I'd forgotten - ice is really slippery! Weird...what made me remember how slippery it is was yesterday at breakfast when I put the orange juice jug back in amongst the ice chips on the hotel buffet. I gave the handle a shove, and the things spun for ages...cool!
As long as you avoid SkiDubai (and I make it a real big habit to avoid SkiDubai) the only place you see ice here is in your drinks, so you forget what it's really like. I forgot. It's slippery...mental note to self - "do not go anywhere where there might be ice occuring naturally on the ground...it's fucking slippery stuff and you will fall over!"
Ok...public information notice over.
I went to see Transformers 3 "Dark of the Moon" (called that because obviously Roger Waters has too tight a hold on the copyright of the much more appropriate title "Dark Side of the Moon"...oh well...)
Once again I thanked my lucky stars (both of them...) that my disbelief is so easily suspended, because if it was not I think I would be writing an angry letter to Mr Bay. That storyline sucks the biggest ass, with the biggest sucky lips of any suckerdom since the giant monster robots of Suckdonia invaded the planet late in the last Ice Age and sucked all the ice off the planet...they also sucked off all the dinosaurs...which is why they became extinct (nothing to do with an asteroid, they all just died from being sucked off...ask your science teachers. They know the truth...)
Yeah, so anyway. Why spend all that money on all that flawless CGI then fill in the gaps between each computer generated segment with bits of the crappest storyline and the corniest dialogue anyone could possibly ever write?
One bit of CGI that was not flawless was one piece near the start where the Whitwickey guy gets plucked out of the air by Bumblebee and pulled inside the car when he changes back into his (its) car-like form...such an obvious (and not well colour matched) composite.
So all in all I was disappointed. But I will survive.
The question I had in my head before I went to see the movie - a question that lingers on from last week when I met with a guy who's job it is to answer such important things - is, what can we do in the future to improve the design of aircraft to make them more secure.
This is a CPTED question, where the environment in question is the aircraft. Certainly the risks and the vulnerabilities cannot really change. You're in a box with a lot of energy (lots of fuel and fast moving parts) and you're waaaaayyyyy up there in the air.
That's a damned dangerous set of conditions. How do you reduce the risks?
Ok, we all realise that one pretty good idea is to not let people take on items that could be used as weapons, and it's also a good mitigation plan to prevent the wrong type of individuals from getting on board. But you can't spot a terrorist until he becomes one and I don't think it's safe to assume that terrorists are all called Mohammed and all carry Middle Eastern passports.
Any person is dangerous as hell when they're intent on doing bad things. Is there anything we can do with the actual physical design of aircraft that could make it easier to manage threats from onboard personnel if they were to happen. If we take away the opportunity and the means, we take away the problem.
From what I've seen the aircraft makers are so focused on their own "risk-realm" they haven't even begun to look at the kinds of risks we mitigate against on the ground every day of the week.
That worries the hell out of me.
I was going to see this on Fri after work, Figured it'll be worth seeing in 3D even though I'd heard it was fairly shite. But of course on a Fri the showing times all change for the week ahead, so it was only on in 3D at 9.30pm... Wait about until then? Nah couldn't be arsed.
ReplyDeleteSounds like I didn't miss much
Buddy of mine went to see it in fabulous three dimensional wonderment the last night it was showing here before Barry Plopper took over all the cinemas.
ReplyDeleteHe told me the 3D was just too much of an eyestrain over the whole length of the movie.
I cannot see 3D so the temptation never exists for me to do that.
They ran a lot more sequences in slow motion in this movie so you can actually see what's going on during the major action sequences. I ws pretty certain that in the previous two Transformers movies they just did a whole lot of squiggling and flashing on the screen in the hope you'd never work out what happened between the thing on the screen being a super-mega-killer space robot and it being a food processor...