Why Pay More? Or at All?

Take a minute to read this story about a boy who got stuck in one of those arcade prize machines in England. I'll wait.In summary: A boy who couldn't win the Pooh bear he wanted from a claw machine squeezed up inside to get it, only to then realize he couldn't get out.

Now you may see a charming tale about a precocious youth, but I see everything that's wrong with civilization here. Why? Let's look at the facts:

He was playing a game in which he knew the rules. You pay your money, and then you get one chance to snag the prize. But he failed at it for long enough that his mom went to get him more money so he could keep trying (this is an issue all on it's own).

After having too much trouble with the legal method, he then decided to just steal the toy. He stormed the machine to take the bear by force, only to get caught in one of the many cells he'll occupy throughout life.

What is his parent's reaction? "He's good at solving problems. He obviously saw getting the teddy bear as a problem and getting inside the machine as the answer." They praise his attempted theft. His mom spins it to show his act as proof that her little snowflake is a great kid! But this doesn't even compare to the worst part:

They give him the bear. As they say, they give him the bear to cheer him up. Why does he need cheering up? Because he got himself into an awful situation while attempting to steal the bear! And his reward is the very thing he was trying to steal! Let's look at the life lesson here- If you can't get what you want legally, just try to steal it and they give it to you.

I may be overreacting, but here's an analogy: A guy wants to buy a car, but after several attempts his credit just doesn't check out. So after hours he breaks into the dealership, only to find himself stuck inside. When the authorities finally free him he's so distraught that the dealership gives him a car for free, praising his problem solving ability. Aren't we just creating a new career criminal by instituting this pattern?

I say this now, but I'm pretty certain my kids are going to end up taking all manner of things apart and climbing on things they aren't supposed to. But there's no way in hell I would reward misbehavior by giving them the thing they tried to steal! Now get off my lawn, you darn kids.

Ode to Soundwave -or- No Decepticon Left Behind

Here's your fair warning: This is going to be a dorky post. But, since I've had this conversation twice in the last two days (once with Ramya, and she was a trooper about it) I figured it deserves a little exploration.

Okay people born after 1980, this is Soundwave.One of the original bad guys of the Transformers universe, Megatron's right hand man, and general badass. Sure, most transformers turn into cars or planes, but what does Soundwave get to be? A micro-cassette player. This is a little reminiscent of "Big" ("Who wants to play with a building?"), but it was pretty sweet to have a toy robot that turned into something that looked like a properly sized real-world object- even if it didn't actually do anything (the Japanese kids got a version that did play sounds, but I digress). Plus, since he was a tape player he could hold tapes that also transformed into other characters! This spawned a whole new sub-group of the toys that included the ever-popular Rumble, Ravage, and we can't forget Laserbeak. If you can't grasp how awesome this is to a 7-year-old boy, then I can't explain it to you. In any case, he was a staple of the toy line, the comics, the cartoon and my childhood for several years. However, he has recieved suprisingly little love in the new incarnations of Transformers. There have been a few attempts to work him back in over the years, like his odd Cybertron version, but check out the latest:Transforms intoTo be perfectly honest, I love this. He's no longer a tape player (more on that later), but check out the paintjob on the truck! Not only is it an appropriate blue, but the decoration on the side looks like a cassette. Plus, look at the front bumper- it looks like the tape player controls! Brilliant. As a robot, they've clearly gone out of their way to make him look like his generation 1 roots- he has the tape deck/controls on his chest. You even get Laserbeak, who tranforms into a...uh...guitar...that stores on the...roof. Okay, so it's not perfect. But you have to love the way they acknowledge the character's roots. Because if you think about it, parents that are buying truck Soundwave for their kids probably played with tape player Soundwave when they were younger.

It makes me wonder though, do kids today even know what a tape player is? I ponder this, but at the same time I went through childhood getting annoyed everytime an adult mentioned records. They'd always say "I had a record of that. You kids have probably never heard of records- they were like big black CDs." I was born in 1978, okay? We had record players! I had Disney read-along books that came with a record that stuck in the back cover. I remember when the McDonald's menu song came on a record in the Sunday paper. Much like when they released that re-mix of Magic Carpet Ride in the late '90s- I remember several adults saying "You probably don't know this, but this song is actually older than you!" Well, duh, it's Magic Carpet Ride. It came out 10 years before I was born, but it's a classic! I turn on the '60s station on XM and I know most of the songs. Then again, I see high school kids listening to a song from the early '80s and I think "How do they know that song?" This is how it begins.

In any case, this is not the first Transformer to out live his namesake. Back in the day I had one named Camshaft who transformed into a Mazda RX-7. A few years ago when they started up the awesome Binaltech line, they made an RX-8 version that they were marketing as "Meister" in Japan, but naturally they were going to call him Camshaft in the states. The irony here being that the RX-8 has a rotary engine, and therefore has no camshaft. Hasbro/Takara eventually settled on making the RX-8 Jazz and made Camshaft an Acura RSX.

My question is why they couldn't just make Soundwave into a CD player or something. Maybe because they wanted to have a vehicle mode that was more in-line with his robot mode. In the dreadful Transformers movie they even had a main character that turned into a CD boombox, and they didn't call him Soundwave (they settled on Frenzy, who was one of the less-popular tapes). Of course, in finding that link I just read his Wiki entry. It says that the movie character would have been Soundwave, but it evolved too much and the personality resembled Frenzy more closely. This is true, and I give Michael Bay a little credit, but that movie still stunk. By the way, this post is now the #1 result if you Google "Transformers Sucked."

And there you go: More about Soundwave than you ever wanted to know. Good thing I already have a girlfriend.

I Told You So!

See? I mentioned the incredible shrinking ice cream package here, but now it's getting national attention. I knew the public wouldn't take this lightly, even if they do have solid rationale.

Mother of the Year

Take a look at this picture I snapped on the Metro last weekend. And don't worry, I was super sneaky when I took it.Seems cute, right? A mother on the train sharing her iPod with her toddler son? Well, let me augment the picture for you with some details from the real-life experience: The music was

a) Absolutely blasting. I couldn't make out all the lyrics, but it was definitely

b) Rap. The repetitive bass and cymbal let me know that she was not listening to The Wiggles with her son. At one point we positively identified Party Like a Rock Star, and something tells me that it wasn't the edited version.

Am I the only one who finds this incredibly wrong? Shouldn't everybody know that blasting music into your toddler's ears could cause permanent damage? Plus, at one point she took his earphone out, upon which he immediately launched into a tantrum, yelling and kicking and grabbing for it until she put it back in his ear. It was bizarre, but at least he enjoys it.

Also, notice that she has her cell phone stuffed in her bra. I guess when your ears are bleeding from the sound overload you want to make sure you can feel the vibrating ringer!

Totally unrelated: I walked into my kitchen last night, and I got that feeling on my face like I had just run into a spider web. I looked up and there was, in fact, a big spider web running right down the middle of my kitchen. We're talking about an 8x12-ish room, and it was running the long way. It was pretty impressive, but is there really enough bug traffic in my kitchen to warrant a web right there?

Notes from the Left Coast

I just returned home from Los Angeles, where I went for a one-day meeting. That's right- I flew from DC to LA Tuesday, had a meeting Wednesday, then flew back Thursday. This may sound incredibly wasteful, and it is, but this was a Test Readiness Review and it was necessary to see the actual equipment. Believe you me, I make use of netmeetings and telecons whenever possible. And in this case, there were things we noticed that we wouldn't have seen over the phone. But I digress.

There were a few fun things I noticed on this trip to California. First, did everyone see this Ford commercial during the Superbowl? Well, the meeting was at a testing facility called NTS, and apparently that's where it was filmed. They showed us the centrifuge, and it looked the same (but I guess if you've seen one you've seen 'em all). I also found this behind the scenes video on YouTube that calls out the facility, so it looks legit.

The next fun thing was that I found a good modern rock radio station out there, and every day they did a little contest to win tickets to some concert or whatever (with the advent of XM I don't hear a whole lot of these things anymore). Around 5 o'clock every day they would do the eloquently named "Rush Hour Orgy." This entailed playing a ten-second sound clip that was three songs and one bit of movie dialogue all layered over each other- the first person that called in and could name all three bands and the movie won the tickets for that day. Easy enough, right? Both times I heard it there was only one band I didn't know. Anyway, they'd play the clip, and people would call in- but here's the thing: no one ever knew all the answers. It would be one thing if they guessed one of the bands wrong, but over half the callers would say "Okay, the movie was 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' and the bands were Def Leppard, Linkin Park, and I don't know the last one." Seriously. Or they'd say "One of the bands was Eurythmics, but I don't know anything else." THEN WHY ARE YOU CALLING IN? I can see that maybe they thought the last one would come to them when they were on hold, but once you get through at least guess! It's like on Cash Cab when people just say "I don't know." They don't use a shout out, they don't guess, they just take the strike. What is it with people? Anyway, it annoyed me everyday.

Finally, I stayed the final night at the Renaissance near LAX. I happened to notice the room service menu (I only get room service in emergencies- or in the UK when it costs about the same as going down to the built-in restaurant) and the breakfast section had an option for cold cereal: $6.00. I could go on about how ridiculous it is to pay six bucks for a bowl of Raisin Bran, but the next line read: "Add fresh berries or a sliced banana: +$7.00." Seven dollars for a banana? For real? Not only is that more than they charge for the cereal, but I just bought bananas for $0.50 a pound. Are they bringing you 14 pounds of banana? I guess hotels are like the airport, where they don't know how much things cost in the real world.

So now I'm back home after spending the weekend in DC helping Ramya move to her new apartment. It's a nice place, but it seems that the days when I could do manual labor for hours and not be incredibly tired and sore later are behind me. I feel like such an old man! I don't know how I ever did PAC. I hope everyone had a great weekend!