#WritingFromIsolationWard
Category: Entertainment
5. The Sword of Omens
“Thunder, Thunder, Thundercats Hoooooooo!” I actually found one of these just laying in some bushes one day. It was the day of a party at my Grandmother’s house and my friend Stuart and I found this along with some other awesome toys just sort of stashed in some bushes. We spent an hour or so clashing with the sword and guns and pretending we were the Thundercats, sight beyond sight and all that. I was Panthro, by the way. My little sister, Mumm-Ra of course.
It wasn’t long before we were beset upon by the Mutant kids who had stashed these toys in the bushes in some form of extra Chromosome safekeeping. After some stone throwing and G-Rated cursing, we were forced to give back “MOST” of the toys. As far as I know, Stuart can still summon the Thundercats when he needs them. “Sight Beyond Sight” indeed.
The Thundercats were a cultural watershed for the Under 12 Furry set, anthropomorphic Cats and supernatural monsters are always a great draw. Especially if they have both Tanks and Swords. Not to mention hoverboards, nunchucks and a cat/rat thing that has an easily imitatable vocal tic, snarf.
The Sword of Omens toy itself was not anything special, certainly no better construction than any other toy sword, but it had the Added Bonus feature of the Eye of Thundara, something your “Flash Sword” or “Pirate Sabre” simply did not have. It could break just as easily, but you could look through the hilt and claim to see the approach of your enemies for as far as 3 blocks away, if you were on an open field or a long straight street.
4. Optimus Prime
Leader of the AutoBots, Easy to transform, comes with a trailer that contains a “repair droid” and a car with human sized seats for some reason. You fold the head and fists into the chest, there is no “Prime Matrix” in there in the G1 version. Optimus Prime was also the only one of the first wave that really looked great in both his “Robot” and “Vehicle” forms. He was heavy and made with a bunch of die-cast metal, so parents could feel like they had value for their money when it came out of the box.
I had read the initial issues of Transformers as a British comic (Large format, newsprint styled comics) and it contained a bit more about the Transformers and some statistical information about the ‘Bots and what they could do, I don’t think there was a toy that I wanted more the year that Optimus Came out. I may have promised the soul of my little sister to Satan that year, who knew that stuff worked?
The big day came, I put the stickers on incorrectly and Optimus Prime spent the next few years fighting Gi-Joes and At-Ats. When I sold him, it was kind of bittersweet, I’ve even purchased the reissue and sold that too.
How’s that servitude to Satan working out Kerry?
3. The AT AT Imperial Walker
When you saw these walking Tank/Troop carriers stalking towards the Rebels in “Empire” you probably wet yourself with glee, I mean, there was already a “Death Star” toy, why not an AT AT. It’s a lethal Robot Dog with (on the original toy) moving light-up lasers and a head you could control like a puppet. Never mind the fact that it could hold so many figures.
I had one of these, no murder required. I think I got it for my Birthday the same year I got Optimus Prime. I remember that it came in one of those semi-generic white boxes from Sears. I eventually traded it for Dolza and 12 dollars cash.
Before I let it go to the crazy kid down the street, who promptly tossed it down a flight of stairs (which his mom, dad and brother told me about, then blamed me for giving it to him) it used to stalk around my bedroom, mopping up hordes of Cobra Troops and stomping on Go Bots.
2. Voltron
The 5 lions Voltron, as opposed to the Vehicles Voltron was a prized toy. It was 5 awesome robot lions that turned into an even more awesome sword wielding robot. It had it’s own cartoon and catchy music. The “small” toy even had friction wheels on the lions so that could “soar” across the linoleum in your kitchen.
I never knew a single person who had all five of the full-size Voltron Lions. I had a bunch of the figures and Ro-Beasts, but only the “small” voltron robot. It was die cast and pretty much the heaviest toy tobot I even owned, save the japanese ones I snagged here and there (and Unicron, of course).
1. Unicron
When the Transformers Movie came out, I think everyone thought that the Unicron Toy would be out “soon” it migt be some kind “Figure” instead of a robot, but surely it wouldn’t be 20 years until we saw it, right?
I think only Omega Supreme was larger than Unicron in the end. Unicron is one of the Transformers that looked SO good in his robot form I NEVER transformed it back into a planet after the first time. Why bother, Unicron stood on my desk and looked menacing, almost fully posable and with articulated fingers, Unicron was literally the greatest Tranformer ever.
It’s too bad the Unicron Toy came out 20 years way too late, I might not have sold him when I moved back to Canada.
Honorable Mentions:
Centurions aka (More Toys than you can buy): Centurions might have been the greatest toys ever if it wasn’t for their sheer number and cost.
Robotech/Macross Toys: Transforming Robot Jets, massive alien battle pods, miniature SDF1. Silly stuff.
Laser Tag / Photon: I was a photon kid, they had a better fictional universe, was there ever a photon cartoon?
Meet Dave
Eddie Murphy plays the dual role of “this generations greatest captain” and “the ship itself” in this Sci-Fi comedy about a crew of 3 inch tall aliens in persuit of a secret weapon designed to steal all of the Salt Water on earth.
Much has been made of how bad “Meet Dave” is, and like “Norbit” before it, most of the problems people have with it can be traced to the easy familiarity of the movie and not to any other quantitive problem. It’s trite and lazy; the plot is obvious and cookie-cutter easy. Aliens come to Earth and take on the attributes of humans, some get into rap, some go crazy and the ostensibly toughest guy on board is a flaming stereotype. Sigh, yawn, seen it before. There are no surprises here. The guy with a stick up his butt goes crazy, takes over the ship an alienates the “kid”. Yawn.
My rating: stars
The fish out of water story has been done to death, even by Eddie Murphy himself. This movie might even be best described as a family-friendly “Coming to America” with Arsenio Hall replaced with Gabrielle Union. It’s pretty much the same movie. Eddie Murphy’s character tries to blend in with the Humans, fails, falls for a local girl and finds love. It’s the same basic movie, without James Earl Jones and Sexual Chocolate.
Once again, we have a long-time movie comedian going back to the well for more of the same, hoping to win over his core audience, only to find out that his core audience has grown tired of his work and moved on to dirtier pastures. When Eddie Murphy tried to go back to dirtier roots (Norbit) they weren’t interested in that either. Which is a shame, because like Mike Myers’ “The Love Guru”, “Meet Dave” isn’t a bad comedy. I laughed at the predictable jokes and liked the ending. Yes, I saw it all coming when I saw the poster, but it didn’t make the ride any worse.
Audiences will go on the same Roller Coaster over and over again, hit the same drops and loops over and over and keep going back, why don’t they do the same for movies by established celebreties? They see the same stories over and over, the same themes. It’s not to say that “Meet Dave” is great, but it wasn’t as bad as one would have imagined. Eddie Murphy was funny, the relationship with the kid was “hearwarming” and the plot was straightforward. What more can one say about a family-friendly movie?
Here’s where things get a great deal more interesting on this whole “Prank”
Usually, when you are going to perform a redirect as a prank, you use an A record to redirect the request, so domainnamenamevariant.com is redirected to someotherdomain.com via an A record. In this case the redirect is a highly disrecommended CNAME or Canonical Nam pointing to an IP address the record reads like this VOTEFORTHEMILF.COM IN CNAME 64.203.107.149.
This IP, whether you go to it via http:\\64.203.107.149 or voteforthemif.com (which now seems to redirect to google in some cases) goes to a special Palin greeting.
All of this is kind of known, but I’m providing a summation that makes the “It was a prank” angle seem like a stupid bit of misdirection. How could the prankster have known that 64.203.107.149 led to a special palin message? 64.203.107.149 has no PTR record and is the A record of JOHNMCAIN.COM but NOT www.johnmcain.com.
The A Record for www.johnmcain.com points to an aliased address from his DNS hosting provider:
Name: edgecastcdn.net
Address: 72.21.81.132
Aliases: www.johnmccain.com
Johnmain.com does not
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: johnmccain.com
Address: 64.203.107.149
Visiting the IP of www.johnmcain.com in your browser http://72.21.81.132/ connects you to nothing.
Visiting the IP of johnmcain.com in your browser http://64.203.107.149/ connects you to a website.
Why would the webmaster of John Mcain’s website link a site to one IP and not the other? That’s more than odd. Here’s why, it’s the same amount of work to set it up, you can copy and paste one configuration to another and make it active so that WEB recquests for IP one and IP two will go to the same place, but in this case reqeusts initially bound for 64.203.107.149 end up going to a special palin greeting. How could the prankster have pre-knowledge that the greeting would be there? I mean, if voteforthemilf.com was a simple redirect to the IP, and the IP (in the case of the more popular www.johnmcain.com) does not connect to a configured website why would they imagine it would magically connect to a Palin related website?
This story is not over, not complete and the “prankster” isn’t giving up their secrets at all.
In the end, this is just a distraction, but it’s a fun tech mystery too, and what’s more fun on a Friday night than a fun tech mystery, right?
If you are a fan of politics, you’ve probably come across some of the discussions regarding the phenomena of people voting against their interests, going so far as to vote for someone who would damage their standing in the community or their livelihood in order to placate some belief that they have held since they were a child.
Nuances of stance and benefit appear to be lost on some folks who will vote for some political ideology regardless of the outcome. Lois Lane, a military brat and wife of the world’s most famous republican probably voted for Lex Luthor (even though he has sworn Blood Death oaths on her Husband, simply because of his stance on military funding (which Luthor Industries Benefits from) and lax taxes (natch).
I wonder if Superman Voted Luthor too?
All of that aside, the idea of politics in comics being more than just Hawkman and Green Arrow calling each other names isn’t exactly new, but DC has bright it front and center with “DC Universe: Decisions” which is kind of poorly timed amongst all of the other DC crossovers going on right now. It’s not even kinda smart, it’s just Democrats and Republicans… D’oh.
I’m not really interested in a Political Drama that involves Green Arrow and Batman, because, in the end, it ascribes Real World beliefs onto characters that may not have Universal Appeal, they are somewhat apolitical, allowing the readers to place whatever labels on them that they want.
Just like the real world, I want my heroes to have secret ballots in the end.
It looks like Judd Winnick and Bill Willingham are going to take that from us.
Why I Disliked Wall-E, Redux
Published by NiteMayr on September 24, 2008I don’t shy away from critics. I engage the Tomoatoes when I am about to go check out a movie that I haven’t already declared “too wicked to avoid for any rational reason” so the reviews, like the one above, mislead me about the quality of Wall-E and lead me to believe that the overgrown manandwomen-children who wrote these bits of fawning praise have taken leave of the hormones that allowed them to leave bald armpits behind.
Pixar is rapidly becoming the Apple of movies (if I remember correctly, it already is) where droves of fawning fans will crawl over each other to obtain the next bit of stuff that is farted loose from the bowells of the beast and they will love it because it is in a cute, non-threatening container, which Wall-E embodies almost as much as his erstwhile gal-pal Eve the I-Pod.
Then there is the heavy handed story, which I complained about previously, so I will only tarry on long enough to say that any halfwit who goes through that much for a “kiss” is not a romantic, they are an insanely focused stalker with serious emotional problems. Movies like this set me up for 5 years of emotional retardation and a firm belief that grand romanticism is what girls “wanted” (in truth they want to be treated like humans and occasionally like a princess or naughty slave girls or naught school librarians or naughty shop keepers … I’m getting off the topic here)
As I was saying, the critical response to Wall-E was overtly praise-laden and should have been reserved for the ressurection of Messers Einstein and Tesla in their all robot dancing girl review and kids fun-e-teria.