Posts By A.B. Kelly

The Roaring Game

· September 23, 2014 · Blog Entries · , , , , , · 3 Comments

AKA My Introduction to “Good Curling.”

The last few Winter Olympics, I’ve become more interested in curling. You may have seen it buried on USA Network or CNBC After Dark or whatever the 75th network down the NBC depth chart is. It’s the one that looks like shuffleboard on ice with a bulls-eye at the end.

Oh yeah, it also has brooms.

I would watch these games with fascination. What the hell were they doing? Why were they yelling so much? And who the hell sweeps ice? By the time the Vancouver Olympics rolled around, I was starting to understand the basic scoring and resulting strategy. My Italian grandpa had me playing bocce ball since the age of five, so it was easy to convert – one point for every stone of yours that is closer than your opponent’s closest stone.  When Sochi rolled around, I found myself armchair quarterbacking – “Why don’t they just put the stone right there? That seems simple enough.”

I started to wonder how one gets into this crazy Scottish/Canadian creation? The fact that most of the American Olympians hailed from Wisconsin and Minnesota made me assume I’d never find out. But boy, if I ever found myself in a place with tundra as the dominant vegetation, I’d have to check it out. I mean, the Olympians don’t look all that fit, they’re not flying at 50 MPH on ice skates, they’re not cross-country skiing. They’re pushing a little rock and walking alongside it to the other end. I’ve played bocce. I’ve bowled. I’ve even swept a floor once or twice in my life. I know I’m the kid that always got stuck in right field for Little League, but seriously, how hard can curling be?

Turns out, in a few ways I was right. And in many more, I was wrong.

It’s not that difficult to find or get started in a curling club. There are actually six clubs in California alone, and others in such frigid locales as Las Vegas and Phoenix. It’s a sport that most people without knee or hip problems can probably learn and play with some ability after a few hours. But mastery? That takes much more.

Most start with a Learn to Curl class.  It starts with a 20-30 minute preview of how the game works, for those rare few who hadn’t been DVR’ing the Sochi matches from 2:00 AM. Then it goes out onto the ice rink to practice setting up and delivering the stone.

It was at this point, long before I had actually set up “in the hack,” that I realized my early assumptions were a bit off.  The distance to the target is way farther than it looks on TV. I figured it would be about the length of a bowling lane, but it’s double that. It more or less runs the length from one hockey face-off circle to the other.

After a half hour or so of practicing delivery without the rock, then with the rock but without letting go, and of course plenty of sweeping, we finally got to make a legitimate curling shot. I crouched myself down into the hack and looked toward that distant target. You can’t even see the bulls-eye, since it is on the ground. Instead, a person stands at the other end and gives you a target. In this Learn to Curl class, the target was laid down by the instructor.  Go ahead, he was showing me, shoot for the button (that’s the middle of “the house,” or bulls-eye area). I reared back, focusing on the target and remembering all thirty minutes of form practice, and let it fly.

My first shot made it just about to mid-ice. Hey, in my defense, had this been as long as a bowling lane, like I originally thought, that would have been dead on.  It took me three more throws before I could get a stone past the “hog line,” the minimum possible distance for stone to be in play. The hog line is a little bit beyond the blue line in hockey, so I had increased my throw by maybe fifty percent, but the hog line is also still a good twenty feet from the house.

With a half-hour or so to go in our two hour training, and still with only a couple of legal shots to my name, they wanted us to “play a couple of ends to see what that’s like.” We only managed to get in two ends (an end is the equivalent of a baseball inning), and each player throws two stones per end, so I only managed to throw four shots. This is the most common complaint about Learn to Curl classes – by the time you put it all together, you only get to take a handful of real shots. But that’s how they keep you coming back for more, I suppose.

And that’s how it happened to me. My final shot, with some good sweeping by my teammates (more on that in a moment) landed directly on the button.

Oh, Damn! I thought to myself. First time out and I hit the hardest shot in curling? Maybe it’s too late for #Sochi2014, but #Pyongyang2018? Here I come.

Turns out hitting the button with no other stones blocking the way isn’t really all that hard. Maybe not as easy as a free-throw in basketball, but not all that much harder. Maybe like an undefended three-pointer.

“You know what we call that?” another instructor asked when I made a similar shot at a later practice. “A target.”

So here I am, some six months later, having gone through two Learn to Curls, two “advanced trainings” (basically Learn to Curl without the first hour), a six-game league, and a bonspiel. In the league, they paired newbies with veterans, and I benefited from this arrangement to the tune of an undefeated 7-0 (counting the playoffs). In the “bonspiel” (what curlers call their weekend-long tournaments), I played one sheet over from two women who had four Olympic appearances between them. Veterans want newbies nowhere near them at a bonspiel, so we fielded a team where my ten times curling was tied for the most. From both of these experiences, I learned more about how simple, and yet how difficult, this game can be.

Each player on the team throws two rocks in a row, interspersed with the other team.  Each player should, then, have a different forte or strategy. During our season, I was the lead in all but one of the games.  The lead’s job is to intentionally throw the rock short of the house.  These “guards” can either be curled behind or raised into the scoring area later. If the lead were to throw that definitive button shot, like I had in the Learn to Curl, it would likely be knocked right out by the other team, and then we’re either back to square one or else the other team is now in a better position. I’ve actually had a team knock my own rock out of the way, then have their stone ricochet behind a guard, making it very difficult to knock out.

The strategy for the second and third team members (throwing rocks 3-6) varies depending on what the play area looks like after the two leads throw those first four stones. And, at least at the level I usually play, those first four have done some kooky, crazy things.  Rare is the game where there are four perfectly placed guards, or even three guards with a well-placed point behind them. The two basic shots for them  are a takeout, which is exactly what it sounds like, or a draw, which is an attempt to score a point closer to the button than the other team’s stones. The one game I did not play lead was quite an adjustment, as I was trying to throw harder than the lead throws.

Then there is the skip, the captain of the team, who spends the first six shots providing the target at the far end of the sheet before taking the team’s final two shots. I skipped during the bonspiel because of my huge experience advantage of having curled one more time than the rest of my team. Skipping is a very lonely life. All the other curlers hang out with each other, walk back and forth while sweeping, even chitchat with the opposition. The skip stands at the far end, calculating and permutating  the constantly changing game. And particularly with a team of newbies, he must think of what might happen if (nay, when) the shot is missed. What is Plan B? Or Plan G? Or what is the worst possible thing that can happen with this shot?

Then, when the skip gets in the hack to take those final shots, the “what’s the worst that can happen” strategy is much more noticeable. I can’t count the number of times my final shot knocked a couple of my opponent’s stones into the house, raising their score from two to four. The lead is like the kickoff return guy. Can a good kickoff return help the drive? Absolutely. Can he fumble or lose ground? Sure. But most of the time, he’s not going to affect the game much. Set up a guard or return the ball to the 25 and the other players on the team are in position to do their thing. When you’re skipping, you’ve become the kicker attempting a 50-yard field goal to tie or win the game. You’re Dennis Eckersley facing Kirk Gibson. Except I was never Dennis Eckersley. At my best, I was in Byung Hyun Kim territory. I can’t count the number of times I made the long walk toward the hack only to tell my teammates, “Well, if I can draw around those five stones with a perfect button shot, we might be able to salvage one point.”

Why does the skip tell his teammates what he’s aiming for? Because they are the sweepers. When someone first watches curling, the first question is usually about sweeping. What is the purpose of it  and does it really make much of a difference? The simple answer is yes, sweeping matters. In my league team, the other rookie and I didn’t always hit our shots, but we were two of the stronger sweepers.  Our ability to salvage a short shot into a guard, or to raise a guard into the house, made us partly responsible for some of that undefeated season.

The curling ice is not clean like in hockey.  No glassy Zambonied surface here.  Instead, the ice is “pebbled” by tiny droplets of water, delivered like an exterminator spraying for bugs.  The pebbles do two things to the stone – slow it down and cause it to curl.  Sweeping flattens out those pebbles for a short time, allowing the stone to both go farther and straighter.  Sometimes the stone is light and you need to sweep like hell just to get it over the hog line.  Sometimes you need to sweep it straight until it gets past a guard, then you stop to let it curl behind the guard.  What happens if you want it to go farther but also curl? Or if you want it to go straight but slower? Well, then you’re screwed and that’s when everybody is quickly assessing plan B. It might be better to keep it straight so that it misses everything instead of curling into and raising the other team’s guard into the house. If you ever watch curling and hear them alternate between on and off, usually they’re trying to make it go further but curl. Or the skip might say “off, off, off,” then all of a sudden, scream “Yes, Hard, yes.” That means the stone finally curled in the right direction and now it needs to be swept as far as possible. Or it could also be an indecisive skipper, but that’s not likely at the level that is on TV. Plus the indecisive skip will say things like “Off. Shit, no. On. I mean… shit… Hard, I guess?”

The one thing that sweepers can’t do, that nobody can do once the stone leavers your hand, is to slow it down. Imagine if you were bowling and instead of throwing your ball through the pins, you had to make it stop right at the five pin. That’s the finesse part of curling, and that (plus the other team getting in your way) is really what makes it difficult. After the first few throws in a Learn to Curl, pretty much anybody can throw the stone hard enough to get through the house. So what’s constantly on your mind as you throw is to try to “take a little off.” Better to be a little short and have the sweepers get it where it needs to go than to send a meaningless stone flying through into the hockey goal. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been worried about it going too far and end up hogging the stone. And then on the next throw, I over-compensate and sail right through the house.

So while I’m far from a grizzled veteran, I guess I’m no longer a raw rookie. In some ways, my initial thoughts were accurate. It’s a game that can be learned quickly. And after three or four shots, most players can at least line up and play a game. And most of the leagues I’ve encountered or heard of have spots for these new players, and these new players can be competitive. However, there’s also an upper level of competition that takes years to reach. The Olympians that were on the same ice as me never called shots with Plan B or C in mind. They make their shots.

Although sometimes I pity their accuracy – there’s nothing as entertaining as watching an awesome cascade of unintended ricochets that steal some points. In the one game we won in the bonspiel, we were up by three and were playing a very conservative final end. On the other team’s final shot, we had one point on an outer ring, and there were about ten stones of various colors clogging up the area in front of the house. With no other option, she threw a stone at full force up the middle, knocking three of her stones in, one of which knocked mine out. We then had to take one final shot each on an empty sheet, with the closest to the button winning the game. That’s curling for you.

And if you don’t score any points? Still no big thing. After the game comes broomstacking, when  you shake hands, say “good curling,” and grab a drink. Oh, did I mention the winning team buys drinks for the losing team? So that 1-5 record my Team o’ Rookies compiled at the Bonspiel? Hell, we pretty much made our entrance fee back in free libations.

Nothing beats sitting around with the team you just spent two hours competing against and re-hashing the game. Man, I can’t believe you missed that shot by an inch. Did you see when that stone lost its handle? Why’d you call for that one shot? Do you think I called off the sweepers too soon?

                 Followed by the line repeated by curlers everywhere.

“If it was easy, they’d call it hockey.”

Yellow Snow (Fiction)

· August 22, 2014 · fiction · , , , , , · No Comments

This week’s flash fiction challenge was to start with a color in the title. Shocker that I went with…

Yellow Snow

Cold.

Wet.

Salty.

My numb tongue retracts, attempting to absorb nutrients from the frozen froth.

Who ordered the sunflower seed Slushee?

My right eye flutters open to a vast expanse of white. A glaring, blinding white.

Snow? Makes sense.

Not sense like remembering an Arctic sojourn in my recent past. But logical sense – the cold, the wet.

The salty?

My left eye struggles open through resistance, hindered by the frozen drift. The radiance becomes blurry , tainted by my dominant eye’s limited range of vision. The white becomes more muddled with each blink, mixing and merging with shades of yellow. Canary blinks to ochre blinks to tan.

The snow isn’t white, my viscous brain processes. It’s yellow.

Yellow snow!

I start the rest of the way awake, spitting. Reflexes bolt my body upright and my hand to my mouth at the same time.

Pain. A splitting headache, but more than that. My legs feel weak, my stomach feels raw. Groping beneath me in a failed and flailed attempt to stand, I finally settle for a kneel. Eyes drop down from the reflected sunlight to the shadow of my body.

The snow beneath my body’s divot is a pool of faded yellow. Another smaller pool of creamy off-white is to my left. Another and another, smaller splotches trail away in regular intervals

If your stream is losing strength, you may have an enlarged prostate, pops into my head as I trace the tainted drippings. Oh joy, I face planted in the latrine.

“Ahh-woooooooo!”

The reverie is broken by a blood curdling sound. Something between a scream and a howl pierces through the crisp air.  My neck rotates still dilating eyes around searching for the source direction amidst countless echoes

No luck. The field lay as vast and barren as before. No prehistoric  animals, no smoky apparition of a beheaded goddess, which seemed the only two things capable of such a cry.

“Ahhhhhhhhh!”

A glance behind me, in the direction of the trailing off yellow snow, sees a copse of trees fifty yards distant.

“Woooooo!”

Certain that the sound is coming across the snowy field, I take one unsteady step toward the trees.  My ankle buckles under my weight, and I plummet back toward the snow. I’m unsure if my ankle is twisted or if this is just a city slicker attempting to cross country in tennis shoes, but instinct dictates I shuffle to safety before finding out. Using my calves and knees like a snowshoe, my hands reach forward and pull through the frozen sea, half swimming and half crawling, toward safety.

I refuse to look back as the sound gains on me. A gusty wind blows upon my back, except the unnatural heat in this frozen tundra makes me sure it isn’t wind. The howls become deafening as I lurch through the thin green line.

The wailing stops. I close my eyes and curl up behind the cylindrical wooden forcefield of an ancient oak. After the horrifying sounds of the run, this blanket of silence is serene.

Until the smell hits my nose. Musty. A car left in the rain with the windows cracked. Rancid. That car had some leftover McDonalds. Putrid. That old McDonalds is in the trunk next to a dead opossum.

Eyes open to a drooling mandible of matted grey-brown fur. A glistening black nose twitches above an open mouth of sharpened canine teeth. Atop it all are two black eyes, intense yet toying at the same time. My ears register the satisfied, guttural growl that has replaced the howls of the hunt.

Whatever energy I have left forces me up the tree. Halfway up, I learn the extent of my injuries. Stomach is indeed raw. Rough bark bites through two layers of cotton clothing, scraping skin that feels like this is not the first tree it’s encountered. The legs feel chaffed and punctured as they attempt, but fail, to find traction around the shaft. Wounds I was unaware of open anew.

The furry harbinger of doom below me skulks around the base, sniffing and attempting to climb. Growls transitions back to howls, but a different howl than before. More of a whine.

Or a call to action. Other howls respond from the thicket of woods. A prey has been treed. The pack is coming to dine. I look back out to the snowy open field, still vast and empty, virgin minus a few splotches of yellow.

They can’t leave the woods, screams my brain, or perhaps my instinct. Whether through reason or intuition or blind hope, I know I must leave the tree before the other creatures arrive.

A leap of faith vaults me over the hunter. I tweak the other ankle upon landing and pitch forward yet again, a position to which I am becoming quite adept at and averse to. But no time to consider my current plight nor position as the canine makes a final dash toward his escaping prey. Claws scrape through denim, shredding the legs beneath, as I revert to the familiar crab-swim into openness.

The howling returns, this time behind me for sure. Energy fading, I stumble out as far as I can go. The blood from my legs drips past the constricting jeans just as I get to the urine spot. Another two steps, with bright crimson drops merging with faded tan drips.

Three steps forward, I fall for the final time. The stomach wounds open as a bloody pool forms right where the yellow snow had been.

As consciousness wanes, it occurs to me that blood fades over time. Wash out a white shirt, the blood will turn brown, then tan. Eventually a creamy yellow.

What about in snow? Would it turn yellow? Probably.

And it sure tastes salty.

At least I wasn’t lying in piss.

Then white and red and yellow fuse together to become black.

What to say about Sharknado 2?

· August 12, 2014 · Blog Entries · , , , · One Comment

Other than there should be no better post to start off a brand new blog.

I know this is a week and a half late, but as with any premium entertainment of this sort, I waited to view it with friends. And Beer. The beer probably would have been accessible on a Wednesday night, but getting friends together, and imbibing as much as we would need to properly experience the movie, would have been difficult on a Wednesday night. C’mon, SyFy (which I shall continue to pronounce “Siffy” as long as they continue to spell Sci-Fi wrong), broadcast Sharknado 3 on a Friday night and I guarantee the number of viewing parties will rival the Super Bowl.

The one major drawback of not watching live was the Twitter element.  At the beginning of every commercial break, they ran a handful of related tweets.  I don’t know if we benefited from having DVR’d the West Coast feed, but the tweets they showed were very timely.  Some related to the scene that had just ended or a cameo that was a minute or two old. I had the benefit of pausing and no time pressure, but a number of my tweets were half-written by the time the SyFy people had already processed and placed a smattering from the Twitterlanche. Then again, Twitter is what caused the initial Sharknado mania, so it makes sense they’d be on the ball this time. In some aspects, Sharknado also helped validate Twitter as a bona fide barometer of the pop ephemera. I’m sure there will be some future Master’s Thesis titled “The Twitter and Sharknado Symbiosis.”

As an aside, tweeting out a week and a half late, the predictive text on my hashtag had to make it all the way to the sixth letter before #Sharknado or #Sharknado2TheSecondOne came up. With three or four letters, Twitter thought I wanted to write #ShartToys. I don’t think I want to know why.

On to the movie itself. I have to hand it to the producers. While some low-budget success stories try to ramp up the cinematography or editing or special effects in the sequel, Sharknado 2: The Second One stayed blessedly true to the original. I’m sure the budget was substantially larger – hell, they managed to shut down a block in Manhattan, that’s got to take some coin – but the overwhelming feel was “Oh, y’all like this? Then here’s some more.”  One of my favorite parts of the original was the rapid switching from stormy to sunny skies in the same scene. That still existed in the sequel, although I suspect it was much more intentional this time.

The first movie made a number of homages to Jaws, as is only natural in a shark movie. The sequel, however, did not feel constrained to copying just one movie franchise or even one genre. The opening scene shows Tara Reid and Ian Ziering (I’m sure their characters had names, but nobody knows them) flying across the country in a plane that happens to fly through a shark storm. In a straight copy of the old “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” Twilight Zone episode, Ian Ziering sees a shark on the wing, then it’s not there. Throughout the movie, he seemed to take most of his acting cues from the Christian Bale Batman model (talking gravelly makes you a bad-ass), but in the opening scene he was pure Shatner.

Note to SyFy: Shat-nado. Thank you, I will take my residual checks now.

Once the sharks, who of course were real and not imagined, breach the plane, the tribute changes from Twilight Zone to Airplane! And lest one thinks they were aiming for one of the more serious flying disaster movies, like Airport, they cut to the pilot, the second (after Kelly Osbourne as stewardess) and best cameo of the film.

There were many cameos in the movie, and I have seen various reports of which ones were “the best.” Biz Markie certainly deserves a mention. Wl Wheaton’s was short but memorable. Billy Ray Cyrus as a New York surgeon with an Oklahoma drawl certainly jumped out. Daymond John gets honorable mention for jumping from Shark Tank to Sharknado. Then there was Jared from Subway. Yes, Jared from eSubway.  I refuse to mention the people who played themselves, such as Al Roker and Kelly Ripa, Even if Kelly Ripa stiletto-ing a shark with her high heel was two seconds of pure heaven.  But appearing as oneself is not a proper cameo in a movie like this. In our drinking game, we quickly stopped taking a “cameo drink” when people appeared as themselves. Don’t worry, there was still much to drink about, especially since our particular rules made us drink any time there were “ominous shark fins.” This might explain why my review focuses on the early parts of the movie.

But the best cameo had to be the pilot of the airplane (sorry, Airplane!), Robert Hays. Ted Freaking Striker from the Airplane! movies was cast as the pilot in yet another doomed flight with no basis in reality. I sat on pins and needles for the entire scene hoping for him to repeat some timeless quip from the old movies. Alas, nobody else in the cockpit was named Roger, Ober, Unger, or Dunn. They were flying nowhere near Macho Grande. The closest we got was a girl in the bathroom bouncing up and down like the one putting make-up on in Airplane! (or the man shaving in Airplane II: The Sequel, a subtitle almost as brilliant as Sharknado 2: The Second One).

Of course, this movie’s bathroom girl gets eaten by a shark, one of many to breach the outer hull of the airplane. Robert Hays goes the way of most of the cameos, forcing Ian Ziering to pull his very own Ted Striker, running to the cockpit and landing the airplane. The airplane had absolutely no structural integrity yet, but after flying through a shark infestation at 35,000 feet, one supposes that the physics of a surfer landing a plane that is missing half of its fuselage is a moot point. In the first movie, he could fly a helicopter because he “saw it in a movie once.”

At this point in the movie, something happens to Tara Reid’s character that pretty much takes her out of a majority of the movie, a great call by the producers. The slightly improved production value was enough to make her plastic much more noticeable. And frightening. Kari Wuhrer was also in this movie. I don’t think the Botox allowed her to move her face at all. But that’s all I will say about Kari Wuhrer, because she will forevermore get a pass from her time on “Remote Control.”

Except one more thing about Kari Wuhrer. Her character spends a lot of time out at the Statue of Liberty with three other females. They all might or might not have been related to Ian Ziering’s character. Regardless, Kari Wuhrer and these other females were frequently talking to each other, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t talking about men. So at least Sharknado 2: The Second One passes the Bechdel_Test, something which cannot be said about most blockbusters.

The next major scene worth noting took place at Citi Field. The best weapon in the first movie had to be the barstool, which a brilliant patron doubled back to get in order to bludgeon a shark with it later. In the sequel, the barstool is replaced with a comically large bat. Comically Large Bat, a souvenir bought during the Mets game, is so magical that it seems to change in size depending on the scene, including growing to roughly the size of the shark that it is hitting for a homerun. Yes, they hit a shark for a homerun at Citi Field, complete with the Big Apple rising up. So I guess it was a home team shark homer.

Inexplicably, the Sharknado is fused with a cold front at Citi Field, explained by Al Roker on a “Today” show broadcast that seemed to go on all day and night. This brought up the promise of a Shark-Nor’Easter. One of my friends is desperately hoping for a Sharkvalanche spin-off, and the detailed explanation had us convinced that was where it was going. But after Citi Field, there was no more snow nor any other mention of the amazing weather phenomenon that they had specifically cut away to explain. I assume this was only done because it was filmed during the winter, so they had to explain why the baseball stadium was surrounded by snow. But the news report failed to mention how the sudden downpour of summer snow caused the snow outside the stadium to be a pre-existing blanket. Nor did the news report mention why the producers couldn’t find stock footage of Citi Field in rain.

The rest of the movie is sharks. And then some sharks. Followed by sharks. A weather map with swirling fronts of blue and red sharks.

Oh, and an alligator in the sewer, which is promptly eaten by a shark. The sharks continue to have the uncanny ability not only to survive and move on land, but also to aim themselves as they are coming out of the tornado (water spout, really, or else how would the sharks survive in it? Because I’m sure there were many biologists consulted on both of these projects.

Judd Hirsch showed up as a taxi driver. This almost rivaled Robert Hays for playing a character related to what you are best known for. But he’s Judd Hirsch, and he’s had many other claims to fame. But, and this bears repeating, this movie had Robert Hays flying a doomed airplane.

Judd Hirsch’s death (Oops, spoiler!) is also tainted by serving as precursor to my one major complaint. A number of people swing Tarzan style from the roof of one submerged car to another. The rope falls into the water with one person remaining, apparently stuck with the car sinking and (naturally) sharks all around. The guy looks at his friend, who had successfully made the jump, then back at the sharks that were forming perfect stepping stones between the two cars.  The two men shout “Frogger!” and he jumps from shark to shark until he makes it across. Now here’s the problem: the sharks were not swimming back-and-forth perpendicular to the cars. Instead, there were three of them forming a line from one car to the next, making it a Pitfall move, not a Frogger move. I can’t believe the editors let that slide, what with all of the painstaking attention-to-detail in every other scene.

No death scene rose to the level of the Hollywood sign in the first movie. That scene was memorable not only because it was the aforementioned Barstool Guy who died, but also because of the line he muttered (“My mom always said Hollywood would kill me”) right before being smashed by the giant W.

The closest parallel in The Second One was the Statue of Liberty’s head, which gets ripped off and hurtled toward the city, rolling down a street and crunching a poor soul.  The scene was not dragged out like when Barstool Guy dodged the swirling letters for a minute of screen time. And there was no fitting quote from the soon-to-be deceased. We actually had to rewind it because we were sure we had missed some “Viva la Libertie” or other reference. But there was nothing. Come on, writers, don’t start mailing it in yet.

The final scene was precisely what one would expect. The logical fallacies came at me so fast, I couldn’t keep track. Why does a random person walking down a New York street have a pitchfork? Or was that a trident instead? Who abandons their fireworks truck in the middle of a Sharknado?

How do all of these chainsaws keep running? Okay, seriously, this is the one that bothered me in the first movie as well. I’ve never really used a chainsaw, but my understanding of them is that they have a kill switch. You have to physically be hold a trigger mechanism or else it dies.  I mean, my lawnmower has this feature and a runaway lawnmower would seem much less likely to sever a body part than an airborne chainsaw. But in this movie, one lucky New Yorker just happens to have multiple chainsaws in his truck bed, each of which he starts up on the first pull (again, something my lawnmower in incapable of) and throws into the tornado. They then spiral upward, cutting through hundreds of sharks each, liberating this particular sharknado in the name of peace and justice. Although I’m sure these were Stalin-esque chainsaws who were actually going to instill their own draconian puppet state in the power vacuum that now existed in these funnel clouds.

Syfy, are you paying attention? Chainsawnado: Behind the Iron-Toothed Curtain! Seriously, call my agent.

The sequel ends much like the original, with Ian Ziering facing down a particularly menacing shark who had taken a loved one (or part of a loved one), mano a mano. Although I seem to remember Tara Reid showing up at just the right time to tip the balance of power against the shark. Somehow, just as in the original, the defeat of this one shark amongst the thousands flying through the air signals the end of the Sharknado threat. Having now seen it twice, it still makes no sense. Was that shark controlling the weather? Was he the shark leader and now all of the other sharks will docilely fly back to the ocean?

The twist in the sequel, though, is that this shark wasn’t just the shark from the last ten minutes of the movie.  Oh, no! It turns out this shark is the exact same shark that attacked them in the plane at the beginning of the movie. Despite the fact that the plane was 35,000 feet in the air and presumably somewhere over mid-America. This shark must surely be the most tenacious and most travelled shark in existence. It also must be the shark with the slowest digestive system in the world. I understand the adage of tying a plot together, of showing something in Act One and bringing it back in Act Three. But I’m not sure this is precisely how it should be done.

It does set up an interesting premise for Sharknado 3, though, doesn’t it? Obviously that shark was targeting poor Ian and Tara. Was this personal? A vendetta? Had the shark mob put a hit out on our intrepid duo after the events in Los Angeles? And does this shark now have children, a spouse, a cousin whot now must track them down to exact their final revenge? It’s dripping with possibilities.

We finished up the movie, as I assume many did, with a trip to YouTube for a group viewing of “Just a Friend,” by Biz Markie. Why? We were just too exhausted to make it all the way through Airplane!

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