A Series of Tubes

It is hard for me to put into words how horrible Transformers 2 is, but I will try. It is as if director Michael Bay found some way to take a dump on my brain and bludgeon it with a rusty object at the same time.Actually that is probably being too kind. Perhaps your reaction would be to illegally download this movie and watch it for free instead. Don’t. It’s not that I lost 3 hours of my life. That would be as if I did nothing for 3 hours. Instead I was made a worse person for seeing this movie. The only people that will enjoy this movie will be the sado masochist, the brainless, and Michael Bay.

Transformers 2 finds ways to make robots racist, put testicles on a robot, have inane and unrealistic dialog and characters, and horrible plot devices that don’t make sense. Oh no, the thingey we need turned into shards, now we can’t use it….oh wait….after carrying it around for 15 minutes, as dust, it is now put back together conveniently right when we need it with little/no explanation of how. Almost every character in the movie doesn’t appear to have a point. By the end I was really hoping that about 90% of the characters would die because I didn’t want to listen to them any more. I wonder if George Lucas had a hand in the character design because most of the characters have the same feel as JarJar.

The screen cap in the picture is of Megan Fox, the girlfriend, being scared of the robots outside. I was making similar faces, but more because I was vomiting slightly in my mouth. Please do not see this movie, even if you are curious what an on screen suck fest looks like.

Since California is in serious budget crisis mode, the UC system is bracing itself for a huge cut in funds ($1 Billion cut to UC/CSU over 3 years). Every once in a while I get an email from Mark Yudolf and the UC Office of the President. In one of those emails, the following was said:

“Salaries for senior managers have been frozen, and the highest-level leaders, including myself, are taking a 5 percent pay cut.”

Mark Yudof and Arnold Shwartzenagger

One would think that Yudof is trying to share the pain of the UC by taking this pay cut. Of course one needs to understand that when Yudof was hired last year, his total compensation package was double that of his predecessor. By my calculations, Yudof’s salary is down from $591,084 to $561,529.8. This means that his salary is still up from his previous job at the University of Texas ($528,860). Of course he is only taking a 5% PAY cut, not a 5% reduction in compensation…so his total compensation package will go down by a percentage less than 5%. Yudof’s total compensation includes: Read more

Arnold Schwarzenegger is getting ready to gut the government of California.  The state has a budget deficit of $24 billion, and the list of Arnold’s proposed budget cuts is about $20 billion.  In a speech made today, Arnold made the following mental disconnect: He didn’t want the state to be in the real estate business and that California would be selling off land (essentially, getting into the real estate business).  It’s like he didn’t listen to himself about 10 seconds ago.  I guess this land sale will generate the other $4 Billion or so.  Of course there is not a single tax increase in Arnold’s plan.  For some reason Arnold thinks that the propositions that failed in the last election means that voters hate taxes.  The thing is that the propositions in the last election were not a round of tax increases.  Prop 1A had tax increases, but also set up a rainy day fund in a year when we can’t afford to be setting one up.  Apparently Arnold thinks that the failure of prop 1A was a referendum on the taxes in the proposition but not the rainy day fund portion because he still wants a rainy day fund.  Arnold is coming to the conclusions that he likes instead of the ones that match the facts.

The video below shows Arnold coming to the wrong conclusions about the election and proposing to gut the state government (along with proposing not to get into the real estate business followed by his proposal for the state to enter land into the real estate business): Read more