I’m taking a break between work, work, packing, more work, and dinner, to get some things off my mind.

In my Tour wrap-up, I mentioned that Alexander Vinokourov (“Vino”) had tested positive for blood doping. That is, he tried to gain an unfair advantage over his opponents by receiving a transfusion of someone else’s blood before a stage of the Tour.

Velonews has a good write up on how they detect such doping. However, in the first paragraph of the section “Does it work,” the doctor seems to indicate that there hasn’t been a published study to check for false positive rates (type I errors) in blood doping detection tests. Without this evidence, the fact that, “hundreds of athletes have been tested using this technique and only a few positives have been found,” is irrelevant. We do not know what percentage of those suspect riders may have actually been clean.

The absence of this evidence is a huge threat to the validity of the interpretations of the test results, and it smacks of the kind of scientific arrogance and lynch mentality we’ve become accustomed to in the anti-doping community. (I do not mean to implicate Dr. Sovndal in this. He’s simply the messenger.)

It’s not as if a study to establish type I error rates would be difficult to conduct. It would actually be easier to clear the experiment through an institutional review board because healthy volunteers are not “vulnerable populations” (unless they’re pregnant, under 18, etc.), unlike the medical patients used in the study by Nelson et al.

It seems Vino’s people have the same idea. He crashed during the fifth stage of the Tour, and the resulting deep gash on his knee became infected. His national cycling committee believes “that the results of the A and B samples were a direct result of the violent fall Alexander suffered during the fifth stage of the cycling race” (source).

So, they’re taking the argument one step further: Not only have there been no studies into the rate of false positives, they have never investigated how blood infections could affect the fingerprinting of blood subpopulations. An interesting angle.

As we’re getting ready to move, we’ve consolidated Ben and Miles’ rooms into one. After helping Miles brush his teeth, Brooke sent him into their room and got Ben ready for bed. When she looked for Miles, she found him in his crib. No one had helped him in.

My guess was that he had used the small chest of drawers that is now next to his crib to climb in by himself. With both of us and my mom watching, I picked him up and set him in front of the crib. What we saw amazed and frightened us.

Miles is the fearless and sports-loving of our two sons. (Few things will melt a father’s heart faster than a two-year-old holding a baseball glove and asking, “Daddy pway catsh!”) Unfortunately, he’s also the small one. (He’s still in clothes he started wearing a year ago.)

Without hesitating, he grabbed the slats on the side of his crib and put his foot through to stand up on the mattress. He then moved his hands to the top of the crib, and, hanging on his arms, planted both feet on the slats. He pulled his body up until his shoulders were just over the edge of the crib and then moved his feet up a few inches. He was performing a technique not unlike an inelegant rock climbing “lay-back.”

Eventually, after cycling between moving his feet up and pushing/pulling his body over the top, he came crashing upside down on the mattress, beaming with pride over his accomplishment.

Of course, all Brooke and I could think of was that, if he could climb into his crib, he could climb out, and the floor wouldn’t provide the same cushy landing his mattress had.

I sometimes feel like the Tour de France only exists to show that fiction can never be as creative as reality.

Last year’s edition will be most remembered for Floyd Landis bonking one day, winning the next, and then testing positive for doping. His case is still in arbitration, so this year’s Tour is over before we even know who “won” last year’s.

So, hoping to avoid such a scandal, the organizers asked riders to sign an anti-doping pledge, which includes a commitment “to pay the UCI, in addition to the standard sanctions, an amount equal to [their] annual salary,” if they are caught doping.

This is something that many fans sitting between the voracious anti-doping league and the cheating riders have longed for. Currently, the only punishment for doping is to bar the rider from future events. Making a guilty rider repay their sponsors or cycling’s governing body raises the stakes to (hopefully) make doping less tempting.

(However, there also needs to be a proportionate increase in effort on the part of the anti-dopers to make sure that innocent riders are not caught in their wide net.)

Here’s a rundown of this year’s odd happenings:

1. A support rider tests positive.

So, the Tour began with a lot of hope for a cleaner ride, but it didn’t take long for that dream to crumble. Patrik Sinkewitz, a German rider on T-Mobile, crashed out of Stage 9, and was informed in the hospital that he had failed a doping test for testosterone over a month earlier.

Several things stink to high heaven about this case: First, this is the same complicated test that Landis’ attorneys showed was being carried out by underqualified lab technicians (though Sinkewitz’s test was probably performed at a different facility). Second, why did it take over five weeks for the announcement to be made? That delay cost T-Mobile a rider, as they would have replaced Sinkewitz had they known, and the Tour would have saved some face by not having an accused rider start the race.

The German news media stopped covering the Tour for one day in protest, but in protest of what wasn’t clear.

2. The suspect yellow jersey

At the same time, the yellow jersey fell on the shoulders of a Dane named Michael Rasmussen, who declared on the first rest day (after Stage that he was a rider the public could trust, despite, “his penchant to go to far-away Mexico for high-altitude training camps. Rasmussen’s wife is Mexican, but some suggest riders go to Mexico because the Latin American nation would seem a safe haven for dubious training practices.”

Note to self: If I ever have the desire to publicly state that people can trust me, I better not have any past shading dealings. Within 24 hours, two damaging news stories broke about Rasmussen.

First, the Danish national cycling team announced that Rasmussen had been removed from their squad not for testing positive, but for failing to be where he said he would be when they showed up for random drug screening. Each cycling organization has the right to show up and test any associated rider at any time. So, each rider fills out training forms stating where they’ll be. Rasmussen had lied and been caught. He was fined and given a written warning.

Second, Whitney Richards, a former American friend of Rasmussen claimed the Dane had once asked him to bring a pair of cycling shoes from the US to Italy. It turned out the shoe box contained doping products, and Rasmussen was trying to use his friend as a drug mule. Richards told Velonews the details back in 2001, but requested that no names be printed with them. Velonews refused to run the story under that restriction. After hearing Rasumssen claim the public could trust him, Richards told Velonews to run the story with names.

It didn’t seem to matter that Rasmussen was wearing yellow at this point in the Tour because his time trialing was so awful. No one thought he would hold the lead to Paris. In 2005, he had been in third heading into the final time trial. He crashed twice, and was off the bike another two or three times and dropped to fifth overall.

We’ll come back to this later.

3. The “most dangerous” contender

In their 30-second teasers for their Tour de France coverage, VS (the channel) asked who could win the Tour. They gave each contender a label. Alexander Vinokourov (AKA: “Vino”) was “the most dangerous”.

To understand why Vino’s positive test for blood doping is significant, there are three bits of his history you need to know. First, two years ago, when he was on the last year of his contract with T-Mobile, he pretty much refused to support his team leader Jan Ulrich and rode for himself instead. He also made the uncouth move of attacking on the final stage (which is considered more of a processional than a race), and jumped ahead of Levi Leipheimer in the overall standings.

Last season, Vino rode for Astana, a team from his native Kazakhstan, but was not allowed to ride in the Tour because five of his teammates were implicated in a Spanish blood doping investigation.

This year, Vino injured his knee in a crashed on Stage 5, and saw his chances of winning the Tour slip away as he fell more than four minutes behind his teammate (and former T-Mobile teammate), Andreas Klöden. Vino then won the Stage 13 1-hour time trial by more than one minute.

The next day (Stage 14), he crashed again, and finished the stage almost 29 minutes behind the leaders.

The day after that, he won Stage 15 by almost a minute.

That night, it was announced that he had tested positive for taking a transfusion of someone else’s blood before Stage 13, he was ejected from the Tour, and his team, including fifth-place Klöden, were asked to withdraw.

Klöden later stated he was contemplating retirement.

4. Another positive

Within 24 hours of Astana’s removal from the Tour, Cristian Moreni’s positive testosterone test from Stage 11 was announced and his team, Confidis, backed out of the race. Moreni admitted to doping.

5. The yellow jersey gets fired

Getting back to Rasmussen, the ubernontimetrialist somehow survived Stage 13 with his lead. When the race hit the Pyrenees, he began to put distance between himself an the other competitors. When he held off a young Spaniard named Alberto Contador in Stage 15 (which was followed by a rest day), he appeared to have the Tour locked up. Stage 16 provided an even better result as he held off both Contador and Leipheimer (Contador’s teammate) to win by 26 seconds.

Velonews immediately noticed something was not right, pointing out that many saw his victory “an affront,” and printed comments by admitted and repentant doper David Millar claiming Rasumssen had “ruined” the race. French authorities searched Rasmussen’s team’s bus. Tour organizers said they wouldn’t have let Rasmussen start the Tour had they known he had been kicked off his national team.

Eventually, the final blow was the word of a reporter and former rider, Davide Cassani, who claimed to have seen Rasmussen training in Italy, when his team thought he was in Mexico. As pointed out by Velonews, a passport stamp should be able to clear Rasmussen, but he has not offered such proof.

He was removed from the Tour and fired by his team the evening after winning Stage 16. The Tour directors say they’re better off without him.

Let’s think about this. When a rider tests positive, like Landis did last year, it is possible to argue the validity of the test, the possibility that the laboratory made a mistake, or even that the rider has abnormally high levels of hormones. However, if the rider skips out on a control, or, like Rasmussen, continually dodges testing, there can be no argument. In short, if riders expect the anti-doping controllers to play by the rules, so must they. On the other hand, if the anti-doping community punishes riders for “administrative errors,” they should observe their rules completely, and not excuse their own errors.

To close off my comments on Rasmussen, missing one doping control is a “mistake.” Missing four, as reported by Velonews, is just plain stupid. Had they been UCI test (rather than Danish national team tests) the third would have counted as a positive test.

6. Good news, muted finish

Team Discovery’s Contador inherited the yellow jersey from the ejected Rasmussen. His team did not celebrate, and he refused to wear it until he finished a stage in the lead. Leipheimer publicly stated he would sacrifice his shot at a top-three finish to support Contador. (Compare that to Vino’s history.) The final standings showed the second-closest Tour finish ever.

This Tour was definitely different than previous installments. I was checking the news periodically not for results (I already knew those), but to see who had been kicked out that day. It will be interesting to see how these situations play out in the next months, and how the organizers react next year.

P.S.

I cannot end my comments without a link to yet another stupid dog owner letting their pooch out on the route.

This dog appears to have even been on a leash. Of the two riders that crashed, the one in white (Sandy Casar) finished first on the day, the other (Frederik Willems) was dead last.

I’ll post a summary of this year’s Tour next week, but for now…. Wow.

The closest Tour ever was decided by only 8 seconds which separated Greg Lemond and Laurent Fignon in 1989. This year’s podium (barring an unheard-of final stage shakeup) will have 23 seconds between first and second, but only 31 seconds between first and third.

For perspective, consider that this year’s Tour has covered 2,127 miles. The leader, a young Spaniard named Contador, has completed that distance in 80 hours, 42 minutes, 8 seconds, for an average of 26.356 mph. His closest competitor, Aussie Cadel Evans, has ridden at 26.354 mph, and American Levi Leipheimer at 26.353 mph.

At those speeds, if the three were to ride for one hour, they would be separated by less than 15 feet.

P.S.

I half-jokingly told Brooke at the end of today’s time trial, that all these cyclists had to do now was pass the doping controls. No one who was suspicious of Rasmussen’s unusually good time trial earlier in the Tour should withhold suspicion of Contador’s performance today. Leipheimer’s and Evans’ times were closer to their personal handicaps.

For many people, the three people who made up the glam rock band Queen (known for Bohemian Rhapsody and We Will Rock You) have no distinct faces, names, or life. We tend to think rock stars fade, and go on performing at county fairs and such. This viewpoint, it seems, can be a disservice to professionals who often are as successful in other domains as they were in music.

For example, who knew that Steve Perry, who fronted Journey forever (Don’t Stop Believin’), followed his solo career (Oh, Sherrie) by becoming a successful producer?

Even more surprising, who knew that the guitarist for Queen, Brian May, had left doctoral studies in astrophysics when the band first tasted success in 1970? He recently took up his quest for a hood, and collected the last of his dissertation data this week. Maybe he’ll graduate this year, so I can pretend to be old by telling my students that I graduated the same year as one of the members of Queen.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070726/music_nm/queen_dc

With all that’s been going on, I’ve barely had a chance to follow this year’s Tour, but I try to catch at least the replay of the finish each day.

Two years ago, my brother-in-law and I were driving a support car in the Tour of Utah, when a train crossed the route. My immediate thought was how completely bush-league this made our race look. A month later, the same thing happened in the Tour de France. Odd coincidence?

That’s what I thought until that same brother-in-law crashed his bike, not into a car, or over a pothole, but over a dog. And then, just the other day, the same thing happened, in the Tour de France.

In typical French fashion, the camera stayed on the dog so everyone could see it was OK, while ignoring the rider (who did finish the stage on a different bike).

So I turned in my dissertation today. Five copies, printed on bond paper, 1.5″ margins on the gutter side of each page (1″ on the other), the front matter single-side-only, in APA style, with three sets of signed forms, and an electronic version to boot. I paid my $130 for binding and microfilming (do people still use that?) and was congratulated three times by the undergrads working in the library administration office.

Upon leaving, I had a feeling that reminded me of the Matrix. Right at the end, when Neo has finally mastered the Matrix, he flexes his shoulders and the world bends around him, as if it was controlled by him. Well, as I walked up from the bowels of the library, I felt I could let out a barbaric yawp
to shatter every window in the atrium.

Finding, therefore, that I was lacking some perspective, I detoured by the French Department, my old haunt, to humble myself by stammering through a conversation with the department chair.

(Il faut absolument que j’aille encore en France.)

There is a hill I absolutely hate.

It’s not long, probably less than a quarter-mile, and it’s not any steeper than climbs I’ve bicycled up. It’s also a climb I’ve successfully ridden, not like those around here that I’ll never complete because I won’t be in shape before I move.

It’s a dinky little grade just east of Richmond, where the Cache Valley Century begins and ends. Of course, for a first time 100-miler, you don’t even know it’s there when you arrive. The park’s at the top. The highway runs along the crest. The ride starts out going north, so you never see that the town is actually set up above a riverbed.

The first three hours passed by like a dream. I was in a paceline holding a steady 21mph. Then, at leaving the 60-mile rest stop, I realized I had nothing left. For three more hours I plodded along, mostly alone, towed by the occasional passing three-man group, but holding on for only a minute.

I had a rough idea of where I was, and, of course, I knew the mileage, but nothing could prepare me for the sight, more than a mile away, of that last climb. From that distance, it looked like a black monolith bisected by a double yellow lline.

Before coming around the bend, I had hoped it would be the last. The meandering route – east, north, east, north, west!?!?, north, east – had become more than tedious. Now I found myself hoping it would turn north or south (or even west again) rather than be faced with that stupid, insignificant hill.

Of course, there weren’t even any crossroads to turn on. I shifted one gear up, hoping to fool my legs into thanking me for the looming downshift. Even my granny gear wasn’t going to make it easy.

I’d ridden out of my saddle, “dancing on the pedals,” many times, but always to either go faster (than I should) or to ease some discomfort. Never had I felt that if I didn’t raise my butt I my wheels would stop rolling. Now was my first experience with this. My knees weren’t extending, but simply falling under the weight of my body as I rolled from hip-to-hip.

At the top, the unceremonious finish line presented itself: the park, the picnic tables, and the participants’ raffle.

I looked back, dwelled for a moment on completing my first century, and then mentally cursed that heinous little hill whose significance came not for what it was, but for where it was and when I encountered it.

I hate that hill.

Now I’m faced with another milestone in my life. The first part was a swim in a cool stream, or a walk on a pleasant evening. The latter stages were filled with backtracking, self-doubting, wars with friends, and comfort in the words of nemeses. Now I face another stupid, self-aggrandizing obstacle, who derives its power not from what it is but when it is.

I’m sure I will always hate it as well.

As we’re packing for our move, we’re having to decide what to keep and what to throw out. I found my old cahier from when I taught in France, and I was about to throw it away (I’m not going to be teaching French, especially not with that text, anytime soon), but I still flipped through it.

I found three pages at the back of the notebook that were research notes for my paleography study on Ste. Marguerite’s confrontation with the dragon. From these notes, its easy to see why I sometimes wish I had done my graduate work in the Classics, and gone on to become a medievalist. My teacher (who’s back in France now) once spent a summer traveling around Europe to transcribe the 19 existing copies of an epic love poem.

Just from this one afternoon with a card catalog, I could have justified a similar adventure. There’s even a reference to a manuscript at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

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My childhood could be defined by three toys: Legos, G.I. Joe, and Transformers. Ben and I still build Legos together (I’ve been eyeing a Mindstorm set for him), and I must be becoming a pinky liberal because I didn’t let Ben buy a cap gun in West Yellowstone yesterday, so Yo! Joe! doesn’t hold much meaning for me anymore.

Hasbro’s Transformers, on the other hand, present me with an interesting mix of nostalgia and imagination. My memories about them are mixed: I can’t remember every Transformer my brothers and I owned, but I can remember specifics about several (and the insane jealousy I felt over my friends who had newer models). My first was a yellow Lamborghini. Like all the early ones, it was die-cast and his hands detached because they wouldn’t fit in the car. My brother had a Bronco-like SUV, and I later got the 18-wheeler Optimus Prime.

I also remember the cartoon vividly, but I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Still high from passing my dissertation defense, and believing many stellar reviews, Thomas and I hit a late showing of Transformers on Thursday. I wasn’t expecting much, but I got even less. I guess I need something like this to remind me why I generally dislike the blockbuster fare.

I will first review the film on five points, without detailing any exact events in the movie (for those who haven’t seen it). Then I’ll go into detail of how this movie could have been so much better. I’ll clearly mark the spoilers.

First, the story is not original or moving, regardless of what the reviews have said. It’s a mixture of humor from Holes, pseudoscience from Men in Black, a motorcycle scene from Mission: Impossible II, and a climax from The Lord of the Rings. There’s even a bit of Herbie: Fully Loaded thrown in for good measure. This may be more a reflection of the genre and its tired-and-true ticket-selling formula than the film itself, but a weak genre will produce weak films.

Second, the characters are not well established and little effort is made to establish the value of each robot in the eyes of the viewer. When a “bad guy” dies, there is no indication of that event’s magnitude. Similarly, when a “good guy” is unceremoniously disassembled, there is no sense of loss.

The knowledge of an individual character’s worth is not necessary to emotive filmmaking. It can (and often is) replaced by massive battles, wherein the deaths of hundreds or thousands produces the same emotional effect as the attachment to one slain character. The Lord of the Rings, Saving Private Ryan, and Saints and Soldiers (heck, I’ll even throw in the Star Wars series) all mix both methods well. Transformers does neither.

Third, there is way to much verbal exposition in Transformers. While characters’ back stories are well developed through events, the plot is revealed mainly through characters explaining (usually pointlessly) their motivations and intentions to each other. This makes me think the writing process was front-loaded, with the initial character development happening at a meaningfully slow pace, and the plot being storyboarded in one afternoon.

Fourth, (perhaps another product of the genre) the “action” sequences are shot (rendered?) too tightly, leaving most of the “action” hidden. The viewer has a vague sense of what’s going on, but the details are hidden behind the blur of swooping cameras, swinging fists, and automatic machinegun rounds. The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, and other films showed this does not have to be the case.

Fifth, finally, and the most nit-picky (what did I expect from such a film), the obvious sellout to GM was too much to swallow. All but one of the “good guys” chooses a GM car for their vehicle: a Pontiac Solstice, a Hummer, a Chevy Camaro, and a ridiculously large GMC pickup. On the other side, the one mass-market “bad guy” vehicle is a Ford Mustang. Subtle, non?

Overall, Transformers is the type of movie I would rent on an evening when I had nothing better to do. But I always have something better to do than watch meaningless action films with little character development and rehashed storylines.

WARNING: Spoilers below

When The Lord of the Rings movies came out, I was not one to scoff at the omissions and alterations Peter Jackson made to Tolkien’s cannon. Movies are not the same as books or television shows, so their stories shouldn’t be the same. However, changes to the plot must be evaluated critically, especially if they degrade the quality of the product from that of the original.

Therefore, I didn’t care that the Transformers movie changed Optimus Prime’s truck, or that Megatron didn’t change into a gun (though I did appreciate a Decepticon whose hidden form was a boombox), and I could see some rationale behind not having Bumblebee be a VW.

My biggest problem with the Transformers mythos, as portrayed in the movie, was that they could change into anything they wanted. When my eldest brother and I watched the first episode of the seemingly long-awaited Transformers cartoon series, we were very disappointed – at first. The opening scene (and here’s where my vivid memories come in) showed the robot forms of the classic Volkswagen Beetle Bumblebee and (I believe) the Porsche Jazz emerging from an underground passage on their home planet of Cybertron. Their discussion revealed they were part of a failing resistance and were stealing some “power rods” to help the cause.

When they transformed into their vehicles, neither resembled the cars we had seen in their toys. Instead, they were futuristic hovercrafts that zoomed off. I remember my brother saying something along the lines of, “If they can transform into anything they want, that’s dumb.” (Such is the indelible impression sage words of a ten-year-old have on a younger brother.)

Fortunately (in the cartoon), as the storyline progressed, it turned out that when the Transformers crash landed on Earth, they were practically destroyed. Their starship’s automatic recovery probe sought out Earth vehicles as forms into which it rebuilt all of the robots. Therefore, no, Transformers could not change into anything they wanted, but what they changed into could be altered through significant repairs.

Unfortunately, the movie did not follow this path. The idea that a robot could look at something and then become it completely dissolves the individual strengths of each character, because each could become another. Blackout (the Decepticon helicopter) is listed on the movie’s website as being the “heavy lifter” of the group, to transport his non-flying buddies. Why would a robot like Barricade (the police car) need a helicopter to move him if he could simply look at a Cessna and change into it?

Transformers, in whatever instantiation, always showed a resemblance to their disguised forms. Most early models had the hood of their vehicle mounted on their robotic form’s chest. Wheels were also conspicuously displayed. It appears the filmmakers started with the robots, and then added half a quarter panel here, a piece of the door there, and a windshield there. The end result was a transformation process that is entirely too complex, takes too long, and seems mainly to hide the fact that the designers had no real idea how an 18-wheeler could turn into a robot. (BTW, the movie’s version of Jazz, seems to preserve some of the original Transformers’ traits, but Frenzy’s robot form shows no signs of either of his two disguised forms.)

Better examples of how Transformers should change form are the Citroën ads seen here: http://www.citroen.co.uk/c4/ (click “See the TV Ads”). Notice in both cases, the car changes into a robot in a single full-body shot, something that never happens in the Transformers movie.

The movie did pay homage to the cartoon in some minor ways. Optimus Prime wields a laser sword at one point, and Jazz (I think, it was unclear) stomps, sending off a shockwave. Ratchet is still a medic, even though his form is a Hummer rescue vehicle rather than an ambulance. And the campy humor is there (though more adult).

This homage though, exacerbates the inconsistencies in the story. Optimus Prime uses his sword to kill a Decepticon via decapitation. Frenzy (a smaller Decepticon) looses his head, but remains autonomous, and transforms into a cellphone. Also, Jazz is ripped in two, and “couldn’t be saved”. So, what does it take to actually “kill” a robot?

Now, on to the story. Why does Optimus Prime need to talk about “joining the All Spark to the Spark in [his] chest, destroying [them] both,” when we could have seen this through a story? Here’s an idea: An Autobot is mortally wounded in an altercation and, as Ratchet attempts to save him (“His Spark is fading”), Sam suggests using the Cube to save his life. To this, Ratchet explains what would be the outcome. In other words, use the story to expose the viewer to the implications, don’t ruin the pace of the story to explain it.

Why is it that the “Cube” only creates evil robots? On four occasions, it brings some machine to life (a cellphone, an Escalade SUV, a computer, and a vending machine), and in all four cases, the robots turn out evil. I’ll pontificate for a bit, but it seems that if Cybertron had existed for centuries before Megatron’s usurpation, that the Transformers are generally created good (or neutral) and then turned evil.

I usually don’t do this, but here’s how this movie’s story could have been much better: First, don’t start with the narration about the Cube. Use the story to bring that out slowly.

Second, the group of Autobots that come to Earth should be the last of what had been an army of resistance fighters, and this is their last chance to defeat the Decepticons who are not superior, but always gain advantage from the Autobot mantra of protecting the weak.

Third, include more, smaller altercations (similar to Bumblebee’s buttkicking of Barricade), but make sure each advances the story and/or explains the back story. Why in the world does it matter for Optimus Prime to reveal that Megatron was his brother after he was dead? Bring that fact out somewhere in the middle. As shown earlier, these events could demonstrate how the Cube could be destroyed. Smaller battles would also establish who the main heroes are on each side, making their eventual final confrontation meaningful.

Fourth, the Cube should bring to life neutral robots. How much more evil would the government look for experimenting on non-evil life forms? Which brings me to my rewrite of the climax:

Finally, in the last battle, the Decepticons should be overwhelming the Autobots, being reinforced every minute by other Decepticons arriving from the corners of the galaxy. This would introduce more “bad guys” than the handful we meet in the movie.

Cornered, and out of options, Sam bumps the Cube into the Escalade (just as he did in the movie), but it comes to life as a neutral robot who defends himself against the unprovoked Decepticon attack (effectively becoming an Autobot). The light bulb goes on over Sam’s head and he uses the cube to bring to life the military vehicles, the parked cars, even the motorcycle the Air Force dude rode in on. The resulting army of Autobots forces the Decepticons to retreat and fight another day.

Such an ending would mean there are more Autobots (and Decepticons) hiding amongst us, fighting a hidden battle for the future of the Universe. Can you say, “Sequel?”