Note: This review is cross-posted at Yummy Reviews.

The Core is like the Day After Tomorrow — it’s pure popcorn-entertaining, world-destroying fun. A movie you watch once and then never see again.

The trick to enjoying these huge “End of the World” disaster films is to constantly keep in mind you that aren’t watching a piece of art. When a movie invents a term like “unobtanium,” the strongest metal — aside from adamantium, of course — known to man, you know you had better firmly plant your tongue in cheek (whatever the hell that means).

The Core opens with a bunch of people in a several-hundred yard radius keeling over. Then, a bunch of pigeons go crazy and start crashing all over New York City. Cut to a Handsome, Funny, and Genius-like community college professor — of geophysics — who is brought to the Pentagon by unsmiling, humorless federal agents.

Stuff happens, blah blah, the Earth’s core has stopped churning and, within some absurdly small amount of time, the ozone layer (or something to that effect) will disappear and the Earth will turn into an incinerated apple, as the Handsome Professor actually demonstrates.

Eventually, an oddball melange of scientists (as if there could be any other kind) is put together to burrow down to the Earth’s core in a nifty snake-like submersible to detonate 200 megatons worth of nuclear explosives that will “jumpstart the engine” that is the core of our planet.

It’s really your standard disaster-film plot — everyone dies except for the two main, pretty characters, and the Earth is saved in the nick o’ time.

What I find so damn funny is how disasters seemingly find all the most populous, well-recognized cities of the planet to strike. For instance, when a tiny hole opens in the atmosphere — a mere fraction of an inch as it’s explained in the movie — a nova-like sunbeam shoots down to the surface…and hits San Francisco. Specifically, the Golden Gate Bridge, which over the course of a minute is turned into cinders. What are the chances that a miniature sunbeam would even strike land, which only makes up 25% of the Earth’s surface? Pretty damn good, at least according to The Core.

Still, all the contrivances aside, I enjoy movies like this. They’re fun to watch — once — and they’re genuinely entertaining. Especially when you get dialog like this:

STOLID GENERAL (to token black scientist): How long would it take to build your…craft?

TOKEN BLACK SCIENTIST: About ten to twenty years.

STOLID GENERAL: What would it take to do it in three months?

TOKEN BLACK SCIENTIST (laughing): About fifty billion dollars!

STOLID GENERAL (straight-faced): Can we write you a check?

HANDSOME PROFESSOR (cutting in): Put it on a credit card — frequent flier miles!

It’s no Fight Club, but there are certainly far worse ways to spend two hours.

JAB

Nick and I were discussing web sites a few weeks ago at work. I was telling him how I still felt like starting a new creative writing website — or “zine” if you prefer. Many of you probably remember me talking last year about starting up a new website, Mojo Overload, to host my writings and the writings of others. I never went through with it, though, because I realized it would be incredibly time-consuming to update. Well, I realized if I used Movable Type — the program that powers this blog — I could easily update the site by giving authors their own name and password so that they could post their own work. Then Nick had a brilliant idea: launch this new site under the name of Stranded on the Edge of Infinity — my old website.

I immediately became very excited about this, and though I swore I wasn’t going to even work on it until after school was over and done with, I got to thinking about how the whole thing work and eventually put this together.

What should hopefully make this new incarnation of Stranded a success is that there won’t be monthly updates or any of that malarkey, just continual posting whenever any author feels like it. Once a new writer’s first work (which doesn’t have to only be short stories; poetry and articles/columns/rants/whatever would also be more than welcome) gets approved by me, then they can post whenever they want. Readers can comment on the work, and authors will be able to have their own little page where all of their content can be. I think it would be exciting, and I’ve already talked to a few people about it, so I definitely feel that there is some interest.

I’ll post more details once the site gets much closer to completion. Speaking of which, I’m not expecting Stranded to be up and running until after the new year. That will give me all of December to put it together and figure out exactly how it will work.

Again, this is all tentative. If I find that there are only going to be two people who might regularly contribute, I probably won’t waste my time with it. If you are interested, however, please comment on this entry and let me know.

Other bloggers: If I’d be grateful if you could give this initiative some publicity on your sites. A quick blurb and a link pointing to this entry would be fantastic.

JAB

It feels odd being up so early and, even more strangely, well-rested.

I had a blistering headache after coming home from work last night, so I called it a night and went to be early — “early” being about 11 pm or so as I usually am up until two to three am. So I woke-up at seven completely wide-awake and ate some eggs and toast for breakfast.

I finished “Perpetual Motion” late Friday night. I’m fairly proud of it, which from me is saying a lot. Aside from the screenplay Jason and I wrote, I’m usually proud of nothing I write. I’m getting ready now to go through the story and make all the parts fit better together. Some of the earlier parts are a little inconsistent with the latter half because as I got further into the writing, the story sort of evolved on its own.

Once I finish editing it, I’ll post some selections here for your reading pleasure. So that’s where I am with the writing right now.

JAB

I’m feeling much better today. Still not 100%, what with the slightly runny nose and annoyingly rasping voice, but well on my way to a complete recovery. Damn.

Why “damn”? What stupid reason could I possibly have for not wanting to feel completely okay?

Starting Sunday night, when I was probably feeling my worst, I sat down and started to work on my long-in-development story, “Perpetual Motion.” I wrote a lot of it and managed to get through a scene that had been plaguing me for some time. The next day, Monday, I wrote the capstone paper for my internship in a little over two hours, then proceeded to write more of “Perpetual Motion,” plowing my way through the next scene-and-a-half. I was also feeling quite crappy Monday.

Last night, after coming back from a long-ass day of school, I did my MIS homework — which isn’t due until next Tuesday. I was still feeling pretty down, though not as bad as the previous preceding days.

The point I am rambling towards is that during the last few days, I’ve been productive as hell — certainly more productive than I usually am. Was this newfound drive to accomplish in part derived from my slightly fevered mind? I dunno. I hope not; it’d be kind of depressing if I was good at getting stuff done only when I felt crappy. I just hope this productivity stays with my through the weekend — I have a huge-ass paper to write on Sunday, and I could really use this…gift then.

Now I’m off to work on “Perpetual Motion” some more and I’m feeling pretty good. Here’s hoping that that creativity wasn’t just a fluke.

UPDATE: Hell yes, this ain’t no fluke! I’m back, baby!

JAB

I actually have an excuse for my recent absence: I’m sick.

Not the “OMG, I wish I were dead and, ironically enough, will soon be due to the extreme suckage of my illness” kind, but more of the tired, sore-throaty, occasionally throw-uppy, “I don’t feel like doing shit” variety of sickness.

However, I need to make myself at least slightly productive today and work on a paper. Also, Todd asked me to promote his new band, The Kessel Run (by the way, Todd–you’re such a geek). They’re playing a show in a few weeks days in Cincinnati. So here’s the info:

THURSDAY OCT. 21
@THE MAD FROG IN CLIFTON(cincinnati)
THE KESSEL RUN (that’s me folks)
THE STUNNED
MARGIN OF ERROR
THE FRANKL PROJECT
8 PM SHARP!!!!!!
BE THERE OR DIE.

I dunno if I can make it because of school, but I highly recommend that you go.

JAB

I’m going to use this entry in particular to take care of a couple loose ends.

Item the first: I’d like to thank Steve, the manager of the Bookery Fantasy in Fairborn, Ohio, for being kind enough to host a Donate a Phone box. He even said he might consider doing some kind of special promotion in the future. He’s a great guy and — lest I forget — the Bookery is a damn good comic book store, too. So again, thanks Steve.

Item the second: I’ve gone through the Links page and updated it. You’ll find some new blogs — I detest the word “journal” — as well as some other new links. Most sweet, is the fact that one of my favorite bands, The Scrubs, are now back together after dissolving three years ago. Plus, they have a new CD out this November. Other links include Nick’s newly redesigned blog, Todd’s blog, and Becky’s blog. Together they provide a good smattering of diverse blogging.

Thus concludes the update.

JAB

I find this extremely fascinating:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Inventor Ray Kurzweil takes 250 nutritional supplements a day in his quest to live long enough to reap the benefits he expects from biotechnology. He says he’s trying to reprogram his body, as he would his computer.

— snip —

Kurzweil, a well-regarded scientist who invented the flatbed scanner and a reading machine for the blind, claimed his pills appear to be helping: Biological tests conducted at a clinic in Denver found his body resembles that of a man in his early forties, he claimed, rather than his true age of 56.

At MIT last week, Kurzweil described a future in which he’s convinced immortality — or a drastically longer life span — will be possible thanks to emerging technologies. His new book, which will hit stores in a few weeks, outlines a special “longevity program” of diet, exercise and nutritional supplements aimed at slowing the aging process.

— snip —

He described three stages or “bridges” on the purported road to immortality. First is his healthy living program designed to correct “metabolic imbalances” and keep people alive long enough to benefit from the second stage. In stage two, a decade or so away, he contends biotechnology advances will block diseases and slow aging, because the decoding of our genome is already leading to tissue-engineering techniques for regrowing cells and organs, and to the creation of genetically targeted drugs and gene therapies.
These techniques, he said, should help some people reach the third stage — about 30 years away — when nanotechnology will allow humans to radically rebuild and extend their bodies with help from “nanobots,” itsy-bitsy robots smaller than human blood cells that will slip into our bloodstreams to fix DNA errors, fight pathogens and expand intelligence.

At that point, he declared, humans may be able to live forever.

Dr. Kurzweil sure is going through a lot of work to live forever. I mean, I wanna live forever and see the future too, but you don’t see me stuffing myself full of 250 pills a day. I just sent these guys ten bucks and then sat back, content to enjoy my first life here and now and then eventually enjoy my second life eons in the future.

Hmm… Maybe I should put Dr. Kurzweil in touch with Alex Chiu, the maker of the Eternal Life Rings. Then he can more easily live forever and look fashionable.

JAB

Way early this morning, this site got comment-spammed 68 times from one spammer. This means, sixty-eight comments were posted about Texas Hold ‘Em so some fuckstick spammer could increase his Google ranking. I deleted the comments, blocked some IP addresses, but I knew it would do little good. IP addresses are so dynamic, most spammers switch on a weekly basis to avoid being blocked.

So, royally pissed, I went and did some research on how to kill spam as it comes in so I don’t have to delete a bajillion comments a day. I considered just ending commenting period, but I enjoy having the same three people post over and over again, so I didn’t want to do that. Besides, if I did that, then the terrorists spammers win.

I ended up downloading a cool program called MT-Blacklist, which basically is a listing of all known spam sites that Movable Type users have posted. So suppose some spammer is tying to bump up a new website. He posts a comment on my site. I simply take his URL, post it to this huge file, and anyone who has MT-Blacklist will never see a comment with that URL in it again. It’s pretty sweet really, and short of passwording all comments (i.e., making all potential commenters register), the only thing one can do to prevent comment spam.

If you have a blog powered by Movable Type and are starting to get a lot of comment spam, I highly recommend dowloading MT-Blacklist. Though if you have 3.0 or above, apparently there are still quite a few bugs to be worked out.

JAB

Yesterday marked the second birthday (third if you’re in China!) of JOSH BALES dot NET. I had been considering making some celebratory design changes, or a special front page, something to celebrate, but as usual I was school’s bitch for the day (and today as well), so I did nothing.

Looking at past entries, last year this time, I was complaining about school and considering creating a new short story submission website. That obviously panned out well. The year before, at this site’s inception, I was bitching about deadjournal, writing in all lower-case letters, and saying “fuck” four times in a paragraph. Neat!

I’ve sometimes wondered exactly how long I’m going to keep doing this thing called “blogging.” Sometimes, I get so bored with it or too busy, and I don’t write in here for a spell. Other times, I’m totally into it and have an excellent time. My hosting account expires in about a month, and the domain name expires — I think — in January. At this time, I’m enjoying blogging when I get the chance, so I’ll be renewing for another year. I think I’m gonna purchase the domain-name rights to joshbales.net for the longest period possible, ten years. That way even if I decide to stop blogging some time in the future, I’ll always have the rights to do it again if and when I decide to. Also, this means no other evil Josh Bales can get their damn, dirty paws on my precious domain name.

But, as I said earlier, you should have no fear — that’s assuming you care — of me dropping this site for at least another year. Here’s hoping it’s a good one.

JAB