Good Ship Topeka Deploys

My first boat, USS Topeka (SSN 754), left on deployment earlier this week; here's a picture:

According to this story, Topeka was featured in the new movie "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen". Even when we first got around to San Diego in 1991, the Topeka was kind of the "go-to" boat when it came to media availabilities. With her recent appearance on "24", along with this movie, it looks like they're still using her as the local Media Darling. (I won't see the movie until Saturday, but from what I've heard from some family members, who went to the midnight showing Tuesday night, the boat doesn't fare so well.)

Update 1701 27 June: I saw the movie. I didn't have enough thoughts about it to make it worth writing a full "Movie Review" post, but I liked it OK. It was basically a huge advertisement for American servicepeople and advanced U.S. military gear, and I was cool with that. (That's probably also why a lot of media critics don't like it.) The movie was pretty long (almost 3 hours) so I should have looked it up on RunPee before I went. As usual, there were some technical problems with the submarine sections: the submarine is shown as being on the surface while "on station", but is able to submerge within about 30 seconds. The ocean where Megatron is buried, the Laurentian Abyss, is described as being "9,600 fathoms" deep -- it's actually about just over 2,000 fathoms deep, and the deepest point in the actual ocean is 5,900 fathoms. The 3-D capabilities of the shipboard sonar are at least explainable if one assumes that they've instrumented the area where a submarine is on duty "at all times". They also showed my old carrier, USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74), right before she somehow changed into CVN 71. (The Stennis shows up again later as herself.) Except for the part where the sub was on the surface, the gaffes weren't actually too distracting, so I give the movie three Hot Decepticons Coeds out of five.