I flew to Fresno for thanksgiving and had the pleasure of passing through airport security. I checked my bags so I didn’t have to worry about the whole exploding liquid thing. It did get me thinking though.
First off we have the would be london plane bombers. There are a number of sites on the internet that show that using liquids to cause an explosion is quite difficult. It kind of looks like that the would be london plane bombers based their plan on Die Hard: With A Vengance.
Assuming this is the case then the TSA based their security restrictions on a fictional explosive that can cause a reaction using a tiny amount of two liquids on a paper clip. Does it not make sense that if this is the case that the TSA should ban all liquids on a plane as they are obviously dangerous. But is this enough. I say NO. And I shall tell you why.
Let’s start with shoes. If you recall the movie Waynes World 2 and the story of Del Preston. He needed to get 1000 brown M&M’s for ozzy and the shop keeper wouldn’t help him. Del had to beat him to death with his own shoes. I think this is reason enough to ban shoes on airplanes.
Belts need to be banned as they are a choking hazard. In fact lets include all clothes as any item, I repeat ANY ITEM, can be used as some form of garrotte.
At this stage Every one on the plane is naked. However if you can’t get access to the cockpit this can never come to pass. But even the cockpit isn’t invunerable. Actually I can’t think of a way into the cockpit. Which is probably a good thing.
But one can dream can’t they (of a plane of naked people, not some sort of terrorist attack).
Over the last week the blog has been absolutely swamped in spam. For all sorts of interesting stuff. I contemplated shutting them off but this is actually harder to do than you might think. So instead I installed a little plugin called Spam Karma 2. This piece of awesomeness is able to tell when a comment is spam or not. Hopefully it won’t be much of a hassle for the regular commentors and if it is causing you problems then email me.
“I asure you officer I’ve only had a few ales.”
As you may have guessed I have been drinking. I was drinking last week and many an intersting happened back then too. Not going to talk about them as I am having some trouble typing. Suffice it to say J to the G is shit with women and that I love tatoos.
I know that doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps in the future I shall elaborate.
If you look on the right there you will see a thing with my favorite* songs. This is from the ultra cool website Pandora which lets you build an online radio station. You provide it with a song and it builds a radio station of songs like the one you entered. It’s class.
Their color* scheme doesn’t go with my color scheme but I plan on fixing that soon.
*look at me, using american spelling.
This is the second post I’m going to write about this movie. The first was lost.
I don’t know why I bothered. I didn’t like the book. Infact I hated it. I hated it just like I hate getting kicked in the nuts. Watching this movie was like forgetting what it’s like to get kicked in the nuts and going up to Dan Brown to kick you in the nuts just to remind you.
In the intereset of unfairness I’m going to compare it to stealth (which i saw another 20 minutes of, just 40 minutes left to watch now at some stage). Stealth has less talking about DaVinci which is a very good thing. It’s got a better script and marginally better direction. DaVinci code beats it on everything else. Except computers going crazy which there are none of.
Imagine you are in Sally Longs, back in the good old days when the old juke box was there. Now take out the picture of the “12 Apostles” and replace it with leprechauns. Make it a little bit smaller and you’ve got Murphy’s, my new favorite Bar in Salt Lake City. The crowd is a little rough according to the G-Man but it’s just some bikers and stuff. Just like Sally’s.
Anyway one night while I was enjoying a drink this guy started talking to me about Tool as I was wearing my Tool hoody. He was disapointed with the tool album. Although there were good songs on the album there was a lot of fun which just didn’t seem right. He then went on to tell me his theory about how 10000 days is actually some form of decoy.
He said the album itself is littered with lots of clues. The track Viginti Tres which is latin for 23, a number which has a significant occult significance, which corresponds to hexagram 23 of the “I Ching”, P’o, which translates as splitting apart. There’s the song name right in two. Some of the tracks have been split apart such as Wings and Blame Hoffman/Rosetta Stoned (this isn’t anything new as Lateralus has Parabol/Parabola). Also a number of songs sound like they should be on other albums, for example “The Pot” sounds like it belongs on Undertow. In order to fool pirates Tool spent a year recording a decoy album. Is 10000 days that album?
Then he told me that Tool have recorded every concert that they have ever performed and the only live tracks they’ve released are on Opiate and Salival. He believes that Tool plan on releasing a live album in the near future and not only that but on the 6th of June they are going to start playing brand new songs that nobody has ever heard before and then are going to release them on a new live album.
Of course it’s more than likely that this is all the wishful thinking of a dissatisfied Tool fan. Personally I doubt it. I had a hard time coming up with evidence to back up the theory. During the course of my investigation I found a couple of rumours. One of which involved a release on the 6th of June but it seems likely that this will be a DVD single of Vicarious similiar to the Parabola and Lateralus ones they released earlier, but who knows with Tool?
So I got back from my little trip down south to Zion National Park and Las Vegas. I’m going to talk about Vegas in this post because, let’s face it, Vegas is way cooler that trees, desert, mountains and hiking. Don’t worry though I will get back to Zion’s as I have a few stories from there.
The first thing that hits you about Vegas when you are around 20 miles from the place is that it is in the middle of the desert. A lot of people know this and they are probably saying how obvious that is but until you see it. A city on the horizon surrounded by absolutely nothing do you realize just how strange it is.
The second thing to hit you are the billboards. After passing a few billboards for Jay’s Adult Shop and the Adult Superstore which is open 24 hours do you realise just why exactly it is called Sin City.
As we were only in Vegas for a day and night we didn’t get to see a whole lot of it. We did get to see the important part’s though. Those being the Casino’s.
We visited the Bellagio, Ceasar’s Palace, the Flamingo, the MGM Grand and New York, NewYork. To be honest there isn’t much of a difference between the actual casino’s. If all you want is gambling then one casino is the same as the next. The draw these day’s is the spectacle.
The Bellagio is more of a supermarket for the Ultra Rich. It is filled with designer stores and staying there cost’s a small fortune on the weekend. Ceasar’s Palace has the whole ancient Rome thing going on and is covered in marble. It also has centurions who will pose for pictures. The Flamingo has a very tropical feel to it with plastic pink flamingo’s hiding in bushes all over the place. New York, New York is like a miniature Manhatten and has one of the coolest roller-coasters in the city (loads of casino’s have roller-coasters).
I spent a lot of time in the MGM Grand, mostly gambling on Roulette, Poker, Black Jack and slots.
Roulette is a fun game. $100 dollars got me a couple of hours of nail biting fun. The minimum bet for the game I was playing was $10 on the inside and on the outside. The inside refers to the area with the numbers from 1 to 36. The great thing about this is that with a $10 minimum it was possible to bet to place 10 different $1 bets which paid off 35/1. Funnily enough it wasn’t that rare to lose that much money which made the game a lot of fun. Unfortunately Lady Luck wasn’t with me on that one so I didn’t come away up.
After the roulette I decided to try my hand at a 60 sit and go poker tournament. This was a ten man tournament with a $60 buy in and no rebuy’s. We got $800 dollars in play chips and the blinds started out at 25/50. For those that don’t know what the hell I’m talking about this was a very high pressure game. Of course I played brutally as I have been known to do in games and was the first out. I played the game all wrong and in hindsight I realise I didn’t really know what I was doing.
Feeling a little disgusted at myself for calling all in with an ace high (I was beaten by ace king with another king on the river) I did what I felt was my best course of action. I went and lost money on the slots. Slots in vegas are fun. It’s possible to win back 90% of your money in a slot machine but it requires something like a hundred dollars to do so. I didn’t play with a hundred dollars so I lost that fairly quickly.
After the slots I met up with every body and we hit the buffet. The buffet is quite pricy at $30 but if you come hungry you can more than make up for that. I didn’t but I had a slap up meal of all sorts of meat, veg and sushi anyway.
After the meal I played a little Blackjack with the other guys. I’m not a big fan of blackjack as it is a tough game to win at when you know what your doing and almost impossible when you don’t. With that in mind it wasn’t all that surprising that I lost another $60 at that.
With what I felt like was enough money lost and the other’s feeling the same way (although not all of us finished down) we decided to head back to our hotel. On the way back (in fact all day) we avoided many of the flyer hander outers and gazed at the many lights illuminating the strip. We also got to see the Bellagios’ fountain which erupts water in time to music. Oceans 11 doesn’t do it justice at all. Before hitting the hay a few of us went to the pool in the hotel and had a swim.
The next morning we went to Circus-Circus the 70′s circus themed hotel which has no Clowns in the morning and hit the breakfast buffet. After sausages, sausage patties, scrambled egg’s, croissant’s, bacon, biscuits and gravy and a whole load of juice I was full enough to enjoy the 5 hour ride home without having to worry about food.
This name will be familiar to those who have seen Kill Bill vol. 2. It turns out that the name Hattori Hanzo once belonged to a ninja who’s duty was to protect the emporer at the time.
And for those Lone Wolf and Cub fans out there, the story of Hattori Hanzo by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima is begin published by Dark Horse Comics.
Gamerism – Nerdlife! is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache