First and IPod. Now This?!?!?! at 1:54 PM

You've all heard about how Barack Obama gave the Queen of England an IPod loaded with all of his speaches, but wait till you hear about Lizzy's latest modern gadget... with some ol' school style wrapped around it... literally. Article found on Yahoo! Games.

The Royal Wii

Bu Mike Krumboltz

The Nintendo Wii has positioned itself as the gaming console for everybody. As it turns out, that includes the Queen of England. Well, sort of. It's not like Her Royal Highness went down to Wal-Mart and bought one with her summer job savings. Rather, she was given a special version by gaming company THQ.

What makes the Queen's "Royal Wii" different? It's gold-plated, sucka! None of that lame white plastic for Buckingham Palace — the Queen needs her bling! Gaming blog Joystiq reports that the gaming company is hopeful that the PR stunt "will amuse Queen Elizabeth."

Meanwhile, Geek.com writes that the gift is actually meant to build awareness for the upcoming game, Big Family Games. An ulterior motive? What?!? As the geeks put it, "for a game that is meant to include the whole family from kids to grandparents what better family to send it to than The Royal Family in England."

According to Game Revolution, Big Family Games is a collection of mini-games, including "golf, tennis, ladder golf, lawn darts, horseshoes, bocce," and more. So far, search interest is rather scant. However, should the Queen declare her love for the gift, expect the title to get a right honorable boost in the Buzz. Silly as that sounds, it's not out of the realm of possibility -- according to insiders, she was "addicted" to playing Prince William's Wii last Christmas. Now she'll have one of her own.

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To read the original article in it's original page, click here (Yahoo! Games: Plugged In)

-Graydon L

My K'Nex Rubber Band Guns at 12:25 PM

I was fooling around with my massive K'nex collection a while back, and I accidentally stumbled upon a design for a repeated fire rubber band gun! I'd seen many wooden rubber band guns in the past and I've always wanted to make one based on the same design, but I never figured it out... until now... BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! (sorry, that' wasn't supposed to be out loud)

Anyway... I now had a fully functioning lock and I quickly built a pistol around it. After that I built another gun with two locks side-by-side, effectively building a double barrel rifle. I was happy with this for a while but soon wanted a shot gun, so I slightly modified my lock design to be tougher and to handle a heaver load and then attached that to a 5 barreled short-rifle frame design. This allowed me to load 5 rubber bands onto the one lock for a single-shot of 5 "bullets".

This is the pistol. It has three little black clip thingies up on the end so I can load three rubber bands simultaneously plus more underneath them to be fired later :-)

The double-barreled rifle. Each of the two locks can hold two shots for a total of four consecutive shots.

All those rubber bands on the side are extra ammo. If you look closely at the top you can see the two side-by-side wheels (they're the white things sticking up on the top) that the rubber bands are loaded onto.

Aaaaaaaim... aaaaaand..... FIRE!

This is the shot gun. It has 5 hooky thingies on the end and one lock so I can fire 5 shots at once. at about 30-40 feet out I get a body-sized spread of bullets. Unfortunately, the combined elasticity of more than 5 rubber bands would break the lock if I had more than one load on, so I made this gun only capable of carrying one load at a time.

All three together for size comparison. Each one carries at least three loads of extra ammo attached to it's side. The Pistol has 3 extra loads, the Rifle has 9 extra loads, and the Shot-gun has 6 extra loads.

Here's a video of me explaining how the lock works:

-Graydon L

MRM - Star Trek at 2:53 PM

Directed by: J J Abrams 

Written by: Roberto Orci

Starring cast: Chris Pine (James T Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock)

Supporting cast: Karl Urban (Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy), Zoe Saldana (Nyota Uhura), Leonard Nimoy (Old Spock), Eric Bana (Nero), Bruce Greenwood (Capt. Pike), Simon Pegg (Montomery Scott), John Cho (Hikaru Sulu), Anton Yelchin (Pavel Chekov)

What's it rated?: P-13 for sci-fi action, violence and brief sexual content (Not to mention language and some sensual scenes as well)

Genre: sci-fi, remake, origin story, action, adventure

Synopsis: Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life-forms and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before. 

My Take: As usual, the caveats first: The most obvious caveat that lends itself to this movie is the genre itself: Sci-fi. This genre has been denied access into many Christian homes and quite frankly, I can understand why. The prevalence of one-world orders, total denial of God, and presentation of Aliens as a fact are some pretty good reasons not to watch any of the "classic" sci-fi movies and TV shows. I understand what these movies are; Fiction (no more) and therefore don't have as many issues with them, but if you do, Star Trek isn't for you.

As you noticed from the rating, there is one very offensive scene to be skipped. I can't remember where it starts, so I can't really help you out there, so just be forewarned this is not for young audiences. Another very crude line is in the very beginning where Kirk is talking to Uhura in the bar. Kirk tells her what her job description means (in answer to an insulting, quiz-type question) and what she says after that, quite plainly, needs to be muted.

Also, the worldview is somewhat skewed (that's Hollywood for ya'). The basic premise is that you control your entire life and you should just do what feels right. In the movie there is nothing wrong with this in it's correct context (Spock's father speaking to Spock. Spock has some feelings, but as a Vulcan he suppresses them, and his father is telling him to use them for some decisions) however, it is easily taken out of context and therefore applied to real life.

Now on to the good stuff. The story was excellently organized, presented and supported with few goofs or confusing facts. It's throwbacks to the old TV show and it's following movies are going to be a thrill for die-hard "Trekkie's" but isn't so confusing that a newbie (like me) wouldn't understand it. Basically, the hardest part to remember is the names of the languages and different cultures. Romulans, Klingons, Vulcans... you'll figure it out eventually :-)

Also, the Action and suspense were fantastic as well. Not just blood and gore flying everywhere but lots of adventurous events and situations, as well as some humorous ones! This action is very well complemented by the use of amazing computer graphics and artistic backgrounds.

All factors taken into account, I think that Star Trek is a great movie for more mature audiences, with lots of action and adventure.

Story: 9 out of 10

Action/Suspense: 9 out of 10

Humor: 8 out of 10

Overall: 8 out of 10

Next week on Movie Review Monday: I.O.U.S.A.!

-Graydon L

An Unimportant Post (You Don't Have To Read It) at 10:03 AM

This is not an important post. I'm just posting a picture of my blog on my blog so that when I link to it in Facebook, I can make the link's thumbnail a picture of my blog. 

-Graydon L