Tag Archives: energy

The Good, the Bad and the Abysmally, Painfully Awful

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Apparently, the movie Battleship is about as bad as you would have expected it to be. I have a hard time believing any movie could be as bad as Transformers was, but apparently this hits that low mark, at least according to one reviewer. (Warning: Some mild profanity!) (via BoingBoing)

“So yeah, if the trailers weren’t your first sign, rather than have the movie revolve around naval combat like the board game, and might have actually made a decent film, they chose to have it be Transformers 4, and yet achieves a level of stupidity in terms of plot and script that makes Transformers (any of them) look like Inception, Independence Day look like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Pearl Harbor look like Saving Private Ryan.”

Ouch.

The review’s probably a lot more enjoyable than watching the movie, though.

Then again, it is possible, with a movie as bad as Transformers, that having nails pounded into one’s eyeballs is more enjoyable than watching the movie.

Let’s talk happier links!

  • We are living in a golden age of proverbs. And before you laugh, think about it: “If you build it, they will come.” (via the Boston Globe’s wonderful Brainiac blog)
  • There is a blog out there devoted to posting pictures of people eating on Law & Order. No, I don’t know why. No, I don’t get it either. (via BoingBoing)
  • Have you ever wanted to kill someone using poisoned clothing? I can’t honestly say that I have, but I’d consider it as a writer of murder mysteries. Has it happened before? Snopes examined the question. There was much discussion on Livejournal. And there were also questions about whether it would work to poison someone’s hair. (I don’t know how you could do this without poisoning the person whose hair you’re… poisoning.)
  • Sad news: A white buffalo was killed in Texas. Sad and very awful.
  • Some highly entertaining and informative audio journalism from the Oil Patch, well worth listening to, that originally aired on Prairie Public Radio in North Dakota.

Documenting a History of Weirdness

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Tho-Radia

Tho-Radia

They do say to remember history, lest you be doomed to repeat it. I’m not sure how much truth there is in that, but one thing’s for sure: America’s been a pretty bizarre place at times. Here’s a few links that I think consist of photographic proof of that.

  • Classroom posters of the 1970s, when you pull out the words, just seem… odd. I don’t have any idea what most of these posters are getting at. (Warning: There’s some profanity with these, so if that bothers you, please don’t click on the link.)
  • It turns out that even with the text, some of them don’t make a whole lot of sense. The “Can you get into the group?” poster seems to have an unspoken answer of “Heck no, you big nerd.” (Again, some profanity. You are warned. Do not click on it if it bothers you, please!)
  • The Atlantic has this lovely gallery of images from the 1970s. Many of the pictures are related to energy and environment, with smog from industrialized areas, heaps of damaged oil drums and cars dumped into a pond. It’s a little disturbing to think that this is the norm, historically: people dumping things any old where. I’m glad it’s not like that anymore.
  • But we’ve been even more insane than that, frankly. I’ve written before about how people used to think radiation was a cure-all and that there was no such thing as too much of a good thing. Here’s more advertisements and pictures to boggle at: hey, I know, let’s have radioactive facials and condoms and chocolate and toothpaste and knit our children baby jumpers out of radioactive wool! And to be clear, there were enough people who weren’t sure it was safe during Marie Curie’s lifetime that when she was gifted with a bit of radium in 1921, they gave it to her in a lead-lined mahogany box. Despite her insistence that it was safe. (She died of aplastic anemia, by the way, so she was not correct about its safety. To be fair, the science was in its infancy at that time and Curie did more for it than anybody.)

Kuchen and Wind Turbines

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I visited my wonderful parents this weekend.

It’s a long drive back to Jackson, Minnesota, from Jamestown, North Dakota, but it is also a beautiful scenic drive. The trees are starting to turn the autumn colors we love, and the fields of golden wheat and corn are beautiful.

On the way home to Jamestown, I did figure out what I’d been missing about the landscape here: wind turbines. Yes, there’s a big wind farm somewhere nearby Jamestown, but driving along Interstate 90 through Nobles and Jackson counties there are wind turbines everywhere now, on both sides of the road and in large and small groups.

Apparently it’s the Buffalo Ridge and its effect on the weather that makes the area so great for wind energy production, or so I’ve gathered. But there are so many more wind turbines there than near Jamestown. They’re the skyscrapers of the prairie, and I miss them.

I did bring a kuchen home and though my dad seemed to want to avoid it (he’s not really a dessert guy), my mom seemed to appreciate it.

This one happened to be strawberry-rhubarb, and instead of little chunks of strawberries and rhubarb throughout, as I was expecting it to be, it had a thin layer of rhubarb-strawberry goo above the crust and below the eggy stuff. Is that typical?

It was wonderful.

That’s the view from my car.

It’s a little… flat. In Minnesota.

To be fair, if four glaciers ran you over, you would be flat too.