Time Consumer

I’ve been thinking about some things today, and I have some unwarranted complaints based on those things.  They are also mostly unrelated to anything relevant, or to each other for that matter.

What’s the deal with the part in Superman II (and I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not ripping off Family Guy) where Superman uses his heat vision to blow up some object, like a sign of some kind, that General Zod throws at him?  Why does he squint and turn away when it explodes?  For that matter, why didn’t he just catch the thing or knock it away so it would land somewhere away from everybody as opposed to make the damn thing explode with heat vision?

Speaking of Clark Kent, sometimes his powers are grossly overestimated on Smallville, and sometimes grossly underestimated.  He can apparently dash off to Vermont or wherever to retrieve the best maple syrup possible before his damn pancakes get cold, and at one point he mentions to his mother that Washington D.C. is only a couple seconds difference for him than Topeka, Kansas when she takes off to be on the U.S. Senate.  Another time, there’s a huge wave rushing down an otherwise peaceful river due to a broken dam, and he dashes in and uses his heat vision to EVAPORATE THE ENTIRE THING, and as far as I could tell he did it just to save a father and son who were fishing there unaware of the threat.  Couldn’t he have just picked them up and run out of the way with them?  I suppose getting rid of the whole wave takes care of any other rescues downriver, but damn, for a guy who hasn’t figured out the flying thing  yet, he’s got the heat vision down.  Why does he have to "activate" his super-hearing?  I could understand if it was merely a focus thing, like he has to conciously tune out the unwanted information, and indeed that is mentioned, but there are numerous incidents where things are said nearby enough to our farmboy of steel that I could hear if I tried really hard, but he’s oblivious.  Maybe I’m just being hard on the writers or something, nit-picking about something fictional, but this is Superman, dammit!  Or, it will be at least…

Now for something non-fictional.  You know that plastic ring that detaches from the lids of bottles when you open them?  Why can’t they stay put?  Seems like half the time the damn thing comes right off with the lid when I unscrew it without even trying to break free.  What good is that?  I now have no way of knowing if my bottle has ever been open before or not.  …Could explain my intestinal troubles of late. (Glad that seems to be over, by the way.)  I miss the days when all soda bottles were glass, and the lids on them were always metal.  They had these little tabs on them I used to enjoy breaking off.  I guess they served the same purpose as that detestable plastic ring.

I have a bad habit of watching this show on Discovery called "How it’s Made."  I can’t help but wonder sometimes– is it really necessary for certain manufacturing processes to be that complicated?  I was watching them make solid rubber tires earlier, small ones, like ATV tires or something.  The had these strips of black rubber that got fed through all these machines that extruded the strips into tubes.  Then the tubes were pooped out into a set of hot rollers and "kneaded like pie crust" (that’s from the show’s narration) until smooth.  What the hell?  Why go to the trouble of shaping the rubber into tubes if you’re just going to smash it up into a mass?  To make it even sillier, the rubber is then rolled back into LONG STRIPS so it can be wound around the tire mold.  That makes lots of sense.  I can only imagine how that thought process went:

Factory Owner: "Okay, I think we’re going to make solid rubber tires, but all our rubber is in these long, thin strips.  Anybody know how we can best turn that into thick tire-shapes?

Idea Guy: "Well, I think I saw these machines that work like giant pasta extruders, that should make some nice long tubes for us."

Factory Owner: "Okay, great!  But a long tube isn’t really a tire shape, so what next?"

Idea Guy: "I guess we should probably use some other machine to grind it into a shapeless mass so we could do what we want with it.  I know of these other machines that knead rubber like pie crust that should do the trick."

Factory Owner: "Awesome, we’re making a lot of progress from those useless strips of rubber.  What comes after that?"

Idea Guy: "Well, I guess the only way to make tires would be to put lots of layers of rubber around some sort of mold, so the only way to do that from where we are would be to form our "pie crust" into some long strips and wind it around."

Factory Owner:  "…  Brilliant!  Order the machines, we got us a factory!"

I must just be bored.  I’m complaining about stuff that really doesn’t affect me in the least.  Except those bottle lids… that shit’s annoying.