The Andromeda Strain

Watched the end of The Andromeda Strain last night, which was great until the last fifteen minutes when it degenerated into a montage of every action movie ending you've ever seen. WTF? Thanks for ruining the last 3 hours and 45 minutes.

So a cure for the virus is discovered and every body's happy until the self destruct mechanism is activated. Ok, no prob, seen it a hundred times, but you need a big finish so I'll go with it. Then the only panel that the system can be deactivated from on their floor is damaged. Sigh....sure, let's just get on with it. THEN, our heroes manage to find a a way to access another floor in the super-safe-quarantine lab within seconds. Oops, not so secure after all. And, of course, it just happens to be through this huge elevator shaft that doesn't have an elevator but does drop straight down to the coolant tank for the nuclear reactor power plant that is about to blow up the facility. Now Benjamin Bratt and Ricky Schroder have to monkey climb up this thing which for some unknown reason begins to rain down debris just to make things more exciting. Huh? The reactor is at the base of the facility. What the hell is with the styrofoam falling from the sky? Now because Schroder is not 12 but has changed his name back to a 12 year old's, he has to die. He avoids an easy escape and sacrifices himself for the greater good. Uh oh! We need his thumb print to deactivate the self-destruct? Enter Daniel Dae Kim who now sacrifices himself to jump in the coolant tank and chop off Schroeder's thumb. Not sure why the coolant kills him, but whatever, lesser characters need to die here, just following formula. Now, Kim's character has just suffered a gran mal seizure but 5 minutes ago. Somehow though he is able to throw a human thumb something like 60 straight up to Benjamin Bratt while dying in a vat of reactor coolant. That's impressive.



Bratt catches the thumb, finds an opening to the floor he needs and is then blinded by hot steam. Oh, for Christ's sake... Onward hero! So now he crawls his way down an air vent, which somehow collapses underneath him as it's suffering from the same poor engineering that's causing the styrofoam roof to fall. Down he falls to the floor, broken and blind. Blah blah blah, self-destruct shut down with less than 20 seconds to go, yadda yadda yadda. I stayed up til midnight for this? I gotta get up at 5am, bitches, and this is the ending you give me? Seriously?

iPod, Pathogens & Fish Tanks

My iPod is back to normal so all is right with the world again. Aside from the the imminent job loss and all. Anyway, it was a lot easier to reinstall the software than I remember the last time, though the last time was the first time I'd done it and was worried about losing all my shit. Aside from hitting "ok" a few times I didn't have to do anything. I'd forgotten it backs up everything in my iTunes, including everything in my note pad.



And that has nothing to do with anything aside from being pretty cool.

Stayed up til midnight watching the Andromeda Strain remake on A & E which was great. The original was good and all but this was a little more fast paced and exciting. And "Utah" reminded me of home as it was actually the interior of BC. I didn't watch the credits afterward but I'm assuming Piedmont was actually Merritt, BC.

A quick question for Hollywood. If Lost can let Daniel Dae Kim, a Korean, actually play a Korean, why not rewrite his Chinese character as a North Korean? They kept trying to blame the out break on the North Koreans anyway. Just wondering.