Tiger: The Price of Fame

Okay.  I should be above this, I know.  And I have to say that Tiger's public apology--while hardly worthy of monopolizing the evening news as it did--was as gracefully done as such a thing can be.

That said, this is still funny.

A Nine-Year-Old on the IQ of Bats

Last night, at the playground, just after sunset:

Doc: "Emma, did you know that bats will chase a pebble if you throw one up in front of them?"

Emma: "Are bats retarded?"

The Hangover

We saw this movie today. It's what anyone should do when the temperature outside is hot enough to shrivel the grass while you watch. I laughed. I was not insulted. It was not stupid. It was genuinely funny. It was funny and yet it was the antithesis of a Will Ferrell movie. Thank God. Nothing happened during the entire movie that completely blew your willing-suspension-of-disbelief circuit breakers. Well, okay, the taser scene may have stretched it a little, but not much. Funny. If you need a laugh, see it.

Star Trek: Humor and Problems

Okay, personally, I have a hard time believing it's been nearly three weeks since I saw the new Star Trek with old and new friends at the IMAX in Raleigh. Very shortly after my seeing it, friends made sure I also saw The Onion's take on it. It's a hoot--even more so if you've seen the movie, and still more so if you've seen all the others and are a long-time fan. Enjoy. (More of my thoughts on the movie are below the video.)


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

So, my recommendation: SEE THE MOVIE. IT ROCKS. But that said, I still have to say that it's far from free of the paradoxes that tend to haunt any fictional effort in the realm of time travel. What follows is more for those who've seen it than not, so I'll warn you now, though I don't think knowing the whole plot in advance would spoil anything, nonetheless . . . SPOILER ALERT!

I think it's fair to say that J.J. Abrams gave himself license to start with a clean slate by undoing almost all we know about the genesis of the Enterprise's crew. Fair enough. Suffice it to say that most of what you know about the series, you can more or less kiss goodbye. This is an alternate timeline/universe.

Here's how that works. The movie opens on James T. Kirk's birthday. Literally, the day of his birth. Whereas the old character that Shatner brought to life grew up with his father still alive, this one takes his first breath just as Dad sacrifices himself to save the rest of his ship's crew. Thus, right off, old Trekkies know we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

The simplest way to lay out the plot is chronologically, so far as is possible, since "before" and "after" begin to lose their meaning when you mess with the fabric of time. (If I've screwed this up, feel free to let me know in the comments.)

Synopsis

Late in the universe and timeline of the old Trek series, the sun of the Romulan homeworld supernovas. An aged Ambassador Spock is dispatched with all due haste in the Federation's fastest vehicle, a ship of Vulcan design, with a store of "red matter." His mission, deposit an appropriate speck of the red matter in the center of the rapidly expanding star, where it will form a singularity (read: black hole), stopping the expansion of the star before Romulus and its entire population is destroyed. Spock seeds the supernova with the red matter, creating a black hole at its center and causing it to collapse back in upon itself, but not before Romulus has been consumed by its rapidly expanding sun. Sucks to be a Romulan. And especially to be a Romulan miner named Nero, who somehow arrives home just in time to witness Spock's spectacularly late arrival and wasted effort, and then somehow blames Spock for the demise of Romulus and the death of Nero's family. I wish I'd been paying better attention and made better note of Spock's tongue-in-cheek description of Nero as an "extremely troubled Romulan," or something like that. (Help me out here guys.)

Anyway, Nero and Spock each are sucked into the singularity and emerge in an earlier time. Sucked in separately, seconds apart in the one universe, they emerge separately, some 25 years apart in the other universe. Nero has emerged some 70 years or so before the supernova, on the day of Kirk's birth. Nero must wait for some 25 years before Spock emerges to face Nero's fury. Still, even Spock emerges some fifty years before the Romulan homeworld is destroyed. The initial action takes place when pissed off Nero, just emerged from the singularity, encounters and destroys the ship on which Kirk's father is serving, with his pregnant wife. And so on.

The rest you can go enjoy, but I'm going to point out a number of problems with this plot. So, if you haven't seen it, go first and read this later, because, honestly, unless you're mind is functioning at warp, most of this is not going to occur to you while you watch it--you'll be having too much fun to worry about crap like the potentialities and paradoxes of time travel.

Problems (of physics, logic, and so on):

PROBLEM 1: Who dreamed up the idea of creating a black hole at the center of a star going supernova as a solution to the problem?

• Last I checked, the theory was that black holes form naturally at the center of a supernova as the remaining mass of the star collapses in on itself. So, what Spock is supposed to create should already exist.
• Worse yet, collapsing the star upon itself via the artificially created black hole solves the problem how? The star, aka the sun of the Romulan homeworld would then be, not gone exactly, but a black, unseeable "singularity" in the darkness. True, the mass and center of gravity should remain the same, leaving the orbit of Romulus largely unaffected, but dark and cold and barren. Not even mushrooms would grow to feed the darkened, rapidly cooling and dying planet. I suppose it might buy time for an evacuation, that's all though.
• Still worse, there's the question of why creating a black hole at the center of the star should pull anything back into it. Somehow, red matter must itself be incredibly dense, ready to implode into infinitude at any moment; otherwise, there is only the original mass of the star to work with, and thus, only the original total gravity. That is, everything expanding away from the star's already imploded center is at greater than escape velocity already. To be effective, the created singularity would need an expanding event horizon. In truth, they seem to have gotten this right--it's how Spock and Nero are sucked in. Red matter. Cool stuff. I'll give them that one. My immediately preceding point still holds though.
  

PROBLEM 2: What, exactly, has Nero been doing for those 25 very real years he needed to wait for Spock to emerge on this side of the singularity? Here's a few thoughts:

• Clearly, he's had his all his communication gear turned off, so that he would have heard none of the communications emanating from his still intact homeworld (remember, the time where Nero emerges, the supernova is a good 70 years away yet).
• Clearly, there's some sort of spatial dislocation to match the temporal one, otherwise shouldn't Nero have emerged near the original sun and in the solar system of Romulus?
• All of which is to say, just WTF has Nero been doing with the first 25 years of some 70 he has available to warn the Romulans of the impending disaster? How has he escaped the knowledge that Romulus still exists? He is one very target-fixated dude. Ambassador Spock called that one.
  

PROBLEM 3: Okay, so Nero's a doofus and an idiot (despite being commander of a highly advanced mining vessel), but there are all kinds of other brilliant people around, including not one, but two, count 'em, TWO Spocks! "And this is a problem, how?" you ask.

• Well, at least one of these guys is going to use the knowledge of the impending disaster to prevent the worst effects of it. That is, to warn the Romulans well in advance that their star is developing a somewhat difficult personality. (Nevermind PROBLEM 4: that a star doesn't just up and decide to supernova one day. The changes in a star leading to that cosmic event take place over eons, not weeks. Whatever.)
• Still don't see the problem? Well, what happens when, with at least 45 years warning, our intrepid young adventurers save the population of Romulus by relocating them elsewhere (something you'd think maybe Nero would've done), and voiding the reason for Nero's anger, Ambassador Spock's mission, etc, etc? How many timelines/universes can exist in parallel?
• I'll answer that: an infinite number. So, really, this problem isn't a problem in terms of paradox. I don't think it'll upset the loop. The loop won't exist. Romulus will be saved by others than Nero, and the younger Nero of this timeline will have no reason for anger, nor opportunity to meet his older alternate self as Spock does. (Spock's implication to Kirk of universe-ending problems resulting from the meeting of the two Spocks needed only a reference to "crossing the streams" in Ghost Busters to be perfect.)
  

I cannot be the only person who emerged from the film pondering these problems. Again, I still enjoyed the heck out of it. But that said, The Matrix, a largely paradox-free contemplation of virtual reality remains the best sci-fi film of my lifetime, at least IMHO.

And oh yeah, that "space jump"? I so want to do that. (Should I mention that without pressure suits, their blood would have boiled the moment they left the shuttlecraft at any altitude considered "space"? PROBLEM? No? Well, okay, I'll let that one go then.

Peace. Out.

Funny, and Not So Much

Two videos arrived today. One I laughed pretty hard at:

Joe Cocker

Translation of Joe Cocker Woodstock Performance

Finally, after 40 years, someone has opened the vault and revealed the answer to a question that has clawed at our brains since the 1969 Woodstock album was released:

What the hell were the lyrics to Joe Cocker's version of 'A Little Help From My Friends'?

He was so wigged-out and loopy on a multitude of drugs, no one has been able to understand his garbled, mush-mouth version......until now!

Click here for the lyrics...

Hat tip: Con

FaceBook

The other, I came to more circuitously. It would be funny, but only if it cheers someone who seems to think I was unclear about a pending change in my own status. (And no, technically, by the video below, I did not break any rules.) Still, one more tip regarding FaceBook:

Adventures in Toilet Training

I had girls the first time around. They had a stay-at-home mom. If there were challenges like this, I didn't know about it.

• Challenges like a young lad marking his territory . . . in the house . . . sister and friends giggling to watch.
• Or stopping in someone else's lush green lawn, midway through a walk around the block with the dog and announcing, "I pee pee!" So we see. Even for a tiny man, the whole world is a urinal.
• Or setting him on the toilet after an announcement that he needs to be there and turning my attention back to something in the kitchen, and minutes later, hearing the rattle of an empty toilet paper roll that I distinctly remembered being a new roll only minutes before. I arrived to find him reaching between his legs to press down the fluffy white mass now swelling in the toilet. As I set him gently on the floor, sort of chuckling to myself, the ever task-focused and thorough young gentleman immediately ran to the back of the toilet and already had both hands on the flush handle as I said, "Noooooooooo!" and reached out to prevent disaster. Jet Li's lighting grab and disassembly of an opponent's 9mm pistol have nothing on the speed with which my thumb flew under the handle to counter the full weight of an almost-three-year-old.
• Or stepping away to give him a moment of privacy the next day, then hearing the flush, and flush, and flush, and flush, and stepping back to find the left hand on the flusher and the right playing in the swirling water. Inquisitive minds want to know: where does all that water go? We buy hand sanitizer like Jay buys milk.

Days, mere days. I have blog fodder coming out my ears; I just don't have time to write.

A Tribute to Moms

Recently, I had the fun of being cc'ed on an exchange between a young mother and her aunt. Today's the perfect day to share that exchange, only slightly altered to protect the innocent. ;-)

First, the aunt sent the following:

Just in case you are having a rough day, here is a stress management technique, recommended in all the latest psychological journals. The funny thing is that it really does work and will make you smile.

Picture yourself lying on your belly on a warm rock that hangs out over a crystal clear stream, and you're naked.

Picture yourself with both your hands dangling in the cool running water.

Birds are sweetly singing in the cool mountain air.

No one knows your secret place.

You are in total seclusion from that hectic place called the world.

The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity.

The water is so crystal clear that you can easily make out the face of the person you are holding underwater.

There! See? It really does work. You're smiling already.

Funnier still was the response:

I could use this little meditation you sent below, Aunt Libby. Here was my day:

I was angry because I lost a potential client today and it would have been a very nice check. Then I came home, pilled the dog, took the dog with me to get Jack from school because she gets lonely and had been in her kennel all day. She might pee in the house otherwise. I then took Jack and Emma for coffee and flower-buying, got home to find that the dog barfed all over the back of the car (choose your battles) because I gave her the pills on an empty stomach, Jack cried because I was outside cleaning it up, so I brought him out so I could finish without having to deal with his crying. We came inside to cook dinner and do homework. Jack was dancing in circles loudly and I was trying to read a webpage aloud to Emma over all his yelling, then he wet his pants and had to change clothes. He wanted my help only and refused to cooperate with his sister. More yelling, this time, not playful yelling. Naked Jack. Finally Dressed Jack. Dog distressed because Jack was too loud for her to eat in peace and his toys were in the way of her dish. Finally dinner, then outside again. We tied the dog to the porch. Planted flowers with Emma, Emma was dancing around in a panic over ant piles, I was coordinating kids, digging, and spoons (we have no shovels). Meanwhile, the dog knocked over flower pot on front porch and it turns out to be ant-infested. Ants everywhere. Soil everywhere. Plants knocked out of the pot. Bad Husky! In the middle of all of this, Jack peed in his pants AGAIN. He was standing on the porch naked from the waist down and flagging his underwear over his head yelling, "All DRYYYYYYYYYYY!" while neighbors walked by-- one of them was pregnant. I told her, This will be you. We finished planting. Emma went to water the new flowers we planted and got the dog's leash tangled in the hose. In the middle of all of this, I start using "Damn!" and you can imagine why. Untangled the dog, convinced Jack to get his own clean underpants on, took the hose from Emma who wanted to turn this into a Wet and Wild Water Event as opposed to Help Mom Before She Shoots Us Event. Finished watering the plants, cleaned the porch, and restored the pot to an upright position, scolded the dog who took a major clue and found a place to lie down and watch the action, rounded up the kids, walked the dog for her nightly poop. Jack walked holding his penis the entire time and when we ran into a neighbor, moved the grasp from his penis to inside his underwear (he just had on that and a shirt by that point) and proceeded to pull out a massive wad of Husky hair from between his cheeks, I don't know how. I just don't. We made it back to the house, ran the bathwater, children's father called four times in a row because he is a pain in my @#$ and refuses to believe that ONE phone message might actually be enough, Emma had left the shampoo bottle on its side and it congealed in a big sticky mess in the tub, Emma left god-knows-how-many messages for Chris while I am bathing Jack-- (apparently she learns this trait from her father??) kids in bed, Mom tired, dog sacked out in the hallway like she did all the work.

The scary part? This is pretty much EVERY day. Some kind of chaos, every day.

Thank God for Moms! It's a wonder they allowed us to live or didn't just sell us to the highest bidder.

I Want a Cheeseburger

Hey, I laughed. So I thought I'd give you a funny before I go all serious on you. I'm finishing grades, making another five-state road trip, and moving from one state to another :-D over the next 10 days, so the blogging may be light. But when I return, I intend to begin installments of a very serious story about abuse of power and what happens when the people who are supposed to prevent that are co-opted by an old-boy network and become part of the problem. You won't be bored. More likely, you'll be outraged. I am. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, have a cheeseburger:

Why My Father is Still My Hero

Almost every young boy's father is his hero. For some, it sadly wears off when they learn to think for themselves. Not for me. And it probably won't for Demitri's son either. I'll offer two videos on this theme today.

House on Fire

The older I get, the more amazed I am by my Dad. The first video comes from an unfortunate structure fire that happened in my home town back in February. The video is long and probably not something you want to sit all the way through, but if you do, notice this: the house is only burning at one end--the fire, if I remember correctly, began in the garage. Wouldn't it have been nice if the firefighters had gone in the house from the end that wasn't on fire and pushed the fire back toward its source? That's what they used to do back in the 1960s and 70s, back when my father was chief of the department he helped create and make one of the very best in the state, probably the country.

But no, in this case, they don't do that. They do two things I used to hear my dad lament so many other departments did back then. First, they start by setting up a stream of water onto the roof. Precious water. Dad learned to fight fire back when hydrants were rare. The water you brought was the water you had, and you certainly didn't waste that water by soaking down the one feature of every house dedicated to keeping water out--the roof. Secondly, they attack the fire from the burning end. That's intuitive. See fire, spray water on it! So the instinct goes. But wait. Imagine if they'd gone in from the other end, protecting what hadn't burned yet, and forcing the fire back whence it had come. Novel idea? Not during Dad's day. That's how they did it. That's how they saved more homes than some nearby paid departments. You'll find the video and article here. And you can watch and cringe as they herd the fire from the buring end right out the other side.

Lord of the Dance

The second video comes from Britain's Got Talent. It'll start your day with a smile. And the embedding was disabled for it, but you'll find it here. It's worth a watch. Enjoy.

How Beowulf Should Have Ended

(Teaser: Funny video at the end of the post.)

We're wrapping up another semester in the world of college academics, and yesterday, my last day of regular classes at The Citadel as a visiting professor, was bittersweet. I still have essays to grade (the ill effect of caving to four sections' pleas to move due dates ever closer to the semester's end) and final exams to administer, but those are quiet times--brief instructions at the outset, the slam of a stapler and a quiet handshake at the end, and sometimes not even that if I've stepped from the room. Yesterday was my last few hours here "on stage," more or less--a whirlwind review of an entire semester's guided tour through British Literature from Beowulf to Samuel Johnson. (I say "an entire semester" as if that's a long time to spend on nearly a millennium's worth of literature, all the while remembering that in grad school we would frequently spend an entire semester on one author, and sometimes, one book. Different goals.)

I think people doubt me when I tell them I usually learn as much from my students as they from me, but I mean that. The lessons I take from this year will be the fodder of other blog posts yet to come.

This one, though, is dedicated to a little bit of fun that wrapped up the semester in my final class in my final day in class here. I wish I'd know about it the hour before. As we opened our review with the text that opened our semester, Beowulf, one of the cadets asked if I'd seen, "How Beowulf Should Have Ended," on YouTube. I confessed I'd not, and then we agreed to return to it if there was time at the end of the hour. There was just enough time. It was fun--an entertaining note to end on.

The Beowulf it addresses in this case is the most recent film version rather than the poem, but that is, after all, the version most likely familiar to the greatest number (as even those who've read the poem have likely seen the movie since and now have some conflated version of the tale in their heads). If you've only read the poem, this won't be quite as funny, and the "Did you kill Grendel's mother?" bit won't make sense, but if you've seen the movie, this should get at least an amused chuckle. Enjoy.

The Economics of Cows

You all need a laugh. Trust me.

It was Barry's post today, over at Enrevanche that turned me on to this. The problem with excerpting some little funny part from a bigger funny post is that, usually, people just read what you post and call it a day.

I'm not going to post any excerpt at all. I'm going to tell you, GO HERE. That's the link for the original post from which Barry borrows only a snippet (on the Royal Bank of Scotland model of Venture Capitalism). Start reading. Laugh. No, wait! Go to the bathroom first. Then start reading. By the time I got to New Zealand, I was crying.

Enjoy.

On more time: GO HERE. You will not be sorry.

Beer Pong Herpes

My mid-term exams contained objective portions that allowed me to grade with other media playing in the background, thus the earlier CBS news post. From there, I moved on to more serious news sources and stories like the one below. I frequently give people a hard time who forward things to me without first exercising some due diligence. This piece is about what happens when news "professionals" are guilty of the same thing. It's four minutes long, but worth it. Clear out some space because you're likely to be ROTFL.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Beer Pong Herpes Outbreak

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Rap Battle
Joke of the Day

Craigslist ESL

From November, when I was shopping for a car for my daughter--do these people not have friends who can proofread their Craigslist ad?

• 1995 jeep cherokee 4x4 good contischen 160000 miles green in colar need mini van for my famely so i need to sell this one if interesstet call [removed] thank you

Nodding Off

When I'm up this late writing a lit test for the morrow, I am easily entertained. Enjoy.

Snapshot: Puppy Prozac

My dog is depressed. Too much moving from place to place. Georgia for most of the holidays, some with me, some without while I was in Colorado. Children there. Rabbit. Life in all its wonder. Gone somewhere every other weekend and more. Mid-week trip to NC for dinner with a daughter. I suspect she (the dog) is uncertain whether I live in this apartment or my Jeep or a variety of houses she calls home on any given weekend. Just as dogs have a way of cheering us when the world is at its worst, so there is nothing much more mood killing than a clinically depressed canine.

But Wednesday she met me at the door with wagging tail. And so we went for a short walk and a longer sit and contemplation.

Snapshot: Grey, low clouds scudding across the sky, driven up creek by a stiff, 19 mph breeze that makes brisk the unseasonable 66-degree, late January day. Low tide and sheets of algae lie exposed in the muddy bottom of the marsh, flapping like so many St Patrick's Day parade flags. Still in coat and tie from teaching, I turn a chair to face the wind and rest a glass of Gentleman Jack on the pier rail. The wind, not enough to force a squint, yet enough to fan a tie and jostle hair growing long enough finally to feel such a thing, drives down the marsh grass and rattles the leaves and empty branches of a winter creek bank. Repeatedly, a Husky buries her face in my lap and pushes in, her version of hug, and I rake long, firm, strokes of fingertips down the length of her back and up again, massaging a mass of too husky a Husky through fur thick for winter. She doesn't play fetch. She doesn't play tug of war. She's been canine long enough now to have forgotten her past life as a supermodel, but having early disdained the distractions that other dogs delight in and having started life too little loved before her initial rescue from a chain that had worn a raw ring round her neck, she doesn't know how to play. But she knows how to love, and knows that she prefers company to solitude, and knows her life holds too much of the latter and too little of the former of late. And so she nuzzles in with more Husky hugs while the wind bristles gray fur and clouds alike and algae flags flail.

What she really needs is some Puppy Uppers; life is Doggie Downer enough for her.

Saturday Night Live - Puppy Uppers


"Puppy Uppers pep up your pooch." "Doggie Downers: Mellows out your mutt."

Two phrases stuck in my mind for 30 years now--apt testimony to the staying power of alliteration.

Neologism Contest

This list is years old now, I think, but still fun to review. I take no responsibility for the accuracy or lack thereof of the introductory explanations, I just think the words are fun.

The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternative meanings for common words. The winners :

1. Coffee (n.) the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.) appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (v.) to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade (v.) to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.) impotent.
6. Negligent (adj.) describes a condition in which you absent-mindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.) to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n.) olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (n.) a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle (n.) a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.) the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n) a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.) a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.) (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent (n.) an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

The Washington Post once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. This year's winners:

1. Bozone (n.) The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
2. Cashtration (n.) The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
3. Giraffiti (n) Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
4. Sarchasm (n) The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
5. Inoculatte (v) To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
6. Hipatitis (n) Terminal coolness.
7. Osteopornosis (n) A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
8. Karmageddon (n) It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
9.Decafalon (n.) The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
10. Glibido (v) All talk and no action.
11. Dopeler effect (n) The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
12. Arachnoleptic fit (n.) The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
14. Caterpallor (n.) The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.

And the pick of the literature:

Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

Equine Medicine

It was funny as a cartoon, and funny as a re-enactment.

You can find more here.

Hat tip: Chap

The Difference Between Men and Women

Stole this from Buck. Some overlap in our readers, but enough unique to merit reposting here on a slow day. >-)

And if you found that fun and need a year-in-review laugh, check out the other video that Buck included in the same post that day.

"I Need to Be Subsidized"

Got this from a friend. Can't help but love it. Answers a lot of questions about what happened to Calvin after Watterson retired him. Clearly, he became a CEO in Detroit.
Hat tip: JB

Model Falls

I know that it's not right to laugh at someone else's misfortune, but if you can watch this, and not laugh, you're a better man than I. I laughed so hard I thought my contacts were going to pop out.