Friday, June 26, 2009

Geography 101

Munqy, being the nerd he is, has been having wetdreams about watching Transformers 2 for the last two years. So when it came out he summoned the Carrot Dealers(tm) to watch what will probably be, according to him, the most orgasmic movie ever made. Since I am no Transformers groupie, I'll leave the detailed technical analysis to the inevitable uber-geeky post by Munqy and I'll focus on geography instead.

I would really, really like to know what kind of stuff was the director on when he decided to basically make the Red Sea, Petra (in Jordan) and the Pyramids all some 200 meters away from each other?! I get it is a sci-fi movie so they are supposed to get a little bit 'creative', but why then did they have to get out of their way to show us that the doomsday machine is inside the Giza Pyramids but first they have to walk the 200 meters to Petra to get the key?!

One possible answer is that they had this cute puzzle that was linked to the Red Sea and Petra and at the same time, the Pyramid made sense as a hiding place to the big-ass doomsday machine. Alright then, couldn't they have kept everything, but added a scene where they travel back across Egypt to the Pyramids? It could be one of those time-lapsed scenes which in 30 seconds they can show us that they have traveled the 9 hours or so from Petra to the Pyramids? With a movie that is 2.5 hours long, you'd think the director decided not to cut any corners to keep everything in. Except of course the 30 seconds that would have made the movie compatible with the geography of planet Earth. Dumbass.

Oh yeah, spoiler alert, don't read if you haven't watched the movie, yadda, yadda yadda.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Conformity on Casual Fridays

For the lucky souls that have never been part of Corporate Whoredom, casual Fridays is a lame attempt by our Corporate Overlords to make us feel a little less miserable on the last day of the workweek, by allowing us to come to work in jeans. I never fully understood the concept of people showing up to work in formal or semi-formal attire. I can buy that if you work in a client-facing industry or function, like Sales, or maybe if you have some important external meetings. But if you are an accountant showing up at 7am for 10 hours of number crunching, in a tiny cubicle infront of a 10-inch black-and-white screen, doesn't it really border on torture to have you also wear a tie?

But I digress. Back to casual Fridays, the funny thing is how everyone, really, everyone is wearing jeans and t-shirts on casual Fridays. Which makes you wonder really, if casual Fridays is a way of letting corporate slaves out of the conformity of b-wear (yes, I'm trying to coin my own Orwellian vocab), then isn't everyone wearing jeans and t-shirts kind of defeats the purpose? Because, technically, if casual Friday is about not looking like everyone else, then you should show up in a suit and tie. Definitely you'd be the only one dressed like that on a Friday, you rebel!

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Timeless elCairo

Much has already been said about Obama's historic speech today to the Islamic world from, to borrow his words, the timeless city of elCairo. It all boils down to the fact that it was an extremely balanced speech, something that says alot about the man himself. Yet to an immature person like myself it was frustrating. A fifty-minute speech and I couldn't find one thing to crack a joke at? What the hell man? Didn't he ask himself what would Jesus do? Because I'm sure the answer to that would have been: stumble once or twice!

There was a close call with his closing line though, I felt he almost went with "God bless America". Could you imagine how funny that would have been! But he skillfully made it into "God...'s peace be upon you". Ugh, lucky bastard. And is it God's peace be upon you or just peace be upon you? Anyhoo, wi 3alikom ya khowya, nawart, mato3od teshrab 7aga?