Entertainment
pharyngula | May 18, 2006
Johnny Depp sure is cute, but the fellow I'm swooning over in the Pirates of the Caribbean trailer is Davy Jones. He can play the organ with his face! (And that is a provocative sentence…)
I'm also impressed that he can summon up the Kraken. It's like this whole movie is stuffed full of tentacles—I'm going to be there opening day, I think.
pharyngula | May 14, 2006It's appropriate to have a poem about pregnancy today—so go read Adapted, Not Designed. It's lovely, and I think you can tell from the title that there's another reason I like it.
pharyngula | May 14, 2006
News from The Panda's Thumb: tonight, The Simpsons is all about the creationist pseudo-controversy, and Lisa gets arrested as an evilutionist. Let's all tune in!
I was unimpressed. There were a few good barbs thrown at the creationists, but in the end the matter is settled by something trivial (Homer looks like an ape; yet again, the lazy Simpsons trope of the stupid Homer resolves the story), and of course they caved and pandered to the false dignity of the dominant tribal superstition. Eh.
pharyngula | May 11, 2006
Lots of people have sent me links to this—thanks, all!—and it's the perfect thing to lift me out of the finals week blahs, and it's also just in time for Mother's Day on Sunday: The Devonian Blues.
Every single girl and every little boy
Was born from the clan of the wayward Dipnoi
Don't let the preacher man spoil all the fun
Took a lot more than 6 days to get the job done
Amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals and man
All belong to the fish tribe, doncha' understand?
Your momma was a lobefinned fish
My momma was a lobefinned fish
Sing along, everyone!
pharyngula | May 5, 2006Watch this short film of Terry Bisson's well-known short story, They are made out of meat. I like the idea, but it was a little off-putting that they used actors made out of meat to play the main characters.
There is no shortage of non-meat actors, you know, and there are some CGI functions that might want to protest the usurpation of roles that really ought to go to minorities. Here some excellent, juicy non-meat roles come up, and they hand them over to the meaty majority.
(via The Valve)
pharyngula | April 23, 2006Remember when you went to the high school dance, and all the social strata of the institution were exposed? You knew who the jocks and cheerleaders were, and the stoners and the college preppies, and of course, the geeks, the A/V nerds, the chess club crowd…the ones who didn't show up very often, and when they did, everyone was wondering what they were doing there. Geek Prom wasn't anything like that—it was kind of an anti-Heathers experience, where all the distinctions were thrown away. There were some beautiful people there, and everyone liked them, but they weren't any more special than…
pharyngula | April 22, 2006I hear it's National Poetry Month, but poetry is way out of my skill set. I was sent this interesting poem about Darwin today, though, so that will be my contribution.
If you want poetry with themes similar to what I write about, I suggest you read Phawrongula. It's still being updated with new stuff!
pharyngula | April 14, 2006I haven't watched South Park in a long time, but I understand the latest controversy is that they blanked out an innocuous, brief portrayal of Mohammed, and everyone is saying the network caved under pressure. Michelle Malkin and her fellow right-wing nutjobs are embarrassingly hysterical over it.
People, it's a cartoon that intentionally tries to drum up shrieks of outrage…it tries so hard that I've lost interest in it. I can't possibly be the only one who thinks this whole affair was done on purpose by the creators, can I? If you think this episode is significant, you've been played.
pharyngula | April 12, 2006Pfeh. Who wants to be a superhero?
Let me know when there is a casting call for Who wants to be a supervillain?
pharyngula | April 11, 2006The Folk Era was a special time in America, a time of innocence, when people sang Kumbaya and really meant it. When banjo music got airplay and Burl Ives had groupies. No one knows what caused the folk era, and scientists are studying what can be done to prevent it from ever happening again.
The nice people at royzimmerman.com have sent me another CD, The Best of the Foremen. They tell me this group was especially popular with biologists (I can see it—songs about wallowing in whale guts and what we euphemistically call "firing the Surgeon General" are always well received by us), and that SJ…
pharyngula | April 3, 2006In the rural fastness of Western Minnesota, a legend grows. A man so nerdly that his infamy spreads far and wide; when people see shell-less molluscs, his name leaps to their lips; when geeks and nerds gather, they all whisper the same thing: "Pee-Zee" (or, as the Canadians and Dr Who fans would say, "Pee-Zed.")
Yes, in yet another of a string of geek honors, I have been invited to the GeekProm, to be held in the Science Museum of Minnesota on 22 April. There will be spaz-dancing, cow-eye dissections, and a talent show, and some couple will be crowned King and Queen Geek.
Obviously, I deserve…
pharyngula | March 27, 2006So…I went to that Bruce Willis movie I mentioned earlier. It was OK, a rather predictable cop thriller in which he does his usual schtick of getting beat up and bloodied and shot, while still defeating the bad guys at nearly every turn—but at the same time he doesn't do the hokey super-cop stuff we saw in the Die Hard movies. At least I was pleasantly surprised, as I went in to it with low expectations.
I mentioned that we usually don't have a problem with obnoxious people here, though, and that was true tonight, but for a different reason: I was the only person at the movie.
There I was,…
pharyngula | March 27, 2006Kung Fu Monkey has an excellent rant about the theater experience, and how it is ruined by loudmouths and cell phones.
I just have to say that since I moved to Morris, I love going to the movies. I'll even go to bad movies. And it's all because the ambience has completely changed. Rogers recommends bringing back real ushers to silence the kibitzers and chatterers and inconsiderate babblers, but we've got something better: everyone in the theater knows everyone else. Nobody gets to make a public nuisance of themselves and then vanish into the anonymity of the crowd.
He's exactly right. The…
pharyngula | March 23, 2006
I know that Steve Allen was a lifelong skeptic and freethinker, but was he also a squid worshipper? How else to explain this sign?
Through the Center for Inquiry in LA, which hosts that Steve Allen Theater, there's also a very useful list of dramatic productions of interest to freethinkers, including everything from Agnes of God to Zardoz (sorry: Red Dawn didn't make the cut). Any college students interested in subverting their university's film series might want to recommend some of the movies from this list. Or you might just try adding all of them to your Netflix subscription.
pharyngula | March 17, 2006More SF indulgence, excuse me: Gary Farber has been reading Heinlein's rediscovered "first" novel (brief summary: it's very bad), and Kevin Drum raises the question of correlation between early SF preferences and later political biases, with Heinlein inspiring conservatives and Asimov motivating liberals (Drum says, "Well, I liked 'em both, but I liked Heinlein more and I turned into a liberal." I'm not touching that straight line.)
I disliked Heinlein's stuff intensely. It was badly written, with a patronizing tone, and always smugly assumed that his simplistic opinions were absolutely true…
pharyngula | March 17, 2006Darksyde speculates about aliens… with illustrations by Carl Buell and others.
pharyngula | March 15, 2006Since the announcement has gone public, I'll mention it here: I get to be the Scientist Guest of Honor at ConFusion, a science-fiction convention in Ann Arbor, in January of 2007. I'll be there with Howard Waldrop and Elizabeth Moon—I'll be the nerd hardly anyone has heard of before. Sign up now before the rates go up!
pharyngula | March 5, 2006I'm stretched out in my easy chair getting ready to watch the Oscars this evening, when this horrid 'news' profile about Brokeback Mountain and middle America comes on. I found it offensive: they seem to have sought out the most narrow-minded representatives of this part of the country—your stereotypical Christian bigot, a clutch of white-haired geezers—who hadn't seen the movie, who rejected it out of hand, who claimed Hollywood didn't understand farmers, who thought a good movie was that treacly crap, The Sound of Music. If there is anyone who doesn't understand this part of the world, it's…