation guys come in. Then wiring, sheetrock, carpet removal, floor restoration (I say that like I have any idea what that involves), a door, and a bed. Doesn't sound like much if I say it fast.

Friday Links: June 7

Recovery of ancient Egyptian city. [link]

A recent Q&A on Twitter with Richard Thompson. [link]

"It's Not About the Nail"


White House to try to address the patent troll issue. [link]

Where we lived in Pangea. [link]

Homemade fried ice cream. [link]
I doubt my freezer's ability to get the ice cream cold enough.

Canine toy critic.


Now you know before hand whether the dog in that movie you're thinking about dies or not. [link]

Cheerios ad summons bigots for showing a mixed heritage family. [link]

New genetics screening service shows some brothers and sisters aren't really siblings. [link]

12 technologies that just won't die. [link]

Sculpting robot.
Mataerial Introduction from Mataerial on Vimeo.

Possibly the first bird. [link]

Roomba circa 1959. [link]

What atheists see in nature. [link]

Why Finnish babies sleep in boxes. [link]

Survey answers about politics change when money is on the line. [link]

The difference between geek and nerd. [link]

10 species announced in 2012. [http://www.livescience.com/34636-top-10-new-species-announced.html>link]

Article about the rise of suicides in recent decades. But also have a look at the windows in the page that reveal stationary pictures behind the page. [link]

More giant naked people from Ron Mueck. [link]

Excel art. [link]

The charts say life is getting better. [link]

Art under an overpass. [link]

Maybe they did find Amelia Earhart after all. [link]

Wearable and eatable tech. [link]

Best commencement speeches of the year. [link]
Hell no I didn't watch all that. I didn't even attend my own college graduation! But I skimmed the text.

We're not as good looking as we think. [link]
Not true. I can't possibly be as bad looking as I think.

80% of donated clothes goes to recycling. [link]

5 unexpected diet foods. [link]

Years ago I read an article about the efforts to make Superman 5 and why they all failed. The article was pulled and appeared to have vanished. I tried several times over the years to find it. But my lackey at work found it in the comments of another page. Good work, Lackey. [link]