'round and 'round we go...

I think this point needs to be more widely understood - it's lost on so many folks.

-Jay

It didn't take long for my classmates to suggest alternatives.  One of those was Speed Racer, the American dub of the Japanese series Mahha GoGoGo.

My mom objected to shows like this and the old Spider-Man cartoon most vocally on the grounds of the excessive violence, which served only to increase my desire to see them.  Forbidden fruit and all that.

Speed Racer, to my young eyes, was all about the car - the Mach 5.

This was gonna be my first car...

Speed Racer and the Mach 5 might be claimed as a source of inspiration for many vehicle-themed shows that later followed - Knight Rider, for example.

So, a few years back when the Wachowski Brothers, still riding the cachet they'd built with The Matrix¹ and its sequels, got attached to a live-action version of Speed Racer, I was intrigued.

The film tanked at the box office when it was released in 2008, and drew generally negative reviews.  I picked up the DVD about a year ago at Target for the princely sum of $5, but it gathered dust on the shelf until last night, when a combination of insomnia and lack of anything better to do led me to pop open a beer and throw Speed Racer into the player.

I'll say up front that not even reviewing films like Mega Shark Vs. Crocosaurus could have prepared me for the Wachowski Brothers' take on Speed Racer.

Let's begin.

We meet a young Speed Racer in school, unable to concentrate on his work.  Constantly caught up in daydreams about racing, he's considered an outsider by his classmates and a poor student by his teacher.  We come to learn that his father builds race cars, and his brother Rex drives them.  These aren't just any race cars, either.  They're impossibly high-performance machines that race on tracks that look more like fancy Hot-Wheels setups:

Not your father's race track

In Speed Racer's world, physics doesn't seem to have much use.  Cars spin, flip, drift around turns, spring over other cars, and travel at speeds approaching 500 MPH.

Speed's brother, Rex, is a very talented racer, but has a fallout with their father, Pops (a horribly under-utilized John Goodman), and leaves home on a dark and stormy night.

Shortly after, a racing accident kills Rex, who was living under accusations of cheating.  The Racer family is crushed.  Mom (played by Susan Sarandon, who spends most of her scenes looking like she's trying to find an escape from the set) takes Rex's death particularly hard, but provides the emotional glue that holds the family together.  (Ms. Sarandon was given possibly the most well-written dialog in the entire film.  Nevertheless, one must wonder just what sort of leverage the Wachowski's had on her to get her into this thing.)

Speed grows up (portrayed by Emile Hirsch)  to become a fine racer in his own right, and after dramatically winning a local race, is approached by Royalton (Roger Allam) to join his stable of racers.  The Racer family, long an independent racing team, is suspicious of Royalton's offer, but goes with him to visit his headquarters, accompanied by Speed's long-time girlfriend, Trixie² (Christina Ricci).

After the initial visit, Speed and Trixie discuss Royalton's offer and Speed's future.

Trixie and Speed

The Wachowski's aren't subtle.  Anyone who can't figure out that Royalton isn't one of the good guys is either dead or asleep (which, by this point in the film wouldn't be out of the question.)  We can tell because his eyebrows have a sort of villainous arch to them.

All he's missing is a waxed mustache...

Really, they could have made it a little less obvious.  Anyhow, when Speed declines Royalton's offer of indentured servitude employment, Royalton tells Speed that the Racer family name won't even have any cache on a late night infomercial, let alone in the racing world.  (Apparently the sport of auto racing in the reality of Speed Racer is little more than a front for corporate manipulation of stock prices, and the winners of every major race are negotiated beforehand.)

Sure enough, before you know it, things have gone bad for the family.

Enter the mysterious RacEr X and (in what has to be one of the most ridiculous names ever) Inspector Detector of the CIB (or something - it's a group that investigates corruption in the racing business).

Racer X (left, duh.) and Inspector Detector

They have a proposal for Speed - team up with RacEr X and some other driver who we were introduced to a few minutes ago that I didn't bother to mention to win a big road race that will lead the third driver to give up a file he has on corrupt drivers and team owners and put people like Royalton with funky eyebrows out of business.  (You'll note that Inspector Detector is clearly a good guy - nary an arched eyebrow in sight.)

Speed and Trixie decide to accept the offer against the wishes of Speed's parents, and head to the race under cover of a skiing trip.

The bad guys put a bounty on Speed's team, and automotive hijinks ensue as the various drivers deploy whatever dirty tricks they have at their disposal to win.

Some dramatic tension unfolds as the race goes through the same cave that Speed's brother, Rex was killed in - a stretch of road that RacEr X seems unusually familiar with.

Speed and company ultimately prevail and win the race, only to discover that the third driver really didn't have a file on all the corrupt players, and was simply using Speed and RacEr X to win the race and boost his father's stock price.

Disillusioned, Speed heads home, but has finally used his keen senses of observation and logic to almost figure out that RacEr X showed up shortly after Rex's death, and that Rex's body was unrecognizably burned, and that RacEr X drives like Rex and knows Speed's moves!  OMG! RacEr X must BE Rex!

Speed soon confronts the mysterious masked man about it, who removes his hood to prove to Speed that he isn't his brother, but knows that his brother would be proud of the man Speed has become.  (Speed, demonstrating that he's not the sharpest tool in the garage, appears never to have heard of plastic surgery...)

The third driver's sister shows up with an invitation for Speed to participate in the Grand Prix, which is his life's dream.  The family has less than two days to rebuild Speed's car and get to the race, which we know they'll do for no other reason than that this would be a very bizarre way to end the movie.

The Grand Prix race, as presented by the Wachowski's is an eye-scorching, ear-splitting eruption of garish color and noise:

Really, the whole movie looks like this...

Basically, if you've ever played a Mario Kart game, the Grand Prix is Rainbow Road with the volume turned full-up on the TV.  The long and the short of it is that Speed wins, the Racer family regains its lost honor, and the corrupt businessmen like Royalton are exposed for the wretched villainous scum they truly are.

Meh.

This was a very difficult movie to watch for a number of reasons.

First off, the characters were uniformly uninteresting - even the leads.  John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, and Christina Ricci are all talented, but they aren't really given anything to work with here.  Emile Hirsch seemed to be asleep most of the time, even in the "intense" racing scenes, and it went downhill from there.  Even the Mega Shark films have something to their characters that makes them less of a chore to watch.

Second, as the screenshot of the Grand Prix should illustrate, the visual style of the film seemed designed mainly to make the viewer's eyes bleed.  I understand the challenges in making a live-action film from a cartoon.  Trying to keep the original visual style probably won't work, but neither will going with a fully real-world approach.  Nevertheless, the source material for Speed Racer would have allowed a much more realistic approach that might have made the film less exhausting to endure.

Third, the characters were all different from how they "should" have been.  In the cartoon, Speed was more confident, Trixie was less aggressive, Racer X more edgy.  Here, we have a Speed who can't seem to look anyone in the eye, Trixie exuding a smoldering sexuality that seems out-of-place (I think that's really more just Ricci...), and Racer X who never lives up to his potential.  This wasn't Speed Racer so much as something that superficially resembled Speed Racer.

Fourth, and finally, by the end of the film, nothing had really changed.  The family still thinks Rex is dead.  Pops still builds his own cars without any sponsorship.  Speed is still racing, and the racing world, now that its most corrupt players have been rooted out, is the honorable world that Speed and his family believed it to be at the start of the film.

They're all right back where they started, and I'm out five bucks.

-Jay

----------
¹As visually innovative as that film was at the time, it just doesn't grab me much now for some reason .  And the sequels always seemed unnecessary to me.

²In the original cartoon, it was easy to come to the conclusion that Trixie was Speed's sister, especially if you were watching the show at six or seven years old.  Even when I watched most of the series a few years back, their relationship still seemed fairly low-key.  Christina Ricci, however, brings a more aggressive Trixie to the screen.  It's a PG-rated movie, so she doesn't go overboard with it, but still...

0700 - Woke up.  Not surprising.  Checked news out of Australia, since it's already 2100 in Sydney.  No reports of anything unusual.  Harold Camping's website is taking too long to respond, so Firefox craps out.

0800 - Still here.  News media still hasn't reported anything interesting.  Maybe they're keeping things quiet to head off a panic.  Wondering whether I should bother cutting the grass this evening.  Camping's website still fails to load.  Probably because a bunch of other skeptical yahoos got up before I did and are overloading their servers.  Getting ready to run some errands.

0808 - Heard a loud thump upstairs.  Just the cat jumping off the bathroom counter.  Whew!

0900 - Dropped the elder child off at school for an activity.  The doors we were told would be open were locked, causing momentary concern.  Turns out we needed to go to the other side of the building.

1005 - Camping's site still won't load.  I wonder if he's checking his math yet...

1150 - Rapture or not, I need some lunch. Nobody at Panera seems worried. Harold Camping, are you out there? You need to explain what's (not) going on!

1250 - Surely all of the roadkill possums and raccoons I've seen today are a sign of something...

1501 - As commenter Skippy points out, at least one of Camping's sites is up, but it's conspicuously void of any useful information.   I'm thinking that perhaps there were some misunderstandings about Camping's true message.  Perhaps he wasn't talking about the Rapture at all.  Perhaps he was talking about something else...

Save The Date! The Raptor Returns! May 21, 2011

And honestly, using packs of these critters to cull the wicked would probably make a pretty convincing statement...

1800 - Nothing. Not a bloody thing. Just a bit overcast. And now word is starting to get out that Camping and his organization are gearing up to admit failure, or may have already. That's in contrast to their earlier absolute certainty.

A key lesson here: in the long history of human endeavor, no activity has such a spectacularly consistent record of total failure as end-of-the-world prediction.

Another important lesson: think very carefully before you pin your plans to the speculations and claims of doomsayers like Harold Camping. Ask yourself - is it more likely that he finally got it right, or that he's just using Stupid Math Tricks to support his claims.

-Jay

I wouldn't find this nearly as funny if I hadn't been a nearly fanatical watcher of both Star Trek and The A-Team as a kid, and recently watched the big-screen remake of The A-Team (which was much better than I personally expected...)

-Jay

Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus.

Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus

I'm thinking that the Mega Shark might be the American answer to Godzilla.  Or not.

MSvC, as I'll subsequently abbreviate the title,  stands unique among films in that it pits Steve Urkel, The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, some dude that kinda looks like Pierce Brosnan but isn't, and some actress I've never heard of against a pair of poorly rendered monsters.

Jaleel White Will Never Live This Down...

Steve Urkel plays  U.S. Navy Lieutenant Terry McCormick who specializes in sharks.  He's on the USS Gibson (a nod to Debbie Gibson's role in the original MSvGO), trying to confirm the death of the Mega Shark, when it shows up out of nowhere and sinks the ship (possibly a commentary on the state of Gibson's career...).  McCormick loses his girlfriend in the carnage, and is the only survivor of the attack.  McCormick has developed some sort of sonic widget that can either attract or repel sharks, depending on what the screenwriter needs it to do at any given point in time.

Not Pierce Brosnan plays Nigel Putnam, a soldier of fortune in Africa who specializes in ghost hunting.

At First Glance, He Might Fool You. Then He Speaks...

Or killing strange animals.  Or something.   Putnam gets into the act when some random tall, blond lawyer lady approaches him in a bar in the Congo and asks him to kill whatever it is that's been eating the workers at a mine nearby.  They fly into the area, and the lawyer lady (inexplicably dressed in a short, tight dress and heels despite being in the jungle...) gets eaten by a giant crocodile (Crocosaurus, duh).  The croc also tries to eat Putnam, but somehow he manages to tranquillize the thing from inside its mouth, and it spits him out and falls asleep.  I was wondering why he didn't try to rescue the lawyer lady at that point, since she was swallowed whole and probably hadn't been digested yet.  Maybe he just doesn't care much for lawyers.

The actress I've never heard of (and I'm using the term "actress" kind of loosely) shows up at McCormick's debriefing, and offers him a chance at some closure by joining a team that is trying to hunt down and kill the shark.  This is Special Agent Hutchinson.    She looks very severe, and speaks in short, clipped sentences, and may actually have been carved out of a block of wood.

That Look On Her Face - It's Like A Mask!

About halfway through the film, she takes off her suit jacket and spends the rest of the film in a tight tank top.  This, I suspect, is a strong hint of why she's in the movie at all.  I imagine that somewhere in development, someone realized that the movie failed to meet the SyFy Channel's MCR (minimum cleavage requirement), so they added the character of Hutchinson to cover that.

Anyway, Hutchinson works for Admiral Calvin, played by The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager.  Calvin's main motivation for killing the shark appears to be so that he can smoke the most expensive cigar made.  Personally, I don't get it, but by the time they introduced that plot point, I was willing to go along with whatever they said.

This Movie Really Needed A Doctor. A Script Doctor...

Back to Putnam.  He manages to somehow get the sleeping croc onto a freight ship, along with some eggs.  (Eggs?  Where did eggs come from?  There weren't any eggs before.  It's like when the development staff realized they were low on cleavage, they also decided to add in some extra random plot points because the plot wasn't already convoluted enough.)  For some inane reason, Putnam wants to take the croc and its eggs to the U.S.  Why?  Really, why?  Does he want to corner the market on croc-skin accessories for the ladies?  Didn't he see King Kong?   Doesn't he know that bringing giant, vicious creatures to a densely populated city is a sure way to send said city to hell in a handbasket?  Whatever the reason, the shark begins to attack the boat. (nit pick:  both the shark and the croc tend to randomly change scale throughout the film.  At one point, we're told that the croc is 1500 feet long.  The croc is slightly longer than the shark.  The shark, early on, sinks a U.S. Navy Battleship, which is ~900 feet long.  The shark is clearly much shorter than the ship.  Yet the dorsal fin of the shark is shown to rise out of the water higher than the mast antennas on the battleship.  It's like the monsters are made of Expand-o-Foam.)  During the attack, the croc wakes up and escapes.  The boat sinks, and Putnam barely escapes.  He washes ashore and heads to a bar, where he meets Hutchinson, who recruits him to help with the burgeoning creature eradication effort.

Back on Admiral Calvin's aircraft carrier, we learn that McCormick and Putnam know each other from back in their Peace Corps days.  Or something.  It's really not well-explained, and by that point in the movie, I was finding myself wishing that the cast would break into a Bollywood-style musical number or something because everyone was so tense and serious.

The rest of the film is spent on a confusing trans-oceanic relay race trying to get ahead of the croc and the shark.  Why is the shark after the croc?  Well....

So those eggs that randomly turned up a while back?  As it happens, giant sharks are attracted to the smell of giant crocodile eggs (I mean, who wouldn't be?), and the giant crocodile just happens to have some "evolutionary adaptation" that enables it  to lay gajillions of eggs whenever the plot needs it to.  (giant pet rock: ham-handledly abusing evolution in order to give some magical characteristic or ability to an organism, even a monstrous one, is one of the reasons that a lot of people don't accept evolution.   I certainly don't expect a movie like this to get science right, but when they don't bother to try to explain anything else, but throw evolution under the bus, it just ticks me off.)

Anyway, yeah.  Sharks like eggs, and the croc has been cruising all over the oceans laying eggs.  Oceans.  Plural.  Somehow these giant creatures are also endowed with warp drive, because they go from Florida to California to Hawaii in the space of what seems like minutes.  And Admiral Calvin's carrier seems to have the same capabilities, because it just happens to be wherever the monsters show up.   I'm sure there's a deleted scene that explains that.  They probably cut to get the cleavage ratio up.

Right.  Well, McCormick, Putnam, and Hutchinson spend a lot of time in this adorable little 4-rotor helicopter, chasing the critters around and coming up with ineffective ways to try to kill them, including:

• Missiles
• Bombs
• Harsh Language
• Nuclear Subs (EPIC FAIL:  The shark swallows the submarine.  Whole.)
• Glaring Menacingly
• Trapping Them In The Panama Canal And Blowing It Up (Leads to random shark-on-land scene as it chomps its way back to the water, like some weird gray toothy Pac-Man.)

The Canal Scheme doesn't work, although it does manage to get the shark and the croc engaged in tooth to tail combat, where again all sense of consistency of scale is sacrificed in the interest of extra beer money.

They take the fight to Hawaii (I think.  Hell, by this point in the movie, they could have been on Mars for all the sense it made), where the croc eggs are starting to hatch.  A lucky slap of the croc's tail knocks the Urkelcopter out of the sky, injuring everyone and giving McCormick flashbacks of the shark attack that killed his lady-love.  McCormick and Putnam, with a renewed sense of urgency, come up with the Greatest Freakin' Plan Yet To Kill The Giant Monsters!

1. Take an inflatable motor boat out to where the monsters are fighting in the ocean
2. Drop McCormick's Amazing Sound Generator into the water, tuned to "Create Volcanic Eruption"
3. Lure the shark, croc, and half a gajillion baby crocs to the site of the impending eruption
4. Get the hell out

What could possibly go wrong with that?

Meanwhile, off camera, Hutchinson has regained consciousness and gotten the Urkelcopter back in the air, and she arrives just as McCormick and Putnam beach their motor boat.  They jump in the aircraft and get off the ground just as the volcanic eruption/nuclear explosion (remember, the shark ate a nuclear sub...) goes off, crisping all the critters in the blast.

Hutchinson finally cracks a smile (and it looked genuinely painful) as she reports that the shark and the croc are toast, and then flies off into the sunset.

Hokey smokes.

I never, in a million years, would have guessed that I'd watch a movie of which I can honestly say that Steve Urkel's acting was the unequivocal high point of the film.

Really.

-Jay

I bolted home from the bus stop, because I knew that waiting for me at home was The Most Awesome Video Game Experience Ever!  

The object of my obsession was a new offering for the Atari 2600 console, Haunted House.  

Haunted House could be thought of as Resident Evil -20.  The graphics, though looking a bit dated today, were pretty damn stunning at the time.  Since I no longer have access to a functioning Atari 2600 console, I'm unable to get my own screenshots, but I found one that I think beautifully captures the graphic artistry that was possible in home video games circa 1982.  

And Kids These Days Complain Their PS3 Isn't Realistic Enough...

Haunted House put the player, as represented by a pair of googly Cookie Monster eyes, in a, well, haunted house looking for pieces of an urn. Why an urn? I don't know. When I hear the word "urn", the first thing I think of is "ashes", as in "Don't knock over that urn! Uncle Bill is in there!" 

The map, such as it was, consisted of several dark floors that the player could illuminate with a match by pressing the button. 

Yes, Kids, In 1982 Video Game Controllers Only Had One Button. And We Liked It.

In easier modes of the game, the walls were visible, but in most variations they weren't so your gaming experience was pretty much just what you see in the first picture. Until the creepy things came.To give the player something to do other than stumble around bumping into things, the designers included some foes - an upside-down letter "V", a giant sperm, and a lump of steel wool. In the game they were called a bat, a ghost, and a spider, but, well, yeah: 

A Bat? A Ghost? A Spider? Maybe If I Squint...

These things would roam the house, and were accompanied by gusts of wind that would extinguish your match if they came into the room.  If they touched you, you'd lose a life, and I think you'd drop any pieces of the urn that you had accumulated up to that point.  

As simple as the game was, I played it a lot.  In most modes, it was just a matter of memorizing where the walls and locked doors between rooms were so you could run quickly through the house.  I believe on the hardest mode that the locked doors were randomized, but there still weren't that many possible layouts, but even so I can remember getting nervous when the wind in the game picked up and my blocky pool of match light vanished. 

It turns out that Atari has updated Haunted House for the Nintendo Wii, which might be kind of fun.  For $20, it's probably worth a look. 

-Jay

Apparently Eric Roberts hasn't had much to do lately.  My  best info is that Sharktopus will grace our screens in September.  I know I'll be watching.

Now, as if this wasn't enough, SyFy has also seen fit to give us Mega Python vs. Gatoroid.   Here's a preview:

Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, based on the preview, seems like not much more than an opportunity to get 80's singers Debbie Gibson and Tiffany onto the screen at the same time.  (Gibson, if you recall, was the female lead in Mega Shark.)  If they can find a way to get a cameo by Kylie Minogue, they'd have a trifecta.

I'll probably watch this, too - I'm particularly impressed by its sharply written dialogue.

It's apparently going to grace us with its presence in 2011.

So many bad movies.  So little time...

-Jay

Some people on the Neighborhood association take these deed restrictions very seriously.  There is at least one lady who roams the neighborhood with a notebook and counts shrubs, and there is one gentleman who set up a motion-activated video camera in his living room to catch teenagers walking in the neighborhood after dark.  Apparently walking while young is a problem that most of us weren't aware of.  He was quite concerned when he offered to give his taped evidence to the police so they could investigate and was met with an official "Meh" from law enforcement.

Right.

We also have an official neighborhood mailbox style.  It's a decorative, cast-metal job with pineapple-looking things (or they could be alien eggs...) on top with some fancy scrollwork.  They are, per the unchanging law of the deed restrictions, painted white, and must be maintained in "attractive" condition.  Once a year, usually about this time, we all get a letter from the Neighborhood Mailbox Compliance Officer, letting us know that some people have allowed their mailboxes to get a little rusty and because of that we all need to get off our asses and clean them up.

This makes perfect sense.  Personally, whenever I drive through any neighborhood, the first thing I do is evaluate their mailboxes.  In fact, just the other day, I cut through a nearby subdivision on the way to Target, and what kept going through my head was:  "This place is going to hell in a handbasket because that dude there has a skanky looking rusty mailbox.  I should stop the car and get whoever owns such a shoddy looking mailbox to come out and fix it up right now!"

According to the letter, it should take no more than 30 minutes for anyone to bring his mailbox into full compliance.  Clearly, the Mailbox Compliance Officer's approach to doing this is to pick up the phone and call someone to do the work, and the 30 minutes includes the time it takes to write a check to the workman.

I prefer to do it myself, which takes a little longer.

Right off the top, I'll say that whoever selected a cast-iron based mailbox with lots of scrollwork and crevices for water to catch in was dumber than a box of toenail clippings.  There is no freakin' way to keep rust from forming on them.  You could encase them in concrete and they'd rust.  This is Kentucky.  It gets humid.  Our rain is acidic.  Stuff rusts.  You can paint it all you want, but it's gonna rust.   Hell, I start to rust if I stay outside too long.

But, metal is what we have, so I try to make the best of it.

The first step in bringing my mailbox into compliance is to clean off any loose rust with a stiff wire brush and a lot of profanity.  The profanity is required because of all the crevices.  These are typically so narrow and deep that no normal wire brush can get down into them, so you end up scraping into them with a nail.  At some point, one of three things will happen:  the bristles from the wire brush will get driven into your hand, a dislodged chunk of rust will somehow get past the perimeter of your safety glasses and end up in your eye, or the nail you're scraping with will break off in one of the crevices where it will form the anchor for next year's crop of rust.

Once the loose rust has been removed, it's time to take a shot at the more tightly bound rust.  This is done by liberally painting the surface of the mailbox with Naval Jelly.

Naval Jelly, for those unfamiliar with it, looks like nothing so much as hot pink, corrosive snot.  When you're done with the first part of this effort, your mailbox will look like it has been sneezed on by a unicorn with a severe sinus infection.²

Let the Naval Jelly set for a while, go drink a beer, and get ready for the next part.

For the next step, you'll need a pressure washer and a blowtorch.

The pressure washer is necessary because the force from a normal hose is completely insufficient to rinse off the Naval Jelly, particularly out of the crevices.

The blowtorch is necessary because once you've rinsed off the Naval Jelly, you have water sitting on exposed metal that you've just gone through the effort of de-rusting.  The only way to quickly remove this water from all the nooks and crannies is with heat.  I think many of my neighbors skip this step.  The decorative parts of my mailbox do accumulate rust, but it's relatively minor compared to a lot of the boxes in the subdivision.  I think they're getting water trapped under the paint.  I suppose you could drive the water off of the mailbox by rinsing the whole thing with acetone or something, but that's not nearly as fun as fire.

Once you've rinsed and dried the thing, the remaining steps are simple:  use a good rust-inhibiting primer paint and cover the entire mailbox.  Twice.  Then deploy at least two coats of white outdoor spray paint.

There you go.  Fried gold.

If you're lucky and didn't inadvertently fail to cover a spot, you should be able to get 2 years out of such a treatment.  Realistically you'll get one, because by the time you've finished the first coat of primer, you'll start rushing and will do something completely boneheaded like not paint the bottom of the mailbox, and by the time you notice that you've got a bunch of rust stalactites growing off the bottom and your brother in the next subdivision over is telling you that they can have wooden mailboxes and they don't rust.

-Jay

----------

¹I've always been a little puzzled by this one. Was this a pre-emptive clause? Or was there someone in the early phases of the neighborhood who did something to prompt such a restriction? There are whispers of the Gila Monster Incident of '91, but nobody wants to talk about it...

²Learn from my mistakes. Wear gloves when using this crap. The happy hot-pink color belies the fact that Naval Jelly is a fairly potent acid. If you get it on your hands, you won't immediately notice it but within a minute or so you'll feel the burn. And don't forget safety glasses. You don't want this stuff in your eyes.

It has been said that fortune favors the prepared, but she also apparently has a soft spot for stupid teen-age boys.

In the spirit of the earlier conversation, I present you with the following tale from my youth:

There were about a dozen boys in my  neighborhood within a couple of years of each other in age, between around 11 and 13.  There was very little through-traffic in my neighborhood, so riding one's bike in the street really wasn't an issue.  There was a small forest at one end of the neighborhood in which older kids with dirt-bikes had made paths, and we spent a fair amount of time riding around back there.  Most of us had BMX bikes by this time (mine was very much like this one, but orange.  And with wheels), which, of course, made us nearly invincible.²

Towards the back of the woods was a wash-out that drained into the runoff creek.  The washout was about two miles wide and at least a thousand feet deep 12 feet across and maybe 8 feet deep (it's actually still there, amazingly, and hasn't been developed into a subdivision...), and after months of being content to ride our bikes through the wash-out, we came up with the totally brilliant idea of setting up a ramp and jumping over the gap.  We envisioned something like this:

Look At Me! I Can Fly!

The reality was rather different:

That's Gonna Leave A Mark...

See, what did us in was physics.  It never occurred to any of us that there was no freakin' way any of us were going to be able to get up enough speed pedaling a bicycle for 40 feet to jump off a foot-tall ramp made of a piece of plywood and a cinder block and have any hope of doing anything more impressive than verifying that gravity still worked a third of the way across the gully.

The saddest part is that each of us had to prove that for ourselves.

The only thing that would have made it worse is if there had been girls there, since by then we were all hitting that part of a teen-age boy's life where our main goal in life was proving to teen-age girls that we weren't all rock-stupid idiots.  (Ironic, isn't it, that the sort of things we did to prove that we weren't rock-stupid idiots are precisely the same things that are likely to have removed any doubt about the matter...)  For illustrative purposes, this is what teen-age boys in 1980 wanted girls to see them as:

One Of The Original Movie Bad-asses

The reality was probably more like this:

Eventually, we figured out that impressing the girls was much more effective if we actually survived to benefit from the results.

-Jay

----------

¹I should acknowledge the patience of my other co-worker who patiently endured all of this with little more than an occasional eye-roll and head-shake. I see that look a lot from her, actually. She knows me well.

²Nearly invincible is teen-age boy for not very good at thinking things through.

If you have spent any time at all on internet discussion boards or on blogs with topics that are in any way controversial,you've probably seen discussion participants who tend to get argumentative, in the manner of the characters in Volume 1 of the Guide to Internet Fauna.  Typically, these gits will eventually get banned, but that's often not the end of them.   

Enter...  

The Sock Puppet - Representative Generic Specimen

The Sock Puppet - This pernicious pest uses a variety of techniques to create new identities from which he can continue his asshattery.  

These techniques can vary depending on whether you run a blog or a forum, and whether or not you require registrations.  There are several categories:  

The Premeditated Sock

The Premeditated Sock - This subspecies of Sock will register for your site, and then (possibly over a period of weeks or months) create several different identities.  The more advanced Premeditated Socks will use multiple IPs and e-mails to conceal their common owner.  These sleeper Socks may remain dormant for years, or they may be active throughout their lifetime, chiming in on discussions from time to time.  It can be extremely challenging to positively identify such users as Socks.  Often it takes comparisons of writing styles or trends within discussions to ferret them out.  An infestation of such Socks can be a nightmare for the administrator of a large blog or forum, since they able to hide effectively amongst the normal users.  One helpful clue is that if you ban someone who has been a heavy participant in discussions, and a user who has rarely or never posted turns up loudly defending the banned individual, you might be dealing with a sock. 

The Impulsive Sock. Note the slovenly appearance

The Impulsive Sock - This variety of Sock is usually easier to detect.  Typically, a participant gets banned, and within a day or so a new user appears that interacts much like the banned identity.  Often, an administrator can figure out what's going on just by comparing IPs or the registrant's e-mail address.  While stamping out Impulsive Socks isn't typically as challenging as dealing with the Premeditated sort, it can be no less frustrating.  Often what the Impulsive Sock lacks in sophistication he more than makes up for in tenacity.  

The Multiple Personality Sock

The Multiple Personality Sock - Occasionally you'll notice several commenters that always seem to interact with each other, sometimes in rapid-fire succession.  They may all agree, or there may be one hold-out that the others gang up on, but you can pretty much count on the fact that if one comments, they all will.  This may be a case of the Multiple Personality Sock.  A recent example of this (which actually inspired me to write this)  is illustrated here.  If you observe what you think might be a Multiple Personality Sock, you can have a little fun by trying to provoke the various faces of the Sock into arguing with each other.  

The Agent Provocateur Sock

The Agent Provocateur Sock - The last sort of Sock to mention here is the Agent Provocateur.  These are rare, but dangerous, and tend to emerge during times of strife.  Despite their innocent appearance, their sole purpose is to foment discord.  Typically, they'll initiate their troublemaking with a private message or an email, maybe something like "I just wanted to tell you that  you're doing a really good job of moderating the Godzilla Back Scales forum.  The other mods are real hard-asses, especially Fire_Breathing_Mama."   Your alerts should start triggering at this point, because: 

 

It's very, very likely that you're dealing with an Agent Provocateur Sock.  It may be someone who, in fact, doesn't like Fire_Breathing_Mama and is trying to dig dirt on her, or it might be Fire_Breathing_Mama herself trying to figure out who her friends on staff are.  Or it could just be someone trying to stir up trouble.  Don't take the bait.  It's much better not to let yourself get dragged into the middle of internet drama. 

And with that, we complete our brief survey of Sock Puppets.  For our next installment, we'll be looking at the vast and varied world of Trolls. 

-Jay