League Post - Bay Day

Michael Bay set the interwebs on fire last week when he announced the turtles in his upcoming TMNT movie would be alien in origin. He's since tried to reassure the geek community that this will be a movie for the fans. I've found that's the standard response when you have a million degrees of nerd-rage raining down on you. Anyway...this week's League topic for discussion is...

After he’s done with the Teenage Alien Ninja Turtles movie, what should Michael Bay blow up next?

Love him or hate him, you have to admit Michael Bay knows how to feature military hardware, do things in a grand fashion and blow things up real good. What immediately comes to my mind thinking of these things is my favorite movie genre: giant (insert creature) on the rampage!

Let's face it, for everything I mentioned above that Bay does well, his movies are usually not known for their character development or well woven plots. I call this Exhibit B in my case as this style of movie would allow him to further play to his strengths, or weaknesses as the case may be.

I'm not saying I want any of the below films remade necessarily. There's plenty of things you can do to differentiate yourself and make your movie original. Hollywood should be doing more original movies "in the spirit of" instead of remaking, rebooting or otherwise trying to cash in on name recognition.

Tarantula (1955)

Them (1954)

Black Scorpion (1957)

The Deadly Mantis (1957)

Other League Members

Tupa's Treasures really goes with the Bay/military connection
The children's book Corduroy gets Bay-ized by Claymation Werewolf
Life With Fandom straps on some space spurs

Mail Order Monday - Computer Programming (1971)

Since I'm currently looking for a job, I thought this ad would be good for today. 

I'm very curious how one would work from home as a computer programmer in 1971. I started dabbling in BASIC about 10 years later and while I could write a program out by hand, it's really hard to test it without a computer. They were still using punch-cards in the early 70's so it's not like you could go to a friend's house to run it.

If you go here and search for 1970 it will bring you to a short section about programming in the 70's.

The IBM 7094, a typical mainframe computer in the 70's [photo courtesy of ComputerScienceLab.com]

Old Burial Hill

We had a few exceptional days of weather this week. Sunny and 70s are things you don't normally associate with March around here. So what did I do? Spend a couple hours in a cemetery taking photos!

This particular location is in Marblehead, MA in a place you wouldn't stumble into if you were driving around town. It has an interesting topography being atop a hill. You can see large rocks poking through the grass all over. Or maybe it's just one giant rock that makes the hill, who knows?

I'd give you the nickle tour through my photos but I took quite a few and it would take me a couple hours, at least, to narrate the whole shebang. If you want to see more head over to my Flickr gallery and check them out. And if you have the time, view the headstones in the largest size so you can read them. There's some interesting and beautiful things written on them.