The new Transformers movie sucks. It sucks a lot. What a big steaming pile of digital effects bullshit. Watch it for flashes and motion and loud noises, but don't watch it for heart. This is the movie from hell.
This movie's focus is squarely on the humans which is why it fails so miserably. Even Bumblebee the robot with the most screen time has a broken voice box to keep him quiet. And we're asked to believe this even though he can assume any vehicle's shape at will. Why go to such lengths to silence the metal men? Great personalities like Kup and Arcee from the 1984 Transformers movie have no echo hear, only the cold silence of technology.
Optimus Prime's updated look is kinda cool, but Megatron's face is an unrecognizable mess. Oh silly Michael Bay thinking he was so smart when actually he didn't understood anything at all about what was genuine about Transformers. This tragic mistake is not just a new-low for and otherwise respectable cartoon, it's rock bottom for adaptations in general (sorry Godzilla 1998).
Check out Richie Lewis's new band Richie and the Creeps . With a professed interest in 50's horror film and playing a type of swamp-stomp rock, this effort by the former lead singer of Tumbleweed is worth the listen.
Dubai is a crazy "new" city that's being planned as the premier world class tourist destination. It's currently building the world's tallest skyscraper Burj Dubai, and Dubailand (shown above) will be bigger than all the Disney parks put together. This place is as over-the-top as it gets!
The usefulness of the MP3 is at its end. Before the world went high-speed internet and storage space was measured in megabytes people needed a shortcut around the relatively large Audio Wave File used on audio compact discs like that Eagles Greatest Hits Vol 2 on your shelf. Thus the MP3, which at standard compression (128kb/s), is about 1/10 the size of its source wave file was introduced. The only problem is that MP3's loose data, that is to say data is simply discarded in order to shrink them down so small. This loss of data is why MP3's are termed lossy and the effects are most noticeable in the high end; in the interplay of the ringing cymbals for example. Live recordings sound especially bad which led the live music community to adopt lossless compression long ago, first with Shorten (SHN) and now with the superior Free Lossless Audio Code) FLAC.
It's really high time everybody switched over to FLAC now because we have the room. Many of us have the high-speed internet. We don't actually have to listen to mutilated music any longer. This is the future, it's time to embrace it.
Also it's good news for Hookah fans in Alaska and Hawaii cause the boys are coming soon to a venue near you.
