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(Beer) Coma

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I’d mentioned this…elsewhere, but when we were at a bar in Massachusetts when we saw buckets of food going to other tables.  “Buckets?”, I thought “that’s my favorite form factor for food!”

 We ordered one out of sight and it turned out to be a bucket of New England clams steamed with chorizo, yum!  Although…seafood and beer, um, don’t really get along together.  (As I rediscovered later when a pound of sushi and a quart of Sam Adams dueled away in my stomach).

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Some noise about the Smashing Pumpkin’s Billy Corgan’s anti-SJW rant.  My favorite part was the SJW-leftie sympathizers ranting about how they were pulling his music, blah blah.  Well that’s a very tiny taste for them of what it’s like for conservatives every waking minute of their lives when all their music, TV shows, books, movies, video games, and whatever else you have are written by the SJW crimethought police.

I thought of it recently while reading Neal Stephenson’s critically acclaimed (of course!) sci-fi novel Seveneves.  His (way) previous novel Snow Crash was rather inventive and somewhat politically incorrect, but his latest efforts reeks of SJW appeasement.
Homersexuals?  Of course!
Unrealistically ethnically diverse cast?  Well he has to stay appealing to that vast tract of black sci-fi readers!
Climate change rants?
Anti-militaristic tones?
Multicultural cheerleading?  It’s all in there!

So tiresome, and it’s cut from the same cloth as the rest of the tired sci-fi crap that came out in 2015.  I can’t help but think back to the slate of Philip K. Dick books that I’ve read that, despite their often copious flaws, featured normal people in extraordinary situations (rather than weirdos on stupid adventures).  It says something about western culture when it takes a guy living in a communist country to write a homersexual free sci-fi novel where the bad guys are left wing death cultists (though I repeat myself).

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I’ve been looking for an excuse through the years to mention the Guns N’ Roses song Coma.  Clocking in at north of ten minutes, it’s a curse filled, angst driven, overly indulgent song on GNR’s already overly indulgent Use Your Illusion double album.  It’s not everybody’s sound that’s for sure (maybe only me and five other people like it), but it’s a sound which was very predominant and is now dead, gone to the age when sci-fi space ships weren’t full of fraggets (I’m ever amazed that GNR’s One in a Million is still on YouTube; any big time producer who pumped that tune out today would have to undergo years of self flagellation under the all-seeing eye of merciless thought police).  Some may view such passing as a good thing, though with no normal morals left to slay, the crime thought police have moved on to made up crap like gay marriage and judgement free molester zones (I repeat myself again).

And songs?  I went to a bar with Mrs. Sandmich and remarked that when we were dating (we’re talking dinosaurs here) the bars played the exact same songs, modern pop music being a wasteland of auditory abuse.

Anyway, while loading up on sushi (at a different bar and at a different time) a young couple was joined by the young lady’s friends.  The conversation got tedious, quick:
Girl one (to guy): “Oh what do you do?”
(note: obviously they’re white because only white people “do” stuff)
Guy: “Well-”
Guy’s girfriend: “He saves DOLPHINS!”
Girl two: “Oh wow neat”
Guys: “-Coast Guard and-”
Girls (same tone and as quickly as possible): “That’s/Pete down at/AWESOME!/car repair/Julie said that/I had to move/car repair/nails done/”etc. etc. for five minutes.

If I was the guy I would’ve gotten up and walked out, heck I didn’t even know them and I wanted to leave.  However Coma came to mind since as part of the angsty guy’s get-away-from-it-all frustration just such a vocal track was crammed in late to the song (between 7:10 and 7:40), scrub to listen and relive the enthralling experience! (For those who are not fans of the song, which will be all of you, it will be pain on top of pain!)

Bartender (afterwards): “Wow you really ate all of that!”

Although, for the single guys out there, apparently “saving dolphins” is a thing…
Girl: “And you said that saving dolphins is part of your job?”
Guy: “Oh yeah totally baby.”

The Force Awakens

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This post has some mild spoilers and catches on one of my primary complaints with the film: that it’s a rehash of the first Star Wars, only not quite as good.  The spoiler fight for this movie has been so successful in part because about five minutes in, even obtuse movie watchers like me have the whole movie pretty well figured out.  Announcing that people shouldn’t relate spoilers for Force Awakens would be like Warner Brothers announcing that spoilers should not be divulged for a Road Runner cartoon.

A TIE fighter-Millennium Falcon battle on a sand planet?!?  Mind: blown. 

There were some story and sci-fi quirks that I got hung up on as well (which is saying something considering the Star Wars reputation for ignoring both), but my big hang up was with the bad guys themselves.  Through the first two movies it was enough to know Empire: Bad, Rebels: Good.  Even by Jedi though this was starting to wear thin and into the newer Lucas trilogy one gets the impression that this whole galactic imbroglio is just some Skywalker intra/inter clan warfare writ large and Awakens does the franchise no favors by failing to resolve the whole good versus evil issue.

It would be rather easy to craft a narrative around a society’s never ending struggle to balance freedom (rebels) and security (empire).  However this narrative falls apart since the Empire doesn’t seem to have a desire to rule over anyone: they’re all about blowing up planets and building more crap with which to blow up planets.  If they wanted to rule over the galaxy it would be simple enough to use .00001% of the budget from one of their many Deathstar fiascos to buy off every politician in every governing body in the Galaxy (the Saudis have been doing it here for decades so that’s proof positive that it works).

Barring that, the only thing that seems to hold up is the Japanese anime view of the darkside consisting of evildoers whose only goal is to accelerate entropy or to embody entropy itself.  The only problem with this (and you may have noticed this), anime is not very popular with general audiences because this tact is stupid.  Bad guys who want to destroy the planet/galaxy/universe in order to “end suffering” or “eliminate the plague that is life” are not bad guys anyone outside of Japan can find any relation to.

This anime character wonders why his dreams can never come true.  Methinks that it might have something to do with, you know, trying to destroy the whole planet that everyone is living on.  Maybe he should start small, with a lego village or something.
Even for the worst of the 20th century’s tyrants they had a goal that they were trying to achieve.  It’s only when the bad guy has a goal that there can be an “anti-goal”, some motivation that drives the good guys and helps you sympathize with them.  There was one point in Awakens when I thought that the whole Republic/Rebel/New Order bit was going to come into focus: the rebels, abandoned by those that they fought so hard to free, are left to try and mop up the remnants of a technologically superior Empire with a mix of old war era equipment, older personnel, and reformed clones.  This would have been intriguing and would have given the audience something (anything) to relate to.  No dice though, that window closed in a matter of seconds and my brief look into a movie that could have been was gone.Three sandmiches: two for production values and one for one last race around the old track.

Extra Credit…
  • Black people came to the showing I was at and made a point to cheer on Black Jedi Dude.  It’s a shame because this character had the most complex possibilities but was pressed into a two dimensional form; good enough for some I suppose…
  • Some back and forth between friends about how Star Wars became a series of films even though it’s plain to see that it was never meant to be.  I thought this contrasted interestingly with Star Trek which could make a movie about the main characters (or even different characters in the same universe) playing poker all day and it would raise nary an eyebrow; at least if it was done properly (it certainly wouldn’t be the worst Star Trek film).
  • Hollywood has sadly gotten rather adept at crafting films like this that have no good or evil.  Liberalism would dictate that the bad guys are the freedom loving guys while the good guys are puritanical tyrants that want to force the galaxy to pay for midnight basketball on planet Brotha 9.  Well that doesn’t work, even for sympathizers, and the opposite would mean introspection of the horror of one’s ideals so…best to make an epic empty movie about nothing.  In the end this may have less to do with the Star Wars universe than the idiots tasked with creating the films.
  • There was a couple in the theater that stayed until the end of the credits.  I was hanging around out of site by the door waiting for Mrs. Sandmich when I heard the guy say “they nailed it”.  I wanted to ask him, “Nailed what?  The intro text?”.  Maybe this movie wasn’t made for me.  It did remind a bit of the Harry Potter films where if you aren’t enjoying it in the first few minutes then you’re watching the wrong movie.

Remastered Trek

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[2020 addendum: Season three of the original series is crap, there’s maybe only two episodes of the lot that are salvageable.  It’s interesting since none other than Jon Poderhetz (sp) had pointed this out when it’s obvious, by looking at the credits, that the season was ruined by women and Jews.]

My doctor buddy related how he was envious of my acquisition of the DVDs  of the remastered three seasons of the original Star Trek series.  I thought that he was being funny (it’s just Star Trek!), but I have to say that there’s something to it.

I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of watching something as an adult which we enjoyed as a kid only to be embarrassed on some level that nostalgia fogged your mind as to the poor quality of the original product.  However, with these remastered episodes, it’s like someone went back in time and made the show, not as it was, but how you remember it.  As well, I’m not sure where they found the prints, but the original show was barely ‘standard definition’, but most of the shots on this disk set look like they were filmed yesterday and polished with some 60s era styling (it’s only noticeable because every episode seems to have a short shot or two which was obviously beyond salvage).