How tall is Optimus Prime?

More importantly: who’s taller, Optimus Prime or the Pink Power Ranger? I’d like to take just a few minutes here to answer this simple little question.

The two clearly have very different images. One is the fearless leader of a race of transforming robots from another galaxy. The other is the high-kicking female member of a superhero team who in her spare time is a good friend of Felicity.

Taking a quick look across the internet I find a good bit of information on the Power Rangers. We will of course be using the original Pink Ranger in this article, the lovely Amy Jo Johnson. According to Celebrity Wonder’s little page about Amy, the Cape Cod-born actress stands a towering 5’2”.

Figuring out Prime’s height was a little harder for me. For one, I don’t own Optimus Prime’s toy. I do have him at my parent’s house, but it seems that at age five I managed to break him and lose all but his torso, so that isn’t much help. I do have, however, the recent Toys ‘R’ Us re-issue of Rodimus Major, a.k.a. Hot Rod. (Hasbro managed to lose the copyright to “Hot Rod” at some point between 1986 and 2002.) Doing some quick measurements, I’ve found Hot Rod to be 5 inches long in vehicle mode and 6 inches tall in robot mode. This will be useful, because now I just have to find out how long he would be in real life, perform some simple division, and I’ll have an answer for us.

Looking at Hot Rod’s vehicle mode, I’ve decided that he’s probably about the length of a Lamborghini Countach. In fact, many Transformers had that exact car as their vehicle modes (like Sideswipe and Red Alert), so I think I’m pretty justified in thinking that Hot Rod is just a futuristic version of that sort of low-to-the-ground really big sports car. A quick trip to everyone’s favorite terrible search engine, Ask Jeeves, with the question “How long is a Lamborghini Countach?” provides the answer: 165 inches, or 13 feet, 9 inches. Now, since his robot mode is 6 inches tall, we can do some math to figure out the right scale.

A few minutes more of searching tells me that Optimus Prime’s toy (the 1984 version) is 6.3 inches tall in robot mode. Now some quick math will give us an answer:

5/165 = 6.3/x 5 * x = 165 * 6.3 5 * x = 1039.5 x = 1039.5 / 5 x = 207.9 

Assuming that Hod Rod’s toy is in scale with Optimus Prime’s, this would give us a Prime who’s 207.9 inches tall, or 17 feet, 4 inches. This makes Prime over three times the height of the Pink Power Ranger.

So there you have it folks! Now onto the matter of deciding who has hotter boots, Amy Jo Johnson or Princess Allura.

My dad's doesn't do that!

Those of you who know me know that I’m going through a bit of a Transformers phase right now. And why not, huh? They’re really cool. If you don’t believe me, check out this site and give your imagination a rest.

I Took a Nap the Other Day

It was a good one, but not the best I’ve had. In my day I’ve napped some epic naps. Some glorious naps. I’m in fact so fond of naps that I think they should always be described using the same words one would use to boast of a victory on a battlefield. Use words like “terrific,” and “monumentous,” and “unprecedented.” Imagine a hardy barbarian sitting in a tavern, recounting how many heads he’d cleaved, how many villages he’d plundered, treasures he’d found. Only about naps instead, and of how many sheep he’d counted, and of how he woke up refreshed but not groggy.

For a second there I was so glad, so proud, to have taken that nap that I wished I was tired right now. Often in life it’s the things that we don’t get very often that we relish the most. After a few weeks with nothing to do, weekends just aren’t that exciting. The principle is that, since we don’t get _ very often, it’s that much better when we have it. We savor it like the moment right after an amazing interception, because half of the event’s splendor is the rarity. There are, of course, many exceptions to this rule. Christmas would be great if it happened every day. Candy is just as tasty even with the Halloween night stomach ache. Masturbation. Ah, sweet, sweet masturbation…

The Nap we can thus see is a magical creature. The nap I took the other day was a Sunday Afternoon Nap. Perhaps you’re familiar with that variety. I love the Sunday Afternoon Nap because it’s what makes Sundays what they are. They’re your real day of rest that, conveniently enough, come right after Saturday which is your day on the move. The Sunday Afternoon Nap happens because one, like a fool, always wakes up too early on Sunday. No matter what time that was, it was too early. So after a few hours of lazing around, you flop down on the couch or back into bed and let sleep, fabulous sleep, take you. The Sunday Afternoon Nap is but one example of the types of naps that happen because they understand perfectly how your day works. But here’s the thing: The Sunday Afternoon Nap is always great, even if you get it every week. In High School, when it wasn’t lacrosse season, I took afterschool naps before starting my homework. They were great. And they were great every single day. The nap has this power to be good every single time as long as you believe in it. Like Tinkerbell (if she were a hooker).

Which brings us to a very important point, as important as not feeding Gremlins after midnight (or giving Scrunchface liquor): naps may not be interrupted. Your nap is a part of you. Stopping it early is like going to the bathroom and then getting up halfway through and leaving - it just ain’t healthy. You know in those sci-fi plots where the person is inside a computer or someone else’s coma or something, and if you wake him up too early his mind will just stay there and he’ll die? Like that - all those stories are just a metaphor for naps. Never, ever, ever wake someone up from a nap unless they’ve asked you to.

Society doesn’t have much place for naps these days. I’m not sorry about that. I’d be very angry if all of America had siestas at 1-3pm and I couldn’t get my Slurpee then if I wanted it. I just find it a little sad that once you get home from work there really isn’t time to fit in a little snooze before dinner. But I guess that’s the price we pay to have 24-hour Slurpee availability and all of the other wonders of living in a superpower. By the time you’ve built your life up and gotten it to a point that you can have a daily nap you’re ready to retire. So damn the old, huh? They say that youth is wasted on the young, right? Well naps are wasted on the old!

All of this just goes to show that life goes steadily downhill after you turn 6. Before that, you can play with toys all you want and you’re required to take a nap every single day in school. And on top of that, you don’t have abstract thinking yet, so anything outside of your field of vision actually just doesn’t exist to you! Sigh.

Just Push Right Through the Flab

I went home Sunday-today. For those of you who don’t know (a big list, I try not to complain too much), I suffer from occasional severe headaches. I’ll not have them for up to periods of months, and then get a headache every day for sometimes weeks at a time. I’ll wake up and be fine but around dinner time feel it coming on. The pain really is very bad, but when you get one every day you learn to live through it and not complain or you’ll end up missing everything that goes on. I’ve also made it a point not to get too desenstitized to pain medication.

This description makes it sound much worse than it really is. I do get the headaches from time to time, but not every day like some kind of chronic problem. My dad has always thought it was a really big deal, but when my physician, eye doctor, and dentist all had no clue why I got them, I just resigned that I’d have to learn to live with them and that was that.

Last week Dad called me to tell me that he had a gift certificate to his chiropractor (he’d suffered an injury doing Tae Kwon Do that left him with tingling nerves) and thought I should go in and see if chiropractive “medicine” could find a cause for my headaches. I went in yesterday to have x-rays taken and it does seem like the vertebrae in my neck are messed up which causes pressure on the nerves which makes the muscles spasm causing (all together now): headaches. So the good news is that after a few visits to an office up here I may be cures of most of my problem. The bad news is that now I have to clean my room to find my insurance policy and will finally have to read it.

But all of this got me thinking. The basis of the Chiropractive Arts is that one’s vertebrae can get out of place and this can cause all sorts of problems, and on top of that if the muscles aren’t strong enought to pull the disc back where it goes they just get used to it being out of place so they resist the chiropractor when he pulls them back to where they go. This means you have to keep going in for awhile until your muscles figure out where your spine’s supposed to be.

So (if anyone’s still reading), is my question: What happens when they get REALLY fat patients? It’s got to be harder to manipulate someone’s spinal column when there’s a few inches of back fat in the way.

Do you think that in chiropractor school they have a class on fatties?

[blank] is the new [blank]

I just saw Kung Pow! Enter the Fist and it rocked. But then I saw Super Troopers and it was delightful. I seem to be late on the boat on that one, though, so I’m guessing you all already know that.

Today’s fun link is a little article by America’s darling, Molly Ringwald.

Rai! Rai...Chu

If you asked me what my favorite Pokemon is (go ahead, ask), I’d without hesitation respond: Raichu. Sure, there are lots of others that rock, but I like that chubby little mouse. He’s a little tougher, rougher, more “street” than Pikachu, but you’ll still want to have him as a pet unlike many of the more badass, scarier Pokemon. And I like his tail a lot.

So as I sit here at 3:40 in the morning lamentably not tired enough to put my head down, I decide to look online for a nice picture of Raichu to have in my images folder just in case I ever need him. A very quick Google image search provides me with this nice picture of the cute little fella. Yay!

But then I look at the bottom half of the screen where it shows me the original location of the picture. Just for fun…

Living a Contradiction

Strange dreams again tonight: very unsettling. Fits my mood these days though. Not that I’m unhappy, I’m just not quite sure where I am. I want a job, but I enjoy not having one. I like the cold weather, but I get annoyed when I have to turn the heat on. And being home these past few days has just reminded me that I don’t really live here anymore and have to face up to the fact that I have to start considering myself to be an adult. But I don’t feel like one, so I’m caught in this battle over wanting to be a real person and have a routine and wanting to just cruise along with no direction. Oh I’ve gone crosseyed thinking about it. Bugger.

As kids we could name every Transformer...

Now as an adult I find my ability to tell Skywarp from Thundercracker sorely diminished along with my once comprehensive internal enyclopedia of every dinosaur that ever walked, swam, or flew. No, this will not be a rant about the loss of youth, but instead a reaction to a happy cultural phenomena going on right now. You see, every once in a while the world lines itself up and produces something precisely tuned just to you. I guess it would be like having all of your favorite baseball players suddenly traded to the same team, or finally having your chance with the girl you had a crush on in high school the day after you get left at the altar. For me, it’s the 80’s nostalgia revival. In a few hours Cartoon Network will air a re-make of He-Man. Late at night you can sometimes catch syndicated GI-JOE episodes. But most excitingly for me is the recent completion of Dreamwave Productions’ first Transformers: Generation 1 mini-series.

I’ll rewind a few months. My friend Jay-1 is all aflutter about the new Transformers comics. For some reason I don’t realize how big a deal this is. Then I go to the store and pick up the preview and the first two issues. I have to say that I was blown away. First of all, the comics themselves are printed on very nice paper. Also, Dreamwave doesn’t run ads every few pages like Marvel and DC do. All you get are a few ads for other Dreamwave titles at the center page, and announcements for next month’s releases at the end. But on top of that, Pat Lee’s artwork is utterly top-notch. I’ve never really cared much for manga-style art, but they employ it perfectly here. The Transformers (though we don’t really see them until issue 2) look great. The artists accomplish what the show rarely did because it showed the Transformers mostly interacting with each other: these things are HUGE. Not only do they just look cool because I’m seeing icons from my childhood, but they just look freakin’ great. The inker, Rob Armstrong, uses computer colors to make all of the artwork look smoother and more vibrant than a live-action movie might appear.

As for the writing: it’s good. I don’t think the story is as strong as others seem to, but I also don’t think that’s the point. I do have to give credit to Chris Sarracini for coming up with a creative way to bring these characters back without just starting where the cartoon or last comic series left off. The basic story is that, three years ago, the Earth got fed up with the Autobot/Decepticon war. They had been fighting for years and people just kept getting caught in the middle, so the humans agree to devote all of the their resources to help the Autobots. They win, defeating the Decepticons. The Aubobots pack their bags and board a giant spaceship, the Ark II, with the deactivated Decepticons in captivity, along with a small group of Earth’s great scientists who are going to Cybertron to study its technology. For some reason, though, the ship explodes, killing the scientists and, the world thought, the Transformers. Now, three years later, a covert bad guy has discovered Transformers buried in ice and has learned how to reactivate and control them. Society’s only hope is the lifeless form of Optimus Prime, but no one can figure out how to get him working. The story works, and turns out pretty well once you get into it. But it does come off feeling a little bit too complex for itself. They’ve got a mysterious villain, an over-zealous military general, the re-activation of the Transformers, poor Spike caught in the middle, and some weird techno-virus that doesn’t get nearly enough explanation. Nonetheless, the momentum does hold up and builds very strongly into an exciting fight. At one point we get a marvelous two-page splash of Devastator rising out of the San Franscisco bay and you realize just how terrible a force a Decepticon attack would be.

I really can’t recommend this new series enough. If you liked the Transformers as a kid, you just have to read it. Dreamwave just finished the first 6-issue arc and plans another in early 2003. In the meantime, go out and pick up the trade of Transformers: Generation 1. You won’t be disappointed.

It doesn’t stop there…

Along with the G1 series come two more titles: Transformers Armada and Transformers: The War Within. The War Within only just started so I don’t have a big impression of it yet, but it starts off well. The idea is that they’re going back to tell how the war started. Optimus has only just become Prime and the Decepticons right now are just rebels starting a coup. One of the cool things is that we get to see the robots’ various “Cybertronian Forms.” It makes sense, because it isn’t likely that Cybertron would have cars and airplanes that look just like those on Earth, so we get cool things like Grimlock as a tank instead of a T-Rex and Starscream as a, well, space jet of some sort. Armada sadly doesn’t worry about that too much, but I think that it merits a bit more attention than some are giving it. Admittedly, the cartoon sucks. I like it despite that fact, but that’s just me. The comic is better, judging from the preview and the first three issues that is. The premise is that there’s a race of robots called the Mini-Cons who the Decepticons are using to boost their own power. Using Mini-Cons the Decepticons are basically unstoppable, and the Autobots don’t like that. Neither do the Mini-Cons, because being attached to other robots in such a way amounts to torture for them. A small group of them escapes and rescues the rest and together they blast off into space to of course become stranded and end up one earth. And I think that it works very well. The artwork, like in Gen 1 and The War Within is superb and you do get a flash of horror when you see the poor little guys getting thrown into cages screaming. Armada also has a very good line of toys accompanying it with some very neat features. They’re bigger than Transformers used to be which provides more detailing and better articulation so you can actually pose the toys instead of just having them stand up straight and do nothing. They each come with a Mini-Con, and when you attach them to the Transformer they activate cool features like lights, sound effects, and guns that flip out of nowhere and fire. The Optimus Prime toy has a trailer that transforms itself into a base automatically when you change his body from truck cab to robot. Very cool

So the Transforms are back and this is a good thing. Get excited, check it out, and remember not to be an uptight adult. Play with toys, read comic books, watch cartoons, and be merry.