Reviews of Many Things
Mar. 19th, 2012 04:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroFour things that have very little in common: Meat-by-mail from Omaha Steaks, the 80s cartoon Voltron, the 90s TV show Nowhere Man, and a book of Scott Adams' ramblings.
Omaha Steaks
They sent me a classic “introductory offer”, with a selection of their wares (steaks, burgers, hot dogs, pork chops, stuff fish, fried potatoes) and a bonus set of steak knives for $60. I figured I’d give it a go, as it was a decent price for that much meat regardless. Honestly, the only thing that impressed me was the vacuum-sealed packaging which allowed me to quickly thaw frozen steaks by putting them in warm water. Otherwise, I found the meat to be pretty standard supermarket quality, and the more complicated offerings were best described as “50s Middle America cuisine” (or as Jethrien put it, “flavor through fat, rather than strong seasoning”). I won’t bother again, especially not at their regular prices. (BSD recommended Fleisher’s Meats in Brooklyn when I complained about this, so I may give that a go when we’ve worked down the meat in our freezer.)
Voltron
I bought the first set of disks (the Blue Lion set) because I only really remembered anything about the first few episodes and doubted I’d make it much further than that. I think that was the right call—the nostalgia was fun, but the show doesn’t hold up. On the odd chance you didn’t know, Voltron was cut together from a Japanese series called Golion, with pieces and the “vehicle Voltron” season coming from an unrelated series called Dairugger. The American writers, as far as we can tell, only had a loose idea what was happening in each episode and made up dialogue that seemed amusing. The changes from Golion created all sorts of plot holes, like the fact that Keith tells how Voltron was split up by Haggar disguised as a goddess in the first episode, but needs it explained to him in the second. The dialogue also has difficulty deciding whether Voltron was created millennia ago and split into the lions in the far past (like in Golion) or created by King Alfard the annoyingly ghostly in the last few decades and split up last month. (Also: It’s painfully obvious in some scenes with female or child extras that they had a shortage of voice actresses.) This is only worth watching if you remember being a fan as a kid, though they apparently also sell subbed, uncut originals of Golion as well.
Nowhere Man
One of the first UPN shows, which was a bit of a cross between The Fugitive and The Prisoner, and was tragically cancelled after a single season (despite being their highest-rated show) when UPN switched over to Blaxploitation TV. My dad watched the DVDs and handed them off to me, and suggested that watching the interviews would give good insights into what was going on. The short answer: The writers really didn’t know. They had a month from idea to shooting the pilot, so the writer/producer threw together a bunch of ideas (he specifically calls the photographic negatives Veil was trying to hide a macguffin!) and they figured it out as they went along. I haven’t watched this since it originally aired, but I’m going to see how much evidence I can come up with for the theory that Veil is actually being hunted by the Dollhouse.
Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! by Scott Adams
Scott Adams, knowing a good way to make money when he saw one, collected a whole bunch of his blog posts into a book. Adams has made a great deal of money with a public persona as a know-it-all, egotistical jerk and sees no reason to stop now. The thing is, he’ll say plenty of things that are funny or profound as long as you don’t think about them too hard, but if you do, then you realize they’re either deeply offensive or have less basis in reality than Ayn Rand’s knowledge of courtrooms. If you’re looking for tech/science/philosophy-based humor, I’d suggest buying one of the hundreds of Dilbert collections instead, or even better yet, skip straight to the XKCD book.
Omaha Steaks
They sent me a classic “introductory offer”, with a selection of their wares (steaks, burgers, hot dogs, pork chops, stuff fish, fried potatoes) and a bonus set of steak knives for $60. I figured I’d give it a go, as it was a decent price for that much meat regardless. Honestly, the only thing that impressed me was the vacuum-sealed packaging which allowed me to quickly thaw frozen steaks by putting them in warm water. Otherwise, I found the meat to be pretty standard supermarket quality, and the more complicated offerings were best described as “50s Middle America cuisine” (or as Jethrien put it, “flavor through fat, rather than strong seasoning”). I won’t bother again, especially not at their regular prices. (BSD recommended Fleisher’s Meats in Brooklyn when I complained about this, so I may give that a go when we’ve worked down the meat in our freezer.)
Voltron
I bought the first set of disks (the Blue Lion set) because I only really remembered anything about the first few episodes and doubted I’d make it much further than that. I think that was the right call—the nostalgia was fun, but the show doesn’t hold up. On the odd chance you didn’t know, Voltron was cut together from a Japanese series called Golion, with pieces and the “vehicle Voltron” season coming from an unrelated series called Dairugger. The American writers, as far as we can tell, only had a loose idea what was happening in each episode and made up dialogue that seemed amusing. The changes from Golion created all sorts of plot holes, like the fact that Keith tells how Voltron was split up by Haggar disguised as a goddess in the first episode, but needs it explained to him in the second. The dialogue also has difficulty deciding whether Voltron was created millennia ago and split into the lions in the far past (like in Golion) or created by King Alfard the annoyingly ghostly in the last few decades and split up last month. (Also: It’s painfully obvious in some scenes with female or child extras that they had a shortage of voice actresses.) This is only worth watching if you remember being a fan as a kid, though they apparently also sell subbed, uncut originals of Golion as well.
Nowhere Man
One of the first UPN shows, which was a bit of a cross between The Fugitive and The Prisoner, and was tragically cancelled after a single season (despite being their highest-rated show) when UPN switched over to Blaxploitation TV. My dad watched the DVDs and handed them off to me, and suggested that watching the interviews would give good insights into what was going on. The short answer: The writers really didn’t know. They had a month from idea to shooting the pilot, so the writer/producer threw together a bunch of ideas (he specifically calls the photographic negatives Veil was trying to hide a macguffin!) and they figured it out as they went along. I haven’t watched this since it originally aired, but I’m going to see how much evidence I can come up with for the theory that Veil is actually being hunted by the Dollhouse.
Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! by Scott Adams
Scott Adams, knowing a good way to make money when he saw one, collected a whole bunch of his blog posts into a book. Adams has made a great deal of money with a public persona as a know-it-all, egotistical jerk and sees no reason to stop now. The thing is, he’ll say plenty of things that are funny or profound as long as you don’t think about them too hard, but if you do, then you realize they’re either deeply offensive or have less basis in reality than Ayn Rand’s knowledge of courtrooms. If you’re looking for tech/science/philosophy-based humor, I’d suggest buying one of the hundreds of Dilbert collections instead, or even better yet, skip straight to the XKCD book.
