MasterChugs Theater: ‘Adventureland’

Though it’s set at a low-rent amusement park, Adventureland is essentially a summer camp movie, a nostalgia-tinged look back at the balmy nights and summer flings you may or may not have had in your youth. Nothing in the movie really justifies its setting in 1987, despite some laughs about Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” and trendy fashion, but it does help add a retro-cool sheen to what’s essentially a very standard coming-of-age dramedy. Coming off Superbad, director and writer Greg Mottola is dialing up the sentimentality and realism here, and what he achieves is admirable if a little ho-hum. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Adventureland’

This is why we will never win the War On Robots

Scientists at the University of Tokyo’s Ishikawa Oku Laboratory have invented a robot that never loses at Rock, Paper, Scissors. (Or “Roshambo,” if you were raised by wolves.) The Janken robot cannot be bargained or negotiated with or fooled by doing that little trick where you start to make scissors and then flatten your palm out, middle and index fingers last.

You can’t cheat this machine with your human brain, because its computer brain is doing the exact same thing, just faster. It watches your hand and then reacts a millisecond later, appearing to make its selection simulataneously with you. In other words, you were right: your older brother is a cyborg.

The war against the machines may not have been over before it started. Just so immediately after it that it seems like it.

Animals hinder, rather than help, the economy

We all know that animals are NOT our friends. They should be our servants, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we should task them with jobs. Nonetheless, the UK feels otherwise. A warehouse in Southampton has hired a cat to be its security guard. Rather than stimulate the world economy, much less their own, by creating a new job, the people in charge of Bandai’s warehouse feel it would be better to have a four legged creature make the rounds.

REASONS WHY THIS IS A BAD IDEA

  • There are people out there allergic to animal fur, potentially children. By having a cat prowl around the toys, these children have been given a death sentence.
  • By paying the cat in fish and cat food, you’ve prevented families and hobos, respectively, from eating. Thus, the families and hobos have been given a death sentence.
  • Where are the checks and balances for Millie? When everyone goes home, who monitors the warehouse to make sure that the cat’s not letting in any of its destructive friends and planting them inside the toy boxes? You’ve now given the children an additional death sentence.

How do you sleep at night, Bandai toy warehouse?

Forget guns, will travel

You may have heard of something called the Rio +20 Summit over the past couple weeks. It’s nothing big, just world leaders getting together to figure out a plan to clean up the air.

Among those in attendance was newly-installed French President Francois Hollande. Naturally, his security team went with him. Unlike their American counterparts, the security team didn’t buy prostitutes, instead, they forgot to pack their guns, which is pretty much the only thing they really need to pack.

So throughout the whole conference, the French security team had either fake guns or empty holsters.