DVD review: House of the Dead 2: All Guts, No Glory

There's trouble brewing. The walking dead have taken over a small California university and a small team of marines and government agents are sent in, not only to clean out the infection, but to obtain a blood sample from the first zombie, thus allowing them to develop a cure that will rid the world of the zombie menace once and for all. Of course they have to do all this before a cruise missile strike destroys the campus. Rap star Sticky Fingaz plays Sgt. Dalton, the leader of the marines who, collectively, have an IQ only slightly lower than one of the dumber zombies. The incredibly hot Emmanuelle Vaugier plays one of the goverment agents (who can be easily identified by the fact that they aren't especially stupid).

Overall, the movie was nothing special, and I can't believe a zombie movie set on a college campus didn't have a coed shower scene. There were a few creative scenes of zombies chowing down on the humans. In addition, House of the Dead 2 does add to our database of zombie lore, which we will need if we are going to have a chance of long term survival on this planet:
1. Zombies tend to continue the daily routines they had when they were alive. Football players still practice, nerds still hang out in the library, etc.
2. Mosquitoes can transmit the zombie virus.
3. Zombies can lie still and apparently dead, then jump up suddenly and eat your brains.

Rating: 3 out of five stars (5 stars -1(no Salma) -1(no co-ed shower scene despite the perfect setup)

Bye Bye Trojan Nuclear Plant

A mysterious internet entity known only as "jasno" sent me this clip of the Trojan Nuclear Plant (photographed below by one of my co-bloggers) being demolished.

Bye Bye Boo Boo

If this story doesn't make you cry like a 13-year old girl, you have no heart.

Space Ninja Footwear

Of course, Yoshi has had his own version of these for years (decades? centuries? how old is he anyway?) But these new sneakers make yet another odd connection with some engineers I know:
ASICs <==> Space Ninja
hmmm.....

An addition for the compleat home library

You can pre-order here.

The question is "Who shot first?"

Razing the Trojan and other mysterious bumps

We drove to Portand this weekend to visit Grandma and here are some pictures deftly shot from a moving vehicle. First, The Trojan reactor which I think is an amazing weirdo thing sticking up in the forest at the edge of the river next to Interstate 5. And since I was a tadpole, it also meant that there was only an hour left to grandma's house. Now they are going to blow it up next week I guess. I never photographed it in all these years, and I barely have now. Not sure what Erika will use to mark an hour left till grandma's. Some rubble I guess!


Trying to photograph the mountains while driving is not easy, so Jackie is helping out from the back seat. We never got a second chance for good shot at Mt. Hood, Mt. St Helens, some other giant thing I didn't remember, but we did get repeat shots at Mt. Rainier. As for Mt St. Helens, Jackie did mention something in the crater which "looked like it was growing" but the details are sketchy. Aside from that, below is the "back" side of Rainer and indeed it's bumpier than I remember.
There may be something going on and it's not visible from the Seattle side. I'm sure they are hiding it from us so that we don't panic and spill our coffee. Stuck on the floating bridge just 15 minutes from home we snagged this hazy "before" picture. Mike to take the "after" when the gov't gives the all clear, but you knew that already.
 

Impact!

This is old news to most of you, but the Impact Effects Calculator is a great aid in imagining what we can expect when the big one hits. For fun, I plugged in the latest theoretical numbers for the object that formed Meteor Crater in Arizona. The calculated results for the crater size were pretty close to actual. Interestingly enough, at 10km from the impact you would survive OK, assuming a piece of debris didn't land on you.

All this leads to the real point of this post: 99942 Apophis (get the SG-1 reference?) If this bad boy is going to whack us, it'll most likely do so in the Pacific, somewhere along the coast of North America. Bad news for some readers. I'll keep a close eye on developments, and if in 2036 you receive an email from me with subject, "The Raisin Loaf is in the Pan", head for higher ground immediately. That is all.

This Can't Be Good

A massive slab of rock is rising out of Mt. St. Helens at a rate of several inches per day. A sign of impending doom, or just giving Washington the finger? I report, you decide.