Bruinsfan

I was really cracking up at the angry miner who was calling the hardened mercenaries/smugglers out as cowards for not volunteering to get shot in an uneven battle for people they met twenty minutes ago. Who would be stupid enough to do that? Other than One, of course. I thought for a bit that Six was going to fly up to the Company ship and turn traitor on the rest. Would have been an interesting twist. Seeing Torri Higginson was a pleasant surprise. I thought the SGA producers had napalmed their bridges with her years ago.

I wish I could believe M&M would do something that subversive, but I'm sure the charges against him are all some sort of misunderstanding and he's going to be the gee whiz Jiminy Cricket throughout the series. I do think that actual psychopathy would be evident even in someone with total amnesia, so that seems unlikely (though a possibility for Three). Speaking of, I wish that actor would try to inject at least a second dimension into his character. I'm bothered every time I see him in my peripheral vision because he looks just enough like Kavan Smith from some angles to fool my subconscious for a half second or so, and it's always a letdown when I realize that's not him. The whole thing felt like a bottle episode, which is not good when all the characters are basically ciphers.

I'll give it additional points over Dark Matter for featuring lots of extras and varied settings, including an outdoor garden party in daylight. I don't get the sense that the entire universe is a handful of characters, a ship set, and one warehouse. (I can just imagine Mallozzi and Mullie pitching their series by enthusiastically saying "Every episode is a bottle episode!"

They kept Luke McFarlane shirtless for half of the episode, and thereby won my loyalty. Much as I'm a fan of his though, I did wonder about the possibility of casting Shawn Ashmore as the other brother.

Exhibit A (that's an android duplicate of Gabriel the Air Walker) Exhibit B Exhibit C

Yeah, the people of Sokovia's capital city were going to lose their homes whether or not the Avengers did anything. Most of them (and the other 7 billion people) are alive to look for new homes because the Avengers evacuated the city beforehand and once it was airborne disintegrated and sprayed it over a wide enough area that it didn't hit like an asteroid impact. The movie called out that it was just a matter of time before the authorities sought to charge Banner for all the destruction (and presumable loss of life) he caused in Africa. That's why he took off on his own at the end rather than hanging around with the team.

Er, no. In the comics robots and other unliving things can pick up the hammer just fine. It's living, sentient beings that are capable of being judged worthy or unworthy. I would imagine that being self-aware the Vision would actually be treated like a human being, and in fact don't recall him ever being able to lift the hammer other than this new movie version. Of course, this version's mind isn't based on the brain patterns of a formerly treacherous arms dealer competitor of Stark's.

Oh well, at least if Claire does end up having children it's clearly Owen who will be the stay-at-home parent raising them.

Yeah. Masrani perhaps might have benefited from having more people willing to tell him "no," but at least his heart was in the right place and he was trying to help right up to the end. Ditto on the Rexy love. If anything I thought she should have made a better showing against the similarly-sized I-Rex as she was mature, had been in life-and-death fights before, and hadn't been clubbed by ankylosaurs and nearly fried by a missile launcher earlier that day. I get that non-vital shots with small arms fire wasn't lethal to it, but the thing isn't frickin' Godzilla, being hit multiple times and knocked into trees would have had some effect.

I've been harrassed for wearing my jersey to a regular season game in St. Louis, so it's not as if any city has a monopoly on misbehaving fans. Though my reception in Carolina was quite nice, and the fans at Predators arena in its first year were great to me despite wearing a full-on Bruins mascot outfit. One of my best hockey memories was being in the Fleet Center for Ray Bourque's final game in Boston (after his trade to the Avalanche) on 3/24/01. A standing room only crowd, and as one we turned on the home team like rabid dogs and cheered every time he took the ice. Byron Dafoe had said in interviews he expected the game to be business as usual, but I don't think he counted on the psychological impact of having an arena full of Bostonians rooting for the visiting team. At least, I don't recall letting in 3 goals in the first 4 minutes of play being business as usual for him.

NOTHING can alleviate 107 years of Cubs futility!

I'm glad for friends in Chicago, but I had close to zero personal emotional investment in the finals. There's no one on either team that's one of "my" players. (Though to be fair, there aren't many people left who were playing before Bourque's Cup win in 2001, which marked the close of my rabid fandom. And I've never been able to stand Jagr.) I was just happy to see some great hockey being played.

Yeah, the mosasaurus better start hibernating after it finishes its I-Rex snack. While the herbivores should be OK on their own, I don't see park personnel making it back with large food animals while Blue and the T-Rex have free run of Isla Nubar.

I'd go if it were all docile herbivores or a Seaworld-type setup like the mosasaurus had. Zoos manage 5 ton animals all the time without any visitors being harmed—it's when you mix large predators like tigers and people who don't know to avoid taunting them that you get casualties. And orcas are only dangerous to trainers and dumbasses like that guy who broke in to Tilikum's enclosure and ended up becoming a human hacky sack.

Well, that's never going to go away as long as every smooth surface in an Abrams movie is gleaming like the Hope Diamond. I may take sunglasses to the theater so my retinas don't get burned out by the first glimpse of the Abrams-style lightsaber.

I don't know... while Jarvis being able to anticipate Stark's every decision was probably a matter of long observation and calculating probabilities, he seemed to make accurate spot judgement calls regarding Ultron's motives within seconds of interaction. To me that smacks of emotional intelligence and insight, not just processing power.

Zara's death really was way over the top. She basically went out the same way Captain Hook did in Disney's animated Peter Pan, and despite how villainous he was I always thought the torture porn aspect was very questionable. Some plausibility problems with the dinosaurs are occurring to me in retrospect now, like pterosaurs barely bigger than human beings being able to grab and lift them—a golden eagle with a 6 to 7 foot wingspan can only lift about 8 lbs. in flight. (They are, however, capable of killing goats and wolves, just not actually picking them up.) Also, while I can easily see a 5+ ton dinosaur being able to break one of those gyrospheres by sheer weight, I'm unaware of any animal's DNA that would give it the diamond-tipped talons it would need to puncture spherical bulletproof glass with a slashing motion rather than just glancing off the curved surface.

Guillermo del Toro. His Pacific Rim captured the same kind of adventurous fun that the first Star Wars movie had and he gives agency to female characters. Plus, his aliens would be Lovecraftean monsters, not thinly-veiled racist caricatures.

The late estimates as of last night are falling slightly short of The Avengers' opening weekend, but the margin for error might push it over the top when you're talking about a fifth of a billion dollars. It has broken the worldwide opening weekend record with $511 million. So, in three days it made more than three times its total production budget and almost certainly paid off the marketing budget as well.

I can only assume the franchise is going to cross over with the Bond or GI Joe franchises to let BD Wong's character go full-on Mad Scientist. Speaking of, I had forgotten that his character was in Jurassic Park giving Alan and Ellie a tour of the genetics lab until I saw it rerun on TV this week. It was nice that they got at least one of the original supporting characters back. I realized at that point that I was rooting for the T-Rex more than I was for the human characters. So glad he or she got the run of the island at the end!

In DC comics it's what allowed Hitler to keep figures like the Golden Age Superman and the Spectre from ending the Third Reich overnight.

Now I want to see a SciFi Channel B movie that pits dinosaurs against Björk and Lady Gaga. The former is able to pass among them undetected thanks to her fortuitous dinosaur-themed fashion choices, and the latter matches the deadly weaponry of her outfits against tooth and claw.

The great salt flats that you could ride a motorcycle across for 160 days and not reach the end certainly seemed to imply that. But I can't think of any way to dry up the oceans without scouring the whole planet free of life aside from microbes buried deep underground, so maybe it's just some huge salt flat in the outback?

The newer previews I've seen make me wonder why in the hell someone would design a smarter, more vicious T-Rex with arms long enough to grab stuff off the ground. If you want a new tourist attraction, give it peacock feathers or teach it to sing your park's theme song or something.

They haven't introduced Kryptonite as yet; honestly, I think Bats would have better chances of finding something magic and exploiting that vulnerability. I can actually see him adding zeros to the end of a check until the Austrian Imperial Treasury hands over the Spear of Destiny.