I see what you did

So I’m watching the premier of dollhouse this weekend and notice something weird.  During the first season, for all but the last commercial of the show, they will tell you "Dollhouse back in 60s" (or 90s).  All of the commercial breaks were 60 or 90 long except for the last one which was about 150-180 long.

 

During this premier, NONE of the commericals announced how long they would be.  I estimated and they were all about as long as the last commerical would be in the first season.  That means that instead of 4 1.5 minute commercials, we suddnely had 4 3 minute commercials.  I want my 6 minutes of show back, A-holes.

 

Commercials are the thing I put up with in order to get free tv.  Which reminds me, I pay comcast for my tv so why do I have to put up with commercials at all?  Oh wait, I fast forward through them anyway so you should stop bothering to try to sell me something and give me more plot back…

Home Movies

There are a couple of directors out there that like a particular style of Filmography (I’m not sure what to call it so I’m calling it that).  In some films it happens only during certain scenes and is fairly subtle.  In other films, it happens all of the time.

 

I may have blogged about this in the past wrt the later Bourne movies as this style was incredibly pronounced in those movies.  The affect is when the camera doing the filming shakes as if someone untrained is doing the filming.  I can only assume it was an attempt to make you feel like you were in the action (even though the style continued when the characters were chatting over dinner).  I actually don’t know how they get this affect and whether it’s built into cameras or you turn off the stabilizer and get the cameraman drunk or what…

 

I’m bringing this up now becuase we tried to watch Rachel Getting Married this past weekend and that movie had this very style.  Tammy actually got car sick watching the first 5 minutes and we had to return it.  The person at Blockbuster seemed to think we were pulling a fast one on her as she claimed that the movie either didn’t have that affect or it wasn’t that bad.  The thing is, we skipped from scene to scene and the affect was still there. While it was never very pronounced, it was there the whole time.

 

Why in a movie like that would we need that affect?  It’s not to make you feel like you’re in the action as there is none.  It’s not to make you feel like you’re in the scene itself because ones vision doesn’t move like that in real life if you’re calm or even if you’re in the middle of a soccer game.  Yes, your vision is constantly adjusting but it does it much faster and in much smaller ways.  Combined with this affect, it can make the movie distracting and harder to watch as your eyes try to adjust to the bouncing and just can’t do it.

 

Personally, I think any director who chooses that affect should be banned from releasing movies for multiple years to teach them a lesson.  It seems like some of them just use it to use it and have no justifiable reason for it and it’s just annoying.  If I wanted to feel like I was watching a home movie, well, I would watch an old home movie…

Escorts

No, not that sort of escort.  Get your mind out of the gutter.

 

Tuesday evening as I was leaving work and on the on ramp, a weird thing happened.  A police motorcycle pull out from the next on-ramp right in front of me and held out his hand.  I was like wtf?!?!  He just sat there for like 10 seconds with no indication as to what was going on and then 5 other police motorcycles pulled out from on-ramp he’d come from. They each went to a different lane to block off the road and then a big bus came by followed by a police SUV. 

 

At that point, I was even more confused and curious.  Once the bus was on the road, the police let us move and formed a protective shell around the bus.  Now, this is pretty unusual as it wasn’t likely to be any of our executives cause it was a bus (wouldn’t they be driving something nicer).  I asked around as I initially thought it might have been the interns as we’ve been known to show off like that for the interns.

 

It wasn’t the interns as they had more busses and did that a few weeks ago.  They also had an escort which brings up the question of how much that cost and what the justification was but whatever.

 

My current guess at this point was that it was the FC Barcelona team that was visiting campus that day.  The timing fits and the fact that it was a single bus fits as well.  BTW, that team is really, really good.  I saw the Sounders game against them in person and a few times I had to count our players to just double check that we actually had a full team on the field (cause it didn’t seem that way.

The border is where?

Apparently, 3 americans have been detained in Iran.  Given all the recent events, I was expecting to hear them listed as media members or some similar role in Iran.  I find out that they were hikers.  WTF?!?!  Is it possible to punish someone for being unbelievably stupid?  They were apparently hiking in Iraq (because I hear it’s nice this time of year) and accidentally crossed the unmarked border…ooops.  You would think that they would have done enough research to know where they were before risking that but then again, they had gone to Iraq for the hiking.

 

Seriously, I just don’t understand some people.

Politics as usual

Well, I’ve tried to avoid talking about politics for a while since we were overloaded with it for so long so I’ll try to keep this quick.

 

I stand by my statement in an earlier post saying that I don’t care about politician’s indiscretions as it doesn’t affect how they govern.  Now, Sanford should not have flown off without telling anyone but now that that is all in the open, I don’t think it’s an issue at all for his ability to govern and he should not be asked to resign.  Of course, he should have taken the stimulus money because he forgot the first rule of politics; you never turn down free money.

 

As for Sara Palin, they must have changed the definitions for "quitter" and "fighter" as her words about her stepping down do not really match with what she actually did.  You can claim she had good reason to do it if you really believe that but you can’t claim that she didn’t actually quit as that’s like rewriting the English dictionary.  You might as well claim that inflammable doesn’t mean flammable.

Legal focus

I’ve notice that the focus placed on certain crimes seems to be incongruent with the nature of the crime…at least in the case of celebrities.  I’m going to focus on four different instances that seem to exemplify the strangeness I find here.  Let’s talk about Bonds, Plaxico, Vick, and Stallworth.

 

Bonds may have lied to congress during their inquery into steroid use in baseball.  What was the result of those inqueries?  A long document listing a bunch of players who likely took PEDs that isn’t even public.  Bonds may have lied to save his own legacy and his own reputation.  He clearly didn’t do it to protect anyone from prison or hide a crime since none of that was the result of the inquery.  Would anything have changed if he had told the truth?  Probably not.  Now he faces a possible 30 years in prison.  I’m not saying that lying to congress is right but when it comes to what he lied about, there was basically nothing on the line whether he lied or didn’t lie except for his own reputation so is it fair to send him to prison for 30 years because of that?

 

Plaxico shot himself.  He’s facing a minimum 3.5 years in prison for shooting himself.  I guess technically it was for having an illegally concealed handgun.  Is 3.5 years and millions of dollars in lost wages fair considering that he already missed a number of games and SHOT HIMSELF.  I’m sure he was probably reaching for the gun to shoot someone else but we can’t really prove that and all we can prove is he was carrying around a gun with him.

 

Vick engaged in a dogfighting ring that injured a killed a number of dogs.  What he did was horrible, there is no doubt about it.  However, he was sentenced to 2 years in prison and probably lst 10s of millions of dollars in salary and fines.  Does his punishment fit the crime that he commited?  It’s certainly far closer than anyone else I’ll mention in this post.  The damage to his career and reputation were far worse than those 2 years ever could have been.  At least his crime was pretty horrendous compared with lying or shooting oneself his punishment wasn’t so bad comparatively although I’d probably give him a years suspension and 6-12 months in prison instead.

 

Last but not least we have Stallworth.  He got drunk and hit someone with his car.  He is going to spend 30 DAYS in prison. WTF!  I understand that he didn’t do it on purpose but seriously.  He killed someone and will only spend 30 days in prison!!!  How is 2 years for dogfighting even fair when 30 days for killing someone is?

 

I would argue that each of the crimes above was worse than the one above it but it looks like the punishments are going to go in the opposite direction.  Of course, the first two haven’t been sentenced yet so they could get off much easier than what I listed but that’s what the could be getting for those crimes.  Yeesh.  Something is definately wrong with our legal system imo.

Threats worked

During the trip to Florida, we rented a car as we were flying into Ft.  Meyers but leaving from Ft. Lauderdale (who knew that Florida had so many forts).  When I picked up the car, the car had a quarter tank of gas in it.  I didn’t notice this or look for this until after I’d left the lot as I’d never received a car with less than a full tank of gas.

 

I figured that they’d have to fill up the tank if they were going to charge the previous person who dropped it off (seems incredibly underhanded to charge someone for a tank of gas and then not actually fill it up).

 

Anyway, I didn’t think much of it and figured this must just be common practice in Florida or something because the rest of my friends who also got rental cars from Avis had the same issue.  However, when I dropped it off, it was a problem.  They said they had no idea what the other location was doing but they were violating policy and the Ft. Laud.  location could not verify my statement.

 

When I returned to the states, I email Avis about it after spending 20 minutes on the phone.  They sent a nice mail back about how they appreciated me reporting the issue and it had been forwarded to the person in question.  I kindly replied that I appreciated their response but they didn’t mention anything about removing the fraudulent charges from my bill.  I also mentioned that if they did not, I would be forced to report the charge as fraud to the government and my credit card company (if they knew how lazy I was, they’d have done nothing).  The response I got back was very apologetic and said they would remove the fee as a show of good faith.    The score is now Me: 1, Avis: 0.