PHYSICS BE DANGED

I had a wonderful time at Ant Man and Wasp!  Such innovative fight choreography!  Such fun in the imaginative scenery going to the quantum level…but

The shrinking technology is based on the assumptions that you are reducing the space between atoms.  There is a reason that certain distances between atoms exist.  The inner pressure of the atom prevents incursion of other atoms.  It is like stuffing people into an elevator.  If you were to put all the people into a blender, they wouldn’t take up as much room and then you could put more people into the elevator.  I could see how the blender might be objectionable to people going to meetings or on their ways home.  The fact is this:  even if you eliminated the space between people, the mass of the people would remain unchanged.  500 pounds of people is 500 pounds of people, whether intact or blended.

(I have to apologize, I’ve been watching too many “Bones” episodes.  So this gooey example may not entice you to read the rest of the blog.  Have no fear!  There are some funny moments coming!  Read On!)

What does that do for our plot?  A couple of things come to mind.  How heavy do you think a building is?  Tons and tons right?  So if they shrank the lab building, even if they managed to put it on a dolly or hand cart, it would crush the hand cart and you still would be unable to move it.  Superman would have problems with it.  Not even John Cena could do it.  So we suspend our belief for just that moment where they shrink the building, put it on a hand cart and throw it in the back of the van.  (Picture the bottom of the van hitting the pavement with the front up in the air, all 4 tires crushed.)  Then they try stealing it, grabbing this building and throwing it around.  We’re talking tons of steel, glass and concrete being caught one handed by someone who has problems moving their luggage in the airport.  Wait, it gets better.  Our heroes get the building back and in order to escape the bad guys, shrink the van they’re driving with the building inside.  It is now matchbox sized and that makes a 30 story building the size of a dime.  When you get that many atoms into that small a space, wouldn’t the temperature go up?  They’d have to do some major Air conditioning to cool it so it wouldn’t explode.

Here’s the kicker…this building is sitting in our sidekick’s LAP.  Think about it.  You have a multi-ton building with temperatures approaching several 1000 degrees sitting in this guy’s lap.  I’m thinking this might be a tad uncomfortable.

Then our heroes shrink themselves down to the quantum level.  Wait.  Quantum physics involves energy and particles on a scale smaller than atomic scale.  So you’re taking something made of atoms and making it smaller than atoms.  What could go wrong?  What happens when you shrink the distance between the atoms and then compress the atoms to be smaller than atoms?  Black hole?  oops.  Then you release the pressure on the guy to let him return to regular size.  I’m not sure any release of the pressure could be gradual, and you are moving from nano-sized to human sized in a matter of seconds…  Sounds like an explosion to me.  Think mushroom cloud.

What happens when he expands to 60 some feet?  Same number of molecules in his body, just further apart.  Like a balloon.  I would think he’d have some cohesion challenges.  “Oh NO!  My head just floated away!”  Lord help him if he sneezes!  He could blow himself into another county!

So yeah, it was a very enjoyable movie and I fully intend to buy the DVD when it comes out.  But, consequences people.  Consequences!

 

Movie Bistro Madness

Come!  Enjoy your movie in the luxury of a recliner!  No sticky floors!  $7 for a ticket!  Unless you order it online to make sure you HAVE a seat when you get there, then it’s $13.  Unless you have our rewards card so you can order on line and get it for $7.  And that’s not all!  In every theater before the previews start, you get an advertisement for the Bistro Theater…4 theaters in the complex where they bring the food TO you!  You want to see an early movie, but you hesitate because you either have to have dinner at 4:00, buy dinner on the way in at 5:00 and hope they’re not so busy that you’re late and cannot get a ticket (unless, of course you already have your ticket…see above) or you wait until 10:00 when the movie gets out and have Taco Bell right before you go to bed.  Taco Bell at 10 pm can have unfortunate consequences.  The Bistro solves all those problems!  TaDAAAA!

“Be sure to get here and order from our chef-inspired menu and have the wait staff bring the food to you in the theater!  You want more to drink or another dessert?  Push the call button and have your payment ready.”  The food on the screen looks like something out of the gourmet chef shows on the food network.  It’s beautifully plated on square plates and artfully drizzled with just the right amount of sauce.  That’s a lot of effort for a chicken sandwich.

When you go to the ticket counter and pick out your seat, the cashier says, “Hey! and you’re in the Bistro so you can skip the concession lines and just order from your seat!  Enjoy your movie!”  Woohoo!  So you go to the theater, find your seat, get comfy and wait for the server to get to you.  Theater is nearly empty because you did arrive 30 min before the show as they suggest when going to a bistro movie.

Dum de dum de dum…no wait staff IN the theater.  7 guys and 2 old ladies are sitting there playing the screen games and they already have their food.  Silly people.  They do not have chef-inspired cuisine to munch on before the movies starts.  Still no wait staff.  Hmmm.  Press the call button.  The theater darkens.  The two actions are not related, but seem ominous.  The server sure enough comes to your chair and pushes your call button so it goes off and asks for your order.  By this time, you’ve forgotten what you wanted to eat and it’s too dark to read the menu.  “I’ll have chef-inspired popcorn with buttery topping please…small, and a bottle of your Blue Mountain Dew.”  “What flavor is the blue mountain dew?”  “I don’t know, it’s blue.  I don’t buy it for the name.  Find the Mountain Dew in your cooler and if it’s blue, that’s it.”  “Do you have your rewards card?” “Yup and here’s my payment,” and I hand him my debit card.  Why debit card?  Because remember it’s dark and I cannot now see my money.  He processes my card, prints out the receipt for me to sign, hands me his pen and runs off, leaving me with the receipt and the pen.

He doesn’t come back.  “Yoo Hoo?”  I must be in an action/adventure movie because all the previews are super heroes and dystopian futures and incredible rescues from disasters.  Dum de dum de dum.  10 min into previews.  Still hasn’t picked up the receipt or his pen.  I hit the call button again.  2 servers walk by me and ignore me with food for other people.  Remember those 7 guys and the 2 little old ladies?  They are looking at me with pity and those eyes that say, “Silly person!  You could have had your chef-inspired popcorn and your drink when you came in and would have consumed most of the popcorn by now…and it would have been HOT popcorn…”  I’m so foolish.  I press the call button again.  He shows up and wants to know if I want to add to my order.  I say no but here’s your pen and the receipt…thought you might need it.

It occurs to me that maybe the servers are on some sort of reality show.  They have to get the orders from the patrons, go to the kitchen, prepare the chef-inspired delicious hamburgers, nachos, and fries to order (there are no substitutions) and get them out to the patrons Gordon Ramsey style.  “You ^(*&%*&( idiot!  You can’t plate that hamburger like that!  Redo that!” and then throws the food on the floor.  “But Gordon!  It’s dark!  They don’t even know if I got their orders right!”  “Oh right then.  Put the sloppy mess back on the plate and get it out of here…scrape off the dirt and such.”  Meanwhile, the previews are over, and it’s last call for orders.  One server in the whole theater, and call buttons lit up all over.  It gives an eerie blue glow about the room.  I have now been in the theater for 40 min.

Once again the screen lights up to tell us that next time we should arrive 30 min before the show so we can have our chef-inspired pizza and beer brought to us and I think, “It really doesn’t take that long to put popcorn in a bag and grab a bottle does it?”  The movie starts.  The ship is blown to smithereens, the bad guys are throwing debris about with a wave of their hands and monstrous mountains with vaguely human features are wielding building-sized weapons to threaten our heroes.  At least I think so.  In the first 15 min of the movie, there have been 8 servers walking between me and the screen delivering food to OTHER customers in the dark.  How can they see the seat numbers?  AHHHH!  Finally!  Here’s my chef-inspired popcorn and dew.  It’s the latest in movie cuisine–like iced coffee and cold soup (Vichyssoise).  Room temperature popcorn.

In a restaurant, 1 server can work with 12-16 customers.  Ideally then, this bistro should have about 5-7 servers.  They should stand near their sections and greet you when you find your seat.  All the orders should be taken while the lights are still on.  If you have a party of 4 with dinner-type orders and a person by himself with a small snack order, you put in the order to the kitchen for the dinners, and grab the snack and the drink on your way back to the theater and serve the single.  As your section fills up, you take orders from the newcomers.  Put in the dinner orders, check on previous orders and pick up the drinks and deliver those to the people who have ordered.  Return to kitchen and pick up any dinner orders that have been completed.  Take orders from recently seated people.  Put in new orders at kitchen, check to see if any orders are filled and ready to deliver.  If not, get the drinks out.  Go back to kitchen grab filled orders and deliver, repeat. And as always, if you have a drink/snack order, get it out immediately.  The only people you should be taking orders from after the lights go out are the latecomers.

If you are going to run 4 bistros in a theater, you’d DAM well better have a big kitchen and plenty of cooks.  You have to serve 240 customers in 30 min or less.

I’m going to order my chef-inspired popcorn and Blue Dew at the counter from now on.

and then the cherries came in

Sunday is my day away from the gym.  I got home from church and fell asleep on the couch for a about 30 min, and 3 1/2 hrs later, my hubby woke me up so we could go play in a concert.  Oh my.  Saw my kitchen friend in the drum section and she’s going to help me put up cherries after the concert.  It was hot, and I had to carry my instrument and some of the stuff that always goes with concerts… stand, water bottle, your hubby’s horn, and he carries the stands the mutes and the music (thank goodness!) There must be about 30 pounds of junk in that stand/mute bag!  As we played, these deep dark roiling clouds came in.  It made it at least not as bright, but the humidity is nasty.  I keep sliding off my mouthpiece.  We got back home about 6:00 and started pitting and steaming and processing cherries.  We barely made a dent.  Cherry jelly, candied cherries, canned cherries, and cherry mash to make jam out of. 2 1/2 hrs!  Then there’s the mess to clean up.

When I make my cherry stuff,  I know exactly what is going into it.  It takes 4 cups of sugar for every 3 1/2 cups of juice.  You get about 5 cups of jelly from it.  I can my cherries in juice instead of sugar, so the only sweetness is the cherry taste.  The candied cherries are going into some almond ice cream that I’m going to make later.

I did my aerobic work out yesterday…15 min on treadmill set on mystery hike.  20 min on elliptical with lvl 4 crossramp and lvl 5 resistance, up from the 4 and 4 I was doing last week.  10 min on the stationary bike on lvl 5.

Then we went to the movie, “Chef.”  You HAVE to see this movie!  It is fantastic.  Nothing blows up, nothing invades from outer space, no crime, no violence (except when he attacks the lava cake), has Jon Favereau, John Leguizamo, Oliver Platt, Scarlett Johanson, Dustin Hoffman, and Sofia Veraga.  The language is a bit rough, but if you’ve ever worked in a kitchen, it’s mild.  Buddy with a reconnect with kid flick.  I would Definitely see it again and may buy it when it comes out on DVD.  And it was about food, which I think about a lot… but only healthy food.  Ok I lied.  Fattening, flavorful, delicious, gotta-have-some-more food is what I think about…  then I pass a mirror.  I realize I can never eat for pleasure again.