I was sent this video a week or so ago and loved it and promptly forgot about it. A conversation about Movember and how silly it is reminded me. I present to you, for your viewing pleasure, Decembeaver!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp3Bns-bCv4&feature=youtube_gdata_player]Monthly Archives: November 2013
Epic Song Cover Of The Week
There are probably billions of song covers on YouTube. None are as epic as this cover of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” by Russia’s Red Army Chorus.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P08B_lBUL0E&feature=youtube_gdata_player]Movie Review: Thor: The Dark World
Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars
Bottom Line: Don’t expect to like or understand the story unless you’re a comic geek. As with the first Thor movie, the scenes on Earth steal the show from the special effecty Asgard scenes. Kat Dennings is hilarious.
So, you see, there are these Elves, right? And they like Dark and stuff, ok? And they once tried to bring Darkness back to the universe by harnessing this stuff called Ether which can, like, totally bring Darkness back. But they were resisted by the Asgardians who fight with swords and axes against the Dark Elves who have these super destructive beam weapons and stuff and the Asgardians totally decimated the Dark Elves and hid the Ether in the deepest regions of the somethingorother where it could never be reached again. And the Dark Elves? The Asgardians totally made them extinct and stuff even though a bunch very clearly got away in a massive space ship right in front of a whole bunch of Asgardians.
Yeah, we’re talking real comic book setup here. But it’s ok. You’ll survive it. The rest of the movie is quite fun.
Like the first Thor movie, the scenes on Earth are much more compelling than the Asgard scenes. A lot of this can be attributed to Darcy Lewis played by Kat Dennings. I don’t think there is a single scene that she was in that wasn’t at least wryly amusing. Exiting the movie, I asked how Kat Dennings wasn’t in more stuff only to find that she’s been in quite a few things, most notably the comedy “Two Broke Girls”, of which I have seen about five minutes before I gave up on it. Maybe I should give it another chance.
This movie is closer to what Thor is supposed to be like than the first. The one thing you should know about Thor is that he is supposed to be a pompous ass and kind of a moron. Wait, that was two things. His pomp was solved in the first movie, but his sheer stupidity was really missing from it. In “The Dark World” we get to see a bit of his lackwit nature with him coming up with the brilliant idea of taking his Ether-toting girlfriend, Jane, from the massive defenses of Asgard to a barren planet which will draw away the very limited Dark Elf army so that he can fight them all himself and defeat the Ether by…something. Thor is the Underpants Gnome superhero: 1.) Fight the enemy. 2.) ??? 3.) WIN!
But, of course, win is what Thor does. And this win is quite entertaining. With the worlds aligning and portals to other worlds appearing everywhere, Thor battles uber-Dark Elf, Malekith, and they batter each other through portals and across worlds. If you’ve ever played the Portal video game, it’s kind of like that only without the orange and green glowing portals.
Marvel has quite a knack of making perfectly entertaining movies that I have absolutely no interest in seeing again. This one is slightly better than those. I probably will never want to see it again, but I would not complain too much if I happened to do so.
One Year
My one year blogging anniversary passed me by without even noticing. My first post was on November 5th of last year. For your reading pleasure, here are some useless Google Analytics statistics:
Unique Visitors: 1835 Visits: 4548 Page Views: 7015
Every state except North Dakota has visited this site. I can only assume that North Dakotans are too busy fracking to bother reading blogs. Every European country except Portugal has also visited this site. I’m just going to say that they’re too busy fracking too, what with their gorgeous beaches and all.
Chrome and Firefox account for 63% of the web traffic. 40% of the traffic is from cell phones and tablets. Facebook is by far the largest referral site followed by Google+ and, surprisingly, the New England Skeptics Society. Do I have a fan there? The top ten most viewed pages are:
- The main page – 954 hits
- Kristin The Hero – 156 hits – a true story about a woman who defeated fire
- Why Does It Feel Good When Someone Touches You – 113 hits – people search for this a lot apparently
- Whenever I Was Sad My Grandmother Gave Me Karate Chops – 106 hits – another popular search and hilarious video about bullying
- Respectability Politics – 69 hits – a term I’d never heard of and neither had others, given the number of hits
- What Part Of Well Regulated Don’t We Understand – 65 hits – ah, the 2nd Amendment…
- But The City Is So Unsafe – 64 hits – I make fun of people who don’t understand statistics
- Why The American Disdain For The Poor – 63 hits – we hates us some poor people
- The Book Thief Book Review – 58 hits – due to the upcoming movie, no doubt
- Teach For America Is Evil – 52 hits – the path to hell is paved with good intentions
What Should I Play Next?
Ok, dorks, I recently finished playing Bioshock Infinite and found it a great big barrel of meh after really liking the first two. I currently have a large catalog of games that were on sale on Steam that I need to get through. They include:
- Assassin’s Creed
- Assassin’s Creed 2
- Fallout 3
- Fallout: New Vegas
- L.A. Noire
- Mass Effect
- Mass Effect 2
- The Witcher 2
Sound off and let me know which is most worthy of my time. I paid for all of those slightly more than what I would normally pay for one game. This reflects both my lack of game playing initiative and my cheapness.
A Virginia Squeaker
What was supposed to be a fairly easy victory for Terry McAuliffe over Ken Cuccinelli for the gubernatorial race in Virginia turned into a much closer than expected win for Terry McAuliffe. Results aren’t final yet, but the most recent results show McAulliffe at 48.0% to Cuccinelli’s 45.5% with Libertarian Robert Sarvis claiming 6.6% of the vote.
It’s been all Obamacare all the time in Virginia the past few weeks. Cuccinelli’s been heavily touting the website troubles and reports of individuals losing their insurance as ammunition against McAuliffe. Despite McAuliffe’s win, it certainly looks like Obamacare hurt him some if the polls leading up to the election were accurate.
If Democrats were smart, they’d be doing some heavy internal polling of Sarvis voters to determine who they would have voted for if Sarvis wasn’t in the race. Generally, a Libertarian candidate would be expected to pull votes away from the Republican candidate, but Cuccinelli’s a special kind of crazy that I don’t think would resonate with Libertarians. It would be really bad news for Democrats if this election showed people leaning Democrat voting Libertarian. Obamacare is a Libertarian’s second worse nightmare next to sharing one’s toys in a sandbox so this could actually be the case.
In other Virginia election news, Democrat Ralph Northam beat uber crazy E.W. Jackson to become Lieutenant Governor. This is important because the Virginia Senate is currently even and the Lieutenant Governor casts the deciding vote in ties. The Attorney General job looks like it’s going to Republican Mark Obenshain who is currently in the lead by less than 300 votes out of over two million cast, so no clean sweep in Virginia for the Democrats.
Around the nation, complete dick and likely Republican Presidential candidate Chris Christie won handily in New Jersey, the only state where being a dick is considered a distinguished mark of character. The most progressive candidate on the ballot anywhere, Bill de Blasio won in a landslide and will be the first Democratic mayor of New York in 20 years. Tea Party favorite Dean Young lost to Republican (and former Democrat) Bradley Byrne for Alabama’s 1st Congressional District. Perhaps some sort of sanity is returning to the Republican party. And finally, Generic Democratic Candidate A beat Generic Democratic Candidate B for Mayor of Boston.
Marriage Equality Comes To Illinois
A same-sex marriage bill passed both houses of the Illinois legislature yesterday and Governor Pat Quinn has promised to sign the bill. This means that gay couples will be able to marry each other as of June 1st, 2014. Bam! I wonder what it was like in Boystown last night. Probably a bit crazy.
This makes Illinois the 15th state to recognize same-sex marriage. The tide is really turning. There was a recent poll out of South Carolina that showed only 52% of residents are against same-sex marriage. You might think, “well that’s still a majority”, and you’d be right, but this is South Carolina! For a bit of perspective, in 2006, South Carolina passed an amendment banning same-sex marriage with 78% voting in favor of the amendment. South Carolina, you’ve come a long way, baby.
And the beat goes on.
Adventures In Obamacare 5: Weekend At Eric’s
I am still in the bureaucratic limbo of trying to prove that I am an actual person, but my friend Eric has gotten past that step because he has a perfectly normal name. He was gracious enough to let me peruse the options that healthcare.gov offers for Illinoisans.
The first thing that struck me was how counterintuitive the website was even at this point. In order to get a list of plans, you had to click this innocent looking green box that simply says “SET”. That’s all it is is a green box. There is no indication that you’re supposed to click it to get to the plans. There’s no cursor change over the box except when you hover over the word “SET” and the cursor changes to the familiar word processor capital ‘I’ cursor. I would think that there would be bells and whistles and pointers and perhaps a marching band playing informing you to CLICK HERE FOR PLANS! But no. I wonder how many people have signed up on the website and think they can’t get to the plans because they don’t know to click the green box.
Once you get to the actual list of plans, things are much nicer. You can look only at certain levels of plans or view them all. The layout for each plan takes up a bit more real estate than it should, but each plan has links to the plan’s provider networks and coverage options from the offering company’s website which is really nice. I didn’t go any further into the process than looking for the plans because Eric would probably be upset if I signed him up for something.
The thing that sticks out the most is how much of a disparity in price there is between the various providers. When you get to this granular level, it becomes really difficult to actually compare the products to each other. Two products with the same deductible and copays and coinsurance can be $100/month different and a useful comparison of provider networks is impossible so there is really no meaningful way to judge if that extra $100/month is worth it.
The good news for me is that my current provider, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, offers the cheapest plans pretty much across the board. The strange thing is that the prices quoted on the healthcare.gov site are slightly different than the prices quoted on the Blue Cross site. For instance, Blue Cross quoted me $152.24 for the cheapest plan, but healthcare.gove quotes the same plan at $157.84. I’m not sure why there’s a discrepancy. I can only guess that there’s a surcharge that the federal government places on insurance orders placed through healthcare.gov. If anyone knows anything about this, I’d be interested in knowing.
Movie Review: The Counselor
Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 Stars
Bottom Line: Great acting and some incredible dialogue will not prevent you from asking yourself what the heck it was you just watched.
Subtitled Bottom Line: Warning! Cormac McCarthy movie ahead!
One thing I am certain of after watching “The Counselor” is that things definitely happened in it. I am not sure what happened or how things were connected but, yep, things happened. The plot, as far as I could follow it is such: This lawyer guy who is distractingly only called Counselor throughout the entire movie needs a lot of money because of…something. In order to get that money, the Counselor decides to broker a drug deal using his drug dealing friends (clients?) that will net him millions of dollars. A series of events that I am sure must be related to the drug deal because they bothered to put them in the movie then occur leading the Cartel to believe that the Counselor has stolen their drugs. A lot of deaths follow which may or may not have been related to the previous series of events.
The first half of the movie really allows all the top talent actors to flex their A-list muscles. This is certainly helped by Cormac McCarthy’s ability to write cerebral dialogue that can somehow come off as both deep and aloof at the same time. If I were of a mind to watch this movie over and over again, which I am not, there are many gems of dialogue that would be certain to make it into my vernacular.
The second half of the movie is kind of a mess. I was never really certain what was going on and how things were connected. Everyone seemed to have a preternatural ability to know where the individual they want will be. I was also never quite sure of who was on what side or how many double crosses were going on at any given time. It would have been nice if the movie credits featured a Venn diagram of whose side everyone was on or maybe a flow chart of events to clarify some of the murkiness.
This movie is proof that a well written, well acted movie can still be pretty crappy. My advice would be this: If you’re going to see this movie, ignore the plot completely. Look at it as a series of vingettes with some incredibly clever and witty dialogue. Also, leave half way through the movie.