Watch This

Happy July 4th, everybody!

Have a ton of fun this gorgeous Sunday, but please don't forget how relatively important your place is in the thick of this vast, chaotic universe--the purpose of your existence is entirely under your control and there are no limits.

[Thanks for the tip, Bob. -Ed.]

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PEOPLE OF CALIFORNIA: YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Despite the teeth, the occasional Kermit voice, the melodramatic coughs, amateur production values, and complete lack of evidence, please don't treat this warning lightly, Californians.

Please pray for the safety of all your loved ones and, since that never works, make sure to have your everything ready to go by the crack of September.

Oh, and eat your heart out, Katie Couric--something tells me Frankie is ahead of the curve on more than just baldness and he won't be at his own station for much longer...

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Are we not already?

Theoretical physicist and stater-of-the-obvious Stephen Hawking recently informed the people of Earth that they should be afraid of aliens.

Viz:

World renowned scientist Stephen Hawking believes extraterrestrial life almost certainly exists -- and humans should be extremely cautious about interacting with it.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on:

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is "a little too risky". He said: "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."

(courtesy Huffington Post)

I mean, how many movies do we have to make/watch about this exact hypothetical situation before scientists understand that we get it?

I wish Stephen Hawking and his ilk would stop being so theoretical/theatrical and spend their time on more constructive endeavors, like inventing an alien-slaughtering death ray.

In other news, you should be afraid of snakes--very afraid:

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Men Will Do Anything to Justify Finding Skinny Women Sexy

A group of Dutch scientists recently decided to further probe the fertile scientific mystery of why men prefer to have sex with skinny women, a conundrum that has plagued many of the finest minds in the Western World, as well as most fat women, for millenia.

The pioneering research in the field, which I read about years ago but have been unable to find online, discovered that even men on a remote island who had never seen a copy of Vogue or watched TV found skinny women sexier than larger women--despite the fact that this culture actually prized fat women, as in the Rubenesque heyday for lazy women.

The landmark discovery--that men of all cultures prefer a woman with a waist 70% the size of her hips--was no doubt praised by the avant garde fashion industry, as it boldly refuted the accepted notion that unrealistic images in the media have unfairly shaped sex appeal in the modern age.

7/10 is the biological magic number. Huh. I guess it isn't that unlikely that everything follows a formula, as much as we humans would like to believe we are above the trappings of our biological directives.


Enter the enterprising Dutch rogues, who for some reason decided to outfit a van with two womannequins of different waist-hip ratios (70% and 85%) and drive it around, asking random men to step inside and, in some cases, blindfold themselves, in order to see which inanimate object they would prefer to have sex with. The three categories of test subjects were: blind men, sighted men, and sighted men wearing blindfolds.

Which begs the question--who gets in a stranger's van and blindfolds themselves, much less to grope a womannequin in a "tight-fitting dress?"

You might as well call the soon-to-be-published research paper "Future Victims of Serial Killers Also Prefer Women with a Waist/Hip Ratio of 70%."

Re-posted from USA Today, of all places:

"The blind participants were instructed to feel and touch the waists and hips of the two female mannequin dolls," says the new study. "The experimenter asked them to rate the attractiveness of the body." Then they repeated the effort with sighted men, both the blindfolded and non-blindfolded, recruited by parking the van at a shopping center and asking for volunteers. Honest.

So, you see--it's totally okay for the media to continue promoting skinny women with perfectly-engineered breasts, since men literally cannot help but lust after them. I mean, science is on our side--it's pure biology! It's not our fault! Honest!

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Chuck Berry's Ghost Must Be Stoked

Ditto for those of Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson (no relation to Jack White's hero, Blind Willie McTell, who evidently did not try hard enough in life).

Why are these three specters so totally pumped, prancing around the shadowy netherworld like king shits in the outhouse?

Because they each have a song on a 12-track gold-plated copper record aboard both Voyager 1 & 2, which were launched in 1977, passed Pluto in 1990, and won't encounter another planetary system for approximately 40,000 years.

One side of the record in question

The other songs were either classical--interestingly, Bach got 3 tracks, Beethoven 2, and Mozart only 1--or tribal, which isn't surprising.

For the full track listing, please visit the fantastic Lapham's Quarterly.

This oddball mixtape could merely be a reflection of the musical tastes of Carl Sagan, who chaired the selection committee, or it could be the result of a powerful equation devised by the Brains Trust to scientifically weed out the most representative music ever recorded on planet Earth, which would be great to get my hands on, in case I am ever called upon to update the mixtape by factoring in the music of the last 33 years, or in case I just want to play around with it when I'm bored.

Either way, questions inevitably spring to mind:

1. Why no Rolling Stones, Beatles, Fats Domino, or Elton John?

2. Was Roy Orbison, aka The Big O, [a fascinating wikipedia entry, btw -Ed.] pissed at being snubbed? Something tells me he was, and that, as was his wont, he blamed the success of Pretty Woman for it.

3. Why send only one record? Was cargo room really that tight?

4. Couldn't it have been a double-LP gatefold, with some beautiful Richard Avedon photographs on the cover?

5. Shouldn't they have consulted me on this before I was born?

If anybody knows where Carl Sagan's ghost hangs out, I'd love to accost him and get some answers. So, you know, let me know...


[Note: Chuck Berry is supposedly still alive, aged 83, but I see no reason to alter an otherwise adequate blog entry... -Ed.]

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Paris Hilton May Plague You For Millenia

I realize I'm behind the times, but here goes...

This just in:

Out there in the ether, there is a blog maintained by a man who wants to live forever.

This being his main concern in life, the author writes about a wide variety of things that affect mankind's ability to live forever--things such as nuclear weapons, rain in Africa, and cryonics.

And, trust me, asshole, when you are a man who follows cryonics, there is no way to avoid this revelation:

Paris Hilton has paid a bunch of money to have her body preserved for potential reanimation--along with the the bodies of her two pet dogs.

Say, wha?!!

‘The Simple Life’ star said: “It’s so cool. Almost all the cells in the body are still alive when death is pronounced.

“And if you’re immediately cooled, you can be perfectly preserved.

“My life could be extended by hundreds and thousands of years.”

So, you have been warned--if you, too, like Walt Disney, desire to live forever, you will still be plagued by Paris Hilton and her ilk.

Reconsidering yet?

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Bad Science

I had never heard of this movie until I read this disappointing article on movies featuring bad science today, which is surprising because Delroy Lindo has been my favorite actor since Romeo Must Die.

I know we all know how bad movies can be, but still--check out this summary:


Who the hell thought this movie would be attractive at the multiplex? Were they ever allowed to make a decision again? Sadly, they were.

The majority of movies that involve bad science are tolerated because most people have no idea it is bad science and the story is enjoyable. Examples: Not that many people know cold fusion does not exist, much less what it is, but they still enjoyed The Saint; time travel is not possible, yet Back to the Future is awesome.

However, I feel like every person over the age of eight knows that the center of the Earth is so hot that people would be instantly incinerated before they even got there, even if they aren't aware of the lethal poisonous gases down there or the fact that the Earth's core would not stop spinning.

So how does the movie get around all this? It doesn't. The scientists unload at the Earth's core without masks, protective gear, or some sort of jerry-rigged "heat neutralizer." Instead, they just sweat a lot.


An even more interesting problem, however, is the fact that after the hydrogen bomb detonates in the Earth's core, the resulting tidal wave of lava radiating outward would most likely cause every volcano on Earth to experience a simultaneous eruption of epic proportions, killing untold millions and spewing so much ash into the atmosphere that we wouldn't see the sun for years causing crops to fail, people to riot, Armageddon--a species extinction on par with that of the Cretaceous period.

But that doesn't matter, because science must always serve the story, and this is a great story, right? Well...to be fair, let's look at the plot more closely, in pictures:

This is where a nerd with a huge penis drops the science, explaining to the audience what exactly is going on here, and why it is an urgent problem; Aaron is enthralled.

This is where the Douche Dream Team, doing their best Armageddon impression, is finally assembled and goes for a walk on the beach before breaking fast at the Ihop near LAX.

This is what it looks like when they get down there,
exactly as predicted by the nerd's sophisticated 1976 modeling technology.

This is what it looks like when the Fat Man sings.

Aaron and Hilary are unable to avoid getting hot and bothered
as they watch the nuclear explosion from a nearby ridge,
in Aaron's sweet-ass Thunderbird convertible.

For no reason whatsoever, since they were totally a safe distance away,
Aaron turns into an asshole/scientific implausibility
and ruins the moment with Hilary, so they all go home.

Preparing for her new role of celebrity planet-saving-scientist,
Hilary exercises like a madwoman every day and loses touch with reality.

In retrospect, maybe it wasn't such a bad movie after all...

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Warning: Your World Is About to Be Turned Upside Down

What a waste of time, brainwaves, money, computing power, and newspaper inches.

Seriously? Somebody had to work really hard to figure out that most cultural events in New York happen at the grandiose cultural centers built in Manhattan, and the most talked-about theatrical performances happen on Broadway?

Without even reading the entirety of her amazing study, I bet she determined that most movies screened in Los Angeles occur in movie theaters.

Thanks, Sarah Williams! Now go drink a fucking bucket of hydrochloric acid* and stop wasting everybody's time.


* I have yet to receive the funding necessary to fully study the results, but I have a pretty strong hunch that this will kill you**. Can you let me know so I can put a little red pushpin on my map of your neighborhood?


** Legal disclaimer: I do not actually want Ms. Williams to kill herself. Maybe she can just quit her day job, move to rural West Virginia, and spend the rest of her life quietly tilling soil and muttering to herself***.


*** I wonder which of those two scenarios is more appealing. I would definitely require a long hard think about it, were I presented with those two options...

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What Has Science Been Doing?

If we have just discovered this?

Not for the first time, I wish I had a time machine, so I could warn my ancestors and re-live my entire life up to my knees in the accumulated product of lifetimes-worth of individually-expelled nostrils. Wait...

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