Can three comedians create a legit sci-fi show? Comedians Ryan Beil, Maddy Kelly, and Mark Chavez are going to find out. Over eight episodes, they’ll try to write a serious, and seriously nerdy, pilot script. When they run into trouble they’ll consult Hollywood experts who have worked on things like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Firefly and science fiction superstars like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Rainn Wilson, Emily VanDerWerff and Neill Blomkamp. And in the final episode, professional actors will read their script, bringing it to life — for better or worse.

In 2011 an article titled “A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage” analyzed the appearance of the McRib between 2005 and 2011, and found that its appearance coincided with dips in pork prices. Basically, when pork is cheap, the McRib has a good chance of appearing. It can’t stick around for too long because if it did, it would cause pork prices to rise.

Moreover, the McRib is probably either a very low margin product or a loss leader for McDonald’s. It is the only sandwich on the menu in most locations that isn’t round, requires a different type of bun, special packaging, and handling.

you can argue all you like about whether or not to send messages to aliens, but we’ve been doing it for 100 years  without meaning to, so any alien civilization that has anything like the technology necessary to come and visit us already knows that we’re here, I mean there’s no hiding, absolutely not. We’ve been looking for alien civilizations with our primitive technology and haven’t found any, but you can imagine that anyone is out there who knows what they’re doing would be able to find us, so I think the cat’s out to the bag.

if there are technologies that will allow an alien civilization to travel from one star system to another, they are so technologically advanced and they have so much energy at their disposal, why would they bother harming us? Our preconceptions and our fears of alien civilizations are entirely based on human behavior and entirely based on human colonialism, where we needed to go to another country to take all the gold, or to take all of the slaves, because we didn’t have enough stuff here. But if you can travel from one star to another, you can make as much stuff as you want, you can make as much food as you want, and really planet earth isn’t giving you anything.

Technology seems to be highly, highly damaging to civilization, so you can imagine that anyone has reached that point that has managed to get over all of the disastrous social plagues that we have here, climate change and wars and racism and any civilization that can get past that and survive to the point of becoming technologically advanced, they’re probably pretty nice guys.

Currently, 28% of all Americans are weekly podcast listeners and 62% listen to some form of online audio every week.

There are currently over 2.2 million podcasts according to PodcastIndex.org, which is trying to be the most comprehensive list of podcasts.

Did you know that it’s believed Galileo was scolded by the Roman Inquisition for sassing his mom? That Isaac Newton loved to examine soap bubbles? That Albert Einstein loved to collect joke books, and that geneticist Barbara McClintock wore a Groucho Marx disguise in public?

By elevating candidates who can entertain over those who can think, mass media have made the election of dunces more likely. Fact-free and nuance-intolerant, these human sound-bite machines have reduced our most complex problems to binary oppositions: us versus communists; us versus terrorists; and that latest crowd-pleaser, us versus scientists.

In his 1977 interview with David Frost, Richard M. Nixon made his notorious declaration about the legality of a president’s actions: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump’s followers apply a similar rule to his behavior: When Trump does it, that means that it is not idiotic. Regardless of what he says or does, Trump is right, and the media, always doing a “hit job” on him, are wrong.

When the Confederate flag–wavers invaded the Capitol on January 6, it wasn’t hard to see them as the descendants of the Confederate flag–wavers Reagan addressed, forty-one years earlier, at the Neshoba County Fair. And, while most people assailed Trump for inciting his mob to overthrow the government, Reaganites still laud their hero for declaring, in his inaugural address, “Government is the problem.” Reagan helped stoke the anti-government anger that achieved critical mass with the Tea Party and exploded on January 6. Of course, his followers would argue that he was merely talking about reducing the size of government, not overthrowing it. But making that distinction would require something that Reagan and his successors in the Age of Ignorance have done their best to eliminate: nuance.

Ike had gone to a livery on the edge of town to get his rifle, and soon Doc Holiday was informed that Ike had his gun and was looking for him.

The Earps and Doc Holliday found them in an alley next to the C. S. Fly’s photography studio and boarding house, where Holliday was staying.

Here is the first big misconception about the fight. It didn’t take place at the OK Corral. The corral, by the way, was abbreviated OK, which stood for Old Kindersley.

The OK Corral was actually a few buildings away on the same block. It was probably used as the name simply because the gunfight at the CS Fly Photography Studio doesn’t really roll off the tongue quite as well.

There were five cowboys there, Ike and Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy Claiborne, and there were four on the Earp side, Wyatt, Morgan, and Virgil Earp, as well as Doc Holliday.

 

October 9, 2022 - I've probably said this many times on this web site, but the Chinese have a curse that I find very interesting.  When they use the curse on someone, they say, "May you live in interesting times!"

I don't know who put a curse on our entire planet, but we are definitely living in interesting times.  Will we be able to stop global warming?  Will Russia start using nuclear weapons in the Ukraine?  Will North Korea attack South Korea?  How long can Muslim countries force women to follow rules set by men?  How long can South American, Middle East and South Asian dictators remain in power?  Will Trump run for President again in 2024?  And how could we have elected someone like Trump in 2016?

There are a lot of books about Trump in bookstores today.  Below are six of the most recent.

Fascination with the Nile had grown not only because it is the longest river in the world, with a basin that spans more than a million square miles, one tenth of the African continent, but because it has made possible one of the oldest and richest continuous civilizations on earth. The fertile green swath of the Nile floodplain covers less than 5 percent of Egypt but is home to more than 96 percent of its population. The rest of the land is desert. So vital are the river’s annual floods that ancient Egyptians based their calendars on them, starting each new year with the first day of the floods.