How I Made $100 This Morning

Or: Floyd’s Humanity Is Questioned By Heather.

This is a conversation I had with my friend Heather about, you guessed it, movies. (Apparently I need to change the name of this blog to “Floyd Talks To People About Movies.” Because that has a ring to it. And because it’s the only thing I chat about ever.) This conversation picks up after an exchange of pleasantries and a soliloquy by yours truly on the benefits of eating hot dogs that sounds more interesting than it was.

Floyd: hot dogs are a necessity for enjoying a filmdon’t go see Pelham 123 in the theaters it’s not terrible, but it’s very mediocrethe only reason I even went is because I was really bored and hadn’t hung out with my friends in weeks

Heather: i could tell by previews it was bad

11:08 AM anything that Travolta and Denzel do has to be tired and played out

I’d like to see the new Cameron Diaz movie

11:09 AM Floyd: UGH

I saw a preview of that before Pelham

They should just call it “Cancer: The Movie”

I wanted to punch the girl behind me, who through the whole preview kept saying to her boyfriend, “I can’t WAIT to see that”

it’s about kids with cancer!

why does anybody want to suffer through that vicariously?

Floyd and Dan Discuss The Hangover

Floyd: so I saw The Hangover this weekend

Dan: your verdict? do you want to get into this?

Floyd: I thought it was mediocre overall
although Zach G was hilarious in virtually every scene he was in
I just thought too many jokes fell flat

Dan: Did your audience of peers laugh at those jokes?

Floyd: I think I would rather have watched a movie about the pictures at the end then what happened after the mayhem
yeah, some of them
I don’t know, I was pretty drunk

Dan: I have been telling people
that if they made two DVDs
and one cost $20, and featured the entire movie with the directors cut
and one cost $19, and only had the Zack G quotes in it
I’d buy the $19 one

Floyd: totally
I might pay more for the Zach G one
include outtakes and I’m sold
one question I had leaving the theater
was that his real dick in the blowjob pictures?

Star Trek Discussions, cont.

Another flurry of emails for your pleasure, this time including Floyd friend BAG:

Just read your colloquy on the Star Trek movie.  Entertaining stuff.  Two points:

BAG: 1. Dan is correct in that there’s a parallel universe angle to all this.  The various Star Trek incarnations have all made use of this device, but usually only for an episode or two.  JJ Abrams trots it out here specifically for the purpose of the reboot.  Thus, most of the events we see in the new movie represent a parallel universe/timeline, and that’s why none of this happened in Old Spock’s timeline, because he didn’t enter the universe/timeline we’re watching until his first trip through the black hole.  This is what allows JJ Abrams to now give us the young characters of the original series however he wants to present them as his movies go forward.  He doesn’t have to kowtow to Trekkie canonicity because he’s created a parallel universe, where he can decide what happens.

2.  If your question about windshields was regarding the Enterprise, then it’s answered by pointing out that what we see on the bridge is not a windshield, but rather a view screen.  But perhaps you were talking about the Romulan mining ship.  I don’t remember if it had a windshield or not.

Dan: I was talking about the Enterprise.  Windshield or not, cracks in your vessel can’t be good for cabin pressure.

Here’s a question.  Since they use viewscreens and not windshields, why is the bridge always located at the top of the ship?  Why don’t they move it to a more protected location, where it can’t be hit by a photon torpedo or whatnot?

BAG: Floyd just e-mailed me and I was about to make the same point in reply.  It’s always amazed me how much damage the Enterprise bridge takes.  A couple of photon torpedoes, or a few phaser hits, and suddenly ceiling joists are falling and little multi-colored fireworks are shooting out from various instrument bays (why do they keep 4th of July fountain fireworks under the instruments?).    Why the hell hasn’t the bridge been moved to the middle of the ship?  The entire brain trust, minus the chief of engineering and the doctor, are stationed there.

Floyd: Actually, isn’t the bridge of the Enterprise in the “stem” that connects the disk to the engines?

And in the future they’ve invented “hull fluid,” which works kind of like that stuff you put in your bike tire that’s supposed to clog holes as soon as they form so you don’t lose air.

Dan: You think I wouldn’t do my homework on something like this?

“On Starfleet vessels, the bridge is usually located on Deck 1, on top of the vessel’s primary hull.”

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Bridge

BAG: The craptastic design is probably due to the design stagnation caused by the socialism of the Federation when they nationalized Boeing and Lockheed-Martin in 2023.

Floyd: I’ve been lied to. I’d always thought the bridge was in the stem, and I’m positive I didn’t come up with that on my own. I stand corrected.

The bridge of the Enterprise is notoriously poorly-constructed. That’s what happens when you award starship work to the lowest space-bidder.

BAG: That’s what happens when you build starships in the middle of f*cking Iowa.

Dan: “Where are we going to locate the Starfleet Academy?”

“San Francisco”

“Okay.  Where are we going to build our starships?”

“Iowa”

“Really?  Huh.  Okay, well, I guess there’s a lot of open space in Iowa to work with.”

“Yeah, it’ll work great.  And we’ll have shuttles to send new recruits from Iowa to San Fran.”

“Why don’t we just send all the recruits directly to San Fran?”

“Because I’m TYLER PERRY, jerkface!  Watch out or I’m going to turn into my hilarious Madea character!”

Right?  Or am I to believe that O’Hura is Iowan?

Floyd: Can’t they just beam the recruits back and forth? Travel and distance isn’t nearly the hindrance that it is in our time, Dan. Because IT’S THE FUTURE. Also, Iowa is full of blacks in the future. Obama broke the racial barrier, and Iowa started letting black people move in several decades later.

BAG: Speaking of the future, my iPhone 3G S is supposed to arrive via FedEx tomorrow.  Teleportation?  There’s an app for that.

Do you guys think Apple makes the tricorders?  (iCorders?)  From the looks of the Enterprise bridge and given Starfleet’s San Fran HQ, I’m guessing Apple’s pretty heavily involved in Federation design.

Floyd: Do you find it funny that people still have to press a button and hold up the tricorder to their mouths in the future? We already have better technology. What happened, Bluetooth technology didn’t survive? Or was it deemed “too douchey” by future generations?

BAG: They figured out it causes cancer.  And even though millions of Federation citizens still use Bluetooth in the future because “it’s cool” and “it’s habit,” all Starfleet facilities and ships have a strict No-Bluetooth policy.

Dan: The Next Generation had Bluetooth.  They pressed the insignias pinned to their chests to open a line of communication.

You’d think pre-Next Generation also had that technology.  I mean, they could monitor vital signs of their captain before Nero killed him (didn’t “TERMINATED” pop up on the viewscreen? I remember chuckling.) remotely, in real-time.  Someone should have thought to put a microphone next to the biorhythm tracker.

Floyd and Dan Discuss Star Trek

WARNING: MAJOR STAR TREK SPOILERS

Occasionally Dan and I get together on chat and have funny conversations. I’ve been bugging him to see the new Terminator movie because it is just SO RIPE FOR RIPPING (that’s the name of your emo band), and he said that we should discuss Star Trek instead, seeing as how we’d both watched and enjoyed the recent sci-fi reboot. But because of my strangely busy schedule lately, we agreed to correspond via a succession of emails rather than a formal chat session. I think the result was probably less hilarious than the machine gun rhythms of our chats, but still worth a read and a laugh.

Note: It should be noted that Dan and I both liked this movie very much, and our nitpicking is done more for comedic purposes than for actual criticism. Also, sorry for the strange text formatting.

How I Won the Abortion Debate

One of my favorite pastimes is discussing politics on internet message boards. The recent assassination of Wichita abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was obviously a hot topic of debate, a conversation I joined with relish. (I’ll leave out my personal feelings towards abortion in this post – let’s just say they fall somewhere in between “abortion = murder” and “abortion=awesome”.)

In particular, I participated in this thread on KU sports website Phog.net, which has a pretty vibrant political board full of all kinds of intelligence and crazy. Anyone that’s lived in American for more than a few months can probably imagine how this debate progressed: most people felt that Tiller’s murder was wrong, with some anti-abortion folk  carefully implying that it was also justified. Eventually the conversation got turned towards the question of when life begins, in which the various camps began debating whether that particular line was being crossed at birth/viability/moment of conception/etc.

One particularly obtuse poster named Buddy pulled out the tried-and-true emotional trigger method – he posted pictures of aborted fetuses (always a crowd-pleaser) and then asked the board how, upon viewing such stirring visual evidence, could one not conclude that abortion = murder? This was followed up with an opposing voice posting a picture of a fertilized egg and asking if it looked human as well. Buddy didn’t appreciate this:

Buddy: so really frank, because it doesn’t look like a human at the moment of conception, it’s not a human at some point? You see the problem here?

To which I unveiled my room-clearing fart of a response:

Human at some point. You are committing murder every time you masturbate. Therefore, Buddy is a mass murderer.

The 20 page, 400+ post thread ended five posts later. And that’s how I won the abortion debate. America, send your Thank You’s to Brooklyn. Next up: Poverty and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Floyd Reviews: Terminator Salvation

This is a loose transcript from an email exchange I had with Dan after he asked me if he should go see the new Terminator:

Terminator – I don’t know whether to give a recommendation or not. It does have a lot of pretty well-choreographed action. It also has a lot of ridiculous, nonsensical action that leaves you less than terrified of the machines.  And the plot makes Michael Bay seem like David Mamet. (Warning: this contains a few vague spoilers, so read at your own risk. It should be noted that the plot is not the strong point of this film, so learning a bit about it shouldn’t lessen any potential enjoyment.)

There were lots of really stupid things about this movie. For instance, the motorcycle robots — it seems a little silly that they exist in the first place, seeing as how the machines have already built heavily-armed flying hovercraft called Hunter-Killers, but whatever, there they are. We’re introduced to one miraculously dodging a piece of flying debris using a series of ultra-fast calculations and incredible motorcycle stuntwork. Later this robot is defeated by a rope strung across the road, Roadrunner-style. Seriously. Then Christian Bale rides it. Like a motorcycle. THIS IS THE FUTURE.

The plot starts out interesting, but quickly digresses into the silly. For instance, the entire movie hinges on the incredibly tired and oft-mocked plot device in which the villain lays out his evil plan to the hero BEFORE IT HAPPENS, thus giving the hero the time and opportunity to escape and thwart said plan. (In this case his escape, from the center of SkyNet HQ, is accomplished by throwing a chair through a window – that’s it. Chair, window, freedom.) Had the villain not described the plan, it would have been accomplished with no setbacks. Game over, Connor’s dead, Machines win. But no – these machines not only developed sentience, they developed PRIDE.

There are plot points that are actually sillier than this, but I’ll wait until after you’ve seen the movie to laugh about those.

One more thing I have to share, and it involves the biggest unintentionally hilarious moment of the entire film. It happens very near the end, as a key character is dying of a massive stab wound to the chest, and the doctor reveals that his heart is giving out and he needs a transplant (because, you know, heart transplants heal stab wounds.) The cyborg (yeah, there’s a cyborg, as revealed by the trailers), who has a real, beating human heart, elects to sacrifice his half-human self to give it to the dying character. It’s supposed to be touching, but it’s just stupid, because you’re supposed to believe that, 9 years in the future, we’ll be able to do heart transplants ON THE BATTLEFIELD. Never mind that there’s no way of knowing if this cyborg is a match, or that the proper equipment isn’t ready, and the potential for massive infection is obvious – heart transplant.

But it gets better/worse – as the tearful characters look around, realizing they’re about to lose their cyborg friend (the single greatest weapon the humans have against the machines, mind you) to save a regular human, the little girl (THERE’S A LITTLE GIRL IN THE MOVIE) looks up with her big, tear-filled Bambi eyes, THEN PUTS HER LITTLE HAND INTO HIS ROBOT TERMINATOR HAND. I started laughing out loud in the theater. This was a scene that literally couldn’t be parodied – it was like watching irony die an agonizing death onscreen. Seriously, that scene was funnier than the entire hour and whatever minutes of “I Love You Man.”

So go see it with the right attitude, and you might be entertained enough to justify the money spent seeing it. For instance, for a matinee price of $6 or whatever, it’s probably worth it. But I was a little upset I spent $12.50 to see it, despite it providing a good deal of both intentional entertainment and unintentional humor. I mean it by unintentional, too; besides the aforementioned hand-holding scene and a few random nostalgic easter eggs for Terminator fans, the movie was virtually humorless.  Christian Bale was playing Bruce Wayne playing John Connor, who was basically like Robin Williams in “Good Morning Vietnam” except far less funny or inspiring. You might say the performance was ROBOTIC!

But let’s be clear: This is a very bad movie. McG is a very bad director. And the plot/characterization was some of the worst I’ve seen in some time. So there you go.

Back for Good

So I’m finally back to posting. It’s been a tumultuous 2 months since my last update, and I’ll compose a synopsis soon. For the time being, I’m going back to a simpler format of Floyd for Thought, and I’m going to try to stick to humor and occasionally politics in the future. I also plan to post a framework of my new life plan soon.  So check back soon.

Say It To My Face, Google!

The ad link on the top of my gmail page at 4:36 a.m.:

Why So Angry? - www.happier.com - Holding On To Anger Holds YOU Back. happier.com Will Help You Let It Go

Floyd Takes On Britney Fans

Brit fans' renewed enthusiasm is an arresting development. I tried. You do better.

A friend on Facebook posed the question: Would like someone to rationally explain the fascination with Britney?  I was feeling a little pissed off at things, and had wrestled with this question a few days prior when Facebook was flooded with status messages proclaiming their attendance of a Britney concert.  Here was my answer:

Britney is a nostalgic keepsake for her fans, most of whom were in middle or high school at the time of her arrival in the national consciousness. It returns them to a simpler, more innocent place before the pressures and depressions of adulthood crushed their hopes and dreams. Britney also indulges her fans in embracing her trashy persona and catchy-yet-lyrically-challenged music while allowing them to act like they’re really above it all, an ironic celebration of the mediocre, even though it’s anything but. Britney fans’ renewed enthusiasm towards Spears and her act is a full-throated, plunging chest line celebration of kitsch without the self-awareness necessary to pull off the charade. Ultimately, Britney Spears is a symbol of the collective arrested development of our generation, a triumphant return to childish desires and impulses despite never abandoning them in the first place.

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

No, I didn’t get a job waiting tables.  Although I would do that if I could.

I’m referring, of course, to the daily torture I’m undergoing while waiting to hear back on two promising jobs.  One of them, a full-time position, is at a publisher for energy trade magazines.  My friend, a copy editor, recently quit, and he recommended me as his replacement.  I sent in my resume and cover letter on Sunday.  Then on Thursday, my friend asks if I can send it again – his boss lost it in the email shuffle.  Sigh.  But at least now I know he got it.

The other job is a part-time writing gig for a blog associated with a new show on Sundance Channel called “The Lazy Environmentalist.”  Now, I have a reference from KU that produced a show for Sundance Channel just a couple years ago, and is considered one of the foremost environmentalists in the world.  I figured there was a decent chance that she knew the host of this new show.  And I was right, she did.  On a first-name basis.  So, at her suggestion, I wrote up an eco-piece (which I’ll publish here, after I learn my fate) and attached some other clips I liked, and she forwarded them on to the host with a glowing recommendation.  She’s the best person in the world.  This was on Thursday.

So now I’m just waiting.  Hours creep by, every incoming email causing my heart to skip a beat.  I’m almost out of money, so the verdict from these two jobs could very well determine whether I stay in New York or whether I’ll be banished back to my mom’s house in Kansas.  I’m sitting in a shitty little boat at a fork in the river, and I dropped my paddle earlier, and I’m just waiting to see in what direction I’m swept.  And one side’s a fucking waterfall.  I hope I get swept the other way.