Some new Portal 2 footage was released last week and…well, I don’t think I can get any more excited about this. I thought it was rather unfortunate that the awesome English voice given to Wheatley was only a placeholder but it seems it’s been replaced by an even more awesome English voice: Stephen Merchant! As a huge fan of The Ricky Gervais Show podcast as well as the original UK version of The Office and Extras, well, this is great news. Looks like the game is coming along nicely and there’s some graphical upgrades but everything looks like what fans of the first game expect.
It’s been almost four years since we started holding Dot Com Pho regularly and filming it as a weekly video. Even before that, myself, John and friends would meet up to eat and chat whether that was over some Vietnamese noodles, burgers, barbecue or terrible Chinese food in the middle of the night.
But this week, John leaves us as he heads to Seattle and then possibly sunnier weather in California. What does this mean for the future of Dot Com Pho? Well, we’ve discussed plenty of possibilities. Personally, I’d like the rest of us to keep meeting up for food, conversation and laughter. I’ll also head down to Seattle and crash at John’s place once in awhile. Heck, when we all get iPhone 4’s, John can join us literally via satellite…or FaceTime. I think the biggest difficulty is gathering guys like iPhone Gary, Greg and Stephen now that we all live so far apart so some definite changes coming but I’m sure the bloggers of Vancouver will continue to be a strong community.
Of course, we could always go with my idea…where John, myself and probably Stephen and Michael do a weekly podcast together. We wouldn’t need to be in the same physical space to do it and, well, things would basically be exactly the same…a bunch of idiots talking about random stuff.
Now that it seems to have stopped eating itself and bugging out, I think this is a good time to tell all of you about my new food blog, EdEats.com! Some of you may have already noticed there’s a new link up top in the nav bar or all the updates I’ve posted on Twitter. Yes, I’ve posted a lot of food stuff here in the past but I think it’s time to split it up and have a separate blog dedicated to food. I mean, I might still post stuff from events I go to here and Dot Com Pho but most restaurant reviews and travel food pictures will be posted at EdEats. I’ve already moved about 30 of my Vancouver restaurant reviews.
So check it out. All future conversations about eating penguins and such will be over there!
Growing up, I watched my share of ridiculous action movies featuring the heavyweights of the time: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Bruce Willis just to name a few. Of course, right in there was Sylvester Stallone, who I was a big fan of just from watching the Rocky movies on TV. I admit, my favorite is Rocky IV, where Sly and another ’80s, Dolph Lundgren, pummel each other to a bloody pulp.
Arnie, JCVD and others were cool and/or funny (“IT’S NOT A TUMOR!) but I think Stallone was my favorite action hero of that era and mostly because of the Rocky saga. While everyone else was some sort of superhuman killing machine, Rocky was just an extraordinary man, the epitome of heroism and strength of will. I mean, you couldn’t keep that dude down.
I imagine that when I was 12, I wanted the same sort of movie that any other 12-year old boy wanted to see: a movie starring ALL these action heroes where things exploded and bad guys were shot, punched or thrown out of airplanes. Unfortunately. the closest thing we probably ever got to that was Demolition Man which had both Sly and Wesley Snipes.
Those days, however, are now over as we now have a movie starring a collection of old school action stars like Stallone and Lundgren (Schwarzenegger and Willis make cameos) as well as a bunch of more recent stars like Jason Statham, Jet Li and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. The Expendables is the movie everyone roughly my age wanted to see when they were 12 and after seeing it, I feel like it was custom-made for 12-year old me while 27-year old me can only really like it with the aid of a time machine.
Yes, despite the potential awesomeness that all these guys on screen could offer, I didn’t really want to see this movie. However, I almost felt obligated to since it’s the movie I wanted to see as a kid. It’s not that The Expendables isn’t an enjoyable film but set your expectations to low. At least Sly still looks like an action star. He in rather good shape for a guy that’s pushing 65. Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, has really let himself go but I guess that’s what happens when you’re the Governator.
Talking about the plot is completely useless. It’s the same generic plot we’ve seen over and over where a group of mercenaries are sent to some remote island to overthrow a genocidal regime led by some crazy dictator. It’s like they used a cookie-cutter when they wrote this script or they spent all their time coming up with ridiculously stupid names for the movie’s characters like Yin Yang and Lee Christmas that they didn’t have any left over to write an actual plot. In fact, the one moment that seemed half-way genuine and human where Mickey Rourke talks about how he wants his life to mean something was just downright out of place amongst all the one-liners and explosions.
It’s not necessary to mention any of the action in the movie either as if it’s good, then it isn’t noticeable and if it’s bad, then it totally fits with the overall tone of the movie. It’s unfortunate that Jet Li is reduced to mostly comic relief and you don’t get to see him really go to town with the martial arts, though. He spends most of the movie being the subject of height jokes. The guy that I expected to totally be comic relief, Terry Crews, is rather underused in the movie and spends most of his screen time using some absurdly overpowered weapon to blow everything up. Personally, I think Terry Crews is sort of underrated as a funnyman and I usually enjoy everything he’s in.
The action in The Expendables is a bit of a throwback where guns do most of the talking and enemy soldiers have as much of a chance against our heroes as red shirts did in Star Trek. In an age where action is almost synonymous with complicated choreography resulting in almost ballet-like fight sequences, it’s almost nice to see the action of my childhood where guys simply introduced some bullets to a bad guy’s face. I will, however, say that they may have been a bit excessive with it. There’s one scene where Jason Statham stabs a guy in the neck and then proceeds to empty his pistol’s entire magazine into his chest. Either one would’ve probably been sufficient. It’s not really a big deal but our heroes complain about running out of ammunition near the end of the movie…which just leaves you speechless.
If you’re too young to see The Expendables, then you’ll probably love it. Seriously, everyone under the age of 18 should absolutely love this movie. If you’re around my age, then you’ll enjoy it simply for the nostalgia…not because it’s a particularly good movie. If it didn’t starred anyone but this cast, then it would be mediocre at best.
If you check your brain at the door and not think about it too much, The Expendables isn’t bad. If you don’t expect too much, you won’t be disappointed.
The Dot Com Pho table has always been filled with many individuals with different opinions. For example, there are those who believe in the current trend of green cars while some of us such as myself think they’re stupid. I mean, I’m not just being a petrolhead on this one. Hybrids are genuinely not as green as people think they are.
I wrote a paper on this back in university, showing research that finds that producing the nickel in a hybrid car’s battery is more damaging to the environment than driving a combustion engine for around 150,000 miles. That’s right, you don’t get any of the green benefits of a hybrid until you’ve driven around in it for that long and well, after 6 years on the road, my Mazda 3 is hovering around the 40,000 mark in mileage.
In addition, it’s not about what you’re driving…it’s how you drive it. If you speed a lot, a Prius is no more economical than a regular car. You have to drive abominably slow for it to only use the electric engine. Plus, most hybrids aren’t even the most fuel efficient cars on the road. In other parts of the world that aren’t North America, there are diesel engine cars sold that nearly double the MPGs of a Prius.
And we’re not even talking supercars. In my opinion, supercars should just not be touched with this ridiculous technology like Porsche’s new 918. It’s possibly the best looking Porsche I’ve seen in a long time (911s and Boxsters are rather ugly) but it’s utterly ruined by the fact that it’s a hybrid. $600,000 should buy you a car that sounds like the Hulk is brushing his teeth with rusty chainsaws. That and supercars are, by nature, greener than any hybrid…because usually they sit in garages and not being driven on the road.
I don’t know…maybe when someone figures out a viable solution for hydrogen-powered cars, I’ll be convinced but for now, give me fuel burners any day.
