Weekly Weigh In: Week 5

This week saw a couple more pounds drop off as I have gotten myself down to 180.5. With this, I have officially crossed the ten pound threshold. Whee! I didn't notice much of a change in the waistline, but the weight is coming from somewhere, so I'm happy.

I've started working out for ten minutes longer each morning, bringing it up to 40 minutes a day, in part to help with things if I can't work out over the weekend, but also to make myself feel better about slacking off with Wii Fit. Now at least I have an excuse as I have to review Top Spin 3, but I won't always have that. Incidentally, Top Spin 3 gives quite the workout as it uses the motion controls to simulate your player's swing, so I'm still getting some video game exercising done, just not as much as with Wii Fit.

Now that I have lost some appreciable weight, the desire to cheat is so much greater because I feel like I've made good progress so I can now let off a little. I will fight this odious desire though, lest I lose all of the progress I've made. I'm enjoying the fact that I can wear shirts that used to be too small and I'd hate to lose progress. Once I hit my target weight, I'll have to decide if I want to keep going to build in a buffer zone, or stop where I am. I'll keep working out every day, but will probably allow myself a little more to eat, and my usual Friday post-bowling Frosty can come back into my loving arms. Other than that, I don't see much changing. The benefit of dieting, other than losing weight, is learning to enjoy seeing a smaller number on the scale more than eating some late night snack, or something similarly bad for me. As long as I keep working out, and enjoy the bad things in moderation, everything should be just fine.

I finished watching The Cottage today and really enjoyed it. A lot of good comedic bits, even if the horror aspect was a bit formulaic. I'll have to see if I can find the DVD to add to the collection. Not sure what's going to be next, but probably The Mist as I can get the whole thing wrapped up before Friday's day off and lack of working out. The weigh-in will be a day early this week as I'm sure I'll be eating more than normal on Friday, so waiting until Saturday will throw off things. Hopefully the extra working out I'll be doing Mon - Thurs will help make up for losing a day before the next weigh in. Either way, I get to be off the diet (mostly) for an extra day this weekend, two actually as I get Monday off from work, so I don't really care. I'm all about the long term goals so a few extra days of eating, or fewer days of working out won't make much of a difference.

Busy and Such

Sorry for the light posting schedule this week but I have been equal parts busy and lazy. Busy as I needed to finish Secret Agent Clank so that I could return it, thereby allowing GameFly to send me my next review game Hellboy: Seeds of Evil for the PSP. Lazy as once I finished Secret Agent Clank I wanted to watch a movie with the missus and play GTA IV, none of which are conducive to posting.

Speaking of movies, I finished The Ruins and was quite happy with the movie until the ending. Spoilers need to be spoiled in order to have this discussion, so if you wish to see this movie on DVD and don't want things ruined, then run along now.

The movie is about four vacationing Americans and the German tourist they meet while in Mexico, traveling to this archaeological dig site in search of the German guy's brother. Once they get to the temple, one of the Americans, Amy, the wishy-washy girlfriend of Jeff, the take charge med school student, accidentally steps on the vines covering the dig site while their group of people is being yelled at by some crazy villager guy. Once Amy steps on the vines, crazy villager guy gets even crazier, calls his homies, shoots an unfortunately expendable Greek tourist who was along for the ride and makes our intrepid group of five high tail it up to the top of the temple. The villagers don't let the five leave the temple, folks get injured and it turns out that the vines are sentient and will pretty much do whatever they can to kill and eat you.

Bummer.

In the book, everyone dies. I don't remember exactly how, but nobody gets off of that temple alive. It's pretty bleak, and gross, but that's the way the book is. In the movie, not so much. After Jeff and Amy's friends die due to some unfortunate knife action, and well after the German guy had to have his legs cut off and the vines choked him from within, Amy and Jeff hatch a plan to get Amy out of there. Jeff brings her seemingly dead body down to the base of the temple, lies it on the ground, and then walks away from it, around the base of the temple, talking to the villagers and drawing their attention away from Amy. After a very nice speech, he yells her name, the villagers shoot him full of arrows and Amy gets up and bolts into the jungle. She is chased by the villagers, but eventually finds the jeep left by the last group of people, starts the engine and drives off. As she drives off, a vine appears under the skin below her eye and we know that Amy is infected.

Again, bummer.

Here's my problem with that. As bad as it was for everyone to die in the book, they pretty much had to. The vine was growing on their clothes, even in places that hadn't been touched by the vines. The villagers kept watch on the temple, and salted the ground around the temple, to keep the vines out of the surrounding jungle, knowing full well that the vines would spread like crazy and probably kill everything. Amy was probably the weakest character in the group, and while the right thing for her to do would have been to turn around, go back to the temple and take one for the team, I'm pretty sure she didn't do that, so as a result, our world in that movie is probably overrun with killer plants now and we're all dead.

Thanks a bunch, Amy. Loser.

The other problem was that Amy was so whiny that it's not like you really want her to live. The book was much better because you knew that these people were all going to die, it was just a matter of when, and how awful it would be. I had the same feeling while watching the movie, so to then have one of them escape seemed wrong to me. Plus, I don't want to be killed by malevolent plants so Amy needs to die. I've heard that there was an alternate ending, probably more in line with the book, so hopefully in that version, killer vines get a small snack of six tourists, but are denied the main course of our entire planet.

Now I'm watching The Cottage and it's fucking hilarious. Andy Serkis is a genius. Hopefully it won't end poorly.

Have a great weekend.

Now That's What I Call Cost Savings

So I had to bring my car into the dealer today because every time I braked, my brakes made this horrible grating noise. For one it was kind of annoying, for two, anyone who drove with me thought that my brakes were going to fail at any moment, plunging them into a fiery death. As my car is still under warranty I was forced to go the dealer.

While I was there, I was told that my car was due for it's 20k service, which entailed an oil change, tire balancing, emergency brake tweaking, whatever the fuck that is, and a car wash. I needed a car wash. I needed an oil change. I needed my tires rotated. Seemed like a good deal to me.

Several hours later they called to tell me that the noise is normal, however there was an update out for my car, so they replaced the brake pads with new ones. Odd that an update for a car is new brakes however I can't see how my failing brakes would be fixed with software, so I guess it makes sense. Anyway, they also told me that my front tires were out of alignment and as a result they were worn down and needed to be replaced to the tune of 400 bucks. Yeah, I don't think so.

When I picked up my car, the guy explained everything that had been done and then proceeded to try and send me on my way without me paying for anything. When I told him that I needed to pay for the 20k service, he looked confused and then said "But you declined the service." I told him that I declined the new tires, but not the service. Whoopsie. He was very apologetic and said that they could take care of it right away, but I couldn't stay and I figured that if I had to get new tires, getting my existing tires rebalanced and rotated probably wasn't worth it. I told him not to worry and went on my way.

When I went out to my car, I noticed that the car had been washed. Sweet! Free car wash! As I was driving home, I noticed the temperature display. My car has a charming feature that when your oil life gets down to 15%, every time you start the car, the engine light comes on and your normal temperature and trip odometer display is replaced with the oil life. The only way to reset it is to change the car's oil. My car wasn't showing the oil life, it was showing the temperature and the trip odometer. Then I looked up in the corner of my windshield and there was the sticker thanking me for going to the dealer, and that I needed my next service at 25k. Sweet! Free 20k service, or at least free oil change!

When I left the dealership, the service guy said that I'd be getting a survey in the mail and that he knows he'll get dinged on the service snafu, but the only way he passes if I give him "excellent" across the board. Sir, you just saved me 100 bucks. I'd say that's pretty fucking excellent.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 4

After a week of what seemed like complete and total starvation, I emerged from the week with a new weight of 182.5. This represents a loss of either a pound or a pound and a half, depending on which value from the previous week's weigh-in you're going with. I was a little disappointed in the loss, as I had wished for more, but I was a Wii Fit slacker all week, exercising maybe one night. My disappointment quickly faded though when I busted out the measuring tape and found that I now have a 38 inch waist line, something I haven't had in years. It's all very strange how you can go all week, seemingly without losing anything and then a bunch of weight falls off, or how you can be losing weight but your stomach remains the same size until you lose some minuscule amount of weight and it is coupled with a 2 inch drop in the waist size. Methinks there's some inaccurate measuring going on, but still, it all can't be chalked up to incompetence. Then again, this is me, so maybe it can be.

This past week I finished watched Bullitt and Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms which I finished up today. Tomorrow I'm going to start on the stack of horror movies I've had sticking around for some time now but never got around to watching. I have The Host (Korean monster movie), The Cottage (crime horror comedy), The Mist (American monster movie) and The Ruins (American sort of monster movie). Most of them are around 90 minutes, which makes for something I can watch in the space of a week without the weekend dulling my memory. My memory isn't so good to begin with, even when it's not being starved so all bets are off when dieting. I'm lucky I remember to put pants on in the morning. I did put pants on didn't I?

Uh-oh.

Ah. Ahem. Back in a bit.

Hot Shots: Open Tee 2 review

My review for Hot Shots: Open Tee 2 is up. Personally, I think my original is better than the edited version. Oh well, such is life in the big game reviewing city.

Panorama-rama

As promised, here are some panoramic shots of my desk at work. You'll have to forgive the blurriness of some of them as a) it's a cell phone camera, b) the lighting in here is conducive to one and only thing, crushing the souls of men, and c) my hands shake a wee bit, making it somewhat tough to line up the seams in the photos. Enjoy!


So here we have the view from my chair, were I to scoot back a few feet from my desk. Starting on the left we have my Redskins mug, the Hellboy movie poster that everyone keeps knocking down, a picture of palm trees from last year's vacation, my Xerox hat which is resting atop the unseen Dr. Chiaopolis, my Einstein-esque Chia head. After that are a bunch of pictures of the kids, a poster of Pearl Jam at Benaroya Hall, and the beginning of the Transformers collection resting on my PC (those are the Real Gear robots). The desktop image is from Okami, with Legends class Cyberton Transformers below the monitor, flanked by the protoform movie Transformers and with Pikachu in the middle, as he should be. After the monitor is Donatello from a co-worker's kid's Burger King happy meal, some more family pics, my Hellboy Animated statue, my Get Fuzzy calendar, my phone, and the deluxe class movie Transformers. Whew!


More phone goodness. More Transformers, along with my Weighted Companion Cube, half of Lugnut from the animated Transformers show and my lenticular Transformers: The Movie card resting in front of the framed picture of Fido, my trusty T-rex. Don't ask.


Here are all of the deluxe class Transformers (the ten buck ones) with some Legends class movie robots and the aforementioned Lugnut thrown in. Lugnut looks blurry because he's quivering in anticipation of being reunited with his beloved Megatron, not because I'm a shitty photographer. You can also see the corner of my New Yorker Office calendar which is filled with hilarious cartoons from New Yorker magazine about the crushing toil of everyday work. They're a hoot.

Up here are all of the Classics Transformers with some Cybertron ones thrown in as well as Animated Blackarachnia, Ratchet and Grimlock. I have some toy moving to do, so they got shoved in where they'd fit. Long time fans of the site will remember this as the location of the Battle Royale. That diorama is no more as I got tired of it and some of the combatants kept falling down. Bastards.

Finally, up top are all of the big guys. The movie Voyager and Leader class toys. Rescue Ratchet, Incinerator and Evac are in vehicle mode because they're fun to transform and I haven't gotten around to transforming all of the others. Plus, the Leader class toys make a hell of a lot of noise when you transform them, thereby cementing my coworkers' ideas about me not doing a damn thing at work.

So, there you have it. Behold my work lair of geekishness. It may be time to chronicle the Lego stronghold that is my home office as well. I'll have to spend more time with my phone's camera first though, or see if my wife's camera has the same functionality. It'll be damn hard to line up shots based on three inch tall Lego figures. To the research lab!

Enjoy the weekend.

Riddle Redux

Yesterday I found out that the contact lenses I'll need to wear for the rest of my life, or until I get cybernetic eyes will cost $46 a month. Minus the $140 a year I get from the insurance, the answer to the riddle "When is free not really free", works out to "when it's $412 a year". Lovely.

In other news, a shiny new phone from Sprint showed up on my doorstop today, a full day after my original shiny new phone showed up. Either the Sprint shipping department heard of my praise for them and decided to reward me with a new phone, or they're the reason that Sprint is having so many problems. Sending free phones to anyone who asks for one can't be good for the bottom line. I need to give credit to my beautiful bride, Linda for that last joke. She'll be here all week. Try the veal.

After a night of blistering frustration, my phone is humming along nicely. As it turns out, the Java suite, or whatever the hell you want to call it, can't run programs for shit, so Gmail's client, and Opera Mini, the two programs I used the most on my Palm, didn't run at all. Bummer. One new Java suite and one Opera Mobile download later, we're cooking with gas. This phone is damn nice, and I'm already having a good time with it, having lost pretty much my entire day to fracking around with it. It even has a panoramic camera thingy where it'll stitch three photos together. Very nice. Tomorrow I'll take some pictures of my cube at work so that you can see the panoramic mode in action, as well as how many toys I have. Try and sleep tonight, despite the excitement you must be feeling.

Take That Terrorists

In my ever increasing effort to single handedly prop up this great nation's economy, thereby destroying terrorism at the speed of thought at the very same time, I have made a number of purchases this week that I feel the need to share with you.

First up, is my shiny new toy, the HTC Mogul, courtesy of Sprint. I had grown tired of my Palm of late, what with it's sluggish touch screen, no doubt made slow from the various high speed ground collisions I subjected it to, and it's need to leave the phone portion of the device off even though the dulcet start-up tones led me to believe otherwise. I need a full size keyboard for all of my Gmailing on the go, so those fancy touch screen models wouldn't have worked. The notion of dealing with Windows Mobile somewhat scares me, but I think in the end, I'll be happier. The ability to remote into my machine at work while on the go, combined with the ability to turn the phone into a mobile WiFi access point certainly makes the OS wrangling worth it. Plus, it's a damn pretty phone. I hesitate to call it sexy, as I hate that term for describing inanimate objects, or animate objects that aren't actual humans, but it is certainly attractive, for a phone, and if I were a telecommunications device, like a fax machine, or a CB, I'd certainly want to freak it nasty. Linda ordered it for me on Monday and it arrived before Wednesday barely had a chance to get going, so despite the problems that Sprint as a company is dealing with right now, their shipping department is not one of them. Good for you Sprint shipping department, way to knock it out of the park.

Realizing that terrorism wasn't quite dead ye, I continued to spend, spend, spend, striking a blow for democracy everywhere. The fine people at TopatoCo have a brand new t-shirt for preordering, so I did just that. The first, displays the result of when a chicken and a pig love each other, very, very much. Let's just say, that the results are delicious.

The second t-shirt shows the calamitous result of a gorilla meeting up with a great white shark. It ain't pretty. I bought this shirt partially for myself but mostly to inform the general public as to the destructive powers that would be brought to bear on our fine race if the natural cunning of the gorilla were ever teamed up with the ruthless ferocity of the great white shark. Luckily for us, their mutual hatred of each other ensures that they will never join forces and focus their ire on us, but if they do, God help us all.


Finally, I bought a shirt that lays bare the human condition for all to see, namely that at the end of the day, we're all just made of meat. It doesn't matter how pretty you are, or how much money you have, or how many beautiful people you have sex with, you're just a walking pork chop, with little or no defenses at your disposal should a gorilla or a great white shark want to roll you in Shake-and-Bake and serve you with a side of applesauce. As much as I love this shirt, I will refrain from wearing it to the zoo lest I give the tigers any good ideas. The last time I was there, they looked at me in a manner best described as unnerving.

Unfortunately, not all intended purchases were able to be made today as my attempts to procure the season 1 set of Burn Notice was unsuccessful. If you don't watch this show, you should as it's awesome. Michael Westen is super cool and the show moves at a really good clip. Plus, it has Bruce Campbell in it. Bruce Campbell! If you don't want to pony up 35 bucks for the set, at least rent the dang thing so that you're all caught up for when the second season starts in July.

Phew! I'm tired. Securing capitalism's footholds in an uncaring world is a tough job. I should go take a nap and then maybe write some reviews or something so that I can pay for all of this shit.

Riddle Me This

Here's a riddle for you:

When is free not really free?

The answer is a long one, so sit tight. Back in 1999, Linda and I started working for a company that managed to somehow get LASIK as an approved procedure in the vision plan. When I say approved, I mean, no out of pocket cost whatsoever. Nada. Zip. Zero. We both got the corrective surgery done and neither one of us paid one cent.

Fast forward to last year and I noticed that my vision was starting to diminish, especially in my right eye. I got glasses for driving, but mostly, things were ok. Fast forward to the beginning of this year and my vision in my right eye had gotten to the point where I couldn't read street signs. I do all of the legwork and find out that because I had been keeping up with my yearly eye appointments, I'm eligible to have my LASIK touched up free of charge.

So a couple of weeks ago, I go for this mega-dilation that they do so that my optometrist can get a better look at my eye before I go in for the LASIK evaluation and he tells me that my vision has gotten worse since February, which is kind of strange, because it had only been a few months and I had developed astigmatism, which is also odd. He also tells me that my cornea is kind of thin, but is probably thick enough for the surgery.

Today I went for the LASIK evaluation and found out that they can't use LASIK to correct my vision. It would appear that back when they did the original surgery they thinned out the cornea too much causing two problems. One, my cornea is too thin for further surgery, and two, the thinned cornea is bulging out due to the pressure in my eye, hence the astigmatism.

Unfortunately, glasses won't correct the problem due to the fact that the lenses are farther from my eyes and my brain won't be able to put 2 and 2 together and I'll feel like my head is going to explode. That leaves contact lenses, which I wore in high school, and hated. If things continue to get worse, I'll have to switch to a hard lens, in the hope that it will keep the cornea's shape. If that doesn't work, then I'll need a corneal transplant.

Granted, that last one is probably not going to be needed, but at the same time, I woke up this morning hoping to be able to get my vision touched up and instead found out that I'll need to wear contact lenses for the rest of my life. Not exactly what I was hoping for, especially when you consider that prior to getting the LASIK, I wore glasses which are pretty much the easiest thing in the world to deal with.

Oh well. At least I'm still alive, and my vision can be corrected so if all I have to deal with is putting in contact lenses, then I guess I got off fairly easy. Tomorrow I go in to get fitted for the fucking things. I can't wait!

Oh, and Stan Winston died, so it's been a pretty big crap storm of a day. Here's hoping tomorrow is better and I don't find out that my physical therapy caused my knee to fall off.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 3

This week saw the largest weight movement thus far with a weigh in of 183.5 lbs, for a loss of 3 lbs and one inch off of ye olde waistline. Woo-hoo! The waistline measurement isn't exact as sadly, my gut is bigger than what the fabric measuring tape we have can measure. It seems like an inch, so let's just go with that.

This past weekend I did pretty well with the eating. My Father's Day choice was to get ribs from my favorite rib shack, and seeing how we did Father's Day on Saturday, I had a chance on Sunday to eat more normally, thereby making sure that I don't spend the first half of this week working off all the food I ate over the weekend. The diet is still going well, although my sister is in town this week, and today was her birthday so I ate more than usual. I still did better than I normally do in these situations, so there's that.

Last week, I finished the Doctor Strange animated movie and then finished the week off with Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron. The Doctor Strange movie was OK. There was a lot of build up and very sedate final battle. Blood and Iron, on the other hand, kicked ass. The last time I watched this movie it was when Cartoon Network originally broadcast it and they managed to take a 75 minute movie and stretch it into two hours. In doing so, they completely shattered any narrative flow that the movie had going on. Watching it without commercials was so much better. Since then I've taken a break from the animation an am now watching Bullitt. Steve McQueen is so fucking cool that I can barely stand it. Jacqueline Bisset is pretty easy on the eyes too.

Hopefully my progress will continue on this week and soon I'll be at my goal. Then I can go back to eating like a slob. Whee!

Happy Friday

Yay, it's Friday, happiest of days!

Or is it?

For some reason, yesterday I got to thinking about how glad I was that I was just one day away from Friday, when it would be the weekend and I could get down with my bad self, hang with the family and generally get away from work. Then, for some reason, I thought of the people for which Friday represented the end of something wonderful and not the end of a week spent in drudgery and toil.

It's summer time now, which means summer vacations and exotic trips and times spent at camp. Right now there are people who are having the best week of their lives, as they spend their time frolicking on exotic beaches and eating fantastic dishes paired with refreshing drinks. These people have never been so relaxed and free as they did this past week.

Or there's a woman who went on a trip, not meaning to do anything but spend time with herself and she happened to meet someone, someone who stirs in her feelings she never knew she had. She lives away, far away from this someone, far enough to make it unreasonable to have more time with this person exist outside of this bubble of paradise she has managed to find herself in.

Or there's a boy who went to camp, not wanting to at all, lonely and depressed when he arrived, because he couldn't compete with at the athletic events, nor did he really want to. He planned on a week of misery until he saw her, and her shy smile told him that she felt the same way about her surroundings as he did. When they finally kissed, each sharing their first with each other, under the late week evening's swollen moon, he hoped that he would remember this moment for all of his life, how her lips were so soft and how her hair smelled like strawberries.

For these people, Friday represents and ending to something they will never get back, never be able to extend, never be able to recapture. The very fact that their experiences were finite, and that they knew of this limitation, even when they desperately tried to forget about it, made their weeks so much sweeter yet makes today so much more painful.

We'll always have the pictures, they'll think. There will be other vacations! We'll go on one every year! And they will, but no matter how good a time they'll have, it will never be as good as this time, and it will sit there, in their hearts, gnawing away at their good times.

We can write, we can call! We'll see each other! But they won't. Geography and time and lives and the real world get in the way to when you can't remember exactly what it was about the other person that got you so excited. If you do meet, you'll desperately hope to recapture what you felt during that blissful week, but it is lost, gone into the ether.

We can call, our parents will take us to visit each other! But they won't. They don't remember what it's like to be 13, when everything seemed to be life or death, when love was uncluttered with adult responsibilities and diminished by the passing of time and the eventual familiarity of decades with the same person.

To these people, I say hold on to this week. Hold it in your heart and guard it and keep it precious. You may never relive it, or return to it, but you can never lose it. It will stay with you even when the details are somewhat fuzzy and you can't remember which place you went on what day, or the exact color of his eyes, or where she said she went to school. At that point, it will have become something else to you, possibly even bested by some greater event you experience, but it will be no less comforting, no less wondrous, no less stirring.

To the rest of you, I say, Happy Friday. Drinks are on me. This is some depressing shit.

Lego Indiana Jones DS review

After a short, though fun romp through the Lego Indiana Jones universe, my review is up.

Enjoy!

About Fucking Time

The Supreme Court ruled today that detainees in Guantánamo Bay can challenge their charges in civilian courts. Basically we've given them the right of habeas corpus, which they should have had from the beginning as they're being held in an institution controlled by the US government.

I'm sure that this doesn't feel like a big deal, and I'm sure that our shitty ass media won't talk much about it, but this is a huge deal. Basically, the Supreme Court told the present administration that you can't just suspend basic constitutional rights simply because times are tough. In fact, the Constitution is designed to weather tough times as the opinion so eloquently states:

The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system, they are reconciled within the framework of law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, part of that law.

Habeas corpus is so important, and was so important to the framers that it is included in the Constitution. In other words, they didn't need to sit around and think about whether or not the government should be able to imprison you for no reason. They knew that the government should not be able to right from the start.

Make no mistake, the part of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that this ruling strikes down is exactly that, the government imprisoning people for no reason. This might seem all well and good when it's some dude from thousands of miles away taken in the dead of night and imprisoned with no knowledge of the charges against him, but what if it's you? What if your kid starts hanging out on message boards online with no real understanding of what they're espousing and gets flagged as a possible enemy combatant? There is no piece of legislation that says that "enemy combatants" can't be US citizens. There was nothing in the law struck down today saying that the government couldn't come into your house, seize you, an American citizen, and deny you the most basic of Constitutional rights that this country was built on. I'm not so naive as to think that every detainee in Guantánamo Bay is completely innocent of the charges brought against them, however suspicion of guilt is not enough to deny them a fair trial, even if they are guilty of crimes against US citizens. We, as Americans, are better than that. We have to be. The underlying principals that our country was founded upon demand that we be better than that. If these detainees are guilty, then let them have their trials so that we can have justice. If not, then for Christ's sake, let these people go. It's been seven years since the detention center opened.

One more thing to consider before I get off of my soapbox. Three of the Justices who sided with the majority, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter are all expected to retire during the term of the next president. Obama has stated that he favors Justices in the mold of Souter and Ginsburg whereas McCain favors the kind of Justices in the minority, Sam Alito and John Roberts specifically, none of whom are expected to go anywhere any time soon. This statement only serves to emphasize just how important this next Presidential election is, and how the decisions made during the next Presidency will have effects that will last for decades. Supreme Court appointments are life long appointments. It doesn't take a master detective to determine who I'll be voting for in the fall, but if you think that you don't need to vote because it's all meaningless, I can assure you that it is not.

Learning: 1, Crass Commercialism: 0

On days like today when my daughter is a bit on the tired side (freaking out over nothing and then not calming down) we put her to bed a good half hour or so before her brother. On these days, when he's the only one watching TV, I usually let him watch an episode of Transformers Animated with me. Of late though he's been hooked on this show called Super WHY! on PBS. It's about this kid named Wyatt who goes with his friends into books and then they find letters to help spell the answer to some pressing problem such as which toy to buy.

Tonight, I gave him the choice of watching either Transformers or Super WHY! and I was extremely surprised to see that he wanted to watch Super WHY!. I guess it's not completely unexpected as every day he tells me that Wyatt turns into Super WHY! that he's Wyatt, that he wears a green mask. Like Wyatt. You know, the guy who turns into Super WHY!. He also tells me about how he tells all of his friends at school that they can play Super Readers at school, but they can't be Super WHY! because he's Super WHY!. Magnanimous to a fault, that's my kid.

I also think that he knows that watching Transformers means he can't stay up as late because it's jam packed with commercials that we just skip through. In fact, the last time we watched it, when it was over he turned to my wife and said that the show was pretty short. He's not wrong, it is pretty damn short, clocking in at just over 20 minutes per episode by the time you cut out the opening and closing credits.

I'm not unhappy that he'd rather watch a show about spelling and reading over a 20+ minute long commercial for toys that, most likely, he won't get. After all, once I'm done buying them for myself, I have very little money left over for others. Hey, I have two jobs, thank you very much. I was surprised though as I would have thought that giant, fighting robots would win over reading any day. Far be it from me to discourage it though. Hell, I'll buy him all of the books he wants, including books about Transformers. I'll even buy him a green mask as I understand that Wyatt wears a green mask. You know, the guy who turns into Super WHY!.

Myst DS review

Man this game was a train wreck. You can sift through the wreckage in my review.

Weekly Weigh In: Week 2

I figured that I'd be in for some problems on Saturday as Friday we had a pot luck at work and people brought in an obscene amount of food. Granted, I didn't have any dinner, so I had almost 24 hours to digest everything but still. Imagine my surprise when Saturday's weigh-in showed 187 and then 186.5, a drop of 1.5 or two pounds, depending on which reading you go with.

Alas, my poor eating continued into the weekend, so that was the last time I'd see those low numbers all weekend. Granted, I didn't eat so much as to gain it all back, I'm not sure that's even physically possible, but still. My scale is, unfortunately, somewhat wonky, so I'm not sure exactly what's going on, however the Wii balance board noticed an uptick as well, so there was definitely some bad stuff going on, the debate is just over how bad it is.

I slacked off pretty heavily with Wii Fit over the week out of nothing but laziness and a desire to play GTA IV however I made up for it by riding the bike an extra 1o minutes a day. Alas, I don't have that luxury this week so it's back to the yoga and push-ups. When you're trying to just get a small work out in, all of the extra crap you have to do in the menus becomes a real pain in the ass. Even so, I should be able to strike a nice balance between Wii Fit and my other gaming this week. Even if the Wii Fit isn't helping so much with the weight loss, I'm definitely getting better at the exercises, so something good is going on.

In other news, I watched the Marvel animated flick The Invincible Iron Man last week while working out and man, what a stupid piece of crap that was. I think I only paid something like five bucks to buy it, but it was still a waste. Now I'm watching the animated Doctor Strange movie, and aside from there being some sort of ridiculous super group of sorcerers, it's not bad. Given that the one guy in the group is shown on the DVD box fighting with Doc Strange, I'm assuming this dude kills everyone else off, leaving Strange as the Sorcerer Supreme. I don't see how this is supposed to be a big deal as apparently they can just recruit any old person to wield Teh Majiks, but I'm sure the movie will explain it all in it's own retarded way. At least the animation for the magic is cool. After this one, I think I'll watch the animated Hellboy movies as I know they're good.

Blinded By the Light

Today I had to have my eyes massively dilated for a LASIK evaluation. The two receptionists made it sound like I was going to be blind for the next 24 hours, but other than needing to wear sunglasses on the way home, and while doing dishes (no shaded on the windows above the sink) and while mowing the lawn, things have been fairly normal. Oh sure, everything has a somewhat blurry tinge to it, and I can't read too well, but other than that, and looking like a junkie, it's all peachy keen.

I'm still not sure if LASIK is an option for me as I may have developed a condition in my right eye that manifests itself as astigmatism, severely so in younger people, and it's not treatable with LASIK. They can install something in your eye, like a contact lens, that stretches the cornea to be more round, or I can just wear a contact in my right eye, neither of which are all that attractive an option. Truth be told, unless I needed the contact to keep my eyes, well eye, from getting worse, I'd probably just go back to glasses. Either that or a monocle, although that last one will require a lot of convincing of ye olde wife.

I'll be having the final LASIK evaluation in the next couple of weeks, and they'll do a corneal topography to see once and for all just how jacked up my eye is. Hopefully not too much and they can fire up the Lasertron 4000 and get things done. Whatever the cause, I'll be sure to share all of my eye slicing stories with all of you. I'm sure you can't wait.

Penny Arcade game review

My review of the Penny Arcade game is up if you're at all interested. It's a fun game, if a little short. I still need to go through it again to get all of the achievements, which makes the short length an asset.

Wowzers

Well, as you can see, my local Walmart had a tremendous amount, if not all, of the Animated Transformers figures. Why Walmart has them, yet they still haven't shipped to me from Hasbro's own toy shop, I have no idea, but there it is.

As much as I'd like to keep each and every one of them, alas, many of them will be going back. Optimus, Megatron, the Optimus vs Megatron 2-pack, Lockdown, Prowl, Bulkhead and Starscream are all going back as I ordered them from the Hasbro Toy Shop with a 20% off coupon along with another, larger Optimus, and I can get all of those toys for about 20 bucks less than what I paid at Walmart, and that's with shipping. It's like getting the Optimus vs Megatron 2-pack free, which is hard to pass up, even with all of these toys right in front of me.

Lugnut, Grimlock, Ratchet and Blackarachnia get to stay as they were ordered without a coupon so it was cheaper to get them at Wallyworld. I will be opening them shortly. Bumblebee also gets to stay as he'll be a gift for my son at some future time. I'll probably also get him a Ratchet to compliment his Rescue Ratchet fast action battler.

I really was amazed at how many they had at my Walmart as two other trips to Walmarts brought nothing but the aforementioned 2-pack. My Walmart usually gets things all sorts of last, so to see so much Animated goodness was unexpected and exciting.

What this means is that I'll be ordering my second order with the Hasbro Toy Shop, the order that contained Lugnut et al, however it also contained my Leader Class Bulkhead and Megatron.
Those two are currently slated to ship the second week of July, and reordering them pushes them back to August, so I think I'll just leave them as canceled and press my luck at retail.

It sucks to have to return the figures, but at the same time, I need time to move my books from the bookshelves in my office to the built-in shelves in the living room to make room for more figures. Also, this way I get a big old box in the mail in a few short weeks containing not only everything I'm returning but an additional Optimus Prime. Plus, I have four new figures to play with. Given all of this, and the money saved by waiting, it'd be silly to keep them all.

Enough talking. Ratchet is a callin'!

Potatoes

I asked my wife what to post about today, and her response was "potatoes". I'm not sure what to do with this, however I try to listen to my wife whenever possible as she is wise beyond her years, and happens to be the only person I'm allowed to have sex with, so I try to follow her advice as much as possible.

So, potatoes. As a rule, I enjoy them. Truth be told, I don't know anyone who doesn't like potatoes in some form. I mean, what's not to like? They're starchy, which makes them filling, and they go well with pretty much anything. Butter? Check. Sour cream? Check. Bacon? Check. I mean, name one other food that can be covered in butter, sour cream and bacon and taste that good. I'm sure there are others out there, but can any of them be cooked, then scraped out of their crispy shell, have their filling mixed with cheese, butter, sour cream and bacon and then shoved back in themselves, only to go back in the oven? Well, sure, cats, but other than cats? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Fried, scalloped, tater totted, hash browned, twice backed, new, red, roasted, in a casserole, in a Shepard's Pie, covering sausage in a dish of Bangers and Mash in Irish Pub, in a tasty stew, kicking it with some pot roast, if there's a way to make potatoes, by God, I'll eat them.

So there you go. Potatoes. Great food, or the greatest food? You be the judge.

Wii Fit Mayhem

Once again GameShark flexes it's synergistic muscle and runs both my review of Wii Fit and my Wii Fit themed Mr. Binky column.

Linda took all of the pictures for the column so you can thank her for displaying my slothful, slug-like frame in all of its glory. The balance board really does make an excellent cutting board and step stool, which is something Nintendo should investigate for future marketing materials. You're welcome, Nintendo.

First Weekly Weigh In

The results of the first weekly weigh in are here and my weight has dropped to, drum roll please....

...188 pounds.

Woo-hoo! I know that this is still a large number, however it represents a 3.5 lb loss since I started the whole exercise thing two weeks ago. I can't see a difference in the waist line yet, and according to my scale, my body fat percentage is roughly the same, but hey, I'll take the weight loss. Let's just hope it isn't water.

This past week was the first week where I dieted as well as really tried to get my heart rate up and I think it helped to get things going. I figure that between burning off 300 calories a day and taking in 300 less calories a day, I can lose around a pound a week. That will make my goal of 16 pounds in 3 months hard to meet, but at least the process has started. This week with both kids home from daycare, I can work out a little longer in the morning, so hopefully that will help too. I also continue to rock the Wii Fit every day for about 20 minutes of activity (not menu surfing, actual activity) which can only help in the weight loss process. I can't say that I feel much more toned, but my scores are, for the most part, improving, so I must be doing something right. I can tell you that the dancer yoga pose is pretty fucking difficult. I mean, zero points and nothing but pain difficult. I think I'll work up to that one.

More updates next week after Saturday's weigh in.

Progress Report

Greetings, time for a progress report on the various things going on our lives. I have a post in mind about this whole Scott McClellan thing, but I think I'll wait for tomorrow for that.

On the daycare front, today was Abby's last day at her current school. They had agreed to let us keep her there until next week, but after her being home on Tuesday for biting, we came to the decision that it was just too stressful to have her someplace where she could come home every day and then we'd have to be pissed at her all day. This means that she'll have a week off between her past school and her new school, but it's better than paying for a week of school that she never attends.

To make sure that she had a proper send off today, Abby bit someone after two days on the biting wagon. To illustrate part of the reason why I think she still does this, I'll quote the "incident report" from her school in regards to the biting. Ahem.

"Abby bit one of her friends on the right hand because she didn't want them to touch a ruler on the teacher's desk. I told Abby that biting her friend is not ok. I also sent Abby to play at the Lego table to play by herself for a while until she calms down."

Ok, now again, I don't expect the school to raise my kid for me, but I do expect a little more punishment than being told to go play at the Lego table. I mean, even if she did have to play by herself, she's still playing! Had she bitten at home she would have been put in the corner for at least 3.5 minutes, probably longer. She wouldn't be playing, she'd most likely be crying. We're hoping that a week off will kind of reset her need to bite and that the next school will do more as a punishment than offering construction toys.

On the working out side, today marks two weeks of working out every day, save one day on the weekend. It is the single longest consecutive stretch of exercise I have ever undertaken. Linda has been doing it with me too, although she walked daily for a long while so she has a way to go before she breaks her record, and I am quite proud of both of us. I've been Wii Fitting it every night, alternating between strength training and yoga, and while I'm not sure that I'm seeing results quite yet, I think that I'm getting better at the poses. It's hard to tell at times. Tomorrow is my day off from working out so I'm going to use it as my weekly weigh in. I think I've lost some weight, but the exact amount won't be known until tomorrow. It's all very exciting, that is until I see no progress and I binge on pork ribs. Whatever the case may be, progress or pounds of pork fat, I'll update here so that you can share in my success or despair. Fun times.

Gone Fitting

No real post today on account of Wii Fit encompassing my time. My review is due tomorrow and these exercises aren't going to unlock themselves.

Pride, I No Has It

I cheated at Wii Fit today.

I didn't cheat on a yoga pose, or pretend to do more jackknifes than I actually did. Instead I cheated at a balance board game. Personally, I think that's worse as the game cares when I do my push-ups wrong, and gets quite snotty actually, but could care less at how poorly I do at the balance board games.

There's this one game where you use the board to direct your bubble encased Mii down a river, dodging bees and the riverbank at the same time. If you even brush up against the bank the bubble pops and presumably you drown. Time and time again I got to the same damn point, burst my bubble and sank into the icy deep. I got so frustrated that I got down on my hands and knees, offered a prayer of apology to the gaming gods and used my hands to navigate the treacherous waters. My reward was a journey under a rainbow, applause by the other Miis on my system and the ability to traverse the advanced course. Great. As if the easy course wasn't hard enough on my balance deficient ass.

I'm chalking up my subterfuge to the fact that I needed to win to see what happened for review purposes and not because I'm a cheating bastard that refuses to be beaten by a glorified bathroom scale. That's my story and it'll take more than several drowned Miis to change it, but you're welcome to try.

Stresstastic

I can't believe that it was just a month or so ago when Linda and I went on vacation and got a chance to relax and get away from the stress of everything. While I'm glad we went, and got to do a lot of cool things and eat a lot of good food, from a stress perspective, I might as well just have stayed home. Sometimes life sucks that way.

The object of constant consternation in our home is my daughter who just got herself kicked out of daycare because she won't stop gnawing on her classmates. In all actuality, she wasn't kicked out of school, we removed her, for two reasons. First is that the school's way to treat the biting was to call us every time she bit so that we could come get her and take her home for the rest of the day. Seeing how she usually bites in the morning, we are essentially paying for her to be home all day long. The second reason we removed her was that perhaps a change of venue is what she needs to get it through her thick skull that she can't bite people.

The aforementioned daycare strategy wasn't working, so we had little choice in the matter. To make matters worse, or better depending on your viewpoint, she doesn't do this at home, not with her brother, not with either of us, not when she has friends over for play dates. Given that she is three years of age, we've been told that we can't punish her after the fact because she won't associate the crime with the time, so given that it only happens at school, we can't punish her for it come 4:30 w. If we could, I guarantee that it would stop because girlfriend is well acquainted with the corner at home and that has nipped most things in the bud. We told her school that she needs a firm hand, due to her stubborn will, but to them that means they talk to her about how we don't bite our friends and then they release her back into the wild, visions of steak sauce drenched classmates dancing in her head.

The irony of the situation is that she's still not eating, so her classmates are pretty much the only things she will bite.

When daycare calls to tell us that she has bitten, one of us, usually Linda, goes and gets her, reads her the riot act, brings her home, has her sit in the corner for an hour and then, well, that's about all we can do. It isn't healthy or easy to be angry at your kid all day, and I don't know if it would do anything anyway. On Friday, I pretty much ignored her as she played while I worked, making sure that she wasn't getting into any trouble, and she was fairly happy, even with the restrictions I placed on where she could go and what she could do. All that has happened is that Abby has learned that if she bites, she gets to go home, endure some punishment and then is away from school, which she doesn't like in the first place.

Now, I'm not saying that it is the school's job to raise my kid, however at the same time, given that, at this age, the punishment has to be immediate, I'm a little irritated that their way of dealing with things up to this point has been to basically "talk it out" and then offload the problem entirely. I'm even more irritated that we've been paying for her to be at school only to have her come home at 9 in the morning. Our family and our pediatrician seem to think that there's something about the current school that she doesn't like, hence the biting and the going in her pants (she's fully potty trained at home too, by the way) which, while I may agree with, I also think that life is filled with instances of having to be somewhere you'd rather not and the solution isn't to then take a dump in your pants and bite someone. Obviously this logic has to be adjusted for the three year old which can't be reasoned with, but even so, my initial thought is to tell her to just get over it.

Hopefully the new school will either address the biting more directly or she just won't associate those kids with tasty treats and we can stop worrying about her being kicked out. Even with that, it'll still be a pain in the ass as her brother will be at the current daycare for two months, which means two different schools for pick up and drop-off every morning and every afternoon. Plus, her new school costs more and is open less, but given that Ben will be in public school, and treated to a boatload of vacation days, we'd probably have her home anyway when he is to make it easier on all parties involved. Given how poorly he reacted to his new school at the kindergarten registration process, I'm hoping that he doesn't think he can get out of going there by biting other kids because there is no other place to go. Once they leave daycare my days of paying for school are on hiatus until college.

So it's been a stressful time at home, and a time with no real answers. Maybe the new school will help things, maybe it won't. We have an appointment with a developmental pediatrician at the end of the month to see if she's just mean or bat shit crazy to boot, which hopefully we'll be able to cancel because being at the new school will fix things. I'm thinking it won't, and she still doesn't eat much, so even if we have to cancel that appointment, I'm sure having a tube put in her stomach is also down the line, leading to more stress and sleepless nights. On the plus side, it's just sixteen short years before she leaves the house. *sigh*

Add to this the fact that today I started my diet to lose these confounded pounds and you have one stressed and grumpy individual. Usually I'd eat to deal with my stress, but I can't do that, and I have no idea where to buy crack if I even wanted to go that route. Not to play into every psychotic gamer stereotype, but GTA IV helps somewhat. Stealing a motorcycle and practicing wheelies on the airport tarmac is oddly therapeutic, and I don't have to harm anyone in the process. Hooray for nonviolent theft!

Wii Fit Impressions

Despite having picked Wii Fit up yesterday, I didn't get a chance to play with it and do a workout until today. After spending over an hour with the game, I have emerged from my man cave laden with knowledge and am prepared to let you take a bite of its luscious fruit.

First, some words about the hardware. It is surprisingly heavy and very sturdy. It would have to be given that it can support up to something like 300 pounds. The board comes with four feet extenders so that if you're playing in a room with carpet, and the carpet touches the bottom of the board you can raise it up. The top of the board is nice and grip-y, which, again, it would have to be as Nintendo recommends that you play the game barefoot. I'm kind of surprised that they tell you not to wear shoes as shoes traditionally worn while working out have enough tread to not send you careening into the walls. I mean, it's not a treadmill. It's a scale for frak's sake.

But I digress. As a scale, it's pretty damn accurate. I've been checking my weight regularly, against the recommendations of both Linda and Andy, and the balance board had my weight and Linda's weight correctly. My BMI is enough that I'm considered overweight, which came as no surprise, and for this, my Mii was rewarded with a little pot belly. Linda's BMI is normal so her Mii remained unchanged.

I tried all of the workouts available to me from the beginning and man, I am horrible at most of them. The yoga ones are some of the hardest as I have zero balance. It doesn't help that I have low ceilings in the basement so some of the stretching is difficult. The trainer does a pretty good job of showing you how to do the exercises, so it's not to hard to follow along, as long as your legs aren't screaming in pain like mine were. The strength training is a bit of a mixed bag. The trainer does a good job of showing you how to do a push-up, however they don't show you what things will look like on the screen while you're doing the push-ups so you end up trying to watch the screen and do a push-up followed by a side plank at the same time. It's kind of difficult. Once you do enough of the strength training exercises you figure out how to listen for the whistle and do things, but until you see it a few times, you're going to tank on them. For the record, jackknifes suck.

The aerobic stuff is just ok. I am apparently the worst hula-hooper in the known universe as not only can I not swing my hips, but I can't catch hula hoops thrown to my by the other Mii's, including the one I made to represent our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. My lack of skills shamed the Son of God, so poor were my skills. The step class, or performance, was equally problematic as I couldn't get the rhythm or the steps down but eventually I got it. I think it just takes time. The running was silly, and, in my opinion, not particularly good for you as I would think running in place would be bad for your legs, but if you put the Wiimote in your pocket and ride an exercise bike, aside from some pacing issues, you'll do fine.

The balance games are fun, and the ski jump is a hoot, even if I have no idea what I'm doing. The best game though is the version of Marble Madness you play by using the balance board to navigate one or more marbles, emblazoned with the heads of your Mii's, into holes on the board within the time limit. It's a lot of fun and surprisingly hard. The slalom race if fun but it's not long enough. The tightrope is pretty tough and I have yet to make it across without plunging to my death.

At the end of my workout, I had gotten my heart rate good and up and my legs definitely were sore for the effort. I'm not a big fan of how an hour of total time only nets you about 30 minutes of credit towards unlocking other exercises, but at the same time, once you know how to do things you can skip all of the demos and go right to the exercises. I've unlocked something like three new exercises which I'm eager to try tomorrow, even if it means more accursed lunges.

As for whether or not the game will keep you working out, hell, I have no idea. Yoga and strength training can't be done while you're doing something else, for someone like me who hates exercising just to exercise, there's not a lot of extra to keep you doing those things. The cardio stuff and the balance board stuff definitely has enough extra to keep you occupied should you need that kind of thing. All in all, I'd say it's a good tool to get people started on the road to fitness and has the right balance of encouragement and shame to keep you going. The ability to add in any additional exercising you're doing every day is nice, even if the choices are limited and you can't add a lot of detail like miles ran or weights and reps. I'm just hoping that the game gives me credit for biking every day so that I don't have to have Jesus throw more hoops at me.

The balance board is an interesting enough peripheral that I think some really great games could be made for it. Personally, I would love a surfing game and I think they could pull it off to great effect with the board.

Is it worth 90 bucks? I don't know. Like any other piece of exercise equipment, and honestly you have to treat is at such until you know for certain what other games will be supported, it's only worth the money if you're going to spend the time with it and honestly push yourself. If you're not willing to do that, don't waste your money.

I've also started playing the Penny Arcade game, which is a hoot and a half, but I'll discuss that at another time. What I can tell you is that it makes a 30 minute workout go by in about ten seconds flat.

Suck it Chelsea

Edwin van der Sar's fantastic save on penalty kicks means that Manchester United are the kings of Europe! For the third time, no less!

Well played boys!

Scheduling Difficulties

Wii Fit drops tomorrow, much to the chagrin of everyone who thought it was coming out today, including various retailers. The Penny Arcade game also comes out tomorrow. As I'm reviewing both of them, my current plan is to play the PA game on my laptop, provided that the demo runs smoothly. I certainly don't want any hardware issues causing problems as I won't know if the issue is with my laptop or with the game itself. I like the idea of playing the PA game on the 360 as there are achievements and you can carry your character over to the next episode, but playing two console games at the same time may prove problematic. Luckily, one of these games is an exercise game, and I've recently started exercising in the morning, thereby giving me time to play.

The bottom line is that both games will get played, both games will get my full attention and both games will get reviewed. It's just a matter of which platforms they end up getting played on. I'm interested in seeing how both games turn out as I think that both have the potential for going either way. Between the two, if one is going to tank, I'd rather it be the PA game as I'm only paying 20 bucks for that one, as opposed to 90 for Wii Fit. Dollar dollar bill, y'all. Here's hoping neither one sucks and my 110 bucks buys me fits of eternal bliss.

The Third Day of the Rest of Your (Exercise) Life

Today was the third day of working out with my spiffy, new exercise bike, but the first day of waking up early to do so. Mr. Andrew Smith, my personal trainer, turned me on to something called Bonk Training whereby you get up at the crack of dawn, pound some black coffee or caffeine pills, bike for 20 - 90 minutes at about 60% of your max heart rate and then don't eat for about 30 minutes while your stomach starts to digest your liver.

The idea is that your metabolism gets a kick-start from the caffeine and then starts eating all of those tasty, tasty fat cells while you work out. Work out too hard and your body starts looking to your muscle cells for energy, don't work out hard enough and your just sweaty, tired and with a serious case of the jitters. By not eating, you keep the fat burning until you can replenish it with real food.

So far I've learned a few things. First, I can't do black coffee on an empty stomach. It makes me somewhat queasy. This is ok as I'm not planning on getting up early enough for the caffeine to kick in any way and I'm so used to being up at that time, that I don't need the extra jolt. My metabolism will just have to get motivated like the rest of me, through boundless amounts of shame. The second thing I've learned is that when you work out in this manner, you are ravenously hungry all day long. I've been doing the small meal thing throughout the day to keep the metabolic fires going, but man, I am starving all of the time. I've been eating a little less to help things along, which doesn't help matters, but I wouldn't think it would make me this hungry. I can only hope that the burning hunger means that my metabolism is going, even when I'm not. If so, then feast my hungry metabolism! Feast on fat until you are sated!

My goal is to get down to 175, which was my weight when we moved here. That means a loss of about 16 pounds, a tall order indeed, but one I think I can attain. I have a room full of movies I've never watched, a comfy bike to ride and an insatiable hunger to harness. How can I fail?

Iron Man review up

On the same day that GameFly receives my returned copy of Iron Man for the PSP the review shows up on GameShark. Coincidence? You decide!

One of my favorite things about working for GameShark, other than my editor continually firing me, is that they allow me to use phrases like "the heady stink of frustration". Creative freedom at it's finest, ladies and gentlemen.

A Tale of Two Games

I got a bevy of games for my birthday, including Grand Theft Auto IV, Condemned 2: Bloodshot, Okami on the Wii, and my new personal favorite, Boom Blox. I've been spending most of my time with GTA IV and Boom Blox and I'm here to chat a little about both.

They kind or represent both ends of the gaming spectrum right now, both in terms of the types of experiences that they provide, and the systems that they're on. On the one hand you have which has an absolutely huge, seamless world in it, filled with emotional characters, plenty of chaos causing fun and requires an absolute beast of a machine to run. On the other hand you have Boom Blox, which is a very simple concept, requires no real emotional investment and could only be done on the Wii. Both are incredibly different and speak to different user bases, but both are a lot of fun to play.

I played GTA III and got to a point where I just didn't care about the main character any more. Wreaking mayhem was fun, but eventually got boring and the various control issues meant that I couldn't progress. It didn't help that there was so much to do, that I couldn't figure out what I wanted to spend my time doing. In GTA IV, you care about Niko Bellic from the beginning. He's just a guy who comes to Liberty City based on the boasts of his cousins, only to find out that his cousin is full of shit. Niko just wants to leave his old life behind and make a new one, only to find out that his new life is just as bad as the old one. You feel for the guy, and while his missions usually involve some sort of criminal undertaking, it doesn't feel like the wanton blood letting of previous installments. The game also has a much better learning curve this time, slowly bringing you into the thick of things before stuff gets too hairy.

The dating and various friends you can build relationships have the potential to get annoying, but at the same time, it's nice to take time in between missions and just tool around with a pretty girl on your arm. My time spent getting achievements have reined in my OCD somewhat so that I can focus on the various collection and racing and assassination missions all at one time, rather than get sidetracked by the various activities open to me. The driving is still annoying, however I've already learned how to weave through the streets without causing too much damage which helps when I need to make a fast exit. The GPS is genius, and makes a huge difference, as does the new wanted system. I don't know if the game is worth 10 out of 10, but so far I'm enjoying myself and when my phone rings, I look forward to whatever act of villainy I get to partake in.

Boom Blox is a casual gamer's dream. It's brightly lit, with lots of cute, domino shaped characters and has a very simple mechanic. Each stage starts with a tower or some other structure. There may be point blox or bomb blox, or chemical blox that blow up when they touch another chemical blox. By using the Wiimote to place the targeting reticle on a block and swinging the remote you launch a ball at the blox and try and knock down the tower. Some stages may require simply finding the weakest point and throwing with all of your might, while others may require a softer touch to knock some blox out of the way while not disturbing blox that take points away. Later stages have a Jenga feel to it where you use the Wiimote to pull blox out of the structure, or even more fun, pick a block up and swing it around as if it's connected to a rubber band, wrecking everything in sight.

Each stage has Bronze, Silver and Gold medals and they're usually based on either getting a certain point score with the limited number of balls you have to throw, or knocking down the entire structure with as few throws as possible. Holding down the B button allows you to move the camera around so that you can see the structure from all angles, however the lack of a zoom button can make it harder than it needs to be. For the most part though, it works really well.

Throwing the balls is a blast, and the game is pretty damn responsive when you have to change up your throwing speed to simply nudge a block, rather than knock it out of the park. My only complaint is that the physics can be a bit of a crap shoot some times. When you knock a tower down, you may have point blox or gem blox that fall onto the rubble, rather than the ground and don't get counted towards your score, so even though you may have knocked the whole thing down with one shot, you don't get the gold. Even when this happens, it's still fun to knock it down again, or tweak your initial strategy so that it blasts the whole thing to hell, so it's not that big of a deal.

Boom Blox is a game that you can pick up and play for 15 minutes and have a great time, but at the same time, the puzzles suck you in so that you can easily lose more time than that. GTA IV requires a much more substantial time sink unless you just want to drive around running people over, which gets boring pretty quickly. I don't know if you could play Boom Blox for hours at a time, like you could GTA IV, but who cares if you can't? Pick it up for 30 minutes, drop some towers, throw some bowling balls at rectangular sheep and call it a day. Then switch over to GTA IV, go out on a date, beat up some loansharks, do some stunt jumps and then watch some tv back at your apartment. Between the two of them, you'll have plenty of fun, and lots of different types of fun gaming moments. It's hard to go wrong with either one.

The Cold, Hard Truth

So I've been dieting this week as I need to lose almost 20 pounds and I've come to the realization that I absolutely hate dieting. I'm not sure anyone loves dieting, but to not be able to eat what I want sucks. Hard. Up until this week, I thought that dieting was my only option as I hate exercising too, however what this week has taught me is that my hatred for exercise is nothing compared to my hatred for watching what I eat.

As a result, it's time to put my exercise plan into motion. As we all know, I hate exercising because it's boring and with the limited free time I have, I don't want to spend it out playing the few sports I do enjoy like tennis or racquetball. Given that I like spending my free time playing video games, what if there were a way for me to exercise while playing games and not just Wii Fit? Enter the recumbent exercise bike.

I have room in my basement to put a recumbent bike in so that I can ride it while playing video games. Given that it's in the basement, it'll be out of the way so that I don't have to move it around unless Linda and I want to watch a movie. With a heart rate monitor to make sure I'm spending as much time pedaling as I do playing, there's no reason I can't bike for 45 minutes or so every evening. Looking up things on the laptop while playing will be a problem, but with the proper planning, I'm sure I can even mitigate those issues to a certain degree. I've already tested my plan out on various exercise bikes, and they all have wide enough seats to be able to sit, pedal and play without fear of falling out and injuring yourself.

Now, I'm not saying that with this plan I'll be able to eat what I want, as I've gotten into plenty of bad eating habits of late that have to stop, but hopefully spending more time exercising will mean less time counting calories. The only problem will be when I'm playing or have to review Wii games, as if there are any motion controls, I'll probably wipe out and break something. I'll have to figure something out for those times as I plan on playing Okami at some point and I don't want to explain to the emergency room doctor why I was waggling and driving at the same time.

I'll do my best to keep you up to date on my fitness progress, unless a) I don't stick with it or b) I exercise my ass off and don't lose weight. Then I'll just hide in shame.

New Top Ten List

It's been two weeks since GameShark's latest Top Ten list, and this time it's my turn. I return to fine form with the Top Ten Non-Shooter Shooters. Flame on!

Buying my Childhood Ten Dollars at a Time

The new Indiana Jones toys are out and while I hadn't planned on getting any of them, once I saw the set where Indy is trying to steal the idol from the beginning of Raiders, I couldn't resist.

While not canonical in that removing the idol didn't cause a bear trip to spear Indy's genitals, it is still a fun little toy. Pulling out the idol causes the "jaws" to spring shut, unless the bottom portion of the pedestal is rotated until it makes a clicking noise. If only Indy knew about this ahead of time, he could have saved himself a bunch of time and all that rock dodging.

The other toy in the line I'm interested is the Adventure Heroes set containing Belloq and a ghost from the Arc of the Covenant.

I find it hilarious that Belloq is so happy, what with the cheery ghost next to him is about to make his head explode. I guess if you haven't seen the movie, you'll think that they're about to shake their massive hands together and then go get a cream soda. Of course, if I buy it and then explain to people why I have it, I'll get more of the strange looks I've grown so accustomed to, so perhaps I'll skip it and just giggle in the toy aisle.

The World Ends With You

My review of The World Ends With You is up an this is a game that really has to be played for you to appreciate just how fantastic it is. If you read Penny Arcade, you'll know that Tycho is as in love with it as I am, and his posts go a long way towards explaining all the fun little quirks, more so than I could do in a review. You can check his take on it here and here.

On the one hand, I probably wouldn't have played it if I didn't have to review it, so I'm glad for the review, but on the other hand, having to rush through a game like this really does it a disservice. It should be explored and savored to really be enjoyed. Thankfully I still have tons of pins to evolve and items to buy and Noise to take out, so there's still a lot of enjoyment to be had.

Just to give you an idea of how much this game has seeped into my every day existence, today I read about how Nintendo just released a new channel for the Wii that will allow you to download game demos to your DS. As one of the ways to level up pins in TWEWY is to put the game in Mingle Mode and find another, any other, DS wireless signal, my immediate thought what that I can use my Wii to level up my pins. Demos? Fuck demos. I'm all about the pins baby.

All about the pins.

I'm on a roll, so I might as well just wrap up today's post now so that I have more time to play the mediocre slice of blasé pie that is Iron Man for the PSP. Yesterday my toy hunting was rewarded with both a Salvage and a Stealth Bumblebee. Stealth Bumblebee is a glorious toy. It's the new Camaro version, so it's a very stylish mold, and not so danged foot heavy as the beater Camaro version. The stealth version is yellow on black though, and with the translucent blue windows and the electric blue paint apps and the new head sculpt, it is one extremely pretty toy. He rocks he box with First Strike Optimus on the speaker in my home theatre room. Peep the gallery at Seibertron.com until I can get some pics up.

Salvage is interesting not only because he's a very nice repaint of Dropkick, one of my favorite new toys, but because of his character biography. Basically, he was a salvage truck until he was brought to life by the Allspark and now even though he's an Autobot and he's all for good and shit, he really just wants to go back to being a truck. I find that very interesting and very depressing at the same time. Assuming that he wasn't a sentient truck before being turned into a Transformer, he had no life at all, and then, once given life, he's immediately drawn into this conflict. That made me wonder if there is a class war of some sort between the Transformers from Cybertron that were Transformers pretty much from the start and the ones newly created on Earth. I mean, if my coffee table suddenly became sentient, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't give it equal say in various family matters. That got me thinking to how the new Transformers would pick sides once they became Transformers. On the face of things, the Decepticons turn into much more powerful vehicles, so they'd seem to have the advantage. And if you were, say a Ford Escort your whole life, and your owner treated you like shit, maybe you'd be pretty pissed and wouldn't want to save them from a life of enslavement. On the other hand, maybe you just like humans? That seems like the weaker of the two arguments. I don't know. All I do know is that if the 200 word character biography on the back of a toy can get me thinking that much, it's worth a purchase. I also know that I need to get out more and that I need to do some maintenance on my push mower because I've neglected that thing so much that if it comes alive it'll be looking to mulch my face off.

5th Adoption Day

Today marks the 5th anniversary of us adopting our son Ben. As per the usual, we went out for Orange Chicken at Panda Express and then got ice cream. What can I say? The boy loves his Orange Chicken.

Five years ago we went to court in Russia and told the judge that we were so concerned about the dry skin on my son's cheek that it warranted immediate medical attention. Yeah. Some situations call for exaggeration and this was one of them. It was either that or spend two weeks in Russia waiting for all of the paperwork to go through. You'd be surprised at what you'll say in court when facing the threat of spending another two weeks eating nothing but granola bars and rationing the bottled water for teeth brushing so that you don't get dysentery.

After we went to court, we were supposed to go back to the hotel, get some sleep and then pick Ben up the next day and go back to Moscow but instead they decided that we'd pick him right up and drive back to Moscow. Just to set the stage for this trip, driving in rural Russia is one of the scariest driving situations you'll be in. The roads are atrocious, and thin. Everyone drives about a billion miles an hour, and if there's a large truck on the road, your driver has no problem swinging out into the opposing lane, even if another truck in said lane is about to paste your ass. Driving in these conditions when it's just you is one thing, but driving in these conditions holding on to your new, seven month old son is something else entirely. I thought we were all going to die, and worse, that I just spent a boatload of money adopting a kid that was going to die with us. At one point I went in the back of the van to mix up Ben's bottle, our driver hit a pothole at Mach 5 and the formula literally exploded all over me. Nice. It's a good thing our driver couldn't speak English as he would have learned a new English word, that word being "fuckstick".

Once we got back to the hotel they dropped us off and left. Linda and I had discussed this in the past, and I had said that there was no way they would take two people who have never had a kid, give them an infant and just leave. Not only would they do that, but they did just that. While in the room, everyone was all smiles, including Ben but once we said goodbye to our coordinator and that door shut, Ben erupted. E-rupted. It didn't help that we forgot one of the basic ideas of feeding a baby, namely that cold formula doesn't cut it. Unfortunately we didn't rectify that little mental error until the next morning, so we were stuck trying to pacify a baby who had been perfect up until that point. Somehow we managed to get him calmed down, get him fed and cleaned up his incredibly stanky person.

Then we rode in an elevator with a prostitute.

I'm not kidding about that last part. All of the adoption books we read about adopting from Russia mentioned that the hotel we were staying at had lots and lots of prostitutes that hung out in the hotel lounge in the evening. True enough, this place was packed with hookers. We decided to take Ben for a walk down in the lobby, forgetting this fact, and rode down with a hooker and her john. I'm assuming he was a john, because if he wasn't, girlfriend had a fetish for the dentally impaired. While we're going down in the elevator, the hooker kept talking to Ben in Russian. It was all very odd. I'm sure she was a very nice person, but I'd just as soon not have a hooker be one of the first people our son hangs out with upon being adopted. I'm kind of old fashioned that way.

There are other stories to tell, but those can wait for another time. For now, I'm happy he joined our family and glad that I never have to go back to Russia. Four times was enough, thank you very much. As far as I know, I've never ridden in an elevator with another prostitute, however I'm not in the habit of asking that of those I'm riding with. I may not know a lot, but I know that much.

One Year of Binky

Hard to believe that I've been working for GameShark for over a year now, but it's true. To commemorate this glorious anniversary, today's Mr. Binky column makes fun of everything about being a game reviewer. Enjoy.

What I Learned on Summer Vacation

As I mentioned before, I was planning on writing this multi-day post talking all about our trip when I mentioned it to Linda and her response was to ask me if anyone cared that much. I'm thinking probably not, as if my own wife, who was there, doesn't care, then you probably won't either. Instead, I'll summarize our trip in today's post, bullet point style. Shazam! So, without further ado, here's what I learned on my summer vacation.

• The Texas landscape is like nothing I've ever seen. You'll be driving along and it's all flat, but it's not farm land, it's just grass, with occasional lines of trees. There's land every where that appears to not being used for anything. Maybe cows graze there, but there aren't any crops. Then you get to Austin and suddenly there are huge hills with houses built into them. What the hell? Where the hills came from, I have no idea. Suddenly they were just there.
• Texas highways are similarly weird. You'll have a long stretch of interstate with nothing on both sides but the aforementioned crazy land. Then one or two lanes will appear, as if from nowhere, on both sides of the interstate, running parallel to the highway, populated with strip malls, restaurants and various big box stores. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, the lanes are gone. Most highways I've driven on, you can see the stores from the highway, but you still have to pull off of the highway and drive a little to get there. Not so in Texas.
• The County Line, of Austin BBQ fame, has good brisket, but my brisket is better. I'm not saying, I'm just saying. Their smoked sausage, on the other hand, single handedly provides a reason for pigs to live. It was the best smoked sausage I've ever had. Their pecan pie is a work of genius as well. It's a deep dish pie with just the right amount of sweetness to it and a crust so light and buttery you'd think it was made from buttered photons. Were I able to go back in time, I'd get the smoked sausage platter and two slices of pie.
• Texas pecans are wonderful. I couldn't eat enough of them. Texas pecans combined with caramel until they're the size of a baby's fist and then covered in chocolate cures all that ails you, unless what ails you is an allergy to chocolate and nuts, at which point they'll probably kill you.
• The Hyatt Lost Pines Resort and Spa is a fantastic place to stay with beautiful grounds and impeccable service. Every person you come across at this place is super nice and very cheerful. Plus, the place has an adult only pool, so after spending some time lazily drifting down the "river" that cuts through the pools you can retire to the adult pool and get away from the kids that no doubt, annoyed the crap out of you while you were drifting. Plus, they have s'mores every night from 7 - 9 so after a day of walking around the trails and avoiding snakes and poison ivy, you can gorge yourself on more chocolate.
• San Antonio is kind of gross. The River Walk is nice, but once you've done it, there's no reason to stick around. Well, there wasn't any reason for us. Frankly, I was a little scared.
• Austin is nicer than San Antonio, but it seems that Austin is a better city at night, what with all of the clubs. The green space along the river is nice, but there's a lot of construction going on at the moment, so it kind of ruins the mood. The state capitol is nice, until you get to the huge statue celebrating those that died fighting for the Confederacy, I'm sorry for "state's rights". I'm all for state's rights, until it's the right to own another human being as a piece of property. Then I think you can shove your statue up your ass.
• There is an Irish pub in Austin called Fadó, which, unbeknownst to us, is a chain restaurant. Whatever. They poured a perfect Guinness and my fish and chips was off the chain. After walking in the hot Austin sun for a couple of hours, the Guinness went down smooth as silk.
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall is way funny.
• Central time is somewhat offputting. I don't know how people in that time zone watched TV prior to VCR's or DVR's. Getting everything done by 7 so that you can watch prime time is a bit of a pain in the ass. When do they play video games?
• If you eat so much over your trip so that you're never hungry, you tend to not appreciate your meals as much, however you appreciate your snacks more. Odd.
• If you've been driving with a GPS for the past year, you lose all ability to read a map. At this point, paying 50 bucks to get a GPS in the rental is better than continually getting lost, possibly leading to fights with your spouse. Just buck up, admit that you have no idea where you're going, and rent the damn GPS.
  

That's all I can remember at the moment. I'll cover the Atlanta part of the trip as well as the Springsteen concert later on this week. All in all, we had a great time. It was very relaxing and wonderful to eat when we wanted to, not be back at any special time and generally just relax. It was tough to come home, but I think I'm all adjusted by now. If I could just get more of those pecans, I'd be perfect.

I Almost Forgot

It's the first of May. We all know what that means.

The Things That Carried Him

Esquire magazine has an excellent piece up called "The Things That Carried Him" about a fallen soldier's final trip home from Iraq.

It is a very well reported and well written piece however it is also gut wrenching to read and I came to tears several times while reading it. It has stuck with me all day today and at times, I well up just thinking about it. That being said, it absolutely deserves your attention. Regardless of your position on the war, the fact remains that there are plenty of people responsible for ensuring that our fallen military members make it home with dignity and respect, and the burden that these people take on, willingly in many cases, to try and lessen the grief of others is commendable. Obviously, I'd love for every one of those people to not have these kind of jobs to do, but sadly, they have plenty of work, and I'm sure that every family member left behind appreciates their efforts. I know that I do.

It's easy, as you go about your day and the coffee machine is on the fritz, or you have some bullshit meeting to attend, to be up in arms about your situation. We all have off days, Lord knows I've had more than my fair share, however when I read something like this it helps put things in perspective. I mean, we're all allowed to have crappy days, but my crappy day would be nothing compared to what some of these people see on an hourly basis. Similarly, it's hard to not feel anything but grief for the family left behind by the soldier at the focus of the article. Sure, my kids bug the crap out of me at time, but I still have them, can still hug them and love them and be bugged by them. To imagine that loss is harrowing.

Any way, it's a tough piece to read, but it's well worth it, if only to get an understanding of the many men and women who are there for the members of our military, and their families, should a soldier fall.