metsmarathon

and you thought your roommate freshman year was a monster! little mike wazowski wants to be a scarer, but is he scary enough? and how did he get to be friends with sully? and why is randall such a jerk? all these answers and more.

well, david wright is known for his exemplary kissing technique.

well, yeah, the backwash off those engines is gonna toss those cars right along if they get too close, and the goons hanging onto the back of hte truck are well, yeah, there's a few things that'd be happining.... firstoff, the backwash off hte engines is going to hurl all manner of rock and pebble and dirt and dust backwards at an incredible velocity. the goons will be picking rocks out of their faces for decades to come. then, if hte car gets too close to the backwash, it's going to get tossed. the airflow over and under the wings is going to give them a little bit of extra resistance, and the plane will be squeezing that air down to generate the lift, and i imagine there will be some increased air flow as a result of this. not to mention the eddies and vortices that'll be generated. and those cop cars and the big trucks aren't terribly aerodynamic. theyre going to see a lot of extra lift. probably lose some ability to control the vehicle if they catch a good vortex. could conceivable flip 'em right over, or send 'em sideways. i think we need to get the mythbusters on it.

it depends on passenger load and wind conditions and atmospherics and the flap settings, but if you said 180 mph, you wouldn't be off by all that much. 150-180 mph is probably a reasonable estimate for most jet-propelled passenger planes.

finally saw this in full. very convincing retelling, and the historical inaccuracies don't get too much in the way (i'd likely feel different were i canadian, british, or kiwi) until the very end. they kinda had me going until the gun-toting iranians drove their car in partly in front of the engines of hte 747 trying to take off, only to have it finally lift into the air as they were about to shoot out the tires. this movie trope bothers me each and every time i see it. it's forgivable to an extent when it happens in toy story 3, i suppose, but less so here. there's no way those iranian police cars and certianly the big truck can catch let alone pass a 747 on a runway trying to take off. taxi, maybe. take off? puh-leeze! it's silly, but seriously, these kind of things just bother me, and kick me right out of hte movie. it's like when you're seeing a movie set in 1987 or '88, and there's this guy walking around in a pair of reebok pumps. it's like, hello, time traveller, welcome back from the freaking future. it just ruins the whole thing. i'm kidding. but the final scenes just had "artistic license" scribbled all over them. otherwise the film was really quite good. i gave it 4 stars. i think a stronger ending - hte original was surely tense, and it did a very good job of keeping my concerned about the success of the mission, but it relied too much of just. in. the. nick. of. time. the tickets are confirmed just as she checks the second time! he picked up the phone on the last ring just as the guy was hanging up! the gates are closed but they can still catch the plane! the revolutionaries just figured out who tehy were just after the gates closed and were locked and chained and welded shut, with an invisible forcefield to boot! the plane took off just as the guy had his finger on the trigger! the revolutionaries climb the tower but the plane is already in the air! seriously, i was waiting for the 747 to have to dodge a SAM, or dogfight an iranian jet. it was all too much. maybe without all that stuff, the movie would have ended dully, but i like to think otherwise.

oh, lookie there. first place. why, hello, first place. my offense is freakin' on fire. what a delightful difference a year makes.

no, there was a scene in the movie where we zoomed right in from the outside, to see in from the bridge window. the camera then continued through the window and around the bridge so that we could see out. at least that's the cinematography that i remember. and that's why it struck me how truly exposed they were.

don't get me wrong. i really did like the movie. maybe it's just inherent to the function of phasers that they are inherently impossible to aim. i dunno. it just irked me - i never really noticed it before, i guess because never before was it made so readily clear that the bridge of the enterprise has a big ol freaking window to space, hey, why not just shoot there? do the shields affect the aiming? because it seems that all other manner of sentitive equipment can be targeted, but not the bridge...? its one thing to have crap aim with blasters or even torpedoes. but phasers are light-speed weapons, and at least in the final showdown, they were both at a virtual standstill in close proximity. ya gotta be able to target something. or is it just that there's some tremendous instability with harnessing such a sizeable amount of energy to make a phaser beam that aiming it is dicey and imprecise. i suppose i can go along with that. it's just never really explained in teh star trek universe, that i can recall. i'm an engineer. i work with weapon-y things. these things bother me. spock vs [harrison] was an excellent fight in a silly location.

yeah, i suppose that i should elaborate on my last statement... the fight was silly for the whole "back of a hovercar" thing, not because sock was doing a fair job of holding his own whereas kirk could do no such thing. i suppose it could have been elaborated upon that vulcans are stronger than humans, though obviously not stronger than superhumans. that was part of why spock went into the warp core way back in TWOK - that a human couldn't get close to the core. i did think it silly that kirk could just kick hte damned thing into place, and that with just the right final shove, it could self-align and maintain that position. i guess one final gripe, which would have made for a far far shorter movie, and a quibble. first the quibble. shuttlecraft sure do take the strangest flight paths, don't they? i mean, in general, they always seem to take the tourist-helicopter flight path as opposed to anything even remotely direct. though htey are really really fast, getting out to jupiter in a matter of hours? minutes? anyways, the gripe. you're locked in battle with a starship. you've got energy weapons and torpedoes. why do they never target the bridge? certainly with the vengeance firing upon the enterprise, tehy knew exactly where the bridge was, and obviously also all the critical systems. why shoot everywhere on teh ship except the bridge, when the goal afterall was to kill the crew and destroy the enterprise? why wait till your superphaser is locked and loaded. why not just properly aim your regular phasers? i mean, i get that you want to first take out the warp drive. but then, why make swiss cheese when all you really need to do is go for the killshot? makes no sense.

saw it loved it. i mean, sure, there were gaping plot holes. the biggest pair of which are really... 1. how did nobody in starfleet not notice the giant supermassive militarized deathship being built next to jupiter? 2. how did they build it so quickly in response to the actions of the first movie? did i miss something? after the destruction of vulcan, marcus decides that someone like john harrison would be the perfect kind of guy to design the weapons demanded by such grave threats being posed to the federation. so he forces harrison to work for him, builds his starship (and surely tests precurser systems and has a kick-ass systems engineering process in place), trains its (admittedly minimal but not terribly bad-ass) crew, and has it mission ready basically in the time it takes kirk to screw up his captainship once. its stated that the prospective fiv year mission that the enterprise would evntaully embarq upon is super-long, so how long could he really have been out there fucking up his permanent record? a year? and they conceived, designed, concealed, and built that uss vengeance in the same time? bullshit. i know its the future, but goddamn, its gotta take longer than that to build a whole new spaceship. everything else, i was mostly okay with, actually. quinto is a superb spock. and i personally loved the TWOK redux thing they did there. marcus was paper thin. he could have been much better with 15 minutes more runtime, i think. harrison could have exposited a smidge more, too. the last fight was silly though. remember, vulcans are stronger than humans.

what... did nobody see this yet?

shoot, i must've blinked... anywho, i kindof liked it, although at times it felt a bit too much art-direction-by-thomas-kincade fakey-fakey. i saw it in 3d, and im not sure that it made anything better. imo, the 3d actually made the visual effects look more effect-y and fakey, and not in a good "we're doing it like this for artistic reasons" way but rather "we're not good enough to make this look less fake." the opening snowfall ruined me, i think.

i'm fairly certain i've never read the book. (there's a thread related to this type of thing, isn't there?) but i'll be seeing the movie tonight.

ooh, i like the angry eyes!

wouldn't you know, i don't think i've ever seen this movie.

well, i expected prices to go way up this season, but instead, for hte most part, tehy are way below what we were paying for players last year. i've got a bit of a logjam at third base, and am willing to find a new home for one of my hot cornermen. i kinda wish votto would have come up before miggy, as he would have better fit my team's needs, but i cannot complain about a $33 miggy. i simply couldn't let him pass, even if it means ultimately giving up either an evan longoria ($38) or a brett lawrie ($22). make your offers! i could use help at 2b, of, and i won't turn my nose up at a compelling pitching offer.

if you're doing tv, then clearly, newhart must be on the list, right? as far as movies which may be unmentioned, i believe that memento would fit the bill.

12 or 13 should be fine for me.

march 7 seems really really early...

i'm probably carrying over too much of my sucky-suck offense from last year, but we'll see how that goes.

lets not forget, too, that we have to renew our league payments by mid february.

there are still a few teams over the cap, with 9 days to go before the cut deadline. drop your jason bays fast!

in order: 1. wreck-it ralph 2. skyfall 3. mib 3

Mets � Willets Point wrote: I assume at some point Superman has to shave that hipster beard, which begs the question what blade is going to work on the man of steel? prolly made from the same stuff he used to sew his superspandex.

ohhh, ok. the bad guy he was chasing was using DU rounds. got it now. i missed that hte first time through, i think. i was of hte impression you meant that eve was firing DU rounds, which wouldn't make too much sense. but the bad guy uses custom DU rounds. alright, fine, got it. those bullets are probably gonna go extra slow, relative to a generic 9mm round. so they likely wouldn't be as lethal. the reason DU rounds work in military applications is that, well, they get shot at really high velocities by really big guns, typically. the gatling gun dangling off hte mouth of a warthog is a massive fuckin' thing, and it can shoot those DU round off at just over 1000 m/s. the DU penetrators that shoot holes in tanks get shot at at least 1500 m/s. out of a glock, a relatively light 7.5 g 9mm bullet comes out at 400 m/s. a heavy bullet, at 9.5 g, comes out at 300 m/s. a DU bullet, at 67% heavier than lead, would weigh somewhere around 12.5 to 15.5 g. that's going to come out super-slow. maybe 200m/s or less even less. not a whole lot of penetration power, and not a whole lot of stopping power. kindof a blunt instrument. and its not a point blank shot, either, so it will be slowed further. i imagine the killer likes his bullets to be DU because they are a signature - a way to know it was he doing hte job. good chance they're hollow point, which explains the fragments. also explains the relative safety afforded by an "up-armored" excavator. not sure hte amount of damage that a shoulder would would do given a hollow point DU round, other than collapsing a lung, mashing bone, and chopping up some vital bloodwork. could be survivable. certainly would restrict bond's ability to fight back, and ultimately to recover. i guess the long story short, i don't think a DU round is necessarily all that good for killing a man when it fails to hit anything good. i don;t think it entirely all that spectacular, that a poorly aimed such bullet would not kill a man who could survive the rifle shot to the, uh... abdomen?