Category: Fun

“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” – book review

In the book “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs“, Judi Barrett wrote about a fictitious town called ChewAndSwallow that rained food. It is quite an inventive story with wonderful illustrations by Ron Barrett.

In the town of ChewAndSwallow, the weather sometimes rained soup and juice.  And had hamburger storms. The weather came three times a day, bringing its citizen their food. There were weather forecasts informing the people of what possible food might come for their next meal. The title of the book “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” is one such forecast.

Therefore, there were no grocery stores in the town; they were not needed. People would eat their fill and whatever is left over is saved for in-between-meal snacks. Although it was quite a chore for the sanitation department to clean up the food on the streets after each meal, things worked out well and everyone was satisfied. Until….

All was good until the weather started to turn sour. One day it rained smelly Gorgonzola cheese all day. The next day brought only overcooked broccoli. And the next day came Brussels sprouts and peanut butter with mayonnaise (yuck!)

Storms became violent with hurricanes of bread and thick pea soup fog. There was a tomato tornado with high salt and pepper winds. Food portions that dropped from the sky became bigger and bigger such that it damaged roofs. In fact, a pancake fell that covered a entire school with a down pours of maple syrup. No school for the kids that day (yeah!).

The citizens finally had to abandon the town by building boats out of bread and sailed to a land on another shore where there were normal weather with normal grocery stores. The end.

The Movie – Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

The book “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” was the inspiration for the 2009 animated movie of the same title by Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller. The story line of the movie is different from the book with Bill Hader playing the voice of Flint Lockwood, the protagonist.

What follows may contain movie plot spoilers.

Whereas the book did not explain why the sky rained food, the movie fills in this plot-line by creating the character Flint Lockwood, who is a boy inventor who comes up with weird inventions that does not quite turn out right. One of his invention was spray-on shoes so that you don’t have to tie shoelaces. The problem is that you can not get the shoe off. Another invention is the monkey-thought translator that enables his pet monkey Steve to talk. But it was his latest invention that inadvertently caused the sky to rain food.

Because the town of Swallow Falls is sick of eating sardines all the time, Flint creates a device called the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator (FLDSMDFR for short) that would turn water into food. Whereas the book has the town as ChewAndSwallow, the movie named the town Swallow Falls and located this tiny island right underneath the “A” in “Atlantic Ocean” on the map.

Before the machine was successfully tested, a mishap caused the machine to be shot up into the sky. And on that day, the sky rained cheeseburgers (which was what Flint had set up the machine to produce as the first test run). So the machine had in fact worked.

Flint now starts taking “orders” and “requests” for particular food from the town’s residents. This includes a request from the policeman Earl. And on Earl’s son birthday, Flint made his machine rain ice-cream (making for a beautiful scene of the town).

Sam, the weather-woman reporter whom Flint likes, never made any food request. So Flint made a request for her by creating a jello-mold castle in which they jumped and played in. It was also in there that Sam confused to Flint that she too was a “nerd” but had learned to cover it up. Flint encouraged her to be her true self and so she started wearing her glasses and tying her hair into a ponytail.

The town’s greedy mayor asked Flint to make it rain food three times a day. The Mayor ate so much that he is morbidly obese and can not walk. He rides in a motorized cart. This is reminiscent of another animated film Wall-E of 2008 where the obese population of the future rides in hover chairs.

The Mayor built a new tourist attraction called “Chew and Swallow” and had sneaked into Flint’s lab to order the sky to rain a Las Vegas style All-You-Can-Eat buffet.

By ordering too much food, the machine goes into the danger “yellow zone” and bad things are started to happen. The sky dropped larger and larger portions of food. A spaghetti tornado destroys half the town. The residents has to evacuate by building boats out of toast. Near the end of the movie we see the Mayor eating his own boat.

Flint tries to shut the machine down. The Mayor tries to stop Flint by throwing a radish at Flint. It missed Flint but broke the communication device to the machine in the sky. Now there is no way to tell the machine in the sky to stop.

Flint feels so bad that he ruined everything that he felt like trash and threw himself into a trashcan along with all his other previous useless inventions. Flint’s father found him there and gave handed him Flint’s white lab coat. Flint pulled himself up and was now determined to save the world by shutting down the machine for good. He built a flying car and the crew consisting of Flint, Sam, Steve the monkey, Sam’s cameraman, and Brent flew up to the machine which was now surrounded by a giant meatball. With some adventures up there, Flint finally manages to shut the machine down by spraying his spray-on-shoe onto the machines output nozzle sealing it forever.

The movie has some good laughs as well as well-developed plot-lines. We see Flint’s romantic relationship with Sam. We see Flint’s strained relationship with his father. And we see Flint’s relationship with himself in terms of his self-esteem.  We also see what happens when one gets too greedy and eats too much.

Wii Video Game

With the release of the movie, videos games with the same name followed — where the player can control Flint. Game available for the Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, and PC.

12 Free iPad Games

Here are some free games available for the iPad which you can download for free — at least it was free at the time of this writing in April 2011 (things may have changed). The screen shots were from iPad 2.

There are many free games out there. Many of these free versions of the game have a paid version which they hope that you upgrade when you get addicted to them. But if you don’t plan on buying the paid version, make sure you don’t accidentally click the upgrade button on the app.

In this article, I presented a dozen of them from different categories of games.

You can download them by clicking on “App Store” from the Home screen of your iPad and do a search for the game name. In order to download the games, you will need to have or create an Apple ID.

After finding the game, look at the requirements of the games to see if they are compatible with your version of the iPad. The games will typically list requirements that look like …

Requirements:
Compatible with iPad
Requires iOS 3.2 or later

You can find what OS (operating system) your iPad is running by going to “Settings -> General -> About” and look for version.

To find other free games, look for the free button next to the game. To download the game, click on the free button, and the button will change to “Install App”. Tap on that and the game will install. You should find the game icon on the Home screen. Note that the icon may be on the second page of the Home screen. The tiny dots at the bottom of the Home screen indicates what page of the home screen you’re on. To go to the various pages of the Home screen, slide your fingers left and right to page through. Enjoy.

1. Angry Birds

We will start off with this game because it is a favorite of many people and is featured in the “Game Center” which you can tap into from the Home screen of your iPad.

Angry Birds is a cute game where you slingshot birds to try to knock down scaffoldings in order to make the pigs fall. You pull the bird back on the slingshot by dragging your finger, aim it at the correct angle, and the let go your finger to let the bird fly.

2. Rows 3D

In this game, you play against the computer with each player taking turns placing stones on the poles.

The winner is the first person who can get 4 stones in a row.

It is a fairly classic strategy type game. It is like the “connect four” game, except it is more advanced in that you can get four in a row in three dimensions.

You can rotate the board by swiping your fingers.  Tap on the pole you want to put the stone in.  And an arrow will appear.  Tap on the arrow to confirm that you want to drop the stone on that pole.

3. Brain2 Free

This is a brain training game with logic, math, memory, visual, and focus exercises. There is a timer, so you have to think quick.

In the logic game, you have to figure out which domino to push to knock down the target domino. In the math game, you have to fill in the sequence of of numbers with the correct missing number based on the pattern. In the memory game, you have to quickly memorize the position of the passengers in a bus. In the visual exercise, you memory an animal scene and have to recall how many animals of a particular type you saw. In the focus exercise, you have to count the number of triangles seen in the shapes.

4. Manic Marble 3 Free

This game is perfect for playing on the iPad, because it takes advantage of the iPad’s accelerometer.

The game will ask for calibration at the start.

You tilt the iPad to cause a marble to roll across an obstacle course.

If you drop the marble, no problem. You get a new one (unlimited number of them).

5. Sudoku

There are many Sudoku apps out there. This one is @Sudoku by Mind the Frog Inc released Dec 16, 2010.

It is a classic Sudoku puzzle game where you fill in the squares of the grid with numbers from 1 to 9. Make sure there are no duplicate numbers in any rows, columns, or any of the nine smaller inner 3×3 grids.

When the game comes up, you will be asked whether you want the easy version or the full paid version. The easy version is the free version and it is fairly easy to solve for experience Sudoku players. However, it is a good game to get started on if you are new to the game.

6. Compression Lite

Just think of it as a Tetris-like game with falling blocks.

Swipe fingers to left or right to move the falling block left and right.

Tap on the block to rotate it.

And flick the finger down to drop (this is optional as it will drop on its own). But you get extra points for doing so.

The objective is remove the blocks with holes by grouping like-color blocks.

7. Air Hockey Gold

Try to knock the puck into the opponents goal.

You can play one player against the computer where you can set the computer opponent to be at different skill levels.

Or you can play two players. Or wireless two players.

You also have the option of playing with two pucks.

Very realistic movements and physics. And finger control feels very natural.

8. Eden’s Quest Free

This is an interactive adventure puzzle game where you have to solve various puzzles to open locks in your quest to find the statue of Akua. Along the way, you meet various characters in an storyline and gather up points along the way which can be used to buy hints.

You can interactive with the scenes in the game by tapping on things.

This game has very nice graphics.

9. Harbor Master

You are a harbor master of a busy port. You have to guide boats to their un-docking stations. And guide them out so that other boats can dock. Make sure they don’t crash into each other, which for some reason they tend to do if you don’t keep your eyes peeled.

You guide the boats by drawing their paths using your finger.

This fast moving game really keeps your mind busy.  Boats have different colored cargo, so you have to guide them to the right colored ports.  Some boats require it to dock on two different ports.

10. Dizzypad HD

You are the frog on a spinning lily pad.  Try not to watch the frog spin too long, you might get dizzy (hence the name Dizzypad)

Tap anywhere on the scene to jump to the next pad. Time your jump carefully. Because if not, you miss the next pad and fall into the water, loosing a life. Frog only have a limited number of lives, you know.

11. Labyrinth 2 HD Lite

You tilt the iPad to roll a ball through a wooden labyrinth similar to the classic wooden model game.

However, here you have to get through levels with canons, fans, magnets, pinball bumpers, switches and gates, laser beams, and more.

In a certain level, you even encounter a ball-duplicator (where you then have two balls).

And in another level, you encounter a ball re-sizer.

12. Tilt to Live

Like the title of the game says, you have to tilt the iPad to navigate your spaceship to stay alive by evading the red dots.

If you touch the red dots (or the red dots touches you), you loose.

But you have weapons at your disposal to ward off the red dots. To use the weapons, you have to navigate to the weapons icons.

More

Five free puzzle type games for the iPad are presented here.

This article was written April 2011. The games mentioned were free at the time of the writing. But they may no longer be by the time you are reading this.

World’s Toughest Sudoku

According to DailyMail in August 2010, linked here is the world’s toughest sudoku at the time.

It was created by Dr. Arto Inkala, an environmental scientist with a doctorate in applied mathematics. It was generated by a computer program that he devised. The puzzle has only one solution and can take someone 3 days to solve by logic.

The article says …

“So its difficulty – and frustration factor – lies in the number of mental leaps needed to complete each square.

Like chess, those trying to solve it will have to think several moves ahead. Many exasperating deadends have also been built in.”

The solution is linked here.

You can play sudoku online here.