Academia Waltz: Snake bit again.

Years and years ago I found the comic Opus by Berkeley Breathed. While I thought it was better than Outland and not as good as Bloom County. I was very much pleased to see Berkeley get back to what drew me to his work in the first place.

I post links all over my site to the comic Opus. Only a month later to have it stop production and completely disappear. I now have to go back in and remove all the links.

Back in April I'm all agog over Academia Waltz. Only a few weeks later the comic stops. I caught it at the end if its two year run. All the links become broken. However this time the comics are still up. All I had to do was click around and find comic one and change all the links to that one.

I have been keeping an eye on it to make sure the links are still good. Which reminds me, I think I'm at that two or three year interval that requires a check of the links page at my site.

Ravy 2011 Pg. 24.

Click Here.

That picture of "Penny" that's been in the upper left of the nav bar for 6 months now?

How I love misdirection.

That is unless its me trying to find a coin shop that moved and they never updated their address.

X-Men: First Class.

We get to see the formation of the Children of the Atom team. Going from the trials, triumphs, and tragedies. We get quite the insight into the true motivations and what made Charles Xavier and Magneto. Set during the Cuban Missile crisis, we also get quite the look at early sixties history and quite the reminder of the Cold War mentality of the struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Overall I felt I got my money's worth. Of course, I'm the guy that actually liked X-Men 3 and Wolverine. This was the first movie I saw this year that was worth paying full price.

Now let's have some fun by riffing it. There were some technical glitches I noted. In the scene where Eric is trying to turn a giant satellite, I could easily tell that not a whole lot of time was spent animating it. Then there was a scene of the Soviet ship carrying the missiles to Cuba, it too looked as if somebody forget to touch it up before being sent out to theaters.

Another part were the weapons being carried by the CIA agents in Russia. They looked like late model M-16s. In what research I did for this article, the M-16 was in development long before 1962, doubtful that even the CIA would have a variation that looked like ones from the 1980's or 1990's. These things were only on screen for split seconds, so I couldn't get a good look at them. Going to have top wait for the DVD to come out and freeze frame it to tell. Probably going to have to come back in here and line through this section.

I never really understood how Magneto's powers could affect non-magnetic metals such as brass. I totally understand iron, steel, and tin, but copper wires? Is he using magnetic fields to do this? Take a magnet and try and pick up an aluminum can. In the movie Magneto twists around the railing of a brass bed to choke out Emma Frost. How is this possible? Guess I should just chalk it up to comic book logic and move on.

To Mystique. Aside from Magneto and Xavier, she is one of the most well developed characters in this movie. What I don't like is her character design. It looks like scales of a fish or the exoskeleton of an insect. Is it some sort of clever way to get a naked woman on screen as much as possible? In the comics and cartoons it's just blue skin. Why take all the time for this kind of make-up job? Star Trek was able to pull off the green skin of Orion women back in 1965 and it looked good.

My final critique: They claim that it is nuclear energy that is creating the mutations that we see. How do you explain Xavier, Eric, Raven, Emma, Shaw, Riptide, and Azezel, who were all born before any atomic testing began? Madam Curie? How about Wolverine and Beast? Was there radiation in the chemical used in flash photography of pre-Civil War?

My my my: One more: There was no bonus scene. Most of the theater stayed through the credits. I saw a few people come back in. Apparently remembering that there is usually some teaser. We were all verbally disappointed by that. Especially me. I had to pee really bad. I waited through all that for nothing. I almost didn't make to Subway in time before it closed. I was expecting someone to find Bucky frozen in ice. Or Peter Parker stumbling into the Auotbot Ark. Maybe even Barbara Morse getting hit with a gamma bomb.

I think I'm tapped out. Go see it, it's worth you time and money. Though maybe they could have done a better job of editing the training sequence scene together like how it was done in 24.

Secret of the century: It's okay to pass a cop.

I'm tooling along, doing 55 in a 55 on a 4 lane highway. Well in the left lane is a cop. I'm catching him pretty quick. That's pretty unusual. Cops around here normally do the speed limit. I decide to slow down and take in the situation. So now I'm doing 50.

I look at his car and see no lights or even turn signals. The cop is looking straight ahead. I look around and see nothing out of the ordinary. I wait another few seconds, and then gun it. Back up to 55. As I start to pass him he speeds up and pulls even with me.

I can see out of the corner of my eye that he is looking me over. Probably thinking what crackhead passes a cop? A crackhead that wants to do the speed limit. I just keep doing what I normally do: look straight ahead and do 55 in the 55.

We hit a red light. It has been red for quite awhile, not a situation where I could have had it green if I had been doing the speed limit. (More on that some other time.) The cop is in the left lane, there's a guy in front of me in the right. The light turns green the cop takes off, then the guy in front takes off. And we ever so slowly get it up to 50. It's like that for about two miles. Slowpoke on the right has his front bumper about half car length behind slowpoke cop's back bumper. Meaning there's now way for me to safely pass them.

Police officers are just like everybody else. They are required to follow the law and do the speed limit while not on a call. If one is doing five, ten, or fifteen below pass him. As long as the law is on your side. I'm not going to get into a what if scenario about getting pulled over. This rant is getting long.

Would I pass a cop doing 50 in the 55 on a two lane road? No of course not. Five miles per hour isn't worth it. Ten or fifteen? I would think long and hard about it. Probably would.

The cop I was talking about earlier does a u-turn and speeds back the other way. I don't pass the slowpoke in front of me, because a block later I have to make my turn.

Ravy 2011 Pg. 23.

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