The Omega Supreme of water sprinklers and a hair drier named Star Wars

The time has come in my house to retire the phrase "the Cadillac of...". People use that phrase to describe something as the best in its class but lately I think it's been being worn out. The last time I heard "the Cadillac of" being used was in a podcast where they referred to the PS3 as "the Cadillac of game systems". About all Cadillacs and PS3s have in common is that they're big, expensive and there aren't many games I like for either of them. Since I make the rules in the perceived reality in my head that I like to call the Kingdom of Macrocrania, I started replacing "the Cadillac of" with the much more relevant "the Omega Supreme of". I began using it in my daily conversations, hoping that it would catch on and spread from the one guy I used it on (Charles the cashier) to all over the world and make me internet famous overnight.

I got to test the spread of "the Omega Supreme of" when my water sprinkler broke and I had to get a new one. At Wal Mart the friendly helper guy tried to help me find the right water sprinkler for me, so when he asked what I wanted I told him I was looking for "the Omega Supreme of" water sprinklers. Apparently the term has not caught on yet because the guy kind of looked at me funny as I stared at his eyeballs hoping for the faintest glimmer of acknowledgement. I don't know what his problem was because even if you didn't know who Omega Supreme was, just the words would bring to mind a water sprinkler that was rugged, dependable and yellow.

Omega Supreme water sprinkler now sits on my lawn, dominating the landscape with its bright yellow ruggedness. When I look at it, all else fades into the background. It is mesmerizing. All attention is drawn to it. I took the now 5 month old Prince of Macrocrania out to look at it, too, but he wasn't as impressed. Watching the water sprinkler sprinkle the grass wasn't nearly as life changing an experience for him as it was for me. But today when I was blow drying my hair he stared in stunned amazement at the hair drier as if it were baby Jesus telling him the story of Star Wars. (But not the new movies, the first ones that I grew up with. Baby Jesus doesn't strike me as a fan of the prequel trilogy.)

My son's reactions to consumer appliances like hair driers and water sprinklers mirrors my own feelings about the new Transformer movie versus the old one. With the old one I was impressed by not just the robots but the total package-the exotic environments, epic scale story and the sci-fi nature of it all. This new movie is like my water sprinklers. The robots command attention but they're set against such boring locations that it's hard for anything not to look fantastic in settings like the desert or in suburbia. Having them engaged in what amounts to little more than a series of scavenger hunts isn't what I would describe as epic storytelling. That's probably the best way to describe my disappointment with the new movie. I guess I wanted to be as blown away by Michael Bay's Transformers as my son was by the hair dryer but instead my expectations got dumped on by the Omega Supreme of peeing robot movies.