Pacific Rim Is Quite Possibly the Worst Movie Ever

We recently switched from Charter to AT&T Uverse. And, then went back to Charter.

In short, Uverse’s internet speed wasn’t as advertised. Though, I have to give them top marks for customer service.

Anyhow, when we went back to Charter, I picked up the HBO package. YOLO. (as the kids say) It’s worked out nicely because I haven’t rented a movie in about a year. So, everything I wanted to see a year ago is now popping up on HBO, Cinemax and Showtime.

When Pacific Rim was added to HBO a couple weeks ago, I was stoked. The CGI looks terrific and I figured Charlie Hunnam deserved another chance. I was wrong.

Looks pretty cool, right? Nope. It's 132 minutes of suck.

This was by far one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen – a complete loss of two hours of time.

I’m sure there are fanboys out there who will disagree. Let me go point by point. 

1. Charlie Hunnam cannot act. His only shot at hanging around is if he achieves Nicholas Cage’s level of “so bad it’s good, but it’s not actually good.” 

I'm pretty sure this gratuitous shirtless shot was Hunnam's way of saying, "See, I could have played Christian Grey."

2. The movie is chock full of ridiculous scenes that make no sense whatsoever. For instance, at one point a scientist has filled numerous chalkboards full of complicated math to calculate when the next Kaiju attack will occur. (Kaijus are these huge monsters that are pop up from a hole in the earth and subsequently terrorize urban population centers.) In short, the time between attacks is following a very predictable pattern.

What sort of scientist needs that much math to calculate a basic function such as this? Pretty sure I could of figured when the next attack would occur with Google calendar and a calculator. 

3. To battle the Kaiju, humans pilot massive mechs called Jaegers. It takes two pilots to share the “neural load” in order to drive these massive beasts. The pilots must have some sort of neural compatibility.

How do they test compatibility? By stick fighting of course. Yeah, that’s right. No need for any fancy brain technology. Put a couple potential pilots in the ring and let them stick fight. That’s it. If one wins too quickly, they aren’t compatible. Makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

4. Speaking of technology, at one point the Marshall describes one of the latest mechs as having 50 diesel engines per muscle strand. He then proceeds to note another mech is nuclear powered. What?!! Why would they shove that many diesel engines in a mech if they can run on nuclear technology?

5. Here’s the final straw. Within five minutes of the movie, you realize the entire mech concept is completely unnecessary.

So, a Kaiju pops up in the Pacific Ocean. They send a mech to intercept. It slowly walks across the ocean floor, until it finds the target. Once the battle begins, we see that the ion cannon is the key technology when killing a Kaiju.

Here’s my conundrum: technology has advanced to the point of ion cannons and mechs. So, why can’t we deploy the ion cannons via satellite and just headshot these fools the moment they pop up? Boom, no need for the mechs and no need for this horrendous movie.

Now that I’ve sufficiently ranted, I will say the CGI is really cool in this movie. It’s a shame the plot was unbelievable and the acting was B-movie-esque.

If you have HBO, save yourself some time and skip Pacific Rim. Watch the True Detective series instead. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey are phenomenal.

Double Duty

I said duty... Seems like lately we've been doing some shaving talk on here. Whether it's not shaving in Movember or reviewing razors, we've know our way around a pretty face.

So, recently, I had the opportunity to test out the Schick Hydro. I was lucky enough to get 2 free samples of this product as part of a promotion on Crowdtap. Side note: I should do a blog on Crowdtap. They are awesome. But  digress.. I gave one of the razors to my neighbor and I was ready to start this new shaving challenge.

If you aren't familiar with my face, I have kept it pretty consistent for the last 2 years in the way of facial hair. I keep a short beard and when it get's long enough to be annoying I trim it down and the circle of beard continues. I keep my neck closely shaved and life is pretty good. I shave in the shower because I feel this gives me the lease amount of irritation. However, some issues arise and I have to manage a couple different shavers in the shower. I've gotta get the beard trimmer out when I want to knock down my beard when it's too long. It does a great job but it lives on dry land and I don't want to mess it up with the shower going. I'll trim up the beard in the shower, cast it aside to it's dry dock, and then start the water and the rest of my shave.

The Hydro that Schick sent me pretty much solves this problem. (Check it out on the left). This bad boy is known as the Hydro 5 Groomer and it is amazing. I've got a pretty awesome razor to shave my neck and now I just flip it over and there's this magical groomer that can trim my face however I want it with the water running. The Trimmer on this works just fine. I don't keep my beard long enough to fully utilize the guard on it. I like that it's pretty small to get in places that are hard to reach, and it's got enough power to navigate through my rugged manly face hairs.

What is kind of overshadowed by the cool trimmer is the actual shave you get with the Hydro 5 side of things. The shave is great so far. The shave is close, smooth, and just short of mystically epic. It is a great shave.

So, as always, the SFA doesn't get any money for this. So, you can Google search for it if you want to buy it. I did put together a quick Amazon link below. Regardless, you can find it there for purchase (which you should).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HT6E2PW

Boiling Point

That's rusty water and calcium all over the place

Recently, I've had some unfortunate circumstances occur with my house. It is and on-going ordeal that involves a 31 year old water heater, a Home Warranty company, my insurance company, a restoration company, a construction company, and 3 different plumbing companies. It is still going on after almost 2 weeks but I am finally at a point in my sanity that I can write about it without insulting any of the companies above.

I received a call from my wife that our basement was flooded potentially from a toilet. After racing home, and squishing through some wet carpet, I discovered that my bathroom, while having an inch or 2 of standing water in it, was intact and it was my Hot Water Heater that was the culprit. It was the original hot water heater in the house and was 31 years old. It died a death where the water inside had finally rusted a hole through its steel chassis and relieved all 55 gallons of itself in my basement. Funny enough, it was right next to the basement drain, but absolutely zero ounces of water made their way there. Instead the water found refuge in my finished area... the carpeted part... where my kids like to play... where we can't hear them and it makes the house quiet.

The current state of hell that is my basement

When surveying the impacted area, it was very real to me that I had no idea where to even start with this. I called a few restoration companies and finally settled on one that didn't work for/with the insurance company, and would fight for me if need be. So, within a day or two, a claim had been filed with my home owners policy and the drying had begun. With that issue being taken care of now, I could focus my time on getting hot water into my house so my wife and I didn't have to drag our 4 children around to random homes asking for running hot water.

We had moved into our house a little over a year ago and we purchased a home protection plan. You know that thing you never use the first year, but need after it expires... Luckily, we decided to renew the plan when it was up and are covered (in theory). Working with this home warranty company is where I am going to take this post. I'm not going to go into the 30 or so calls I've made to them, their utter lack of response, or pretty much their desire to do nothing to make my situation right. That post would take about 17 pages and I'd get frustrated. I'm going to take this post to reflect a little bit at how angry I got at people. Why did I get so angry?

I'm not a mean guy. I might tell my kids they can't watch TV or have dessert some days, but not mean typically. I turned into a mean guy with this experience. I yelled at people. I insulted them. I didn't like it and I felt terrible after scolding people on the telephone. Even the one person that cared to call me back, I wished that she find a new job because her company was that terrible. But why did I get so angry?

It was baffling to me that when I started dialing the number to the Warranty company that I could just feel the anger growing and it didn't matter who answered the phone, they were going to get it. After about 4 days of this, it had impacted my life outside of the basement. There was added stress at work, at home, everywhere I went.

Finally on day 5 or so, I made the affirmation that I was done being angry about this and getting it resolved without yelling was the priority. And with that small change of perspective, life got better and things started moving in the direction of fixed. It was pretty cool. I've never really been one to look at a situation other than the way I saw it and I've surely never changed my attitude in hopes things would be better. I've always just gutted a situation out and moved on.

Anyway, this post probably has no meaning to you or you life but has been a good dump of my brain to sort of recollect my feelings and what made them better. So stay positive WOULD YA?

Just keep in mind that if you do purchase a Home Warranty and need to use it, it might not be be as straight forward as you would think, but give them patience and take some breathes and it might work itself out in the end.