Among my guilty pleasures is watching reality shows about people buying crap and reselling it. Storage Wars is an A&E show that works on the premise that it’s fun to watch a bunch of people fight over abandoned junk left in storage units. The show has proved so successful that it now has several clones-Storage Wars Texas, Storage Wars New York, and I recently found Storage Wars Canada. They all have a small group of people-usually four or five-who hate each other for no clear reason and always try to run up the price on the storage units. I find…
Tag: heroes
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Clearly Philip Jose Farmer wasn’t thinking about a series of books when he named this one To Your Scattered Bodies Go. It’s a title I’ve heard from time to time and it’s made a few best Sci Fi Books lists here and there. It’s one I recently got around to reading. To Your Scattered Bodies Go is the first of the Riverworld novels. These are stories about a world that has been terraformed into an unending river and populated with everyone who ever lived on Earth. It’s a concept that has some appeal, as a writer can plop down any…
In Time
In the Future, people never age past 25, all cars were designed in the early 1970s, and time has replaced dollars as currency. In Time is a familiar story, a poor guy from the bad part of Time and a rich girl from the good part of Time, go on a Robin Hood style crime spreed to help the poor and the disenfranchised. Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake and the rest of the cast is young and good looking and always a minute or so away from dying. It seems that everyone could be an immortal, but where you put…
I Am Number Four
Shown in Theater Number 4, cute, huh? The story of a group of aliens being hunted by another group of aliens all of whom have supernatural powers and are hiding in plain sight here on Earth-while blowing up everything they run across and showing up on YouTube. It’s a pretty standard issue story and a movie only made possible by super cheap CGI. Like all setup movies, I Am Number Four is crammed full of dull and boring backstory about our super hunk alien and the nasty fish people who want to kill him. Only it’s backstory that doesn’t really…
Stargate Universe Canceled by Syfy
The Syfy channel seems to be more interested in Wrestling and Paranormal BS than actual science fiction. Maybe that’s why they changed their name. The Syfy channel canceled Stargate Universe only weeks after canceling Caprica. The only shows remaining are Warehouse 13, Sanctuary, and Eureka. Tick tick tick That’s the sound of your life running out. I never liked Caprica, it was too much a show about The Matrix and too little a show about Battlestar Gallactica. But it was starting to get a little interesting, just when they axed it. I didn’t like Stargate Universe either, for similar reasons. …
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
I liked Mark Haddon’s debut novel about a 15 year old boy who discovers a neighbor’s dog dead-impaled with a garden fork. He then sets about doing a bit of detecting in an effort to discover the identy of the killer. Following in the footsteps of Flowers for Algernon we see the world through Christopher’s eyes-a world that is at times greatly different from the world most of us live in. Christopher over explains everything-when he introduces himself he explains the history of the name ‘Christopher’ and how he doesn’t really like what it means. He is autistic, and the…
American Pickers
There are two things you need to be a successful antique dealer-knowledge and money. The heroes of The History Channel’s American Pickers seem to have an endless supply of both. They also have a lot of time on their hands, as the point of American Pickers is that they are roaming near and far to sort through piles of junk for items they can resell for profit. I like American Pickers and I have to admire the chutzpah of these two saps as they bang on doors and hand out their want list. I have yet to see them hit…
Inception-Dreaming The Matrix
I’ve been waiting for someone to make another Matrix movie since 1999 and Inception is pretty close. It’s a sci fi movie, sort of. Sort of because there is no real science mentioned as to how the people in this universe share dreams. This is not a problem, since we are never sure what reality really is and if there is a higher level where the real technology of Dreaming exists. We are shown a number of realities, all of which have differences in how time passes, so that the 30 seconds it take a van to fall from a…