johnzo

Kylo Ren is like any number of Heisman winning QBs. He looks great in practice, when he's interrogating helpless captives or cutting down old men. But when he faces pro-level talent, he folds up, and he clearly can't play through pain. Supreme Leader even says that Ren needs a little coaching up at one point. And yeah, I agree with TUP: Poe is a little too eager to talk about the Skywalker map mission. I just took that as "the movie's moving pretty fast, let's repeat our premise two or three extra times to make sure that everyone's still with us."

Looks great, you guys. Thanks for making this such a great site!

(edit: never mind)

The Phantom Menace was so awful bad terrible but I have to admit that I really like Darth Maul's moves. From a pure watching-humans-do-stunts level, I think that's my favorite. The Luke / Vader ones were better for actually having emotion and dramatic weight to them. The swordfighting in those scenes is really kind of secondary, the important and cool stuff is the conversations they have while they're swordfighting.

I call it: Rey is gonna turn to the Dark Side. She has this owlish predatory I-love-killing-things face that the film stops to acknowledge in two different fight scenes. She is going to trip the dark fantastic and she and Finn are gonna be fighting before we're done. I really liked the film. My only disappointment: yet another superweapon. The rest of the derivative stuff I didn't mind: adorable droid marooned on desert planet with critical information, the Millennium Falcon smuggling fugitives, Han getting drawn back in, family redeeming family, etc. Loved the Tom Waits by way of Bob Marley sound to the cantina. My take was that Darth Nose was a murderous child and terrible swordfighter, extremely gifted in the force but still a total Vader pretender. Even so he was an important minion who got face time with Supreme Leader and was trusted with the Jedi hunting mission. The Sith have fallen on hard times, it would seem (if these guys are Sith, I dunno, goggles grandma says that there's lots of different Force people around.) And I think Rey is supposed to be a generational talent, a Force McDavid.Unlike you, b.b., I liked how the fighting looked crude and amateurish and not like the Jedi sword ballet we got in the prequels. The Force is totally amateur hour nowadays. I think this is really cool because there's a huge void for our new characters to fill. And here I reveal that I am a total ******* dork: wasn't that lightsaber the one Luke lost on Cloud City? His Return of the Jedi lightsaber looked more like a candlestick.

Is there any CFL rule against accepting compensation for tearing up a coaching contract? Could Edmonton trade to get Thorpe? Popp could play this like Desjardins played the Kevin Glenn thing: stay cool and maximize return. I guess the only trouble with that analogy is that Popp doesn't have anyone obvious waiting in the wings to take over as DC.

I just discovered Rick and Morty. A silly cartoon about a drunk misanthrope mad scientist is somehow the best thing on TV. Star Wars Rebels hasn't been bad either, it's definitely got the old school Star Wars spirit.

When?

Also, Conrad Black is an ex-con, and for someone who is asserting Canada's irrelevancy, he sure was intent on re-attaining his Canadian citizenship a few years ago. I remember reading Barbara Amiel in Maclean's as a kid. I remember asking my mom, "mom, why are the rich people so scared?"

The Global Mean Sea Level is 4" - 8" higher today than it was a century ago, and the rate of growth is accelerating. Someone is wrong about this. Who is it? Conrad Black, or the scientists who measure the GMSL? Solutions innovated in Canada can be exported worldwide. Who cares if Canada isn't culpable for this problem? Canada could help lead the world out of it. Ah, yes, here's the dog-whistle. People who sign onto the climate consensus are just the heirs to Stalin. Ad hominem much, Conrad?

Miami is going to be the North American city that takes it hardest earliest from sea level rise. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/11/miami-drowning-climate-change-deniers-sea-levels-rising According to the article, that part of South Florida is built at low elevation on porous sandstone. When the sea levels rise, the water will saturate the rock and from there, the sewers. Miami Beach is already hurting from this. We will see what happens. Would love to hear perspectives on this from our earth science people. (yes, it's the Guardian, they are a filthy partisan media outfit)

The Star Trek movies are the Toronto Maple Leafs: it doesn't matter how much they suck, people will pay money to watch them, and thus, there is no need for anything to change.

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Would love to see Ryan Smith in Blue & Gold. Wonder if anyone will take a flyer on J. Masoli after his solid eastern final?

Yeah, my company really stepped up on this one. We're seeing it in a super nice theater, I got a +2 to bring some friends along. Just hoping the movie is good!

Seeing Star Wars on Friday. My company's taking us out. My expectations are high, I'm looking forward to high-fiving all my nerds, so I suspect it will be a crushing disappointment. Then I'll be trying to get tickets for a 70mm showing of the Hateful Eight on Xmas Day.

Should we discredit the consensus of ninety-five percent of the world's climate scientists because Leonardo DiCaprio is ignorant about how Calgary's weather works? If not, then why the **** does this matter?

The Earth is going to last a lot longer than human civilization on it will. Barring a visit from Galactus, our planet has about five million millennia ahead of it. Humans have been doing agriculture and building cities for less than ten millennia and we've already faced at least one extinction / mass die-off event. There are going to be many more in our future, and we're going to roll a deuce at some point. So who cares if the seas will rise dramatically at some point in the life of the planet? The germane question is, will the seas rise dramatically while the Earth is still populated by humans?

Are you seriously telling me that because we didn't directly observe an event, we can't know anything about it? Evolutionary biologists, astronomers, murder detectives, and airplane crash investigators will be very disappointed to learn this. I welcome correction from the earth sciences people on all this, but we do have ways of measuring the evolution of glaciers by examining the sediments found within them. For instance, if you find a linear layer of ash from Krakatoa in your ice sample, you know that ice has been frozen in place since 1883. Also, you can examine the rock around the glacier and boulders that were transported and deposited by the glacier. When rock is exposed to the sun, it's struck by cosmic rays, which react to create very convenient isotopes that have known rates of decay. So by examining the prevalence of these isotopes in the rock, you can estimate how long the rock has been out in the open. Unless this is all a dirty lie, we can chart the rise and fall of glaciers. I am out of time and can't google it, but I suspect that we can know about how sea ice has evolved by examining its effects on coastlines.

KBF, I hear you about partisan polarization. I'm pretty lefty by nature and I'm constantly shaking my head at the bullshit antics on my side. I hate it when people lie about important things, and I hate when the imposition of doctrinal purity trumps the good that the doctrine is actually trying to achieve. I'm the kind of guy who loves socialism but isn't super fond of a lot of socialists, y'know. But, back to the matter at hand. Yes, there are profiteers and liars on all sides of the climate debate. America in particular is a land of opportunistic entrepreneurs. When I think about these things, I keep coming back to the massive scientific consensus assembled around climate change -- fewer than five in a hundred climate scientists dispute human-driven climate change. Why is that? The simplest explanation is that climate change observations and conclusions are made in good faith. What are the other explanations? If this is a conspiracy -- Schmitt suggests climate scientists communists -- its one with ironclad discipline. Is climate change just a marketing strategy for research grants? I can buy that on some level, but that research has to survive peer review. If it's ****, it'll be flagged as **** -- unless there's a conspiracy. Yes, this is an appeal to authority. I'm just an internet idiot, I can't argue climate science and I won't just copy words from a friendly website. But if you're going to have an authority, science is a pretty good one to trust -- its batting average is pretty high. Sure, when I was a kid we were told we were moving into an ice age. When I was a kid I was also told that smoking was super bad for me, that computers were going to double in power every eighteen months, that CFCs were burning a hole in the ozone layer, that HIV caused AIDS -- all of those things turned out to be true.

Is Marshall really an every-down back? He's not great at making anyone miss and I think you need some element of shiftiness to be a great CFL back. You look at Cornish, he's got the power and can drag the pile, but I've also seen him absolutely embarrass linebackers with a move. And Walker had very few touches in his time here. Many of them were up-the-gut blasts, and he got owned on those. Couldn't believe how badly we used him. He's not a complete player by any stretch, but he can do damage in the open field -- run a pick on the MLB, get him the ball with some receivers and a lineman in front of him and let him do his thing. But we just used him like an ordinary running back.

Hillary Clinton is openly calling out the NRA. She's a follower, not a leader, so she must be convinced that the politics on this are shifting and that the NRA's absolutist Second Amendment views are becoming a minority. That said, everything hinges on the Supreme Court. The White House and Congress can pass whatever they like* but there will be constitutional questions about anything they do and the NRA has been pretty successful at the Supreme Court (recent reversals notwithstanding). So the best thing to do for gun control right now is to put a Democrat in the White House who will get to make some Supreme Court appointments. * they won't pass anything, because the federal House is hopelessly shitfucked by the cult of anti-personality that Gingrich established. No gun legislation has any chance of hitting the floor there, unless it's about expanding gun rights.

Seriously, what can Obama do about America's gun problem?

You've said this several times, KBF -- that climate change alarmism is lucrative and will continue so long as people can get paid to study it. And I don't think this is unreasonable. People will do things to get paid, and people get invested in the things they get paid for. However, this argument has never been convincing to me because action on climate change will cause significant disruption to moneyed interests. If you say that climate change science is fueled by greed and avarice, surely you must also acknowledge that opposition to climate change action is motivated by greed and avarice as well, and not by ivory-pure devotion to the preponderance of scientific evidence.

Dude, if we could terraform Venus then Terran climate change would be ... simple. Venus is a nasty place. It'd be easier to terraform the Marianas Trench.