8/6/08

M. Night Shyamalamadingdong movies through e-mail to Blogspot: “The Sixth Sense” would have Haley Joel Osment say to Bruce Willis on their first meeting, “Hey, you’re dead!” “The Village” would have a character say at the beginning, “It sure is nice living in this nature preserve as if it were the 1800s.” “Unbreakable” would show Samuel L. Jackson wringing his hands and cackling like a super villain as he sabotages the mass transit systems to weed out the superhero Bruce Willis. “Signs” would… well ok, that one didn’t really work for me anyway so let’s forget it. Perhaps I'm just being a prima donna by getting pissed off when my “artistic vision” gets hosed up, but the whole point of the Monday rant was totally lost when it went up at the same time as Tuesday’s. I know I should have told Spiderman to not post Tuesday’s rant until Monday’s had a chance to be read. I acknowledge culpability here, but it still pissed me off when the “twist ending” was ruined. I know this looks like I'm blaming Spiderman for it but I'm not. Actually, he’s the one for whom the whole twist ending got ruined, whether he knows it or not. Most everyone else I told about my “blind date” on Sunday was told it was with a cat. I was just stringing him along, well to be honest, just in case he had told his wife about it. I was trying to string her along through him. So, I guess the surprise twist may have still worked. I don’t know. Perhaps I'm just being girlie about this. Ok, I was just thinking about the whole thing while wandering around campus. I remember now that I kind of gave up on making it very interesting and suspenseful after all. I guess I'm over it now. Besides, it’s water under the bridge at this point. Speaking of water (nice segue eh?), I finished reading the website devoted to bashing the “water powered cars” scam. As it turns out, there are some scientific studies which show an increase in thermodynamic efficiency, and therefore a fuel consumption improvement, by introducing very small amounts of hydrogen into the fuel/air mixture of a spark-ignition engine. So it turns out that the mileage improvements people are seeing with the “Mason jar hydrogen generator” might not be a placebo effect and it might not be due to (tee hee, I said doo-doo!) the leaning out of the mixture. I stand corrected on that one. I'm still not drinking the Kool Aid, but at least there is, possibly, something there. Now, whether or not a 12 volt electrical system can actually produce enough hydrogen to see gains is still up for debate. One side says, “You will wind up burning a little more fuel to generate the electricity for making the hydrogen so the gains will be negligible,” while the other side says, “Nuh uh!” Ok, so I may still be a little more biased towards disbelief. I guess what I will say is that while introducing the miniscule amount of hydrogen and oxygen electrolyzed from water using a car’s electrical system may provide fuel economy increases, to say that a car so equipped “runs on water” is like saying that a regular car “runs on electricity” because there is a 12 volt system for the spark ignition. No wait, better yet it is like saying a regular car “runs on springs” because the valve train, suspension, seats, doors, hood, trunk, windshield wipers, switches, headlight adjusters, transmission, pedals, and just about any other item has some sort of spring in it. Ok, maybe that goes a bit too far, but still. Well, it is rapidly approaching lunch time and I'm about to fall asleep at the keyboard so I think I'm going to shut up now. Have a day.