Smokey And The Bandit (1977)

As a  way to get back into writing for this blog, I will be reviewing movies that I have either not seen in ages, or have never seen.

I saw Smokey And The Bandit when I was about 10 years old and, naturally, having the mind of a 10 year-old, I thought it was fun and hilarious. Now, being forty-something, I still think the movie downright funny and, with the exception of a few lines here and there, still holds up.

When rich people want illegal beer from across the Mississippi, they call on The Bandit and the Snowman to go get it. This movie is less about the plot and more about the one-liners, thanks to Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason), and slapstick car chases. It is truly representative of the 1970s with fast cars, truck drivers, and CB radio. It's a fun road trip movie that I thought was more bawdy than it actually is.

Sally Field plays Carrie, a runaway bride that we find out was supposed to marry Junior, the son of Sheriff Buford T. Justice, which is why the pair are chasing The Bandit. It is unclear if she ever actually revealed this to him or not. At the end of the movie, as they drive away, she yells, "Tell Junior, no hard feelings." Besides that, there is really nothing else to say about the "plot" of this movie. 

While reading up for this post, I found out that yes, Coors beer was in fact illegal to transport east of the Mississippi because it was not pasteurized and contained no preservatives. Also, the reason that CB radio was all the rage in the 1970s was because it was accessible to all thanks to solid state technology and the 55 mph speed limit. 

Smokey And The Bandit is the only movie that there was by this name. There were absolutely never any crappy sequels made that Burt Reynolds refused to take part in. Nope, they never happened. Just like there was never a sequel to Caddyshack. That never happened either.

Repost: New Product Announcement

SGMR Industries. Inc. has always been committed to selling products for money to people who probably don’t need them in the first place. Since we first introduced our first product, people have been throwing money at us and clamoring for more. Well, we gave them more. We added more adjectives, and more shiny bits and sold it for more money than the previous version. That’s what we do and people love us for it.

Today, we introduce yet another, new, revolutionary, shiny, big, fabulous, and highly improved product. It will do something more impressive than the previous version and we will introduce something else that people didn’t think they needed. However, people will make a reason to need this product and they won’t care how much they have to pay for it, because it’s from us. We are excited to see how much more money we’re going to make off of this product and how many people will buy it before we obsolete it in six months when we tease our next product that will contain one more thing that people don’t need. 

We will begin preorders at retail outlets on Friday morning which means that we will control the entire news cycle that day. This is our mission, and when the product is released, we will only distribute at those same retailers so that we can build hype for the next iteration. People like to stand in line for exclusive products that they spend a lot of money on to look more impressive in front of their friends. Our commitment to our customers is to make them feel more important than everybody else.

Introducing A New Blog

I know, I know, I haven't written anything new on this blog in a while. Well, it will still be a little longer, but I am going to start writing on the ISC Blog. The first post is going to be an article from a website that for some reason sends me newsletters called Prophecy News Watch. It's exactly what it sounds like, a "news" website that looks at the world and tries to shoehorn events to fit "biblical prophecy".

The first post is based on an article talking about 9 signs of the apocalypse. It's not very good and it is quite underwhelming. I can't see how anybody would read that article and think that the world is ending. Things happen. We're seeing things happen and they don't need a reason to happen. So I wrote again, but not here unless you count this post tell you that I wrote somewhere else.

I hope you like the new blog, and I will try to get back to writing real stuff here as well. I need an outlet for all of the stuff running through my brain. 

Repost: Boba Fett Ain't No Badass

Original Post Date: July 11, 2013

I grew up thinking that Boba Fett, galactic bounty hunter from the Star Wars Saga, was one of the biggest badasses of them all. He was the strong, silent type. He captured Han Solo. And he was the coolest dresser.

But wait.

Look at that second item again. Did he really capture Han Solo? No. He followed him. He narced on him to the government. Then he took credit for his capture when he collected his money from Jabba the Hutt. However, it was Darth Vader that would ultimately capture Han Solo and hand him over to the bounty hunter. He fired his weapon once and missed. He couldn't even be bothered to chase after the person at whom he was shooting. What if it was another bounty hunter trying to take credit for his…er, Darth Vader's, hard work. So, he was lazy as well as a lousy shot. He couldn't even load his own cargo into his ship, the damn thing floated and it didn't look like those Bespin guards were struggling. Hell, his downfall was even worse.

The next time we catch up with Boba Fett, he's hanging out in what amounts to a good ol' boys club in the backwoods of the galaxy. Hell, Princess Leia was more badass than him when bargaining over Chewbacca. She pulled out a grenade and threatened to kill everyone and die in the process. Oh, but Boba Fett pulled his gun. What are you gonna do, Fett, shoot that little monkey thing? Were you even around when Luke Skywalker entered or were you still sleeping? On a side note: Jabba's palace was a sausage party. There were two females in the whole joint and neither were much to look at.

Things happen

Oh look, Boba Fett reveals that he can fly. He also reveals that he has a bunch of other toys in his arsenal. He ties up the only guy with the light saber with a piece of string that can easily be cut. Luke only acts like he's detained to get Fett to let his guard down. While he's distracted, Han Solo hits his backpack with a long rod and launches him into the Sar'laac Pit. While he's down there, he can listen to stories of everyone else got there. Thrown in by the Jedi Knight, an explosion caused another to fall, another was thrown in by the only black guy in the trilogy. Finally Boba Fett can tell his story, "I was knocked in my defective backpack by a blind guy with a stick who had been in a coma for a few years." When the laughter subsides, he can get on with being digested for a thousand years. Frankly, if it came down to choosing someone to have my back in a fight, I'll take an Ewok or two.

15 Years? Seriously?

So yesterday (December 1) I decided to transfer this domain name over to Google Domains since the ISC domain is already there, my blogs are all on Blogger (a Google company), and I am an admin on three other domains. It was a minor formality, but something hit me. In March 2019, I would have owned the aliencg.com domain for 15 years. That means that the AlienCG name that I use online is already more than 15 years old. That name came about in June 2003 when a few friends and me decided to start a video game forum called The Game Board.

I was looking for a new online alias because in 2004, you didn't reveal your personal details online. I was always obsessed with aliens and UFOs, so I was looking for an alien-related alias. I had already used Alien Underground and Alien Overground, so I wanted something new. My friend, Mitch (aka Golden Boy/Amorphous Blob on The Game Board), said, "Why not Alien Coffeeground," at which I laughed, and soon decided that it was perfect. Due to a slight over-saturation of video game related forums out there, I decided to shutter the account and sold the domain name (big mistake since over the past couple years, I could have sold it for a lot more than $50).

I enjoyed having a website and I had learned a lot about PHP/SQL development, so I looked for and bought aliencg.com in March of 2004 as a personal website and blog that I called Alien's Planet. I still have the original code and some slightly broken iterations can be found on The Wayback Machine at archive.org. After many frustrations with shared hosting sites, I moved to the free WordPress service and renamed the blog Swamp Gas & Moonlit Reflections after having a renaming contest, and starting fresh (I did save the XML files from the old site). Eventually I moved to Squarespace where I had also started the SGMR Podcast (a personal podcast) and then to Blogger to save money. I shortened the name to SGMR and now host the podcast at archive.org.

A Problem So Simple...?

I love math. Anyone who knows me will know that is a fact, plain and simple. There is a problem that intrigues me and it is so simple to state, but seems impossible to prove. It's called The Collatz Conjecture. The premise is simple:

• Pick any positive integer
• If it is even, divide by 2
• If it is odd, multiply by 3 and add 1
• repeat these steps until the cycle repeats

Put into math notation:
If n is even, n/2
If n is odd, 3n+1

Here's the conjecture: Every number (n) will eventually go to 1 using these rules. So far, every number up to 2^60 has gone to 1. 1 is the only number that repeats itself, going from 1, 3*1+1=4, 4/2=2, 2/2=1, and so on forever. It seems like a simple problem to solve, but it isn't. What seems to make this problem so difficult to prove is that there is no application for it and there is no pattern. It falls under a category of "recreational math". Prime numbers and the hunt for them are also considered recreational, but primes are used in encryption these days (although, a 10^64-digit prime is kind of unwieldy for encrypting your passwords).

Because there is no current application for this problem, there is no cash prize for solving it like there is for the Riemann Hypothesis or the P Versus NP problem. The Collatz Conjecture is a curiosity in math and I love the problem, but I know I'll never see a solution for it in my lifetime. For now, all I know is that any power of 2 goes to 1 and doubling any number that goes to one will simply also go to one. Here's a video about this problem:

Play around with yourself if you are mathematically inclined. and if you're really inclined, try to solve the Millennium Prize Problems. Those should be easy </sarcasm>.

NaNo Prepping

What? Mygirlfriend wrote a blog post? Holy crap, I better I write one now because I don't want to look like a slacker.

NaNoWriMo is almost upon us once again, and soon I will be starting off strong, writing a few thousand words right out of the gate only to hit a roadblock and figure out where I want to go from there. That's okay though because I have an outline this year and there is no way my story could ever deviate from that…crap, it already did and I haven't started writing yet. Oh well, I'll write another post of absolute gibberish (I'll repost that one day).

In all seriousness, though, I am undertaking the task again. I lost last year due to lack of steam at the end and also the loss of a couple thousand words when I opened Scrivener on another computer before it had properly saved. This year, I'm using OneNote because it is perfectly suited to this task. I am also not going to be a slave to my wordcount (he says…) and I'm just going to get this story out. As I said above, I have an outline (which actually has plenty of flexibility) and I plan on sticking to it. That means that if I get stuck on one part, I can move to another without worrying much about continuity (What do you mean my character was three years older six months ago? Oh, it must have been a time machine accident between chapters. Wait, I'm not writing about a time machine.)

Anyway, if you'd like to participate in NaNoWriMo and write 50,000 words in 30 days and be like the other sadistic fools who take on this venture, visit https://nanowrimo.org for information. It's a lot of fun and you can meet new people.