Sometimes you can just do nothing...

... and beauty will happen, all on its own. -- PL

Leonard who...?

I saw a story online last week* about someone selling a "Star Trek" themed house for a lot of money -- $35 million, apparently. It turned out that the whole of this "Star Trek space mansion"  (as it was described in the header of the piece) was not "Star Trek"-themed, but the owner had installed a media room/home theater which was patterned after the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise from "Star Trek: The Next Generation". I have to admit, it looked pretty cool.

There was also a sizable collection of "Star Trek" stuff in the house, and as the camera briefly panned over some of the items, my eye was caught by something odd. I wasn't sure if I'd seen it right, as it seemed so ridiculous, so I scrolled back and forth in the video until I could pause it at the right moment.

As you can see in this screen grab, it was a display of what were labeled as Spock ears from the original "Star Trek" TV series, as worn by someone named "Leonard Nemoy".

"Nemoy"?

Wait… you go to all this trouble and expense to outfit your house with all this cool "Star Trek" stuff… and you misspell the last name of one of the key original cast members?

I'm not sure why "Ears" is capitalized either, but that's a minor point.

Maybe the seller should knock a few bucks off the asking price for this "Star Trek mansion" due to this goofy misspelling… unless the ears don't come with the house -- in which case... never mind.  -- PL

*Here''s the link to the story:

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2014/05/28/pkg-star-trek-mansion-for-sale.wptv&video_referrer=

A brief review of "X-Men: Days of Future Past" (the movie)

Just saw the new "X-Men" movie directed by Brian SInger, and I left the theater with a smile on my face. There is a lot to like about this movie, beginning with the fact that it reboots the continuity of the "X-Men" films in such a way as to obliterate the missteps of the past, starting with the second "X-Men" movie. I'm curious to see where the franchise goes now.

It's not a perfect movie, and it has at least two giant, gaping logic holes that occurred to me as I was watching it -- one more of a important detail which was overlooked, the other more daunting because the entire plot of the movie depends on your uncritical acceptance of this concept.

I am going to avoid revealing these "spoilers"  here, for those who don't want to know these things, by putting them in what has been referred to on various websites as "Invisitext" -- basically, text in white which does not show up unless selected.

Part of the plot -- and a part which directly leads to perhaps the most delightful and imaginative sequence in the movie (newly-introduced super-fast mutant Quicksilver's handling of some trigger-happy guards) -- involves supervillain Magneto being held in a metal-free prison deep beneath the Pentagon. It is specifically stated that one of the reasons -- besides all of the plastic, wood and other non-metal building materials used to construct this area -- it is also made of concrete.

Well, as we all know, and as we are gruesomely reminded later on in the film in one of the most brutal scenes, concrete in modern buildings isn't just concrete -- it is also rebar, the steel reinforcing rods around which concrete is poured to make it stronger. GIven that the Pentagon was constructed long before anyone knew about Magneto, it seems likely -- highly likely -- that its concrete parts would have been made with integrated steel rebar. If so, Magneto could have used these at any time to break out of his prison.

The second thing -- and this one is a much bigger problem -- is the idea that Bolivar Trask's robot Sentinels are enhanced by the use of Mystique's shape-shifting abilities through some sort of manipulation of her DNA. This nonsensical idea reminded me of some of the light-on-the-science science fiction concepts from the early days of the computer age, when a "computer virus" might lead to some humans catching that virus.

Really quite ridiculous -- I mean, think about it for a moment. How do you change the abilities of an inorganic robot by mixing in some organic DNA? It makes no sense. And yet if you don't buy this idea, the whole movie pretty much falls apart.

It's unfortunate that they went in this direction, because the use of this goofy idea isn't even necessary. The Sentinels could have easily been made as threatening and as overwhelming a force without becoming, essentially, mutants.

Hey -- that just made me realize ANOTHER huge lapse of logic: If the Sentinels have become, as I just mentioned, for all intents and purposes mutants because of the infusion into their being of Mystique's mutant DNA, why don't they all turn on each other? Isn't their whole reason for being to locate, hunt down and destroy mutants? I guess that would have shortened the movie considerably.

There are probably a few more problems of this nature which will become clear on repeated viewings. 

I do plan to see it again -- even with the aforementioned issues, it was a fun movie to watch. And the cast did a great job with the material given to them. -- PL

Lazy, stupid misuse of great words #2: countless

I've already done one of these for the word "countless", but the lazy, stupid abuse of this wonderful word seems to be popping up a lot these days... or maybe I am just noticing it, for some reason.

A few days ago, shortly after I'd posted about how much I enjoy National Public Radio, I was driving in my truck and heard a music review on NPR about some musician -- I think he was a Brazilian in his seventies -- and the reviewer was enthusing about how this musician had "recorded countless albums".

Really.

"Countless albums"?

It's such a mind-bogglingly stupid misuse of "countless" that it makes my head hurt.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the musician in question is seventy-five years old. Let's also posit that he is an amazing prodigy who has recorded ten albums per year since he was twenty years old (obviously a ludicrous number, but bear with me). That's ten albums per year over the course of fifty-five years. Basic arithmetic gives us, then, a total of five hundred and fifty albums. I can count that high... can't you? Five hundred and fifty is so staggeringly, brain-bendingly not even close to "countless" that it takes my breath away.

There is no way -- not even REMOTELY -- that this musician, or any other, could have "recorded countless albums". -- PL

WEFEing #2

I am a little reluctant to file the following under "WEFEing" (short for "Witless Exaggeration For Effect"), as it actually does contain a certain amount of wit, but I am going to include it here because other than that dash of wit, it does suffer from the same silly use of language that a typical example of WEFEing does.

I love National Public Radio -- it offers so much in the way of news and information and opinion, in an unhurried way which is so different from most other media. I mostly listen to it in my truck, or sometimes when I am working at home.

But it is not without its faults, small though they may be. One such tiny fault is contained within a short promo for NPR that I have been hearing on the local NPR station (WFCR in Amherst) often in recent months. It is this line, apparently from a Terry Gross interview with one Charles Fishman, author of a book titled "The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water". The line in question goes like this:

"Every drink of water you take, every pot of coffee you make is dinosaur pee."

Every time I hear this, it drives me a little crazy… because undeniably clever as it is in making the important point about how water is recycled ad infinitum, it is literally NOT TRUE. Yes, while that drink of water you just had may have, in whole or in part, once, many many many millions of years ago, been for a short time the urine of a dinosaur, it no longer IS. The ongoing cycles of purification through evaporation and condensation and/or filtering through the soil changed that dinosaur pee to just water.

See, that snappy line wouldn't have quite the ear-grabbing, attention-getting, gross-out effect if it read this way instead:

"Every drink of water you take, every pot of coffee you make was once dinosaur pee."

Of course, the less-snappy version of the line DOES have the virtue of actually being TRUE. -- PL

What the -- ?!

This was the view outside our bedroom window this morning.

I thought it was spring already! -- PL

Fighter jets over Northampton

While bicycling around Northampton with my friend Rick a couple of days ago, we kept hearing the thunder of fighter jets passing overhead -- unusual for this area. We stopped to get coffee at Smith College*, and, while sitting outside enjoying the warmish spring weather, heard the jets passing overhead once again. 

I whipped out my little Pentax camera and managed to get a shot of the planes -- four of them -- as they roared overhead in a tight formation. I've NEVER seen that here before.

We speculated about what they might be doing -- Practicing for an air show? Getting ready to fight the Russians? Just having fun? -- but conceded that we really had no clue.

As we finished our coffee break and got back on the bikes to head back to Mirage Studios, the planes appeared overhead once more, this time with one of the pilots "waggling" his plane's wings. -- PL

         (*When I first typed this up, I inadvertently left the "m" out of "Smith", resulting in "Sith College", which made me -- as a "Star Wars" fan -- chuckle.)