I try to grade B-movies for originality, but there are limits. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a gigantic whale pile-drive a nuclear submarine and jump out of the water with it in its mouth. I’ve definitely never seen it done this implausibly. What a plausible version of the sequence would look like I leave as an exercise to the reader. I’m reminded of something Roger Ebert, that under-appreciated connoisseur of genre films, wrote in his review of Pink Flamingos:

How do you review a movie like this? I am reminded of an interview I once did with a man who ran a carnival sideshow. His star was a geek, who bit off the heads of live chickens and drank their blood.

“He’s the best geek in the business,” this man assured me.

“What is the difference between a good geek and a bad geek?” I asked.

“You wanna examine the chickens?”

Asylum (shudder) has about cornered the market on low-order ripoffs, re-imaginings, and assorted crap. They’re the fine folks behind American Warships and Atlantic Rim, shameless copies of Battleship and Pacific Rim. They also made Nazis at the Center of the Earth, a modern version of of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of Earth but in incredibly poor taste.

Read More

Two congressmen have introduced a bill (HR 2066, the Pets on Trains Act of 2013) which would require Amtrak to formulate a policy for carrying domestic pets on certain trains. See the Huffington Post for a brief summary, and here for the actual text of the bill. What discussion I’ve seen focuses on a non-issue: that after three days in transit a dog wouldn’t be a good companion in the coach. That possibility is foreclosed by the text of the bill, but no one ever reads such things. I don’t see this going much of anywhere but I thought I’d offer some more detailed commentary.

Amtrak allows service animals only. No comfort animals or pets. I once sat across from a woman with a service animal for two days aboard the Empire Builder and it wasn’t a problem, but obviously (a) service animals are well-trained and (b) their owners are used to handling them in public.

The proposed bill, which includes escape hatches like “certain trains” and “where feasible” would require either that Amtrak either set aside a car where pets would be allowed as carry-on items, provided that the pet is contained in a kennel and that the pet as stowed meets the current carry-on policy or that Amtrak allow pets as checked baggage, provided that the area is “temperature controlled” and that the pet as stowed meets the checked baggage policy. In both cases the journey as ticketed would have to be 750 miles or less and Amtrak would be allowed to assess a commensurate fee. Finally, the bill provides that “[n]othing in this section may be interpreted to require Amtrak to add additional train cars or modify existing train cars.”

Read More

Last night I went for a walk down to the confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers. It’s a remarkable area. First, it’s bracketed by public parks: Scott Park (northwest) and Hugh Moore Park (southwest) on the Easton side, and the Delaware River Park on the Phillipsburg, New Jersey side. Second, it hosts no less than three railway bridges which stand as a reminder to Easton’s past importance in that trade:

• Lehigh and Hudson River Railway Bridge (northernmost)
• Central Railroad of New Jersey Bridge
• Lehigh Valley Railroad Bridge (southernmost)

The Lehigh Valley bridge is I believe out of service but the other two see daily use. This evening I was fortunate enough to catch some Norfolk Southern maintenance-of-way equipment on the ex-CNJ bridge, followed about 20 minutes later by a grain train grinding slowly across the ex-LHRR bridge and into Phillipsburg.

Read More

This coming Monday I’m giving at talk at HighEdWeb New England about collaborative development in open source, focusing on liberal arts colleges. If this were one of my movie reviews that would be the “A plot.” The “B plot” is that I’m taking the train to the conference, and that unusually for me it’ll be 100% new mileage.

The conference is Mount Holyoke but I’m taking the Vermonter from New York up to Brattleboro. There are two reasons for this. The first is that my friend who’s picking me up lives closer to Brattleboro than Amherst. The second is that this train will be rerouted to the west bank of the Connecticut River in a year or two, and I want to ride the old route before that happens. Again, I’m that guy.

The ride in from Easton to New York was uneventful. Trans-Bridge Lines does a good job. Its buses are comfortable (for 90 minutes anyway) and the free wifi gets the job done. I-78 was remarkably empty. The only hiccup was finding New York Penn overrun with mouth breathing collegians dressed in green. Sigh. Amtrak Police finally showed up with a bullhorn and cleared them out. Yay!

Read More

I keep track of all my train mileage because I’m one of those people. By my reckoning I’ve done over 41,000 miles on Amtrak alone and another 10,000+ on other systems, mostly in Europe. A full quarter of my Amtrak mileage is on a single train: the Lake Shore Limited, which operates between Chicago and New York, with a section to Boston. I’ve taken it to three Moodle Hack/Doc Fests: Summer 2009 at Smith College, Winter 2010 at Lafayette College, and Summer 2011 at Hampshire College. I’ve ridden it to a pair of weddings. I took it to HighEdWeb 2012 and B-Fest 2013. I’ve made three trips on it in the last eight months. This makes writing the following all the harder: Lake Shore Limited, I’m afraid that we may have to break up.

Here’s the situation. I have cause to make the trip between New York and Chicago at least once a year for the B-Movie Festival in Evanston, Illinois. I’m likely to make it another time for business related to the German Studies Association, and it’s a fair bet that I’ll make at least one trip for pleasure to the Midwest. I’ve never made less than two round-trips in a calendar year since 2009. I’ve done one already this year, another is booked and at least one more is on the horizon. I’m just not sure I can do it on the Lake Shore Limited anymore. I think my future lies with the Capitol Limited.

7 things I don’t like about the Lake Shore Limited

Read More

Here’s the pitch: it’s an Alien rip-off set on an oil rig. No, not Proteus. That’s the one with the heroin smugglers. No, not Leviathan either. That’s the one with Peter Weller. This one stars William Forsythe (Stone Cold).

This looks like it was shot for TV. The color is washed out and almost Matrix-like in the use of green. It’s really unpleasant to look at. The CGI is used sparingly but it’s not very good. I swear the helipad looks like an optical drive.

Oh boy are we in for a long haul. There’s a decent ambiguous opening involving a robotic submersible, somewhat undercut by an onscreen reference to the “Weyland Corporation” (groan). This is immediately destroyed by a cringe-inducing “family discussion” between the Karl Urban Experience and the Kid (Who Can’t Handle Line Reads). We soon also meet our other tropes: the Foreigner, the Black Guy, the Woman, the Expendable Roughnecks, and the William Forsythe (played in this case by the actual William Forsythe).

Read More

Roger Ebert is a sucker for old-school adventure movies. He copped to this weakness in his review of Congo, which he described as “a splendid example of a genre no longer much in fashion, the jungle adventure story.” Perhaps this explains his otherwise inexplicable decision to award 3 1/2 stars to Anaconda, a film not otherwise honored by posterity. It’s a good, even great, B-movie, but I have to ask what curve he graded this on.

Admittedly, there’s much to recommend the film. Its cast is top-notch: Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, Owen Wilson, Kari Wuher, and Danny Trejo. Voight gives the most memorable performance as a crazed, Peruvian (um…) swamp-rat. It puts me in mind of Depp’s later performance as Jack Sparrow, in that it’s so bizarre you just have to accept it on its own terms. The individual characters, even the ones just along to be snake-fodder, are given some depth. The production design is sound and the direction competent. The CG effects looked dated, but then so do those from Air Force One. CG was still in transition in 1997 and much of it hasn’t aged well. Conversely, Fifth Element still looks gorgeous.

It’s also worth remembering that we’re only a year out from the dreadful The Ghost and the Darkness, a similar film but set in Africa with lions instead of snakes. You’ll never see a review of that here because I’ll be damned if I’m going to set through that interminable slop again. If you’re not going to make a great movie at least make it entertaining. Also, no film which includes a character inquiring “hey, is that real dynamite?” can be all bad. We’re going to skip over Kari Wuher’s inferior line reads, the waste of Ice Cube and Eric Stoltz, and the general worthlessness of Owen Wilson.

Read More

It’s best to imagine WordPress’s plugin ecosystem as a swamp. Swamps are terrible. You don’t want to be there. You run a constant risk of disease and/or drowning. Anything that sinks into the swamp–it’s not coming back.

I’ve been debugging an odd problem on our WordPress installations involving categories. On some sites, posts which are in have multiple categories don’t display more than one category. That would be strange enough, but the category permalinks are coming out in the format SITE_URL/category/foo with the title baz, where foo is one category and baz a different category:

Read More

Yesterday I showed my phone to gate agent in Chicago and successfully boarded the Wolverine. This morning we boarded the Blue Water in Kalamazoo using only a phone. Our conductor beeped the QR code on the screen without incident.

Folks, I’m here to tell you that e-ticketing works. The only open question is how well these trips post to my rewards account. I don’t expect problems but I’ll check in a week or two to see if the points post. As I said in Part I the only thing missing from the app is my room and car assignment on the sleeper, and that’s only for my benefit.

Previous posts about e-ticketing:

Read More

In yesterday's post I discussed Amtrak’s rollout of eticketing nationwide. I outlined four tasks which required a proof of ticket and which I hoped to accomplish with my phone alone. So far, we’re two-for-two. At the baggage counter, the attendant didn’t bat an eye as I offered her my phone with the eticket displayed. Our bag was ticketed through to Chicago and whisked away. Painless. At the Club Acela, I showed my phone again and the attendant verified that we were ticketed for a roomette on today’s Lake Shore Limited, allowing us access. Two steps to go.

As an aside, the baggage attendant had no problem with ticketing our bag to Chicago even though our ultimate destination, Kalamazoo, has no baggage service. I’m still puzzled by Seattle’s refusal to do the same thing in May 2011 with the Empire Builder, and I have to assume it was because of the endemic delays at that time (those delays will be covered in a future post).