Friday, May 15, 2009

The New Trek

Saw it last night while Amy was in class. Good and very pretty, but it has a pretty bad case of the stupids in spots.

A few examples? The villian's ship has a bad case of flame factory. The interior has huge open spaces and lots of platforms with no railings that forebode future plummeting. The Enterprise wasn't any better. Several scenes in the engineering spaces made me wonder when Scotty was going to have to work his way through the Chompers. And Jim Kirk went from being a bad ass to being the galaxy's punching bag. I don't think he wins a fight in the whole movie. And when did Chekov become competent?

I felt similar to when I first watched Deadwood. Deadwood was every cliched Western I'd ever seen, but with more dirt, profanity, and general immorality of screen. Star Trek was every sci-fi cliche I'd ever seen, but shined up until everything glowed.

But boy was it pretty.

Friday, May 01, 2009

Not Stimulated Enough

I had my meeting to price out a new central air unit. It's going to hurt, but I'm going to do it anyway. The new unit will be 40% more efficient and will be probably be under parts and labor warranty for as long as I'm likely to own this house. It will also have humidity control which the current unit lacks and, in my mind, is practically mandatory for any sort of forced air unit.

Oh and the tax breaks and stimulus money? Yeah he told me not to expect any. In order to qualify for federal dollars I'd need an insane SERE rating. State money is limited by funded and the money is almost always spent by now. About all I can expect is a tax deduction come next April.