Hot Takes Tuesday with {Jack O’Shea}: Transformers Got Us Fired Up

Hot Takes for Tuesday June 20, 2017

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1. Every country should have to submit a person for every Olympic event.

As I’m sure you’re well aware, the Winter Olympics are less than 8 months away. And since I’m a sucker for those P&G commercials where the athletes thank their moms for stealing their childhood so they could become world class bobsledders, I could not be more pumped.

I’m also a big fan of Team Cheerios, which, if you don’t remember, was the cereal brand in which General Mills tossed regular ol’ Cheerios, Frosted Cheerios, and Honey Nut Cheerios, into the same box to symbolize unity or diversity or something.

The perfect balance sweet, savory, and gluten.

Tragically, they discontinued TC after the 1996 Summer Olympics, which absolutely devastated my 3 year-old self. And if right now you’re thinking, “Jack, why don’t you just buy your own Cheerios, Frosted Cheerios, and Honey Nut Cheerios and just make it yourself?” I have tried, and it’s just not the same.

And I’m offended you even asked the question.

But while I do love both the Summer and Winter Olympics, I think I speak for everyone when I say that the Summer Games are just vastly superior. I mean, there really aren’t even enough unique events to justify the Winter Olympics at all. The only difference between the two is that one requires snow/ice. And how many real sports actually require snow or ice? Like five.

And this is one of them.

The Summer Games features a wide assortment of events from swimming, to table tennis, to greco-roman wrestling, to horse jumping. The Winter Games features a wide assortment of events from skiing down a mountain, to snowboarding down a mountain, to skating on ice, to sledding on ice.

In the 2016 Summer Olympics, 87 out of the 207 nations that competed won at least a bronze medal. In the 2014 Winter Olympics, only 26 nations left the games with medal, and only 88 nations even competed. Why all the disparity? Because the concept of snow doesn’t even exist in most of the Southern Hemisphere.

In fact, I’m surprised people aren’t protesting the exclusively Northern Hemisphere Winter Games given the social justice world we’re living in.

Not a lot of this happening in South Africa.

The Winter Olympics just aren’t that interesting to me. The whole thing is just too predictable. I can only watch the Russians, Americans, Canadians, and Norwegians slide around the ice so many times before I watch Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for the billionth time.

But, I have a solution. As I previously noted, only 88 countries even competed in the last Winter Olympics.

Those ARE rookie numbers. According to Google, there are 207 countries in the world, and I think it should be mandatory that every single one puts forth at least one competitor for each event—including, and especially, North Korea.

This would make the sheer athletic ability of the top competitors much more visible. Sure, the same nations would still win each of the events, but at least we’ll know for sure that there isn’t some curling savant in Kenya that would blow those maple tree huggers from Canada out of the water.

Not to mention, it would be both hilarious and fascinating to watch a guy from Maldives—the flattest country in the world with an average temperature of 84 degrees—attempt to luge face first down a steep hill of ice.

This guy trained his entire life for this one run.

Take Temperature:

6/10 — Winter in the Maldives.

2. Cigars are overrated.

Cigars definitely look very cool. They are to smoking what handlebar mustaches are to facial hair. But, unlike handlebar mustaches, cigars are a little too hyped up.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing cooler than a badass military dude chewing on a stogie in the heat of battle.

I’m going through a biiiiig Band of Brothers phase right now.

I’ve never had the slightest desire to actually go out and buy a cigar. I have, however, been offered a stogie at many barbecues, graduations, and birthday parties, and I’ve got some disappointing news, folks. They’re just not enjoyable enough to live up to their reputation as a celebratory treat.

And this whole “the best cigars are from Cuba” thing just seems like a bunch of hullabaloo to me. It’s like when people say that the best pizza comes from New York, or the best cheesesteaks come from Philadelphia, when we all know that the best pizza comes from Lenzini’s Pizza in Culver City, California, and the best cheesesteaks come from Subway.

Lenzini’s don’t fuck around.

Besides, if you’re going to smoke something, why not smoke something that you can actually inhale without getting extremely nauseous? Like meth.

Take Temperature:

6/10 – Summer in Norway.

3. Transformers is heading in the right direction.

Now, granted, I’ve only ever seen the first Transformers movie, and I only saw it once. But, I have seen all five trailers for the franchise, and I have to say that I fully approve the direction they’re headed.

For example, in the fourth installment of the franchise, Transformers: Age of Extinction, the bad guys (or maybe the good guys, IDK I haven’t seen it) are dinosaur robots.

That’s just good stuff right there.

I’m sure people complained that it doesn’t make sense for robots that transform into modern machines to be shaped like prehistoric beasts for no reason other than that it looks cool. That must have been a complaint, right?

But, I totally get it. Michael Bay has vision. Dinosaurs are awesome. Robots are awesome. And, therefore, dinosaurs + robots = 2 awesome.

Furthermore, in the newest movie, Transformers: The Last Knight, Anthony Hopkins has climbed aboard to play seemingly the exact same character he played in Westworld.

This is a big get as far as I am concerned. As long as the franchise continues down this path of adding Oscar-winning actors and new bigass robots to each new film, I think Transformers will give the Fast and the Furious franchise a run for their money sooner than we think.

Take Temperature:

5/10 — Not as hot as the many, many Transformers explosions.

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