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Review: G.I.Joe – Rise of the Cobra

The first trailer I saw for “G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra” worried me greatly. In no way did it resemble the popular 80s cartoon of my childhood, and contained largely B-level actors and special effects.

For the most part, my initial assessment was correct.

The movie centers on the origins of the characters we know from the show, including Duke and Ripcord. At this point, Cobra, as an organization, doesn’t exist yet, but its leader(s) (specifically, Destro) are just getting started. A few old favorites, including General Hawk, Scarlett, and my personal favorite, Snake-Eyes, make their respective appearances early on, as you would generally expect: the Joes come in and save Duke and Rip Cord from the Baroness and Storm Shadow, then take them into their organization and train them to be the elite fighters they should be (wait…isn’t that how it happened in “X-Men?” …yup…)

The effects in the trailer looked terrible and, generally, they didn’t improve at all in the full feature film. There were definitely some cool sequences and transitions put in there, but a few extra effects dollars would have gone a long way to make it the spectacle it was trying to be. While they were at it, they should have tried actually spending some money on actors. Dennis Quaid (General Hawk) was barely a player (and wasn’t particularly good), and Christopher Eccleston (Destro) was wasted. Sienna Miller (The Baroness) did the best job of them all, in my opinion, but the guy they chose to play Duke was pretty horrible…and he’s the focus of the whole movie… Joseph Gordon-Levitt also makes an appearance, as well as Brendan Fraser…randomly…

There weren’t as many terrible one-liners in it as I would have expected, thankfully. There were actually a few funny moments, especially with the addition of Marlon Wayans (Ripcord) providing a little levity. Your trademarked “knowing is half the battle” was definitely in there as well, delivered by Dennis Quaid…and no, he wasn’t talking about staying off drugs… For the most part, however, the script and plot, as a whole, was derivative and cliche. Then again, it’s a movie based on a 1980s cartoon put out to sell toys…much like another franchise I know (that did it better).

That all said, it wasn’t as bad as it could be. Again, some of those action sequences were actually pretty sweet, but some extra money to make them truly top notch would have been welcome. While the acting was very, very bad overall, I didn’t really expect it to be good in the first place, so whatever…not a big loss…

Anyway, certainly not the best movie I’ve seen this summer, but I thought it would be a lot worse. I probably won’t be picking up the DVD, but I’m glad I saw it.

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A Digital Brave New World

I was listening to my NPR Science Friday podcast yesterday discussing the topic of who owns your digital data, broadcast on July 31st. The discussion covered a variety of different issues, including recent attempts by Facebook to retain rights to anything you post there, how Google plans on archiving all information digitally (it’ll take 300 years), and the ability of Apple to remove content from your iPhone any time it wants to.

One thing brought up in the discussion, however, was the idea of purchasing content. When you buy an album through iTunes, for example, you can burn that to a CD, putting it in a form that you can then access anywhere or anyhow you want. Music is one space where this kind of transaction has been pioneered and largely works well. In the software space, however, it isn’t really like that. If I buy a game through Steam, for example, I’m given a limited number of installs, otherwise I have to purchase it again [you can burn a backup, though, in that particular case]. More to the point, if I purchase a game on my PS3 or Wii digitally (i.e. PSN or WiiWare), I can only play it on that machine. What happens when the PS4 or Wii 2 comes out? Can I still play those games? Will they still work?

There are some forms of Digital Rights Management, used by the game company Electronic Arts (EA), that actually limit the number of times you can install the software. For the game, Spore, you would buy your DVD and then could install it 3 times. That’s it. So, if you reformatted your computer and needed to reinstall it, you’d lose one of your turns and have to do it again. EA had to intervene and remove that DRM because people got so pissed about it.

As another example, Brooke bought Bejeweled for her cell phone awhile back, then got a new one. So far as we can well, we can’t transfer that game to her new phone. So, did we ever really “own” the game? Because, if I “owned” it, I should be able to move it onto a new phone, just like if I bought a new stereo, I could put that same CD into it. Or a new TV, I could still watch the same DVD on it.

So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of this as more things go from physical media to digital media. Movies, likely, are going to go that way where you won’t buy a DVD anymore: you’ll have a digital copy of the movie. And while that digital copy will work for awhile, what happens when the new hot tech toy comes out that can’t play that old file anymore? I’ll have to buy it again.

I guess we’ve gotten used to physical media over the years, where I could take that movie on VHS and copy it over to DVD. Sure, it wouldn’t look as good, but at least I wouldn’t have to buy it again. It just seems like some of these efforts by corporations trying to “protect their property” are going so far as to turn what you think you own into something more like a rental. And, personally, if I think I’m “renting” something, I don’t think I should be paying so much to use it.

This isn’t something that worries me tremendously: it’s just something to think about.

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More on Health Care

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Keith Olbermann did a nice job a few nights ago outlining another aspect of this argument, specifically how much money the insurance industry (and health industry as a whole) is pouring into buying votes in Congress. He points out some of the key individuals holding this up, Republican and Democrat alike, and how much money they’ve made in political support over the years. It’s a 13 min video, but pretty eye-opening.

One point he made in the first 3 minutes was one that I haven’t heard brought up often, however, was with regards to “bureaucrats getting in the way of the patient and the doctor.” Specifically:

“Wow, Senator [John Thune (R-SD)] — this illustrates how desperate you and the other Republicans are, right? Because Sen. Thune, if you really think ‘bureaucrats and politicians’ need to get out of the way of ‘patients and their doctors,’ then you support a woman patient’s right to get an abortion, and you supported Michael Schiavo’s right to take his wife off life support, and you oppose ‘bureaucrats and politicians’ getting in the way, and we’ll just mark you down on the pro-choice list. That’s a rare misstep for you Sen. Thune.”

This is an excellent point and it really shows how hypocritical these guys are. Bureaucrats have been trying to get between “you and your doctor” for years in the form of Pro-Life conservatives, amongst other things, but that’s the one that’s the real sticking point for me. These are the same people that say you can’t have an abortion. Well, that’s a politician making a decision for you. But they say that these decisions should lie between you and your doctor. Waitaminute…[head spinning in confusion]

The whole thing drives me nuts…

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Obama wants to kill old people!

Rachel Maddow has this 7 min segment discussing how the crazies are now coming out to say that health care reform is simply a backdoor to assisted suicide of the elderly. Seriously. That’s what’s being debated on the floor of the House. And on right-wing talk radio. The idea that Obama wants to kill old people.

The whole debate is getting rather annoying, honestly. There are all kinds of proposals being put forward from the Left, yet the Right is stopping at “tax cuts and stopping companies from denying you because of pre-existing conditions.” Sure, they’ll keep you and give you insurance, but jack up your premiums to high heaven to account for it. And if that’s all that they’re really proposing, then they have no comprehensive plan. Tax cuts and that simple regulation aren’t enough to fix the problem(s).

Reform needs to happen and we need to work together to get something useful passed. In my opinion, a Public Option should be included, but at the very least a LOT of regulations need to be imposed upon the private insurance industry if I plan on being able to afford health care in 10 years. Even if a Public Option isn’t included in the final bill, profits need to be reigned in at these health care companies, and I seriously doubt that any Republican-backed plan would suggest that.

Spreading fear and doubt about the existing ideas (i.e. “this plan will kill you!!”) is simply not helpful, and if anything, prevents anything from getting done. Much like back in 1993 when we tried getting something done, and it was stopped by similar tactics. And by “we,” I mean the Left. Because the Right is apparently just fine with where things stand.

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That’s kinda neat!

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So, I’m officially a published author now. I heard a few weeks ago that the manuscript I’d been working on (for, like, a year…) was accepted to Neurotoxicology, a bi-monthly journal published by Elsevier, but I didn’t want to post anything here until it was up on Pubmed. I should be receiving proofs sometime this week so I can look at the final version of the document (i.e. what it’ll look like when it’s actually in the journal), so maybe I’ll put up a picture of that, too!

Either way, I decided to search for “Linsenbardt” in Pubmed today and see if I was there. And I am.

That’s kinda neat! 🙂

Unless you have access through your university, you can’t actually read the paper yet. Elsevier is pretty annoying about such things, making you pay for access otherwise, but because NIH funds were used to pay for the work done in the paper, it’ll have to be made available, free, to the public sometime eventually.

I’m starting my second paper now (as in, as we speak…), and my PLAN is to get that submitted by October somewhere. But, as some of you know, that last paper took me FOREVER to actually get out and submitted. October is when the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting is, however, and it’d be nice to tell prospective employers that I have one paper published and another one on the way. Also, for the purposes of graduating, getting two first-author papers is a good thing (as in, typically, if your name is first on the list, then you either did most of the work, or wrote the whole paper yourself…not always the case, but usually it goes something like that…so “first-author” is pretty important).

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The State of Network News

You know, it’s very telling about the state of news and news anchors as a whole when Jon Stewart is considered the most trusted, taking the mantle from Walter Cronkite (and that’s the way the question was phrased: “Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America’s most trusted newscaster?”). In a recent Time Magazine poll, Jon Stewart was ranked most trusted among the primary network news anchors.

Jon Stewart – 44%
Brian Williams – 29%
Charles Gibson – 19%
Katie Couric – 7%

Honestly, if I’ve got the news on at 5:30 (and I do many nights of the week), I’ve got it on CBS, for the most part because that’s the network my parents and grandparents always watched. Personally, I don’t think Couric is doing all that bad of a job, but that said, I get more news from Jon Stewart than many other sources. At the very least, especially compared with the cable news networks (read: MSNBC, Faux News, etc.), Stewart wears his bias on his sleeve. You know where he stands. And he’s probably the best interviewer on television, both with Republicans and Democrats. He isn’t out to get the big story. He just wants to ask you well-considered questions that you probably won’t be asked by the other networks.

Anyway, I found it pretty amusing…

Edit: Please note that there were a little over 9000 votes, when I posted this, total in that poll. If you click the “next” button, you are taken to the next poll on Time Magazine online…which tells us Bing is better than Google…mostly according to Iowa… Apparently, this (these?) poll(s) should be taken with a metric ton of salt…

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A Trip Down Memory Lane

So, for some odd reason, I decided to see if I could find my first website, which was the Hickman High School Drumline site (ca 1998). How, pray tell? I tried first looking through the Internet Wayback Machine, which is actually a pretty nifty archive of as many websites as they can get their hands on. If you’ve never tried it, you should do something like search for “http://www.yahoo.com” and see what it looked like back in 1996 (hint: far less pretty).

Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember what the address was for the website, so then I resorted to Google. I knew I’d hosted the site on Tripod.com (remember that?), so I searched for “Tripod HHS Drum”…that came up with some pictures off the site, but from there, I was able to trace the address to: http://www.members.tripod.com/drummer6/. It looks lovely. Please note the “Best Viewed in Internet Explorer 4.0” there…

Anyway, if you look around it, you’ll find some old pictures from the late-90s and some sound files of our drum solos from a few shows. I don’t even know how I got those, but likely, it was me sitting with a tape recorder next to the TV while playing the video tape from the VCR.

So yeah, just thought I’d share that bit of history. I’ve learned a thing or two since those dark days of Frontpage 97…

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Of Music and Middle-Age…

So, I talked with a visitor at church last Sunday and she tipped me off to a coffee house (of sorts) at Kingshighway United Methodist Church. They apparently do it every third Saturday and bill it as a family evening, something to get some folks together for fellowship while also enjoying each other’s talents. There were a good 30-40 people down in this old fellowship hall about 10 min. south of us on I-55, in a neat area of south St. Louis City.

While I’m not sure I’d classify it as a “coffee house,” necessarily, it was still a good time. I mean, there was coffee there, and cookies and cheese puffs, but that was about it. And truthfully, it was more of a variety show than anything else. That’s not to say that it wasn’t entertaining, but again, I’m not sure “coffee house” was the correct moniker.

Either way, we had a surprisingly good time. There were a few kids that told jokes, one did some magic tricks, one guy sang “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” with a karaoke machine, a group of guys played some CCR and Elton John music…overall, it was a very entertaining evening!

The truly neat part about it is that many of these individuals that were getting up there performing were middle-aged, and this was probably their only outlet to share their musical talents. It’s difficult for me to imagine being in a similar situation, as I’ve been able to keep playing drums/guitar/etc. ever since leaving high school, but many of these folks graduated from high school and didn’t play with a group ever again. An opportunity like this allows them to get to practice their instrument and play it occasionally in front of a group, which is more than I can say for others out there with their instrument hidden in a closet.

Anyway, it was pretty neat. I can only hope I’m playing something in another 30 years!

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The Man

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I had a few requests for an explanation of “The Man,” so here you go:

I’m not really sure where he came from, but a couple of years ago, The Man appeared at my parents’ house. I’m thinking that he was atop a birthday cake and then was stuck in a drawer somewhere since my mom rarely throws things away that she thinks she or someone she know will have a future use for. Anyway, when he came out of hiding, one of my sisters decided it would be a great idea to attach him to a 4th of July rocket and send him flying. So, we did. Over. And over. And over. It was hilarious and an adventure to track him and the rocket down after each launch. This year when I was there for the driveway fireworks show, The Man got caught up in a pine tree by the road so my dad had to go rescue him the next day. You can read my mom’s comment from a couple of days ago to see what happened after I came back to St. Louis, but there’s the story!

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The 11th Street Hill

11th-st-hilll-90This hill was to the side of Ma and Papa’s house in Louisiana, Missouri.  Well, actually, I’m quite sure it’s still there, but it doesn’t seem as big as it did to us back in 1990 when the picture above was taken, but anyway….  We spent hours on this hill riding (while sitting) skateboards down and avoiding cars.  There was also a hill next to Papa’s service station that served the same purpose, but had a nice grassy area at the bottom to stop us.  One of my favorite memories of Papa is of him riding down the hill next to the station on his wheely thing for working under cars, then falling off and Ma getting out the Bandaids to patch his skinned knees.

Here are two more from Christmas ’94 when the Baumann girls got skates:

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