Diogenes could have found his honest man much faster if he’d used a Green Lantern

And even if he hadn’t found one, he could have willed one into existence!

The Green Lantern movie opened Friday, and while it’s only 26% fresh, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be.

When your expectations are low, it’s easy to meet them! Let that be a lesson to you!

Ryan Reynolds does an okay job as Hal Jordan (which seems a bit backwards; isn’t it usually the comic book character that has first and last initials the same?), and the CG does an okay job as every other character in the movie.

DC tries to beat Marvel at their own game, and while they come up short of the better Marvel movies, they also don’t sink to the level of the worse films (Hulk, for example. Or DC’s own Batman and Robin).

It’s a good summer flick; you don’t have to think, just turn your brain off and watch the effects and Hal Jordan turn from a slacker test pilot into a determinator superhero. I’d say it was a bit worse than X-Men: First Class was, but still better than Superman Returns.

As long as you don’t go in expecting Iron Man, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, you’ll probably enjoy it.

Dispossession

I haven’t played it yet (hopefully I’ll have put some time in by the end of the week), but Nier is that rare beast in today’s console gaming market: an original property!

When games cost millions of dollars to develop, produce, and market, coming up with a new IP is a big risk; it received mediocre reviews, but apparently sold well enough that Square Enix is considering a sequel.

I figured for $20, it was worth a gamble; the NYT claims that it resembles the Legend of Zelda series, only targeted more towards adults instead of children.

If it’s half as good as Zelda, it’s definitely worth $20.

If Fast and Furious had happened 100 years ago, we’d’ve been at war with Mexico by now

And rightly so; if the government of Mexico were facilitating the smuggling of arms into the US so they could be used to kill Americans, no president would stand for it.

The local ATF office was against the “plan;” especially since there was no possible way to trace the guns smuggled to Mexico once they left the United States. All the ATF could do was sit and wait for them to be recovered from the last crime scene they were used at.

The true goal of Operation Fast and Furious has to have been to create a situation where gun control was acceptable politically.

If that was the goal, the way in which the “operation” was conducted makes sense; otherwise, like ATF agent John Dodson told the committee,

I cannot begin to think of how the risk of letting guns fall into the hands of known criminals could possibly advance any legitimate law enforcement interest.

If we weren’t in the nuclear age, we’d be at war with Mexico right now. And it would be all our fault.

What better way to normalize the dissolution of the fourth amendment

Than to make a toy TSA screening wand (H/T Radley Balko)?

I wonder if it comes with instructions on how to conduct enhanced screenings for people who opt out…