What Were They Thinking? — You Spin Me Right Round, Baby, Right Round Like a Mango, Baby

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This standup advertisement for Absolut Mango showed up on bar tables in 2009.  It features a cutout with a mango on a wire, so you can spin it around; the mango is whole on one side and cut into cubes (for easier eating) on the other.

It’s a clever enough idea, I suppose.  Give idle bar patrons something to do with their hands and they will imprint better on your product.  (Although, I’m not sure this wa sa great idea for gay bars.  Looks way to vaginal to me.)

The problem is in the construction.  As you can see from the picture, the wire isn’t centered in the mango, so when you spin it halfway around, it blocks up on the side of the cutout.  So the spinner doesn’t spin.

(“But this might just be a one-off manufacturing defect,” you say?  Yes, might be.  But I’ve seen this standup three times, in two different states, and all of them had the problem.  That points to a design flaw.)
 

Caught You! — Church of Yoda

“Caught You!” identifies places where people don't quite do the full job with their marketing materials and ads: major typos, Photoshop flubs, etc.

This ad showed up in a local community paper.

Who the heck wrote this, Yoda?

(Okay, I’m sure it’s a case of someone in too much of a hurry or with inadequate computer skills not doing good line breaks.  But still…)
 

Movie Review — Armageddon

I watched Armageddon last week, the 1999 sci-fi flick about an asteroid the size of Texas bent on crashing into Earth (and killing us all), with the solution being to recruit and quick-train deep core oil drillers as astronauts to drill a hole in the asteroid and drop a nuke in to blow it up.

Okay, admittedly seeing the the names Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay on a movie’s credits list should trigger the brain into saying “This is going to be lots of stuff exploding and levels of ridiculousness three times what anyone should be expected to endure, so just shut yourself off now.”

But I can’t do that!

Thoughts (and spoilers for every bit of the film!):

• I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie where the high concept was quite so easy to distill: “Roughnecks in space.”
• If you send up two shuttles, one will crash.  That’s a given.
• The music (and some of the visuals) in this around the astronaut departure and return was some of the most patriotically manipulative I’ve encountered, to the point that it was almost a parody of itself.  (And let me note that by “encountered”, I mean “noticed” — so over the top that it broke me out of the film to analyze what they were trying to do.  The first film I noticed this with, and still my marker for egregiousness in that department, was A.I.)
• Why did they even bother having a woman astronaut in the crew if they were going to leave her in the shuttle the entire time?  The only thing she really got to do was to get tossed against the wall when the Russian cosmonaut wanted to hit the equipment with a pipe to make it work.
• After the (surviving) shuttle overshot its landing by 20-plus miles, it still basically crash landed, since the terrain wasn’t what they had planned on.  So how did it manage to take off again without any issues at all before the bomb blew up?
• Why do they have to put stupid countdown deadlines into these things?  All that does is tell us “Don’t get your hopes up.  The bomb won’t and can’t go off until the last few seconds.”  Here they had 18 days, and they still set it off in the last half second.
• What was so special about the drilling depth of 800 feet?  The asteroid was a million miles away when they detected it, and they could only barely analyze details on it anyway.  So why did the hole have to be 800 feet and not 775 (in which case they could have set the bomb off a good 30 seconds earlier)?  And why was 800 feet still the right depth when they were drilling in a completely different location than planned, in totally different material?  (I suppose this can be rationalized as the roughnecks and the shuttle crew didn’t have enough knowledge of the situation to ask the question, and even if the crew in Houston could have revised their estimates in time, would it have made a difference?  At that point, it was “Drill the hole, dump the bomb, and just pray like crazy.”)
• With radio and video transmission cutting in and out, it was amazingly clear for a good minute or more for Harry to say his goodbyes.  (There should also be a several second delay in transmission times due to the distances.  For dramatic purposes, we can excuse that some and they actually left things hazy enough to not make me complain about it too much.  It would have been a wasted plot point to make a big deal of it.)
• On the other hand, an extended period of clear video signal sure wipes out the tension from earlier regarding their absolute last chance to remotely detonate the bomb.
• The repeated scenes of small town America with people costumed right out of a 1950s farm really bothered me.  No one dressed like that in 1998.  See my earlier comment about the music being manipulatively patriotic.
• The surface of the asteroid was covered by razor sharp spikes of rock.  People were flying all over the place, crashing into the terrain.  Rocks were exploding, creating showers of even smaller razor sharp rock fragments.  And not a single spacesuit got even a tiny puncture.  (One guy did from his helmet being smashed to bits, but that’s not quite the same thing.)
• Given that the shuttle that didn’t crash overshot by 20-plus miles, how didn’t the second armadillo even find them?

And wasn’t that ending amazing?  At the very last second, the bomb that was dropped in the hole drilled in the wrong place on the asteroid tumbling end over end in all three dimensions (which had ruined their earlier calculations) blew the asteroid in exactly two pieces, sending both of them to pass Earth on opposite sides of the planet (“Missed it by that much!”), and the explosion also vaporized all the other rubble, including the basketball, Volkswagen, and presumably Chrysler Building-sized chunks which were in the rubble cloud stretching hundreds of thousands of miles ahead of and behind the asteroid (which had already destroyed much of New York and Shanghai, and all of Paris), so nothing more hit Earth at all.  What are the odds?

Let me tell you, as a math/comp sci major in college who started as a physics major, the odds are… (calculate) um… (check again) er… (grimace) zero.

Even if we close our eyes to the largest chunk (ahem) of this, that the asteroid itself was exploded enough for the major pieces to miss Earth and avoid the“global killer” nature, the fact remains that huge chunks of stuff were hitting the planet for three weeks before the big one arrived, and had already killed millions.  We saw massive amounts of smaller stuff preceding and following and all around the asteroid; if the shuttle didn’t blow up from the nuclear blast, then neither did anything further away than it, nor did many things closer than the shuttle that were larger.  There would be far more volume of that rubble than the leading bits that had already hit, given a reasonable normal distribution.  Even with the Texas-sized chunk missing, you’re still going to have one the size of Dallas (about 1/1000th the size of Texas) going boom into the mid-Pacific and creating a tsunami that wipes Tokyo, Sydney, and Los Angeles off the map.  You’re still going to have one the size of Crawford, Texas (1/1000th the size of Dallas) leaving a crater where Switzerland used to be.  You’re still going to have Lake Michigan vaporized by something the size of a semi.  You’re still going to have stuff the size of golfballs destroying the Hagia Sophia and the Taj Mahal (since they were both seen in the film).  And what’s more, you’ll have had this happening increasingly for a couple days before the bomb went off (the destruction of Paris was a good demonstration of this, but there would have been several more impacts of that size in the day or two before the bomb exploded) and you would have them coming for 3 weeks afterward, asteroid strike or not.

Global killer, with nothing more than bacteria surviving?  Averted.  Massive climate change that still lasts for a few hundred years?  Right on schedule.  Human population drops from 6 billion to 600 million (and that may be generous), with technology infrastructure and everything we know of as industrial-level civilization destroyed?  Check check check.

But I guess that sort of a slightly upbeat but ultimately depressing ending wouldn’t go over well, huh?
 

Flash! Aaahh! Destroyer of the Universe!

I’m a big fan of tabbed browsing when using a web browser.  I tend to launch tabs for a dozen or more webpages at once — for a weekly calendar I do, currently more than 50 tabs at a shot.  This allows me to go through several pages in a row (I just close one tab and the next shows) without having to constantly pull up a new bookmark.

For a couple years, I used Firefox on Windows, but I increasingly had problems where my entire computer would grind almost to a halt.  Task Manager would show Firefox eating up 99% of the CPU, which would force me to kill it and relaunch.

I eventually switched to Safari on Windows, because I found that it would load a set of tabs sometimes as much as 25% faster.  But I ended up with the same CPU spiking problem.  Sometimes I could painstakingly go through each tab and close it until I cleared whatever the problem process was, but this could take a few minutes and only worked some of the time.

I then switched to Chrome on Windows.  It puts each of its tabs into its own process.  In theory, this allows one process to stall or crash without bringing down the entire browser.  (In practice, though, when Shockwave crashes, it crashes across the browser, on all tabs.  But on the up side, I can reload each of those tabs and it will relaunch.)  I still had the CPU spiking, and while I could then narrow it to a single tab’s process, I still couldn’t identify which tab that was or kill just the one tab; killing the tab from the task manager would kill the entire browser.  But on the plus side, Chrome will remember what tabs were open when you quit (or crashed) and will generally reopen them on next launch, so recovery was that much easier.

I’ve also had some of the same problems on my Macintosh, with Safari.  Not as bad and not as often, but still now and then.

By now, I knew what the problem child was: Adobe Flash.  For whatever reason, seemingly at random, a Flash process will go bonkers and eat up all my CPU.  I don’t know if it’s truly random or something I could predict if I knew more about Flash, but it doesn’t really matter.  The take-away is “Flash has problems.”

This is the core of why Flash is not enabled/permitted on the iPhone and the iPad.  It is simply known to cause problems.  Some reports say Flash issues cause like 75% of browser crashes.  I note that even without it, Mobile Safari on my iPhone crashes now and then (as often as a couple times a day, depending on usage), usually when I’m trying to close a page.  I can certainly picture adding Flash into that would increase the likelihood of those issues.

Fortunately, there is a solution!  Block Flash!

Well, no, preventing all Flash on your computer is a stupid solution, a scorched Earth method.  So much of the web has components in Flash that there are things you simply miss out on, as any iPhone user can tell you.  (But on the other hand, much of it is stuff you don’t really need.  One social networking site I’m on uses Flash to make a bit of text pulse when you’ve got a new message.  Talk about something that doesn’t need Flash!  Not to mention all those website intro pages!  And the flashing noisy ads!)

So instead of outright blocking Flash, we can put up a gate.  This prevents Flash from loading when you open a page, but it also gives you the opportunity to load selected Flash elements, such as to view an embedded video or to show the site’s navigation bar (grrrr).  You end up with a far less cluttered page view as a side effect.

On Chrome for Windows, I use FlashBlock.  Firefox users also have Flashblock.

On Safari for Mac, I use ClickToFlash.

My browser CPU spikes have all but gone away (and when they happen, it’s because I’ve disabled the extension!), and my browser crashes and needs to kill/relaunch the browser have dropped by 90%.  (I now have to relaunch a couple times a week, rather than several time a day.) That’s a massive improvement.

Highly, highly recommended!  Use Flash at your leisure, not at theirs.

FlashBlock is not a perfect solution, though.  I’ve found that some of the Apple movie trailer pages use an embedded Flash player (rather than QuickTime, why?) which won’t play when I click it, so I have to disable the extension, reload the page, and then re-enable the extension.  Similarly, YouTube recently made a change which presents a message falsely telling you to upgrade your version of Flash, but again, what you need to do is disable/reload/enable.  I’m hoping that either these sites or the FlashBlock extension maker will be able to repair these issues.  (I haven’t hit them with ClickToFlash, so maybe there’s hope.)

(With apologies to Queen.)

(Kudos to Daring Fireball for a lot of useful thought on this subject.)

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Updated on March 22, 2010

Check out this Foxtrot strip.  Great gag!

What Were They Thinking? — Rock Me, Sexy Jesus!

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

This was the front cover of a “Come check out our church” flyer from the Seventh Day Adventists or the Jehvoah’s Witnesses or one of those religious groups that mainline Christianity would love to call a cult but which is too big to get away with doing that.

Damn.  Sexiest Jesus bear I’ve ever seen.  (And short of the blue-eyed ones, probably the most Western European one, too.)  If they’re trying to recruit gay guys to this church, this is a great start!

“So you take your beer in one hand and then scoop under his balls like this…  Hey, you to my right!  Peter, John, Simon, whoever you are.  Eyes on the cup.  Stop cruising Thomas, Phillip, Bartholomew across from you!  Myself Almighty, you’d think you guys were a crew of randy sailors or something!”
 

Movie Review — The Hangover

The Hangover is the last of the films I saw on the loooong flight from Sydney to Los Angeles.

The basic plot is that a group of buddies do a bachelor party in Las Vegas.  The next morning, they wake up to find the room trashed, the groom-to-be missing, and none of them can remember what the heck went on.  So they spend the entire next day trying to piece things together via what few clues they can find, leading them to a hospital visit, an impromptu marriage, a stolen tiger, a visit from Mike Tyson, and a run-in with a gay Asian gangster.

Thoughts:

• There was lots of stuff shown in the hotel room — the beer can pyramid, the suspended bench, etc. — that never got explained or referenced.  Arguably, that was just scene setting, but based on the rest of the film (and the photo montage at the end of the missing hours), they didn’t spend enough time in the room to do any of that stuff.  (But we’re not supposed to worry about stuff like that.)
• Initially, I thought (hoped) they were going to do a comedy version of Memento, where they recover the most recent activity, which leads them back to the one before that, to the one before that, and so on, with only the stuff that happened just after their rooftop toast finally clicking everything into place.  I suppose that amount of layering would be hard to sustain in a comedy, though.  Pity.
• Time is the biggest problem of the film, of course.  Anyone who has been to Las Vegas knows that just going from one casino to the next takes 30 minutes because these things are so huge, and that doesn’t change whether you are driving or walking.  Now add in the antics at the strip club, the acquisition of the tiger (including just finding Tyson’s home), and there isn’t enough time in the night for all the stuff to have happened.  (But we’re not supposed to worry about stuff like that.)
• Speaking of time, could they have made the Sunday morning drive from Las Vegas to the wedding in Los Angeles in the two hours implied in the movie?  Mmmm, maybe, but its a stretch.  Google Maps says it’s a 4.5 hour drive.  Assuming no traffic (and no cops!) and the wedding site actually closer to Riverside, driving at an average speed of 120 mph would do it in a couple hours.  But that’s really really dicey.  (Jesus Christ, would you stop worrying about stuff like that!  It’s just a fucking movie!  And a comedy at that!)
• The Asian gangster character was offensive.  But no more so than the rest of the movie.  No, I take that back: the recurring pedophilia references for the one character, those were more offensive that the rest of the movie put together.  I was embarrassed for the film every time that running joke reared its head.

What Were They Thinking? — Am I Blue? (Nope)

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

It bothers me when a product name doesn’t match its contents.  For instance, Blue-Touch Dishwashing Liquid, where 3/4 of the line is anything but blue.  I suppose you have to preserve the brand, but maybe the brand isn’t worth preserving when you dilute it like this?

Maybe “blue touch” it’s a phrase reference?  Don’t think so, since the only reference I find is “light the blue touch paper”, meaning to do something which causes anger or excitement.  Contextually, no, doesn’t fit with dishwashing liquid.