dvandom

Rotten Tomatoes has it at a decent level (69% this morning based on 22 early reviews[ETA: Oops, slipped to 42% on Friday]), and things like machinegun buttocks don't particularly bother me. I have no Fond Childhood Memories of Astro Boy (I don't think I even heard of him until I was in grad school), although I've enjoyed the cheese factor of the original episodes I saw on Cartoon Network a few years back.

All in all, I have no reason to expect to dislike Astro Boy. On the other hand (which may or may not transform into a blaster), neither do I really have any reason to want to see it, other than "robots/animated/splody" (and I have an unwatched Revenge of the Fallen DVD I can use to scratch that itch if need be). It's sounding like they're telling a fairly bog-standard "boy learns the value of friendship and how to be a hero" story, which may or may not be a perversion of the original storyline (I recall a distinct lack of other kids for Astro to play with in most of the originals, but kids play a big role in the trailers) but is certainly not a take that calls out to me as interesting in its own right. Most of the limited negative reviews use the "made of spare parts" metaphor, which suggests that the storytelling craft is lacking.

So...unless people whose judgement I trust absolutely gush about this movie on Friday night, I'll probably spend the two hours catching up on my DVD pile this weekend rather than seeing Astro Boy. There's nothing else I'm even thinking of going to the theater for before Thanksgiving, so I could always catch Astro Boy next weekend if it turns out to be good.

Arkansas-Oklahoma-Kansas section of the American Association of Physics Teachers conference notes. 19 pages, possibly comprehensible to non-specialists. Plus an activity page at the end that anyone can enjoy. ;) (Edit: Oh, and typing these up is why I didn't do any ASH writing last week.)

Mwahaha! I'm watching the deleted scenes on Monsters vs. Aliens. In one of them, B.O.B. ingests a grenade and bounces off to go fight the alien hordes with a battlecry of "LEEEEEEROOYYY JENNNNKINNNSS!!"

Recommended. Good mold, improved "non-eye-searing" colors.

I've heard Frankie Valli's "My Eyes Adored You" a few dozens of times over the years, and yet I never managed to hear the title lyrics correctly. Mind you, he does kinda swallow the last two words, but I'd always thought it was "My Sweet Georgia" (as in, a woman named Georgia). But I finally heard it today with a front-sell (oldies stations tend to not front-sell or back-sell songs, on the not-unreasonable assumption that the audience already knows what the songs are..."songs you know" is a frequent ad line for them).

As frustrated as many of us may be with the slow (or no) pace at which Obama undoes the damage wrought by the Bush Administration, it may be that we're a little too close to the issue. At least as far as the Nobel committee is concerned, Obama's already come a long way towards keeping things from getting a lot worse, even if he hasn't made things better yet.

In other words, while we're annoyed he hasn't built a bridge across the bottomless pit yet (and seems in some ways content to leave the pit just as it is), some parts of the world are delighted that that car approaching the pit has at least slowed down, if not stopped.

ETA: It was pointed out to me over on Facebook that one thing Obama has accomplished so far has been to get Russia to stop pointing missiles at Norway. Where they vote on the Nobels. So, y'know....

UC Davis gets grant to develop a solid forensics basis for comparison of duct tape tears. The idea being that a tear in duct tape (used, say, to bind up a hapless superchica) is as identifiable as fingerprints or ballistics markings. So better start using scissors....

Electrical transformer went offline at work, just before 4 lab classes were about to start. Whee! My office has no windows, so with no power to do computer work (no WiFi either, and I don't have any work related stuff loaded on my EEE) and no light to do non-computer work, I have repaired to the comic shop and its WiFi.