Last night most of my family went to the Grand Haven v. Rockford game. Sadly, I was the only one of us rooting against Grand Haven. I have three brothers, three of us graduated from GHHS, and one is still attending the dreadful school. My tenure at the high school included a couple of years on the football team, and a lot of misery. I did not then, and continue to disagree with the way that high school is run. To this day I continue to enjoy watching them fail.

Much to my surprise, it was half time when I got there, apparently both teams were exclusively running, and blew through the first half in nearly record time. The score was 0-0, so I didn’t miss anything good. And, by the time I reached the place my family was standing, Rockford scored their first touchdown. Soon thereafter they scored their second, and final touchdown.

Sadly, the final 14-0 score was not as nice as the 51-0 score at GH’s homecoming last year, but you can’t win them all. However, that was not the most amusing event of the evening.

Apparently, the GH football team is returning to the old formula that served them so poorly during the Horodyski era: Run, Run, Run, Punt. This is the first time that I have seen such an abomination in the Farley era.

I’m sure most of my readers don’t care about this, so rant complete.

This post is a little delayed, but I figured that I should make a point of getting it up.

Two days ago, the Stanley Cup made its way to Grand Haven for public viewing. This opportunity is a little twisted, since the local team (Detroit) lost to Pittsburgh in the championship game. Had the Red Wings won, the Stanley Cup would never have been near Grand Haven. But, through some bizarre fate, the coach of Pittsburgh is from Grand Haven. It all makes me feel very dirty.

A couple of my brothers went to check it out, and took a few photos while they were there. You can check them out on my flickr feed.

Stanley Cup on Flickr

City Hall Lost Their Tree

6:25:15 PM me: Hang on a minute
6:25:22 PM me: Going to take a picture of the the end of the world
6:25:24 PM vanlandw: i am actually going to be brb’ing soon for the store
6:25:27 PM me: gg
6:25:29 PM vanlandw: and yoiu should take a photo fo the world blowing up
6:25:31 PM vanlandw: but i’ll be on tonight
6:25:33 PM me: k
6:25:39 PM vanlandw: ?
6:28:55 PM vanlandw: what world is ending?
6:28:55 PM me (Autoreply): Nope.

No more power. Damnit.

I was composing my follow up post to my Final Fantasy X post when vanlandw messaged me. Then, in a matter of moments all hell broke loose. It went from violently sunny to violently windy. Rain, heat humidity, wind and chaos slew Grand Haven with a vegennce. While the storm was short lived it did a ton of damage. Over the course of several minutes it managed to rape the trees in my yard and KO enough power lines to leave me sitting here in some kind of tropic stone age hell. Thank the good lord for laptop batteries. Otherwise I am sure I would be feral by now.

The enfuriating thing about this is that we have no lost power in years prior to the earlier storm this year. Thus, that means not once, but twice year summer we have lost power. I am furious, there is no other way to describe it. The air is so hot and sticky using my laptop is all but unbearble. Were it no my only indicator that I lived in the 21st century I would not be using it.

I am going to leave this post as it is now, I think I am going to go for a drive and take some photos of the damage. If I find any good ones I’ll put them up with this post. Ugh, it smells like the fisherman’s worf. Goof grief. I wonder if any fish got blown up…I should check in the trees.

Bah.

UPDATE 2009-08-10:

As you can probably tell by the graphic I stuck in the post, I was able to take some rather interesting photos of the damage. I created a photo set on flickr so you can check out:

August 9th, 2009 Storm

Last Tuesday night, at 23:15 I venture out to witness Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. I had one of my brothers go to the theater and get us some tickets earlier in the day, since they had already sold out four theaters at that point. By the time I got to the theater, they had sold out all six theaters showing midnight premiere. Now, please bear in mind that Grand Haven (GH) is a pretty small tourist town, and our theater only has nine screens total.

Typically, the GH theater will only open one theater for a midnight showing (some times two if the first theater sells out prior to the evening). I have witnessed a range of light to pretty full (the King Kong premiere only had a handful of people). But, I had never before seen the horror of six theater’s worth of people all cram packed into the lobby. It simply was not meant for that.

Sadly, their seating plan was rather shitty. Since the lobby could not possibly hold all the people, they opened up the last couple theaters for early seating. Basically, they rewarded people who didn’t show up until the last minute to get a ticket. Beyond that, they seemed to randomly let people into the other theaters one by one starting at 23:35. Since everyone was just packed in there, there was nothing resembling a line so when people finally realized that a theater was open few people actually started to flow in. I seized one of these opportunities to cut through a large group of immobile teens in order to get a good seat.

Once my brother and I finally got in the theater the waiting game began. We were in theater five, which was being chained to theaters six and seven. This means that three theaters were all being shown from the same film. So, it took forever for them to get setup and sync’d. They even had to stop everything and reset once during the previews while they worked the bugs out. The movie finally began a little after 0:30.

I was quite pleased that the movie started right out with the Autobots taking out a few rouge Decipticons. Based on the previews, I was afraid we are going to be stuck with forty five minutes of lame college setup before we even saw a transformer. Granted, the college scene did immediately follow, and it was long and tenuous. I’m glad that is was at least forgettable so you weren’t leave feeling annoyed once the action got started.

The story of the movie really was quite horrible. But, not so horrible it was revolting. It was basically just enough to keep pulling together the action sequences, and confuse long time transformers fans. It might be a little better than I am describing, as I am told that I missed a rather important part that explained the nonsense.

I would say roughly half way through the film, at the scene in the museum I started feeling quite sick from the heat. It would appear that the theater’s HVAC system was not designed to accommodate such a large mass of people for a long period of time. My guess is that the theater itself was in the mid 90’s, and the air was stagnant and humid. When I got out into the lobby I saw that I wasn’t the only one wilting. Several people were milling around mumbling about how hot the theaters were. After a few minutes of splashing cold water over my arms and face I was able to return to the theater.

There were not a lot of surprises in the film. It was pretty clear that Megatron was going to be resurrected. I believe everybody thought that they were going to kill Optimus Prime (I still don’t like that decision). And, as expected there were more transformers, lebouf, and fox. However, a few things weren’t as I expected.

Based on the name, and the way things were setup I assumed that they were going to do a blatant rip off if Star Wars: Revenge of the Empire. But, the film really did not bare much resemblance. However, they did do an incredibly lame “master / apprentice” relationship among the Decipticons. Additionally, I did not expect Megatron to kill lebouf. So, that was a really nice surprise. The only other really different thing was the story. I was expecting the story of the film to be something like the first one, which they spent too much time on in the first film (since it wasn’t very good anyway). In this film its like they knew the story wasn’t worth the effort so they just put everything into giant robots fighting each other. And, really, what more can you expect from a film based on action figures made by Hasbro?

Since, missed a chunk of the film, I am going to try to see it again while its in theaters. I’d love to see it at the IMAX, but I am pretty sure I would get some violent motion sickness from all the action going on, on the screen. But, at the very listed I would like to see it in a high quality DLP theater. Regardless, I did see most of the film, and feel that I can render a verdict on it.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, as a film fails miserably. However, as a work of entertainment it is a wild success. As I mentioned in a previous post, it really hits the important parts of a summer blockbuster: PG-13, mass appeal, little story, lots of action, and sex appeal. I have recommended the film to anyone on the fence about it, and I expect it to make tons of money in an otherwise slow movie season.

Using my special rating system, as a “film” I rank Transformers 2 as -3. However, as a summer blockbuster, I rate the film a 5.

For anyone planning on seeing the film, and not caring about all my spoilers: enjoy!