Funny, Nerd stuff

One of my cats doesn’t like Star Trek

Well, one scene, at least. We watched Star Trek IV today. The cats watched with us because, well, I assume they want to keep an untrusting eye on me at all times. There’s a scene near the beginning where the big ‘whale probe’ volleyball cake mixer space robot thing is doing its space thing where it blasts space whale sounds at Earth. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, I lost you at ‘volleyball cake mixer’.

Swooping Bird of Prey
Watch out, kitty! Klingons hate tribbles, and you’re the closest thing around!

So (our cat) Louise is sitting in front of the TV and watching the space probe closely. It’s making interesting noises, so this makes sense. The subsequent scene, however, is different. Space whale noises end and now a Klingon Bird of Prey shoots towards the viewer at warp speed with a whoosh. Well, that’s we see. Louise, however, sees a huge FAST MOVING HAWK THING diving straight at her and roaring. She may not be the cleverest cat, but she doesn’t need to be to know that Klingons/SUPERSPACEHAWKS are bad news so she bolts.

In a blind kitty panic, she sees this ship warping directly at her and claws her way over the back of the chair she was sitting on and flies through the air to hit the ground running. Her claws extended, she tears into the carpet and blasts off. Crossing into the hardwood floor, she loses traction and scrabbles furiously to avoid smacking into a wall. She clearly knows that only speed will help keep her safe from this attacking form and exits the family room and kitchen at > 10-15mph.

If I could speak cat-onese, I would have a long talk with my kitty. See, not only was it not a real bird trying to kill her, if it HAD been real, running to another room wouldn’t have been enough. Klingon Birds of Prey have warp drives, for one, so she cannot outrun it. Second, the yield on photon torpedoes means that even one could effortlessly destroy our entire neighborhood. I mean, come on cat. You can’t outrun a photon torpedo, you’re a cat, not some sort of… crazy whacked out super cat.

No, Louise, your decision to flee the television was illogical.

Rant

Ancestors

I was thinking of my ancestors this morning.  Over the centuries, they have variously toiled in fields to survive under cold skies, dragged heavy gear through mud for the chance of surviving a few minutes of terrifying battle, huddled below creaking deckboards while crossing stormy oceans.

They’ve seen Winter as a direct force of mortality and had loved ones plucked from them by its icy grasp.  They lost babies to drought in baking Summers and knew that starvation was just around the corner at any moment if they made a mistake in their planting.  My Lakota predecessors were driven from the Dakotas by soldiers, sent fleeing across the country only with what they could hold.  My German family is from the Neander Valley where the struggle between Cro-magnon and Neanderthal may have ended.  The Thirty Year War was kinda rough too.

They’ve done all of this, and yet today _I_ had to carry a cup of coffee  all the way to another coffee station WITHOUT one of those little cardboard sleeves that keeps your hand comfortable.  The place where I made my coffee was out of them so I had to go elsewhere and I swear, it was kinda uncomfortable for most of the half-minute it took to get there.

Trolls

Original ending to The Return Of The Jedi

The original ending of the blockbuster 1983 film was much less popular with test audiences than the version that finally made it onto the big screen.

The final redemption of the film’s original unlikely protagonist was, it seems, thought to be insufficiently clear to film-going audiences of the day.  Today’s audiences, of course, would be able to appreciate the transformation of Salacious Crumb from slave-jester to dignified hero at the moment of his death at the Great Pit of Carkoon, accepting of his fate as he rode the flaming wreckage of Jabba’s sail barge down towards the unforgiving sands of Tatooine.

The studio was in a panic at the news.  At the last moment, the actor playing Darth Vader was brought in to hurriedly fill the spot.  The ‘Jedi Ghost’ effect was quite expensive and a deposit for the special ink had already been put down.  Somebody had to fill the spot, so the little known character of Anakin Skywalker was grudgingly chosen.

Rant

Facebook notifications

A friend of mine noticed something you probably have too:  Facebook is now putting up notifications when your friends update their status.  Not just statuses you’ve Liked or people you’ve added to your super stalking list, but straight up ‘Joe Schmoe has updated their status’ is showing up as a red badge notification.  “Why is this happening?” he asks.  I offer the following theory out of a misplaced sense of obligation and competency:
Facebook knows that there’s an endorphin release for many people when they see the red notification in their Facebook toolbar. By adding more events to cause those notifications (and subsequent chemical releases), Facebook is conspiring to addict you to those internally produced drugs and in doing so to cause you to seek them over and over by increasing your Facebook visits.

Ideally, each consumer would measure the interval between refreshes (and consequently ad views) in seconds. Think of the twitching, shaky fingers of a cigarette chain smoker as they prop that Marlboro up and stare sightlessly off into the distance, smoke curling around them like a visible wall. Now, as an ex-smoker, imagine harnessing that single-minded addiction to making a company money.

Yeah, they’re smart.

Stories

An unsettling coincidence

1 Comment

Something unsettling happened last night.  You may read this and think ‘Oh you, now you’re being silly’, but this really happened.

I left the shop around midnight after a long day working on our contest entry and turned from McKinley onto 7th/99 to head east towards home.  For anyone outside of town, this is the far west side of Eugene and I live in the far east side of Springfield.  There are two towns between where I was and where I live.

Due to massive road construction, the four lane road is currently a single lane with a one foot drop-off (~1/3 meter for my civilized friends) into rock on one side and a sidewalk on the other.  The street lights for this stretch were out, so this stretch was very dark.

As I accelerated, I noticed a dark shape on the road ahead of me.  I began to slow and as I did so, I picked up three more shapes next to it.  I rolled to a stop about 20 feet away from a group of four…   raccoons.  They had stopped in the road and were staring at me.

Raccoons.

After a moment, they backed off the road as if to say ‘move along, buddy’ so I took my foot off the brake and began inching forward.  As I neared them (watching from the sidewalk), I carefully reached out and locked the door.

“Thunderscreech”, I thought to myself, “you’re being silly.”  Then I looked over to my left as I passed the group and saw that the biggest one was standing up and facing directly at me.

I don’t know what I thought it could do, but…  I punched it.  I hit the gas and took off.

It’s a coincidence, right?  I mean, a hamburglar of raccoons (I assume that’s the proper collective noun for these animals) standing in the middle of a darkened construction zone that just happens to be a natural constriction point I’d travel through is something that happens to other people, right?

Life's too short to be nice