Grateful for @Amazon delivery notifications that informed me a @USPSHelp driver decided to leave a package outside a closed business. What if this had been something much more valuable than toilet paper?
Tag: rant
The fact the State Fair of Texas put a mask on Big Tex is an outright travesty.
Look, I catnapped through most of the #LSU game because at noon I came off a 10.5-hour shift, having been up since 10 PM last night. What was @LSUfootball’s reason?
You have to love the way the Amazon warehouse algorithms and shipping supply systems work. Hardcover book? Ship it in a box surrounded by bubblewrap. Two 2.5-inch external drives? Just throw those in a slightly-padded envelope. 🙄
Look, you raving psychotics, just because you got the Christmas lights installed on your house already doesn’t mean you have to TURN THEM ON.
#OneHolidayAtATime
The body of Halloween isn’t even cold in the ground, we haven’t had Thanksgiving yet, and Target already has Christmas crap out the instant you walk in the door.
#OneHolidayAtATime
There goes Disney, breaking my heart that the only version of Star Wars we’re going to get on Disney+ is the Special Edition.
SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MATT DAMON FILM, THE BOURNE IDENTITY, STOP READING. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.
In all Hollywood thrillers, there’s a certain suspension of belief the audience is expected to give. And in every movie, there are gaffes, missteps, and mistakes. But the one scene in The Bourne Identity that has always, and continues, with subsequent viewings, to bother me, is the one at the farmhouse, the confrontation between Jason Bourne and Clive Owen’s character, the Professor.
The plot points us to the Professor being one of Bourne’s equals. They’re both from the Treadstone project. They’re both “super weapons” of a kind. They’re both highly trained, and highly skilled. When Eamon’s dog is missing, and Jason realizes a killer is out there waiting for him, he does what we expect him to do: take the fight to the killer. It’s here the writers take the easy way out.
If the Professor was as highly skilled and as highly trained as we’ve been led to believe up to this point Treadstone agents are, he would never do the following:
- Give up the high ground.
- Give up the quiet shooting ability of the suppressor on his SIG 55x rifle.
- Give up the superior range and firepower of the SIG 55x rifle for a backup pistol.
Jason doesn’t know the Professor’s location. Given the layout of the farmhouse and the surrounding area, he suspects, but he doesn’t know. When he runs out into the trees from the farmhouse, the Professor attempts a shot, and after missing, decides to come down from his perch on the hill? Why give up the high ground, and the sun behind you? Your target is still below you, still within range, just hidden in the trees. Shift your position, attempt to reacquire, but you DON’T COME DOWN FROM ON HIGH.
And as he gives up the high ground, he simultaneously gives up sound suppression on a firearm? Jason Bourne may be the best Treadstone produced, but he still wouldn’t be able to track the shots by sound, even if he suspected the Professor’s hide at the top of the hill. Not at that range.
Finally, after coming down from the hill, the Professor inexplicably takes the only sighting device on the rifle off—why no iron sight backups? He then decides, as the birds Jason sent into flight with a shotgun blast whirl noisily about, to put down the weapon that could reach to any edge of the big clearing they’re in, and take up a small pistol with a more limited range and fewer available rounds.
I just can’t buy it. The film’s technical advisor(s) really let the production down in this area, and allowed the writers a cheap and easy way out to put down the other Treadstone agent on Jason’s trail. Way, way easier than it should have been. At least Castel lost a straight-up, one-on-one fight with Bourne. It is, for me, a thoroughly disappointing scene in an otherwise enjoyable (if imperfect) action thriller.
WINTER DOESN’T OFFICIALLY END for another three weeks, but Daylight Savings Time arrives next Sunday, and with it the semiannual aggravation of resetting every clock and watch in our lives. (Don’t forget the microwave! And the car dashboard!) Must we be saddled forever with this World War I-era relic? Contrary to popular belief, daylight savings doesn’t reduce energy consumption, it increases it. And not everybody relishes late-evening daylight; plenty of people would rather see sunlight earlier in the morning.
We can end this spring-forward-fall-back madness once and for all — and we can do so without having to choose between daylight time and standard time. The solution is simply to split the difference: Let’s amend the Uniform Time Act so that clocks would be shifted by 30 minutes — then let’s leave them that way for good.
Tony Woodlief never fails to amuse me in some fashion:
[T]his is what we have come to: a grown man, grooming his eyebrows in traffic, using his rear-view mirror. In Wichita.