Steaming Turd

Picard: Mister Worf, send universal greeting on all channels.
Worf: But Capt–
Picard: Now, please, Lieutenant.
Worf: (sighs) …Aye, sir. (pushes button) Bah weep graaagnah wheep ni ni bong.
Riker: (stifles snicker)

I didn’t have quite all my Official Nerd License prerequisites complete, because I had never seen the original Transformers move, aptly named, The Transformers: The Movie. Until yesterday, that is. The movie was re-released on DVD last year, and I finally got around to renting it from Netflix.

My rating? 3 out of 5 stars. It got a one-star deduction because of things like silly casting decisions, huge script rewrites that resulted in numerous plot holes and continuity errors, and the very obvious fact that the movie was made just to sell toys. Okay, so Leonard Nimoy was Galvatron in the movie, even though the character was just Megatron rehashed, and even though Frank Welker was right there doing the voice for Megatron (Welker did the voice of Galvatron in the TV series thereafter, too). At least the modified voice of Orson Welles (five days before his death) as Unicron sounded cool. The plot holes and continuity errors are too numerous to go into detail, but it should suffice to say that most of the rewrites and scene cuts were due to the movie’s use as a marketing vessel.

The other one-star deduction was due to the stomach-wrenching overuse of 1980s movie rock. An inexplicable inclusion of Weird Al’s “Dare to be Stupid” was amusing, even if it had nothing to do with the scene of the movie it was in.

On a side note, the movie kills off most of the Transformers characters that I liked as a kid in about the first half hour of the movie (because their toys were being discontinued, of course), and I never did much care for the post-movie characters. I didn’t take off points for that, though. At least Soundwave gets to say, “Soundwave superior, Constructicons inferior.”

Anyway, I hope they re-release the TV series. Sure, the animation isn’t that great (mediocre by both Looney Tunes and today’s standards), there were still plot holes and discontinuity errors, but at least the music didn’t suck, and the voice acting was good. Plus the first two seasons had the characters I liked.

P.S. If you got the reference at the top of this post without needing to read past it, you’re officially a bigger nerd than I am.

Israelis may have destroyed Syrian nuclear materials cache purchased from North Korea

At least with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, we had an opponent who wanted to die just as little as we did. With anti-Israeli extremists, victory is measured by body count, not by survival. I don’t even think Kim Jong-Il is crazy enough to use nukes, and he’s certifiable, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Hezbollah wouldn’t be able to detonate a working nuke fast enough, if they ever got hold of one.

The most frightening thing about this story is that we know (and, probably for decades to come, will know) so little about what happened, including just how close the Syrians (and, by extension, Hezbollah) were to having a deployable nuclear device.

On the plus side, the ease with which the Israelis were able to deactivate Syria’s supposedly advanced air defense system is amusing. One gets the feeling that one day the Syrians are going to poke Israel one too many times, and the Golan Heights will move to the bottom of a long list of territories Syria wants back.

About a year ago, I posted a simultaneous brief review of Soylent Green and the book it was loosely based upon, Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!

One thing I didn’t mention in my review was that, among other representations of sheer destitution presented in the book, lots of poor people without a real home of their own were packed onto floating cities of decommissioned ships.

I guess life really does imitate art sometimes (even when the art wasn’t that good to begin with). An advocacy group for the homeless in Hawaii is suggesting to the federal government that an old destroyer tender be donated to them so that it can be moved out of Pearl Harbor, moored somewhere, and converted into a floating homeless shelter.

Otherwise, they may have to start converting the homeless into delicious green cubes.