Blessed by the Potato

I’ve been catching up on 24 (a show I initially dismissed as gimicky, and while I do find some faults with the execution of the concept, it’s actually quite watchable). I think it really is meant to be watched in rapid succession like this. There have been a few things that have bothered me, such as the computer people constantly “opening sockets” to do anything. It’s really strange technobabble, and it kind of annoys me that they keep repeating it (it is ok to make up some new technobabble).

What gets me the most though is that nobody seems to wear seat belts. Which is strange considering how many accidents they all get in… Likewise, Jack Bauer goes on all kinds of raids without strapping on a bulletproof vest, except for one or two times when he goes out of his way to put one on, and those are the times he actually gets hit.

Some unrealistic things are just going to be a given to help the show along, things like magical security cameras that can be enhanced to show an incredible amount of detail, and send their images over “a socket” to CTU. And the fact that this high-security government agency can’t go a single season without a mole or traitor sneaking in. They stock a good number of security guards (who have recently started wearing red shirts to indicate that they’re disposable), but apparently keep them in a closet except when called since they never actually stop anyone from getting in to or out of the building, or keep an eye on the people while they’re working. And it just wouldn’t do to have commuting across LA take more than 10 minutes…

A number of other plot inconsistencies bug me, though.

Spoiler alert!

For instance, in season 5 there is much lamenting over the terrorist threat to attack Suvarov’s motorcade. The whole time I was thinking: if you’re the kind of person willing to sacrifice a few secret service agents for nothing, then why not send the motorcade on, but send the Russian president by helicopter instead? Then many, many episodes are spent trying to recover a certain voice recording. Several times Jack has it in his possession only to lose it again. The big question I was practically screaming at the TV was why didn’t Jack just copy the stupid thing?! He had a cell phone and a tape recorder, he could have just called CTU, played it up to the receiver, and let them archive it that way. Or later when they capture Henderson and the recording isn’t on him, and Jack figures out that he’s using it as insurance (otherwise he would have destroyed it), why not just kill Henderson? After all, as he threatened, if anything happened to it, that would be made public. That would save all the effort of tracking it down, and just get it out there. Sure, it wouldn’t be ideal chain of custody procedures for evidence, but in a case like that it probably doesn’t matter as much. Plus it would help a ton for all the people who say “I think Bauer is telling the truth, but I haven’t heard the evidence myself…”

Well, one of the busiest highways in the world has a new name (at least for a section of it). It’s a name befitting a hair metal band.

I don’t really care for the name change, after all, we already have several Veteran’s Highways (the former Airport Rd. in London, and the 416 near Ottawa). And it’s a pretty cheesy name, I don’t know how much it really honours our soldiers (and other domestic heroes). The quotes in the article make little sense to me:

Capt. Mark Bossi, who served in Afghanistan, fought back tears as he rode along the stretch with CTV Toronto.

“That’s amazing — it really is,” Bossi said when he saw one of the signs. “It’s on (Highway) 401 — people are going to see them everyday.”

The signs are in response to an online petition in support of renaming the highway that was overwhelmed with responses.

Bossi understands why the grassroots movement to dedicate the stretch grew so quickly.

“If you think about it, every soldier has a mom and dad,” he said, his voice trembling.

“A lot of guys have wives and children. I think that’s one of the reasons Canadians wanted the highway renamed.”

So seeing the highway renamed made this captain so emotional he had to fight back tears? That makes little sense to me, the highway would probably have to be named after me personally to get that involved in it, and even then… of course, I haven’t suffered unknown amounts of PTSD. The last part of his quote makes even less sense. Every grad student has a mom and dad, and many have wives and children, but that really doesn’t make any sense for a reason to rename a highway. In fact, he seems to imply that the highway was renamed to appease/coddle the survivors of soldiers killed rather than to actually honour the soldiers themselves.

At least it’s not something that’s really going to affect me. For brevity’s sake alone, I think most people will still call it the 401 in everyday usage, similar to how nearly everyone still calls that stadium beneath the CN Tower “Skydome”.

Just a quick note to the Rogers users out there: Rogers will begin charging for going over your monthly download cap (60 GB for Express, 100 GB for Extreme) soon. Of course, knowing Rogers, they’d never tell you that until you actually got a bill from them for it. The usage monitor tool (when it works) now shows the charge amount as well as your usage to date. At the moment the overage charge is $1.25/GB (which seems a little steep already), but that will be going up to $2/GB for Express (each tier is anticipated to have its own overage charge amount, Extreme at $1.50/GB, and Ultra-Lite at $2.75/GB), and the cap will be coming down (down?!) to 50 GB for Express. It is believed that the charges will go into effect in September, but will be waived until December (so if you just look at the bottom line of your bill, you might not notice until December, but if you look at the service breakdown, you may see a funny charge/refund set of lines starting this month… assuming you go over your cap). The maximum overage charge is anticipated to be $50 (though if you’re a 300 GB/mo downloader, Rogers may drop you).

Personally, this probably won’t affect me. When I had Extreme, the most I ever downloaded in a month was 62 GB, and that was when torrents worked and I was connected to a WoW server for half the day. My usage now is typically in the 20-40 GB range, but that’s just a little too close for comfort if the cap becomes 50 GB (especially if I get back into online gaming). It comes off as pretty scuzzy, especially with throttling being used as another measure to limit bandwidth use, and so many price increases seen in the past few years. If I thought the phone lines in this house could handle DSL, I’d probably switch to Teksavvy. (Unfortunately, half the phones in the house have a lot of audible static, which just can’t be good for DSL — and I still haven’t found the phone demark box in the basement).

Well, Quebec has admitted that the three masked bandits making the news rounds lately were indeed cops. They also said that they weren’t there to incite violence or act as provocateurs, but after seeing the video, I think that’s a statement we’ll just have to file under “what else would you expect them to say?”

I find this topsy-turvy business of the police looking for a fight and using underhanded tactics like this to be very disturbing. What’s happened to our society? I mean, we can barely stomach it when this sort of thing happens in the States, but to happen in Quebec? And what the heck is going on at the SPP?

Snarky letter-formatted post aside, I did enjoy Transformers. It was quite a bit different from “Canon”, but is, in its own way, a decent movie.

I did almost puke.

The GM sponsorship was pretty obvious, and I pointed it out to Wayfare:
“They made a deal with GM.”
“Makes sense. Think of how many kids of our generation wanted a Delorian after Back to the Future.”
“I still want a Delorian.”
“Exactly! If they still made them, they’d be the only thing on the road!”

Spoilers follow (skip to the previous post, which is below this one in the default view, which is pretty spoiler-free)
Some nits:

I was really glad they got the same voice for Optimus Prime, and was a little surprised to see the return of the sword/axe for Optimus and the ball & chain for Megatron: weaponry that I don’t think we saw in more than one or two episodes of the cartoon.

PS: IMDB has the stereo decepticon down as Frenzy rather than Soundwave. The old memory’s foggy, but I thought Frenzy was a cassette for Soundwave…

PPS: If you’re playing MOO2 and are trying to find the distance between two stars, the key you’re looking for is F9.