MelGrubb.ToBlog()

I get mad about this every time I go to see a movie lately.  I’ve just paid approximately half of what I’ll eventually spend to own the freaking movie when it comes out on DVD (assuming I like the movie that is).  If I’m on a date, then I’ve probably blown the entire cost of the DVD, and this is before I’ve even considered buying popcorn at a price that kids’ fundraisers would be ashamed of.  I’ve now forked over a good chunk of money, and made my way to the theater where my movie is showing.  Now I get to be force fed advertising while I wait for the movie to start.  I’m not talking about the previews, which are a whole different half-hour I’ll never get back.  No, I’m talking about product advertising.

But that’s not what I’m mad about.  No, that’s all stuff I’ve been beaten into accepting over the course of my life.  I’m talking about just before the movie starts, when the AMC people decide to treat me like a child with the phrase.  "Please don’t spoil the movie by adding your own soundtrack".  Why don’t you just say "Don’t be a tool" and insult me the rest of the way?  At least Cinemark’s now-defunct "Front Row Joe" was mildly entertaining while reminding people not to yell out "Oh no, don’t go in there!" during the film.  Then there was that great clip with the two Indians hunting buffalo when a ringing cell-phone scares off the herd.  That one was awesome.  They need more of those.

This AMC audience insult reel has to go, though.  I’ve just given you enough money that I think I deserve to be treated like an adult.  Maybe I’ll just go to a theater that doesn’t insult me each time I give them money.  This is one of my many reasons for supporting the few remaining local theaters we have.  Places like Studio 35 need our support, and appreciate it enough to not treat us like lemmings who’ll just take the kind of abuse the megaplexes feel compelled to heap on us.

Let me start by saying that this movie is just plain wrong and just plain kick-ass in equal proportions.  You’ll spend an hour and a half saying "Oh no they won’t", "Oh no they didn’t", or "Oh God, they did".  You’ll say it about the gunfights just as much as you’ll say it about the plot, which is just as thin as it ought to be in a movie called "Shoot ’em Up".  It’s just enough story to explain the way to the next outrageously implausible situation.  Think "Kill Bill" with guns.  And that’s as it should be.  The villains are reeealy villainous.  You can’t possibly like them, and in true shoot-em-up fashion, they possess a seemingly bottomless supply of hapless, innacurate bodyguards, thugs, and other nameless red-shirt equivalents.  They’re so numerous, anonymous, and short-lived that I’m fairly certain a detailed analysis of the eventual DVD release will find the same stuntmen dying at least a dozen times apiece.

Our anti-hero isn’t merely hard-boiled, he’s completely solidified.  He’s so hard-core implacable that we don’t even get to learn his name.  No doubt about it, the James Bond folks are regretting the day they passed over Clive Owen for Daniel Craig, and Owen couldn’t have asked for a better "Up yours!" than this.  He’s a one-man killing machine, pissed off at the world in general and pretty much everyone in it individually.  He runs rich, inconsiderate drivers off the road for not using their turn signals, shoots bad guys in the foot for having ugly toenails, and shoots the ponytail off the back of a thug’s head because he thinks it looks stupid (I have some personal issue with that one).

As one of the few characters in the movie with a name, Paul Giamatti’s "Mr. Hertz" manages to be suitably evil.  More evil than he has been before.  Oh he’s been slimy before, sure, but this time he’s just plain evil.  He’s smug, he’s mean, he’s callous.  You hate him right away, and you spend the whole film wanting him to die.  But you really enjoy hating him because, for the first time in the history of film, there’s a villain intelligent enough to make the observation "Do we suck?  Or is he really that good?"  He’s even intelligent enough not to reveal any big secrets during his character’s obligatory exposition scene.  Overall, it’s an awesome job by Mr. Giamatti.  He’s portrayed a total caricature of a human being and somehow made him believable.

As for the gunfights… Even though it seems like they make up approximately 85% of the film, they don’t get old or tedious.  They are always new and inventive, and each one tops its predecessor in terms of style, ingenuity, and scale.  Just when you think a gunfight can’t get any weirder, it does.  It’s like a team of writers were placing bar bets, trying to out-do each other.

Writer 1: "I bet I can write a scene where the hero shoots people while holding a baby."
Writer 2: "Oh yeah, well I’ll write a scene where he shoots people while MAKING a baby, if you know what I mean (heh heh)."
Writer 3: "I’ll do better than that.  I’ll write a scene where he shoots people while DELIVERING a baby."
…
(Long pause)
…
Writer 1 & 2 (in unison): "Name that tune, dude!"

You think I’m making this up, don’t you.  No I’m not.  He really does those things.  And then it’s like the producer came along and upped the ante on them even more:

Producer: "Oh, so you think you guys are good, huh?  Well how’s this.  No fireballs.  You can’t blow up any cars, buildings, gas-tanks, nothing.  You may only flip one car, and… uh… let’s see… something hard.  I’ve got it!  The hero must kill at least two bad guys using only a carrot.  In fact, while you’re at it, I want you to make carrots an integral part of every scene… I just bought a carrot farm and I need to look out for my investment."
Writer 1: "Dude, you’d better be buying us pizza."
Writer 2: "And beer."
Writer 3: "As in "keg of"."

This is not high art.  This is not meant to be high art.  This is high body count, plain and simple.  A couple of bad guys even get killed by the credit sequence.  I’m not kidding, they don’t just get killed in the credit sequence, they actually get killed by the credits themselves.  What more could you want?  Four stars, Mel-bob sez check it out.

I’ve noticed this for a while now, meant to write something about it, and have just never gotten around to it yet.  Why is it that the English subtitles are the only ones that have a disclaimer or other parenthetical comment?  Every DVD we watch at home has either an asterisk or some explanatory sentence next to the English subtitle option, usually looking something like this:

• Spanish
• French
• English*

* (For the deaf and hard of hearing)

WTF?  Am I not allowed to use the English subtitles because I’m NOT deaf or hard of hearing?  Or is this explanation necessary because the American public is just so mind-bogglingly stupid that the English option needs to be explained to them so they don’t call up the manufacturer and ask them why their English-speaking DVD has English subtitles as an option?  Did the movie studios get so many questions from the knuckle-dragging public that they felt the need to put the explanation out there in full view just to shut them up?  If I’m not deaf or hard of hearing, can I call them up and pester them to put some more options on for me?  How about a DVD menu like this?

• Spanish
• French
• English*
• English**
• English***

* (For the deaf and hard of hearing)
** (For parents with sleeping kids)
*** (For those who just want to know what the hell the mumbly characters are saying)

You’d be surprised what insights you can get from turning the subtitles on.  Sometimes they tell you what snarky comment a character has just made under their breath.  I sometimes turn on the closed captioning for regular TV shows as well, particularly if any of the characters talks extremely fast, or is otherwise hard to understand.  I literally laughed out loud watching Battlestar last season when the hybrid (The naked woman with the white shower cap who sits in the Cylon tub and babbles incoherently) said at one point "I don’t care if it rains or freezes".  That’s friggin’ hilarious, and if you didn’t have the captions turned on, you missed it.  If you don’t get the reference, go look up "Plastic Jesus" and come back.

Anyway, I’m not so much insulted by the moronic political correctness of the whole thing, but by the compulsive need of American society to dumb-down everything from coffee cups (Of course it’s hot you IDIOT) to our DVD menus.  I swear the movie Idiocracy is coming true right before our eyes.  If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it.  It’s decidedly lowbrow humor, but there’s a point to be made there as well.  We are devolving into super-idiots at an alarming rate because of our own compulsive need to make everything idiot-proof.  So this movie is meant to appeal to the very people it’s lampooning.  But that’s the inside joke you see.  It’s like the way the South Park movie predicted its own fate, and just like clockwork, parents were up in arms over the effect that movie had on their kids when it was very clearly rated "R"… never for one second realizing that THEY were the ones the movie was talking about.  Personally, I think every potential parent should be forced to watch the South Park movie, and if they don’t "get it" then they should be forcibly sterilized and never allowed to raise children.

But please, just for once, could Hollywood stop assuming I’m an idiot and just let ME decide why I might want to turn the English subtitles on?  Just give me that much credit, okay?

The design is nothing groundbreaking.  I’m just taking a little bit from here, a little bit from there, and wrapping it up into what I consider to be a very simple, yet powerful set of classes.  Lets start with the idea of a set of reusable, common rule methods to check common business rules like verifying that a string field is required and must be a maximum of 30 characters long.  Add in a few rules for testing other simple scalar types, and you’ve got the basics covered.  We’ve all built this class at least once.  We may as well call it the "Hello Rules" class, right?

Next, we need a place to keep track of what rules have been broken, so that we can display them to the user.  I have, in the past, created strongly-typed collections for storing these results.  In this design, I’ve adopted the use of Generic collections instead.  I haven’t created a strongly-typed collection since sometime last year, and I’m finding that I like the use of Generics quite a bit.  They can be very powerful, and eliminate the tedious repetitive coding, or code generation template editing that strongly-typed collections require.

Now we need to get the broken rules into the collection.  A common design is to build your rule checking methods to accept this broken rules collection as a parameter.  Essentially we are saying "If this rule doesn’t pass, here’s where to put your complaint."  During validation, the entity calls a rule, implemented as a method in some common rules library class, passing it the value of the property being validated, a reference to our broken rules collection, and whatever other parameters the particular rule method requires.

I was intrigued by an older design of Rocky Lhotka’s in which the addition of the broken rules was handled by the collection rather than by the rule.  In this design, the results of the rule were passed directly to the collection.  This was the equivalent of saying "Remember this rule if it’s broken, otherwise forget it".  Something about this arrangement interested me.  Putting the collection in charge of doing the adding and removing seemed like a pretty good idea.  If I remember correctly, it had something to do with preventing outside code from messing with the contents of the collection, but that didn’t matter to me.  I just liked the aesthetic of putting the collection in charge of its own contents.

The externalization of the rules still bothered me, though.  I wanted to design a system that was wrapped up in a tidy package, with fewer "moving parts" to deal with.  I decided to combine the common rules into the collection class itself so that I could just tell the broken rules collection to evaluate a condition and add a rule to itself if it was broken.  I liked this design so much that incorporated it directly into the framework I developed at the time.

I still like the general "shape" of that design, and have created a newer, generic-based implementation.

As it turns out; no… no I could not be a roofer. I know now that I wouldn’t last a day; and if somehow I did, I’d be dead by the end of the week.

On Tuesday, the roofers came to do the house. I decided a while back to take advantage of having a dumpster there and do my garage at the same time that the professionals would be doing the house. It would give me an easy way to dispose of the old roofing, and an excuse to be outside all day so I could make sure that all the proper materials were being used in all the proper places. No-one wants to pay for fiberglass-reinforced underlayment and wind up with 15 lb. felt instead. Not that the installers would intentionally rip you off, but when the guy with the truck that drops off your stuff is missing some of it, and has the wrong colors of other items, you really ought to check the rest of the load. If I had paid for 15 lb. felt, then that would be fine, but the shingle manufacturer requires you to use a certain kind of underlayment (which they just so happen to manufacture) in order to qualify for their warranty. This specific underlayment, by the way, was one of the items missing from the aforementioned delivery truck, resulting in the job coordinator having to drive around town scraping together three rolls of the stuff from various stores so that the job could continue, and I’d get to keep my shingle warranty.

So while the pros were setting up 30′ extension ladders, I was setting up my 10′ a-frame. How hard could it be? The detached garage is only 16’x22′, the pitch is maybe 15 degrees at the most, and I did a garage roof much larger than this with my dad back in high school. What could go wrong? Well for starters, I think the 2007 Mel is about double the mass of the 1988 Mel, a little stick-figure of a boy by comparison. Secondly, the garage I did with my dad was a new roof with nothing to tear off. Tearing off is precisely all that I accomplished over the course of an entire day in which the pros tore off and reinstalled the whole house, with the exception of a small trim section that had to wait until the next day. My progress was slow, even after one of the pros loaned me a vicious looking shovel/pry-bar/spikey thing that reminded me of a lirpa from the Star Trek episode "Amok Time"… you know the one I’m talking about.

(Note: I didn’t actually know the name of the Star Trek weapon… I had to look it up. I’m not that much of a geek)

Also, I found out that there’s a very good reason that the roofers show up at your house at 7:30 in the freaking morning. Once the sun gets high in the sky, not only does it become heat-stroke-inducingly hot up there on the roof, but the shingles become gooey, sloppy, floppy, and generally damn-near impossible to remove. In retrospect, after tearing off the first half of the roof in a pretty decent amount of time, I probably shouldn’t have taken a "break" to go buy the materials for putting the roof back on. The second half of the roof was your basic living hell to remove. Everything turned to glue, and the nails were no longer simply coming along for the ride with the shingles. For the rest of the day I played hide and seek with the sun, climbing up on the roof to scrape off some more liquid shingles whenever the clouds rolled in, and then dashing back inside the house when the sun came back out.

I managed to get the tar paper down (15 lb felt: after all, it’s the garage) before the sun disappeared on me for good, but not a single shingle. So that became my project for the rest of the week. Fortunately, putting shingles on is a lot faster than taking them off. Oh, and while I’m on that subject, I’ve seen some commercials for local roofing companies boasting about how every shingle they install is hand-nailed like it’s some point of pride for them. Why would nails installed individually by the hands of a precariously balanced, sweaty, heat-stroked dude be better then the extremely consistent results of a nail gun? My father was quite the woodworker, and told me to use a nail gun whenever possible because you don’t want to be repeatedly shocking and stressing your project. One good focused shot is better than several clumsy unfocused hits. Hand-nailed shingles? No thank you. Any miss with the hammer results in a bruised and damaged section of the materials that are supposed to protect my home for the next 30 years. Of course, I hand-nailed the garage because I don’t happen to HAVE a nail gun, or indeed the air-compressor required to run it, and I’m perfectly happy to save that money and spend it on something that I’ll have a future use for. Nail guns are very specific to particular ranges and sizes of nails. It’s not like I could buy a roofing nailer, and then use it to build cabinetry. They’re different animals.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any more full days to devote to the installation phase, and the weather man kept saying we were about to have a monsoon, so I was up on the garage roof until 11:30 on Wednesday getting as much of the roof covered as I could before the rain hit… which of course it didn’t. I had to finish the roof on Thursday, the day that it was supposed to rain like crazy… and still didn’t.

I may have mentioned this before, but I have the curious ability to manipulate Murphy’s law. For instance, when we’re waiting for a movie and it’s just not starting on time, I’ll pull out the phone and start up a game of Tetris. Before I’ve cleared the first row, the lights go down. I never realized I have this power over the weather, though. So I guess tonight I should wash the car so that it will finally rain, and make my last three days of living hell worthwhile. The bright upside of this whole thing is that I’ll never ever have to do it again. Not because the shingles are going to last forever, but because I’ll be in my 60’s when they finally wear out, and somehow I don’t think I’m going to volunteer for the job again at that point.

So, in conclusion. I need to think of something else to keep in my mind as the fall-back plan if this business ever does finally drive me over the edge. I’m thinking I could drive a garbage truck. Especially now that they have those kick-ass robotic arms that do the heavy lifting while you ride in air-conditioned comfort. It’s as close to driving a battle mech as any of us are likely to get anytime soon. Sure it’s not a glamorous job, but the massive robotic claw more than makes up for it, I think. And the odds of repeatedly smashing my fingers with a hammer would be greatly reduced.

Usage:
Dude, the BA totally whiteboarded me into taking that feature.

As programmers, we try to "factor out" repetitive behavior and logic whenever we can. At least that’s what we like to think. But when it comes down to it we repeat ourselves a lot.

(Hint: This is funnier if you take a deep breath and try to get it all out in one big rambling sentence… you’ll fail, but it’ll be funny)

We build frameworks so that we’ll never have to solve the same problem twice… at least, that is, until you change employers, the whole "intellectual property" thing kicks in and you have to try to re-implement your best ideas all over again from scratch which, by the way, totally sucks when you just CANNOT for the life of you think of a better way to do something simple such as enumerating the different ways in which multiple conditions can be combined together and so you’re left dumping your brains onto the back of a drink-stained Bob Evans placemat over dinner because the aforementioned intellectual property rules prevent you from simply looking back at source code that you shouldn’t even have but hey, it’s burned on the same CD as all your Battlefield 1942 patches that you’re not about to download again because just finding the damn things would be a major pain now that everyone but you turned their backs on that game and ran off to plunk down another $50 for a newer game that will be just as obsolete in two years time, and all the game-deserting rat bastards left you behind with nowhere to re-download said patches for a game that no-one plays anymore, and frankly you probably won’t either unless for some reason you actually DO throw the CD out in which case you’re guaranteed to get a call the next day from your old clan members talking about how they’re "getting the band back together" asking if you still have the patches around, and asking if you could burn a copy for the others since they can’t find the needed patches and they’ve all agreed that they’d all really like to play "that mod that dude made with the cars and stuff". So you’ve kept the CD around, and the old source code that you already know works but you dare not look at because of the same deep-seated superstitions that prevent you from holding onto useful things like old company-logo-imprinted coffee mugs no matter HOW perfectly-shaped they are for holding your pens (recent), or indeed how virtually indestructible they seem when you try to destroy them (old) in some "closure" ritual that you think will somehow purge you of your pent-up superstitions, guilt, and/or homicidal rage for the smug-faced executive tool that just destroyed your family life for the foreseeable future while you search for another gig.

(Note to ex-coworkers, this particular "tool" worked for a company with a three letter acronym involving no A’s or W’s, but a statistically high number of C’s)

And even if you DID sneak a peek at your old source code it wouldn’t do you any good because you realize how far your ideas have come since then, and how inadequate your old architecture was when it comes to implementing your latest brilliant world-domination scheme which coincidentally requires you to implement an ever-so-familiar abstract representation of a query which may or may not end up being translated into SQL for consumption by a relational database, only this time it needs to squeeze its way through a black box full of sharp pokey things known as on ORM layer whose name may or may not start with "N" and end with "Hibernate", all the while knowing full well that if you SHOULD happen to pull the world’s first totally generic, tool-independent query generator out of the lower decks Microsoft will just turn around and release their Entity Framework the next week, rendering everything you’ve done completely obsolete just like they did when they rendered useless all the flashiest, most useful parts of your personal code library the day they released .NET, or like the more recent death-blow that the Enterprise Library gave your validation framework and role-based security architecture, making you question whether you really want to set yourself up for that kind of disappointment by sitting down to redesign and reimplement stuff you’ve done before just so you can watch it get run over by an 18-wheeler with a Microsoft logo on it mere moments after you’ve removed its training wheels, kissed it gently on the head, and told it how proud it makes you.

Wait…what was I talking about?

Oh yeah, repetition. So I’m sitting here working, and find myself face-to-face with something I’ve seen and/or created about a hundred freakin’ times over the course of my career… a class called "Address". Now I swear I’ve solved this problem to death for a myriad of different clients most of which started as small, local companies that swore up and down that they would never, ever be doing business outside their home town and therefore didn’t need to worry about things like Canadian postal codes or country fields and were later, quite predictably, purchased by international companies who actually DID care about such things thereby necessitating a last minute overhaul that you’re called on to perform within a completely unrealistic time frame because the huge data integration push is coming up next monday, and they can’t comprehend that you can’t just flip a magic switch and rebuild their entire application to understand international addressing schemes even though these are the same people who had to make the business decision that it wasn’t worth the hours it would have taken to design the address class correctly in the first place because the budget and/or timeline just wouldn’t tolerate the extra load that they seem to have magically forgotten about now because in their minds all fixes and modifications are trivial. I consider myself lucky this time because this particular Address class I’m looking at today WAS implemented correctly the first time, and CAN handle international addresses. Still though… It seems to me like this is one of those problems that ought to have been solved "Once and for all" by now. There’s a feeling that somewhere in the .NET framework is the Address class to end all Address classes, the one true, golden implementation of THE most common class in all of computerdom and that somehow I’m just not looking in the right namespace for it.

I could start an open source project to pound this particular nail in once and for all. I could implement THE address class, and immortalize my name forever as the developer who finally did it. The developer who finally created the one great reference implementation of the ONE class that EVERY freakin’ project on Earth needs. The all-singing, all-dancing, all-inclusive address class at last. I could… but I guarantee that the .NET framework V.(n+1) would then include a somehow ever-so-slightly-MORE-brilliant version of exactly the same thing, and I’d be left standing on the side of the road holding another pair of freshly-removed training wheels in my hands, staring at a street littered with bicycle detritus, and looking around for the hidden camera.

All the radio stations seem to have Stone Sour’s "Through Glass" on overdrive rotation lately, and it’s really beginning to piss me off.  The last time a song on the radio annoyed me this much was Hoobastank’s "The Reason". (See "The Atrophy of Rock & Roll")

Whereas "The Reason" was a completely emasculating ditty about removing your own soul and replacing it with one more to your girlfriend’s liking, "Through Glass" is a monotonously repetitive and completely meaningless collection of randomly-selected words and phrases.  I haven’t done an in-depth statistical analysis yet, but it seems to me that by the time you’ve heard the first 10 seconds of the song, you’ve heard 90% of the rest of it.  This song was on the radio while I was installing crown moulding in the kitchen a couple weeks ago, and I swear I made it halfway around the kitchen before this crap was finally over.  It just droned on and on and on ad nauseum.  Please don’t correct me if I have a syllable or two wrong here, I really don’t care to seek out the song to double-check it, but I think after that first exposure to the song I had the chorus fairly-well committed to memory.

Excuse me?  Can anyone help me extract a coherent thought from this?  What glass?  The glass in the door a girlfriend has locked between her and you because you’re a blithering idiot?  Perhaps it’s the glass in the door of the rubber room where this crap was written.  Hey, they’re nice words and all, and I’m sure in the hands of a skilled writer they could be coaxed into something more closely resembling human communication.  I could forgive the words if they showed up once or twice over the course of the song.  It’d be a little abstract train of thought thing.  But after the 500th time it gets repeated, the train of thought begins to resemble the Lionel around the Christmas tree, you know?  It’s going nowhere, and it’s going there slowly.  And then there’s what can only be described as the sub-chorus, a kind of recursive variant on the standard Rock & Roll verse/chorus/verse structure involving further levels of indenting.

Once again… WTF?  It’s almost like he’s trying to say something… almost.  Is there something in your head that you’re trying to get out here, because I’m not getting it, man.  The stars are lying to me?  Wait here while I go get my tinfoil hat, okay?

I won’t reprint all the lyrics here, but feel free to go look them up, and get back to me if you can find the slightest shred of meaning in there.  Hey, I’m all for meaningless songs, I mean the Cocteau Twins’ lyrics are as close to meaningless as you can get.  Half the time they’re not even words, but that’s because Elizabeth Fraser tends to use her voice as an instrument, not as a communications mechanism.  Even when she is singing words, she’s polishing their syllables, and glossing them over such that they don’t even resemble themselves anymore.  They’ve become soft-focussed silhouettes of words by the time she’s done with them, and they sound just beautiful even if they don’t mean a thing.

There is, however, a subtle difference between scatting and babbling, and this dude’s babbling.

The kids did very well on their last report cards, so they got to pick where they wanted to go.  They wanted to do one of the indoor waterparks, especially after hearing me talk about the Kalahari resort where CodeMash took place.  So today we went to "Fort Rapids" here in Columbus, and I noticed a few things.

1. 2007 is apparently the year for shit brown bathing suits.  I must have seen 50 of them today, on people of all shapes sizes and ages.  Some had stripes.  Some had polka dots.  Some had pink frilly trim.  But however they were embellished, their basic color could only be described as "shit brown".  So there’s either a nasty fashion trend on the horizon, or that was the only color left on Fort Rapids’ gift shop racks, and everyone forgot their suits today.
2. I’m not exactly in "model" shape anymore.  I was, for a brief time in the mid-90’s, but I’m not now.  I’m married, I have a sedentary job, and video games are too damn good these days.  So I’m carrying a lot of extra weight around.  I’m not delusional about my looks at all.  I think I may be alone in this though, at least in Ohio.
3. Even if you ARE completely delusional about your weight, plugging up a water slide has GOT to be a life-changing moment of revelation.  No, I didn’t plug up a water slide, but someone else did.  The "Blackout Pass" was shut down, taking all the other water slides with it while the paramedics were called in to extract someone from the pipe… someone we will refer to as "Augustus Gloop" for lack of a proper name.  It took them at least an hour to get Augustus down and out the door, and they never did reopen that particular slide.

Now to be fair, I don’t think the person they took out on the back-board was QUITE large enough to actually stop up the pipe, so some rule-breaking, showoff, spinning-around behavior must also have been involved.  We’ll never know the whole story, since the ride’s totally opaque, but that slide’s only got TWO freakin’ turns.  It’s a pretty basic slide, two right-hand turns into a spinny toilet-bowl thingy.  Observe the following crappy cellphone camera picture.

Since our victim never made it as far as the vortex, that only leaves the two turns.  You can’t possibly be going fast enough during turn 1 to do any kind of actual damage, so that only leaves turn 2 at the bottom of the hill.  That’s not exactly a sharp turn, either.  I’d say it’s a 30 foot diameter at the very least.  The math says someone wasn’t following the rules.