The Expendables

A while back the Butcher and the Red-Headed Kid tried to make me sit through The Expendables 2, which was so terrible that even they eventually got bored and went back to shooting things in video games. But they insisted that the first one was awesome.

The Butcher and I watched it this weekend and it was pretty awesome in just the ways you’d hope cheesy action movies would be. I wish Jason Statham could be in every movie, even if he just made brief ass-kicking appearances. Like you’d be watching some period drama with women all trussed up and men wearing top hats and people would be drinking tea and, out the large windows, you’d see time-period-appropriately-dressed Jason Statham kicking the shit out of some guy. Who knows why?

Anyway, I was delighted to see Dolph Lundgren in it as well, even though his character never made any sense to me. One minute he was good, then evil, then good again? Apparently he’s magic, so as long as you shoot him in the chest, but not in any vital organs (apparently they’re much more sparse in the chest than I’d realized), dude can be up and around in a matter of days. It seemed like days anyway. Why didn’t True Blood cast him as Eric’s dad? Is there some way we can make that happen? The show already makes no sense. Let’s just recon that his dad didn’t die or wasn’t that dude we already saw and, instead, it was Dolph who is also a vampire.

If there is going to be a moment when a lot of Swedish guys glower at me this week, I hope Lundgren is in on it.

Come on, Sweden! I am pulling for you to make this happen.

Dog Butt!!!

My favorite thing about the photo I used for this post is all the animals.

There’s a horse at the river, a team of donkeys higher up on the bank, and a dog butt there in the lower left corner.

Flood Stage

Yesterday, there was a warning about flooding in Whites Creek Pike in the Bordeaux area, along Hamilton Road, where that dude who had been fighting to get the city or the state to do something about flooding was killed during the 2010 flood.

Here’s the part that stood out to me. The warning said that water would be in people’s back yards at 13.0 feet and that the river was now at 13.8 feet. Okay fine. Then it said that the creek is not considered to be in flood stage until 18 feet.

There are only two possibilities I see here–either that was some kind of massive typo or people on the creek side of Hamilton Road have a LOT of yard that’s actually creek bed. There would appear to be a five foot discrepancy between where the people along Whites Creek believe the creekbed is and where the National Weather Service believes the creekbed is. Otherwise, how can you have the creek in people’s back yards five feet before it’s flooding?

The thing about Whites Creek is that it has a pretty wide flood plain. Like, if you’re crossing White’s Creek on Clarksville Pike, if you look toward the florist, you can see that the florist simply must be in the flood plain. And Hamilton Road is just a foot or two above the florist. I think, if you were being honest, you’d say that the creek should get the whole 300 yards or so from the hills on the far side of the creek to Hamilton Road on the nearside. That should all be “Whites Creek” even if the creek itself is now just a couple hundred feet across, hugging close to the high ground to the south.

So, if it is anywhere in that 300 yard across area, I don’t think you can rightly say that it’s flooding. It is still in the area that is obviously the creek’s. People should have NEVER been sold property there. Because, also, obviously, if the creek is normally in its banks and you’ve gotten used to thinking of its flood plain as “your yard,” you are going to be alarmed to discover that the creek is in your yard.

But even after 2010, even after we saw people whose houses had flooded, whose belongings were all out in their yards, a lot of those houses are still lived in.

That bugs me, but I don’t know what can be done about it.