What I'm Playing, Reading, Watching, Surfing

This month, I have been a real couch-potato. When I am not hard at work, I have been busy (if busy is the right word) watching movies, playing games, reading books, and surfing obsessively:

What I'm Playing:
Fallout: New Vegas is my latest video game obsession. I'm not gonna bore you with an in-depth review, but in summary, this is a mind-bogglingly complex, and strange game.  The game is a role-playing shooter, with some very bizarre story-lines: I have cooked imitation human meat for a fancy New Vegas restaurant, I have given a brain transplant to a dog (see picture, left).  I have even sampled the sexual services of a "sexbot", to name some of my stranger experiences.  Believe it or not, I've been relatively ethical.  In this game, I have been meticulous about not killing innocent people.  But sometimes, you can't help it. Just recently, I cleared out an entire casino with a stolen assault carbine. Now, everyone cowers around me on the New Vegas strip.  But what was I supposed to do?  They attacked first.

Rex, my robot/canine companion

What I'm Watching
I am slightly fascinated by a documentary we recently saw: Azorian-The Raising of the K-129.  This documentary discloses the biggest and most ambitious CIA project of all time: raising the K-129 submarine. Apparently, this Russian sub sank from unknown reasons back in 1969. The Russians did not have the technology to find their own submarine, and so searched aimlessly for several weeks. In contrast, the Americans triangulated the exact position of the submarine within minutes of the submarine sinking (let's just say that we Americans have lots of underwater sensors all over the world). Because this was during the Cold War, the Americans decided to secretly raise the nuclear submarine. Just, how does one raise a nuclear submarine, secretly exactly?  Well, you design and build a custom ship that looks like any normal ship.  But it isn't a normal ship, because inside the ship is a huge mechanical claw.  The claw can  be lowered half a mile deep. The claw is custom-designed to grab the submarine, lift it, and ensconse it safely, deep inside the belly of the ship. I kid you not.

The documentary is chock-a-block full of nerdy engineering details. For example, perhaps the largest bearings ever designed or built were made for this project (made to isolate the cyclic motions of the mechanical claw deep underwater, from the rolling of the ship above water). Also, some poor engineering chump had to design gigantic custom pipe-threads on long pipe sections purely for extending the mechanical claw.
  
I'm not a boxing fan by any means, but watching Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson was a huge inspiration to me. Jack Johnson, (not the musician) was the first Black boxer to win the heavy-weight boxing title. This was hugely controversial back in the day (this took place during the 1910s) because people were horrified to learn that Blacks could be physically superior to a White. What I find so fascinating, nay, inspirational about Jack Johnson, was that, in a time when many Black people were still impoverished and segregated from White society, Jack Johnson actively crossed those lines.  He scandalized society by consorting with White women, sometimes travelling with a harem of them everywhere he went.  He also dressed splendidly in the highest of fashions (he reminds me of some NBA players today), and sped around town in a series of expensive racing cars. He was arrogant, and merely smiled his famous gold-capped smile when racial epithets were hurled at him during boxing matches. I find Jack Johnson an inspiration of the human spirit.  There is something so indomitable about him. And he was stubbornly himself, despite all of the pressures from society for him to be another way.


To be continued...