Primate Typings

The same-sex marriage “debate” in a handy poster form! (via Scott).

The song’s a hoot, too.

Bad Guy: “The Pinnacle, huh? The very height of human perfection, are you?”

Pinnacle: “One of them. But it takes many mountains to make a range.”

While my junk foods habits have been scaled way back in order to lose weight, that doesn’t mean I don’t keep my hand in – the bag.

So, when M&M’s trotted out a new flavor and tied it to the new Transformers movie, I decided to give it a try. Here’s the new flavor:

 

Robots changing into (in)edible candies? That’s even sillier than the cars.

 That’s right, chocolate, peanut butter, and strawberry! They’re clearly playing with a peanut butter and jelly idea, here. That’s a staple of my diet, albeit with more bread and less sugar. So, I picked up a bag today and…

Well, they probably could have left out the peanut butter. The strawberry flavor is pretty strong, almost completely overwhelming it, though the chocolate hangs in there pretty well. My opinion may change as I work my way through the bag over the next few days, but strawberry-chocolate good and peanut butter superfluous.

 

This is why Diebold machines need a paper trail.

The other thing I saw, I didn’t buy (hey, I said I was cutting back). The always delightful Doritos are now selling us these:

  

Weed sold separately.

 Marketing to the youth segment, I see.

Over at AMC today, John Scalzi grades the fathers in science fiction movies in honor of Father’s Day. Needless to say, Darth Vader gets an F.

Bad Dad

Transformers were a cool toy. Car, robot, and Rubik’s Cube, all rolled into one. They were great.

They had lots of really long television ads. I’m sorry, I mean they had their own cartoon show. It was eighties animation, so the look wasn’t bad and they stayed true to the toys. It was aimed at kids, and it showed. It wasn’t “Ren and Stimpy” or “SpongeBob SquarePants,” where there was enough there to cross-over into the teen and twenties markets.

The show was about alien robots from two groups who crashed on Earth. Rather than reveal themselves to the humans, they decide to hide themselves. Which is fine: aliens hiding among us is a classic science fiction bit. Except they decide to keep up their fight, which makes them kind of hard to hide. And the need to get the energy they to get off the Earth also would make it kind of hard to hide. So the writers have to go through all sorts of contortions to keep the robots secret, just to have a reason to maintain their transformation abilities. Okay, so this eventually falls to the wayside and we get robots that turn into dinosaurs, but this completely fails to hide the fact that any story in which robots turn into vehicles is going to be stupid.

And that was fine. We were kids. It was fun. Who cared if the premise would still be reasonable when we became adults?

Why the hell are we getting a second Transformer movie aimed at teens, twenties, and thirties who are smart enough to recognize that the story-engine makes no sense? Yes, yes, turn off your brain and enjoy Truckasaurus breath fire and chomp on wrecked cars, only in CGI instead of down at the track. But for Transformers to keep up my suspension of disbelief, I’d have to be brain dead.

Oh, well. At least it will be better than Land of the Lost.

Circle: Your reward for doing good work is more work.

Square: Ah, the burden of competence.