Movie Review: Tunnel Rats (2008)

I saw Tunnel Rats -Hell is for Heroes, the unrated director’s cut by Uwe Boll.

It had promise, according to the cover art and text description on the back. I watched 52 minutes of this movie on a tertiary display while I was working, then my shift ended. I’m not even remotely interested how the movie turns out for the remaining 44 minutes. I wasn’t trying too hard, but I failed to find anything like a plot during that first 1/2 of the film.

If you’re into combat movies, movies about dark evil places, and movies with lots of gratuitous gore, this film is for you. If you don’t consider any of those to be a reason to spend an hour and a half plus the cost of a rental, skip it.

Frustrating Computing Experiences: One More :(

I was trying to find information for something at work today. The manufacturer’s website had some Java thing on there for their buttons. Firefox told me I had to install a missing plugin to view the page. Fine. I told it to install that sonofa.

It found the plugin right away and it pretended like it was going to install, then it said I didn’t have permissions to install it. Fine.

Logout, login to Windows as the machine administrator. Go to the same webpage. No mention of having to install the plugin. Fine.

Logout, login as myself again, and run Firefox as the Administrator. It opens the webpages Administrator had open, not the ones I had open. Fine.

Close firefox, run it as myself, copy/paste the address into notepad, close firefox, run firefox as Administrator and open that web page. Now at least, Administrator has to install a plugin. Great. Install the mother.

The plugin finder searches for several minutes. I take a piss break, come back and it’s still searching for that plugin. Great. Reload the page and try again, same result.

Fine, I’ll do without that page. I decided I’d just see if I can poke around the website from the homepage and the plugin can go F itself. So I deleted the tail end of the URL and went to the home page of the website. It said I needed a plugin.

Okay, fine, we’ll play this game again, go ahead and install it. It finds it, it starts to instals it, and everything is going swimmingly.

I went to type up this blog post, and the [deleted] plugin installer program takes the system focus away from Notepad and I type two letters to finish the word I had been typing. It took the focus away and popped up a dialog box to request my input.I selected an option, but I don’t know what it was because the dialog box was only open for 1/4 of a second. [deleted] [deleted] [deleted] software. Software should NEVER force its way to the top like that.

Fortunately I did manage to tell it not to install the (stupid) Yahoo! toolbar.
And finally it did install, and I was able to view the buttons on the webpage and it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for.

But RRRRRRRGH!

Man That Guy Must Really Be Terrible!

“I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down” President Barack Obama (regarding the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill)

First he claimed the melting-down economy as his own, now he accepts responsibility for the worst ecological disaster in his own lifetime. That’s quite a legacy he’s owning up to, there!

Of course, the (almost-kakistocracy) Obama administration is doing as much as it can bungle, to see that the problem is worsened. Louisiana still hasn’t heard anything back on their desperate requests to dredge up a row of sand berms to protect their fragile marshlands. Now I just heard today that, on May 8th they were pleading with the government not to allow oil dispersants to be released underwater. They said the oil would not rise, where it could be skimmed or burned off. It would make underwater rivers, which would get caught in currents, and possibly kill huge portions of the nation’s fisheries. May 13th the EPA allowed it anyway and they started releasing dispersant chemicals at 4,000 feet. Now we have miles-wide, miles long rivers of oil NOT rising to the surface, getting caught in the undersea currents.

Great.

I share Neal Boortz’s sentiment that neither the spill nor the majority of the ineffectual flailing about which followed were the fault of President Obama. I am also not too terribly heartbroken that he will catch a lot of blame for it anyhow, because he’s an evil man.

At least the topkill seems to be working, for which I was praying and am very grateful.

Busy Morning, Eh Boys?

My morning commute to work takes me down a twisty two-lane road with woods on the North side and multi-acre front yards on the South side. One of the properties on the South side has a fancy brick entry, which neatly conceals two police motorcycles. So it is (of course) a frequent location for the local PD to raise some money off of speeders with their RADAR guns.

This morning, as I was heading West to work, I was behind one of those motorcycle patrolmen. Having finished writing out a citation, he was going back to hang out with his partner. He had to wait for an oncoming car to pass (headed East) so he could go back into his shady speed trap hiding spot. As the car passed by, the lights on that bike lit up like a blue and red Christmas tree, and he pulled a U-turn right on the road. He was off after the next offender.

(I’m guessing it might have been a case of expired tags or something.)

F1 Racing In Watermelon Austin?!

As Jeff Ward pointed out, it is looking like the taxpayers may be on the hook to build a race track. There is evidently a stolen-from-taxpayers state fund for helping billionaires build sporting arenas*. That is sure to be part of it, but who else is going to be paying? A day after the initial announcement of a decade-long deal between Austin and the racing people, and no word as to who will build the track? He thinks it smacks of government stealing from some for the enjoyment of others again.

But my first thought was: HERE? Here where they are supposedly all sideways about the environment we are going to have cars screaming around a track for the sole purpose of screaming around the track, which get 4MPG and go through 3 sets of tires in a few hours? Cars that make such a racket you have to wear plugs and muffs to get near them when they are in operation? Seriously? They’re going to allow that here? Wait till the nearest NIMBY neighborhood or environmentalist whacko association hears about THIS!

*In related news, did you know you were paying $31M for the Superbowl this year? Also, Travis county is looking to raise property taxes, because it is impossible to spend LESS money year-over-year.

Tea parties: Not anti-government, anti too-much government.

How Not To Write a Nice Book

After I finished The Killing Fields, I wanted to freshen my memory about the history of Cambodia, and (to be quite honest) to reassure myself that the Khmer Rouge really did end up out of power eventually. I found this this article containing a round condemnation of “First They Killed My Father” by Loung Ung. The book was apparently written to manipulate a reader into sympathizing with the authoress, who largely made it up. That’s not so bad, until you realize she was writing about being a survivor of the tyrany of the Khmer Rouge. The book is decried a travesty, stomping on the memory of the innocent Khmer-Cambodians brutalized during that awful time -with a hint of racism for good measure.

Mentioned more favorably are “Music Through the Dark” by Bree Lefreniere, narrated by Daran Kravanh, and “When Broken Glass Floats” by Chanrithy Him (both of which are now on my Wish List).

********

It got me thinking. Losing 2,000,000-ish Kampucheans would be like losing 75,000,000-ish Americans these days. Imagine writing a book about it, from the perspective of a survivor, that was at least in large part made up and passed off as factual.

Not.

Nice.

Movie Review: The Killing Fields

I watched The Killing Fields for the first time today. I’m young enough that it would have been WAY too early for me to see it when it first came out.

Wow. That’s a good movie. It’s a bit hard to watch in places, and sometimes the acting is a bit transparent, but (and this is high praise for a movie, from me) it’s not a waste of two and a half hours of your life.

It is also most emphatically NOT for viewing by children (even some young teens), expectant mothers, or the faint of heart. I’m not sure if it makes it better or worse that it’s based on a true story. May God help us not to repeat it in the USA.

Razzle Dazzle, Border Control Edition

More nuclear reactors . . . as part of Cap & Trade.
More insurance for healthcare . . . as part of Socialized medicine

and now (drumroll please) . . .

Fewer National Guard troops than requested, in non-security roles, on the US/Mexico border . . . as part of comprehensive immigration reform (amnesty) bill?

The President says he wants to send 1,200 (of 6,000 John McCain was pushing for) National Guardsmen to lend a hand in supporting roles (vs. actually making the border secure). This WILL be spun by the national leftist media as an amazing great good response and the border will surely be secure after this just wait after all he is sort of god!

It will also be a typical Obama response: do something that sounds good in a properly-worded headline, but not enough to actually help, besides being too little, too late.

Movie Review: Why We Fight (2005)

I finally got around to watching the “Why We Fight” movie made during the regime of the eternally-hated President Bush.

If I had never watched that film, I would never have found out:

The US military is full of uneducated losers who couldn’t support themselves on their own, without the assistance of parents in the lower socioeconomic class.

We didn’t win the war in Vietnam

The USA is a “democracy”

Further I would never have known that the primary reasons we are fighting in Iraq are:

To further the US Empire

For oil

To profit the companies who build hardware for the US military.

I might have been inclined to think that, from WWII through the current wars, there were actual enemies out there, who would like to kill me if they could, and whom we send our troops to fight. I might have thought that Communism was a threat to be resisted by force of arms.

Bonus points for insulting the intelligence of the viewing audience with cheezy camera work, stock footage shot who-knows-where-or-when but inserted in places calculated to engender sympathy with our enemies

I left a note in the box when I replaced the DVD: “P.S. please take no notice of the existence of actual ENEMIES”

N. Korea Making A Risky Bet

On one hand, we have a bunch of sympathetic co-religionists fellow-travelers Democrats running the United States, and they are already stretching their military resources thin over in the Middle East. They are unlikely to want to START a war with us, and they may be loath to jump in a war we start with the South, because they are Capitalist Pigs in the South.

On the other hand, Hillary is bumbling toward war talk, and their President is obviously able to be swayed by public outcry, at least sometimes. Plus, they did kick our [deleted] last time we were involved in a war with the USA and the South.

. . . but you know, it sure would be nice to have all that industrialized goodness down there, and it would show what a great leader I am, to win a war over the South . . .