Lone Locust Productions

Month: July 2006

  • Maintenance Blogging

    I just haven’t had much time lately, so have I got a backlog of stuff… guess I’m going to post it in condensed form, otherwise, I’d be typing all month.

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  • Thanks, Jackie Chan, you’re a hero in everyone’s eyes

    ABC News => Drunken Jackie Chan Disrupts Show

    They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but really, perhaps Jackie Chan needs to consider stopping drinking?

    Jackie Chan disrupted a concert by Taiwanese singer-songwriter Jonathan Lee and exchanged insults with the audience, a news report said Tuesday.

    Ming Pao Daily News quoted the 52-year-old action star as saying onstage that he was drunk.

    Chan suddenly jumped on the stage Monday night and demanded a duet with Lee. He then tried to conduct the band but stopped and restarted the music several times, the newspaper reported.

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  • Phoenix Light Rail Madness

    Phoenix Metro

    We actually took the kids to Steele Indian School Park for the Fourth of July show this year.

    For many years, the big fireworks show was held downtown, and, by coincidence, we have a friend who owns a house within a couple blocks, so every years we used to go to his front yard.

    Then, a couple years ago, they moved the show to the new park, which is 2 miles from our house. We thought we’d get a great vantage point, but there’s just enough big trees in the way that, unless you get on the roof, it’s not very good.

    Even though it is only two miles, of course, all the streets are closed off and it’s too darned hot to walk (especially with a 4 year-old and a 1 year-old in tow.) So, this year we drove to one of the designated park and rides where special shuttle buses were running for free to the park. The ride (up Central Avenue) wasn’t too bad. People had been arriving for hours and so there was just a small but steady stream of people looking to catch the shuttle.

    The ride back was a nightmare.

    Apparently there was a car accident right in the intersection of the one street that was allowed to cross Central. (How do you have an accident in an intersection crossing a closed road?!)

    What that meant was, not only did you have everyone leaving the park all at once to catch the busses, but the busses couldn’t get from the parking lot to the park, so the streets just jammed with people waiting for the busses to arrive.

    When we finally did get on the buses, they were absolutely standing room, rush hour Tokyo packed, and the ride back was taken in 6 foot increments. It wasn’t pleasant. One of the reasons it was so messed up was that the route travelled right down Central in the midst of the light rail construction. (You see, there really is a tie-in to the light rail in this post.)

    Anyway, the upstart of this was that some dumb SOB, standing on the other end of the bus was complaining long and loud about the light rail. He’d clearly drank all the anti-light rail kool-aid and was talking out his ass. (In exactly the same way the anti-light rail people do.)

    “Blah, blah, blah… the train only travels 15 mph… blah blah blah… no one will use it… blah blah blah.”

    Unfortunately, since he was at the other end of the bus and I didn’t feel like shouting at him, I just gritted my teeth and let him ramble on.

    Phoenix Metro

    In any case, to set the record straight, I suggest that you go to The Valley Metro Rail Page and read up about it yourself. (Of course, you can argue that their information will be – obviously – biased, but the facts aren’t too hard to check.)

    Basically, the light rail can travel at 55mph; however, because it travels along city street in traffic, the train will be programmed to operated at the designated, legal speed limit for the street it is traveling along. Combine that with the fact that it makes limited stops (too few in my opinion, as they dropped a few stations in the planning phase) and the lights will be synchronized to allow it to pass means that it will travel at near the speed limit.

    I realize that no one drives at the speed limit in this town, but it is unrealistic to argue that the train should “speed” down the streets, and, if you’ve every travelled those roads during high volume times, no one actually even approaches the speed limit, so the train should be a faster alternative.

    His other gripe was that no one will ride it. Well, obviously, that remains to be seen. Considering how awful this city’s bus system is, I’d argue that no one would ever ride the bus, either, but they do. if I hop on even the earliest Indian School bus traveling towards Central, it’s standing room only until it reaches Central and then almost everyone gets off and hops on a Central bus. Those people will absolutely be riding the light rail when it is operational.

    The light rail route doesn’t really go much of anywhere that I want to go, but I have to believe that the route chosen, while it may have been a compromise, covers some of the most heavily trafficked bus routes.

    This morning, the Arizona Republic ran an article on the light rail showing some pictures of the construction process. I was very pleased to see that each car can hold 8 bicycles, and with 3 cars per train, that’s a 24 bicycle capacity. I quite like that, that makes it viable for me to bike the 1 mile to the nearest stop, then bike the 2 miles to my office from the stop near work.

    One thing I don’t like from these pictures – those seats look just as awful as the seats on the Phoenix bus. Every time I return from Taiwan, where I ride the bus a lot, I think, “It’s not so bad riding a bus, I must do that more often.” But, once or twice on those horrible, narrow, plastic, butt-numbing buckets and I decide to go back to riding my car.

    I suppose if they put upholstered seats in the busses, some fourth-grade reject jackass with a finger up his butt would cut them up and generally vandalize them.

    Hmm, guess this post constitutes a rant, now.

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  • Doctor Who – Doomsday – Review

    Doomsday
    by Russell T. Davies

    Last week I reported (despite what everyone else seems to be saying) that nothing really happened in “Army of Ghosts” – it was mostly a filler episode with the completely pointless subplot (of the overall story) of the “ghosts”. Really it just killed time till they were revealed to be Cybermen.

    This week, though, they really delivered – if not a great story at least an exciting one.

    Last time at the cliffhanger, 5 million Cybermen arrive everywhere on Earth ready to “upgrade” us all. Meanwhile, the Daleks emerge from the void. Could things be darker for the Doctor?

    So what happens? Huh, now that I think about it, there’s not much plot here, either.

    Cybermen want to take over the Earth, Daleks want to take over the universe, Daleks and Cybermen cannot get along, 4 Daleks appears to be an even match for 5 million Cybermen, but they’re still scared of the Doctor.

    The Daleks were protecting the Genesis Ark, which is in fact a Time Lord prison ship, containing… perhaps millions of Daleks and they’re unleashed on the Earth.

    They’re lots of shooting, destruction, general mayhem and a ripping good time was had by all.

    The Doctor sucks them all into the void, permanentlyseals the rift between the two parallel universes and the story ends – both worlds saved – the Daleks and the Cybermen wiped out (yet again?) and the Doctor looking for a new companion.

    I thoroughly enjoyed it, but there are a couple gripes and possibilities.

    • The Torchwood chick got upgraded, but apparently the Cybermen weren’t too thorough with her as she still retained her identity and acted as a “hero” in the end. (The oil “tear” coming out of her eye was really hokey.)
    • The Doctor’s solution only sucked people and things that had crossed the universes into the void, therefore we can assume that all the newly upgraded humans in this universe are still running around.
    • The Genesis Ark was a Time Lord prison, who knows what was locked up in it besides the Daleks – Davros? the Master? Apparently all you had to do was hang on really tight and you could avoid being sucked into the void – who knows who or what managed to stay in our universe?
    • The Doctor risked life and limb to grab those magna-clamps (not so subtly foreshadowed in the previous episode) so they could “hang on”. Wouldn’t rope have been easier and more effective?
    • Bad Wolf, Bad Wolf, Bad Wolf! Argh! Did we have to put up with the whole last season subplot just because dÃ¥rlig which sounds a lot like “Dalek” means “Bad” in Norwegian?
    • Cliffhanger? I hate season ending cliffhangers! Especially stupid ones and worse, stupid ones where the announcer tells you to wait 170 days to find out what happens.
    • With no communication between universes, how the hell could Pete know to show up exactly where he did, at exactly the right moment, poised exactly as he was to catch Rose and why wasn’t he just instantly pulled right off his feet and sucked into the void?

      • Stay Tuned at Christmas for “The Runaway Bride”

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  • Doctor Who – Army of Ghosts – Review

    Army of Ghosts
    by Russell T. Davies

    The final two-part story of the series has begun and, as we’ve known for a long time, the Cybermen are invading Earth, but they’re doing it very, very slowly, which is what can be said for this episode, too. There’s not much happening, really.

    Of course, the big story (if there isn’t more than one) is that this is Rose’s swan song, and we’ve been really primed to believe she’s going to die. In fact, in the beginning of this episode she explains to us in narration that this is how she dies.

    I still maintain that “dead” is a euphemistic term for some transformation, as Rose is clearly at least “alive” enough to tell us she’s dead. (I still think Rose will somehow become The Face of Boe. [See my earlier post.])

    The episode opens with the Doctor and Rose arriving back on Earth to visit Jackie, who has apaprently gone mad because she insists that her dead father is about to arrive. It turns out that for the last 2 months “ghosts” have been showing up all over the planet, in shifts. Everyone is all quite good with it by now and it is revealed that Torchwood has been causing it.

    Torchwood and the Doctor come together, there’s lots of unnecessary exposition and we learn that Torchwood holds a sphere that doesn’t exist. The Doctor identifies it as a void ship – a craft capable of existing in the void between dimensions.

    Meanwhile Cybermen are taking over people at Torchwood, who then turn up the ghost shift to full power and ghosts reveal themselves to be… Cybermen. (No surprise there.) They’ve now arrived in their millions all over the Earth.

    Meanwhile, Rose encounters Mickey, who has apparently also come through to continue his fight against the Cybermen, who disappeared off his adopted planet. He thinks that the sphere contains the Cybercontroller, or some such, and is there to destroy it. It turns out it contains Daleks.

    End of episode. In other words, the whole episode was just setup for the next one, and in that respect, I don’t think it was a very good episode – really just filler.

    A few observations, the Dalek (including a black Dalek, which signifies rank) do not look like the Imperial Daleks from the Parting of the Ways, so presumably they are real original Daleks who escaped this universe when the Doctor wiped them and the Timelords out of existence. Perhaps they are Daleks who escaped even earlier, perhaps when the 7th Doctor wiped out Skaro’s sun.

    Bad news for the Doctor, unless the Timelords got out of town, too.

    Since nothing really happens in this episode, the trailer for next time is much more interesting. The three Daleks (there appear to be only three – or perhaps four) are escorting a Dalek-like case containing “The Genesis Ark” and the Cybermen are taking over the planet – in fact, there’s even talk of cooperation rather than war between them.

    Two possibilities come to mind, the Genesis Ark contains the power (or a gene bank, or who knows what) to recreate the Dalek race – could it be Davros? Is it a device which Rose destroys and sacrifices her “life” in the process?

    Time will tell, I just hope the next episode actually gets off its butt and does something.

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