Hopefully Not Stupid
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
The Six Degrees of Scooby-Doo
Link
How do you get from Batman to Diane Chambers? Mickey Mouse to Fraiser Crane? Cartman to Cloud Strife? Homer Simpson to almost anybody? If you accept the reasonable premise that anyone who has appeared in a crossover with someone else must logically exist in the same universe, and thus the same universe as anyone they were ever in a crossover with, it becomes evident that due to the working of promiscuous crossoverers (The New Scooby Movies, Cheers and its spinoffs, Happy Days and its spinoffs, The Simpsons, and anything that has ever featured a comic book character as if he were real) a very large percentage of our entire popular culture is one gigantic, amoeba-like fused mass of shows and continuities that makes the Crisis on Infinite Earths look like a two-bit Internet fanfic.
We're all familiar with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Some of us are familiar with the related concept of Bacon Numbers. Might I suggest the idea of Scooby Numbers? The Harlem Globetrotters would have a Scooby Number of one. Gilligan and the other Castaways have a Scooby Number of Two. From there, how many more jumps do you need to get to St. Elsewhere?
Link
How do you get from Batman to Diane Chambers? Mickey Mouse to Fraiser Crane? Cartman to Cloud Strife? Homer Simpson to almost anybody? If you accept the reasonable premise that anyone who has appeared in a crossover with someone else must logically exist in the same universe, and thus the same universe as anyone they were ever in a crossover with, it becomes evident that due to the working of promiscuous crossoverers (The New Scooby Movies, Cheers and its spinoffs, Happy Days and its spinoffs, The Simpsons, and anything that has ever featured a comic book character as if he were real) a very large percentage of our entire popular culture is one gigantic, amoeba-like fused mass of shows and continuities that makes the Crisis on Infinite Earths look like a two-bit Internet fanfic.
We're all familiar with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Some of us are familiar with the related concept of Bacon Numbers. Might I suggest the idea of Scooby Numbers? The Harlem Globetrotters would have a Scooby Number of one. Gilligan and the other Castaways have a Scooby Number of Two. From there, how many more jumps do you need to get to St. Elsewhere?
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
Ree Baba Ree Baba
Link
Found on the 365 Days project, this is the info page (along with download link, but it'll only be good for another couple of days!) for Ree Baba Ree Baba, theme music for the Bollywood film Teen Eekay. Everyone reading this, please take a few minutes out of your day to download this and listen to it. It sounds like a long-lost Muppet song, like Cookie Monster finally snapped, started swinging from chandeliers and spewing chewed snackmeal around the room. It sounds like a demon hopped up on nitrous oxide. It sounds like the mirror image of the Tick theme song. I can't stop laughing whenever I hear it.
I can't help but think, if I downed a couple triple espressos I might actually be able to understand it, but I am not yet prepared to make such sacrifices in the name of science.
Link
Found on the 365 Days project, this is the info page (along with download link, but it'll only be good for another couple of days!) for Ree Baba Ree Baba, theme music for the Bollywood film Teen Eekay. Everyone reading this, please take a few minutes out of your day to download this and listen to it. It sounds like a long-lost Muppet song, like Cookie Monster finally snapped, started swinging from chandeliers and spewing chewed snackmeal around the room. It sounds like a demon hopped up on nitrous oxide. It sounds like the mirror image of the Tick theme song. I can't stop laughing whenever I hear it.
I can't help but think, if I downed a couple triple espressos I might actually be able to understand it, but I am not yet prepared to make such sacrifices in the name of science.
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Japander.com
Japander.com
Found on Metafilter. American celebrities sometimes appear in commercials in foreign countries to earn some extra cash, on the conditions that they don't air in the U.S. Words cannot express how disillusioned I was when I saw that still of Harrison Ford in a commercial for Japanese beer. Don't get paid enough millions for all those movie roles Dr. Jones?
Japander.com
Found on Metafilter. American celebrities sometimes appear in commercials in foreign countries to earn some extra cash, on the conditions that they don't air in the U.S. Words cannot express how disillusioned I was when I saw that still of Harrison Ford in a commercial for Japanese beer. Don't get paid enough millions for all those movie roles Dr. Jones?
Monday, December 22, 2003
And the phrase for the day is:
"Boon companion." Don't you just love personal-ad-speak? But this phrase I think deserves a greater life outside the newspaper's groin. Brainstorming priority number one!
"Boon companion." Don't you just love personal-ad-speak? But this phrase I think deserves a greater life outside the newspaper's groin. Brainstorming priority number one!
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Top 10 Space Mysteries for 2003
Link
I love this kind of stuff. I go the taste for it at 6 reading my grandpa's National Geographics, then my Dad's coworker lent me back issues of Astronomy, then I got to reading Scientific American, back in its good old days, in a doctor's waiting room. If you don't care about all these wonderfully weird things with the wonderfully weird names then you, my friend, need a nice, healthy injection of Geek. I found the link... I don't remember the address, it was from a list of lists or something. Metafilter was the jumping-off point though. (Like they need my pitiful link.)
Link
I love this kind of stuff. I go the taste for it at 6 reading my grandpa's National Geographics, then my Dad's coworker lent me back issues of Astronomy, then I got to reading Scientific American, back in its good old days, in a doctor's waiting room. If you don't care about all these wonderfully weird things with the wonderfully weird names then you, my friend, need a nice, healthy injection of Geek. I found the link... I don't remember the address, it was from a list of lists or something. Metafilter was the jumping-off point though. (Like they need my pitiful link.)
What Tolkien Officially Said About Elf Sex
What Link
This is another of those things I read somewhere (I think this time it was Memepool) and thought was cool, and just now realized hey, why not post a link to it myself. Something to keep in mind when watching a particular movie trilogy, perhaps?
What Link
This is another of those things I read somewhere (I think this time it was Memepool) and thought was cool, and just now realized hey, why not post a link to it myself. Something to keep in mind when watching a particular movie trilogy, perhaps?
Sunday, December 14, 2003
Don Markstein's Toonopedia: Alfred E. Neuman
Link
I did not know that Alfred E. Neuman predated Mad Magazine, but it seems that both the image and the name (apart from each other) had a long and rich history outside of that magazine. Like the shmoo, this seems largely forgotten today. I bet comic historians love blowing people's minds with that tidbit.
Link
I did not know that Alfred E. Neuman predated Mad Magazine, but it seems that both the image and the name (apart from each other) had a long and rich history outside of that magazine. Like the shmoo, this seems largely forgotten today. I bet comic historians love blowing people's minds with that tidbit.
The horror that is Shmoo
Link
Shmoo, plural shmoon, came originally from Li'l Abner, where they were white blobby creatures that supplied all of mankind's needs, ate nothing and reproduced prodigiously. They were subject to at least two campaigns of genocide, first by a businessman, then by the government, because with shmoo meeting all needs no one had to work or buy anything.
Shmoon also became, because of a couple of particular horrible cartoon series produced by the home of cartoon travesty, Hanna-Barbera, another name for an ingratiating, annoying, "funny" sidekick character. Orko, Snarf, Dyno-mutt, Gleep, HERBIE, the list goes on and on. This page is a list of such characters, with pictures.
Link
Shmoo, plural shmoon, came originally from Li'l Abner, where they were white blobby creatures that supplied all of mankind's needs, ate nothing and reproduced prodigiously. They were subject to at least two campaigns of genocide, first by a businessman, then by the government, because with shmoo meeting all needs no one had to work or buy anything.
Shmoon also became, because of a couple of particular horrible cartoon series produced by the home of cartoon travesty, Hanna-Barbera, another name for an ingratiating, annoying, "funny" sidekick character. Orko, Snarf, Dyno-mutt, Gleep, HERBIE, the list goes on and on. This page is a list of such characters, with pictures.
Thursday, December 11, 2003
The Miller's Crossing
This article from The Black Table describes a late-night conversation between 80's Dennis Miller -- snarky, pop culture obsessed, annoying comic newscaster for Saturday Night Live -- and today's Dennis Miller -- football-hosting, Bill O'Reilly meeting, Republican congressional candidate. Very sharp.
(Lineage: found in a comment on a Metafilter post from a few weeks back.)
This article from The Black Table describes a late-night conversation between 80's Dennis Miller -- snarky, pop culture obsessed, annoying comic newscaster for Saturday Night Live -- and today's Dennis Miller -- football-hosting, Bill O'Reilly meeting, Republican congressional candidate. Very sharp.
(Lineage: found in a comment on a Metafilter post from a few weeks back.)
Monday, December 08, 2003
The Democratic Candidates
The Democratic Candidates
I'm kind of new to voting Democrat, but the mixture of changing political opinions, and the ever-important Anyone-But-Bush factor, means I probably will this year.
But who to favor? I don't know hardly anything about any of the names currently being bandied around the blogscape. Which is why I find the above page so useful. Check it out if you know more about who you won't be voting for in 2004 than who you will.
The Democratic Candidates
I'm kind of new to voting Democrat, but the mixture of changing political opinions, and the ever-important Anyone-But-Bush factor, means I probably will this year.
But who to favor? I don't know hardly anything about any of the names currently being bandied around the blogscape. Which is why I find the above page so useful. Check it out if you know more about who you won't be voting for in 2004 than who you will.
Saturday, December 06, 2003
And Gerrymanders As The Beaver
The New Yorker: Fact: The Great Election Grab
(NOTE: Story on this page likely changes once a week. Check archives for article if its title doesn't match the above.)
I think there's a sense in my country (the United States) among most of the people that what goes on with politicians is not their business.
No, really. I get the sense than when people like my father look at the nightly news and they start talking about the next election, their eyes glaze over. Because they already know who they're going to vote for, so why bother taking up precious brainspace thinking about it.
Brainspace. That's what I call that intersection of number of free neurons, time and job that limits the number of things you can think about in your life. It's a limit I run up against all the time. Everyone else does too, they can't help but run up against it, because in a sense the number of things you can think about are the number of things you do think about. Every one of these things that doesn't arise directly from your soul is unspeakable blasphemy.
And yet... politics is an inherently blasphemous process. The article linked to descibes how blasphemous it has become. It is a story that needs, needs to be read by everyone you can find. The more people you find, the more chance you'll find someone whose eyes won't glaze over when he sees it, those people who are armored by smugness and certainty. The armor must be cracked.
The article is a piece on the facts of gerrymandering and how it's done these days. You remember gerrymandering, invented in 1811 it involves drawing congressional districts in order to favor the incumbents. Every man gets a vote for senators and representatives, but your votes go into a pool with those of other people. Gerrymandering is about deciding where the lines of those pools are drawn. It is part of the dark, rotten core of American political life, just one example of how far the ideal of democracy has been tainted. It's been around for almost 200 years and no one's done anything to stop it because the people who can are the ones who can do it, and they're almost always reluctant to deny themselves the advantage they had to fight against to get in power in the first place.
The problem with this is that it's difficult to draw district lines that don't favor someone. Indeed, drawing the lines so that districts are always evenly distributed is almost as bad as what we have now, because a region with a lot of people of one party should be favored towards that party. Now, gerrymandering has progressed to the point where computer programs are used to draw districts, and as the article shows, you can move the lines around with your mouse and design districts, plainly showing party counts as you move them, to maximum advantage easily.
There is only one solution to this. Find the two most honest, least knowledgeable about voter densities and districting members of Congress, one for each party. Lock them in a room with a map of the United States showing state outlines and nothing the hell else. Give them a transparency with a regularly-spaced grid printed on it, and five minutes to center the grid on each state and trace its outline with a pen. You'll end up with a lot of districts with few, if any, people at all. You can take care of that ahead of time by declaring that districts with, say, less than 5,000 people should be merged with the lowest-population adjacent cell, or more than 300,000 (pulling these numbers out of of air) should be split diagonally down the middle. Also, the districts will be poorly suited for many other things. Certainly they won't be convenient, but democracy itself is by nature inconvenient. But the people doing it should by no means know what they are doing, because if there's one thing that's obvious about the political climate in the US today, is whatever angle either side can find to gain an edge is immediately and enthusiastically pounced upon, and that the pouncing people congratulate themselves afterwards for doing it.
The New Yorker: Fact: The Great Election Grab
(NOTE: Story on this page likely changes once a week. Check archives for article if its title doesn't match the above.)
I think there's a sense in my country (the United States) among most of the people that what goes on with politicians is not their business.
No, really. I get the sense than when people like my father look at the nightly news and they start talking about the next election, their eyes glaze over. Because they already know who they're going to vote for, so why bother taking up precious brainspace thinking about it.
Brainspace. That's what I call that intersection of number of free neurons, time and job that limits the number of things you can think about in your life. It's a limit I run up against all the time. Everyone else does too, they can't help but run up against it, because in a sense the number of things you can think about are the number of things you do think about. Every one of these things that doesn't arise directly from your soul is unspeakable blasphemy.
And yet... politics is an inherently blasphemous process. The article linked to descibes how blasphemous it has become. It is a story that needs, needs to be read by everyone you can find. The more people you find, the more chance you'll find someone whose eyes won't glaze over when he sees it, those people who are armored by smugness and certainty. The armor must be cracked.
The article is a piece on the facts of gerrymandering and how it's done these days. You remember gerrymandering, invented in 1811 it involves drawing congressional districts in order to favor the incumbents. Every man gets a vote for senators and representatives, but your votes go into a pool with those of other people. Gerrymandering is about deciding where the lines of those pools are drawn. It is part of the dark, rotten core of American political life, just one example of how far the ideal of democracy has been tainted. It's been around for almost 200 years and no one's done anything to stop it because the people who can are the ones who can do it, and they're almost always reluctant to deny themselves the advantage they had to fight against to get in power in the first place.
The problem with this is that it's difficult to draw district lines that don't favor someone. Indeed, drawing the lines so that districts are always evenly distributed is almost as bad as what we have now, because a region with a lot of people of one party should be favored towards that party. Now, gerrymandering has progressed to the point where computer programs are used to draw districts, and as the article shows, you can move the lines around with your mouse and design districts, plainly showing party counts as you move them, to maximum advantage easily.
There is only one solution to this. Find the two most honest, least knowledgeable about voter densities and districting members of Congress, one for each party. Lock them in a room with a map of the United States showing state outlines and nothing the hell else. Give them a transparency with a regularly-spaced grid printed on it, and five minutes to center the grid on each state and trace its outline with a pen. You'll end up with a lot of districts with few, if any, people at all. You can take care of that ahead of time by declaring that districts with, say, less than 5,000 people should be merged with the lowest-population adjacent cell, or more than 300,000 (pulling these numbers out of of air) should be split diagonally down the middle. Also, the districts will be poorly suited for many other things. Certainly they won't be convenient, but democracy itself is by nature inconvenient. But the people doing it should by no means know what they are doing, because if there's one thing that's obvious about the political climate in the US today, is whatever angle either side can find to gain an edge is immediately and enthusiastically pounced upon, and that the pouncing people congratulate themselves afterwards for doing it.
Thursday, December 04, 2003
Anime Conventions and Cheats
Link
What's up with that big water droplet that runs down a character's head when they get embarassed or nervous? Why do male characters get nosebleeds around beautiful women? And what do people falling over upon hearing bad jokes have to do with Mad Magazine? This is the place to find out.
Link
What's up with that big water droplet that runs down a character's head when they get embarassed or nervous? Why do male characters get nosebleeds around beautiful women? And what do people falling over upon hearing bad jokes have to do with Mad Magazine? This is the place to find out.
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
The Man Who Beat the Old "Press Your Luck" Game Show
Link
(From my bookmark list, probably originally from Metafilter.)
I remember watching that show every once in a while. It was the one with those poorly-animated cartoon "Whammies." We (me and my mother) grooved on it at the time, but yeah, it seems rather dumb now. (Though slightly less dumb than the update currently showing on the Game Show Network.)
The basic idea was this: three players answered general knowledge questions to earn "spins," which they would use in two different rounds of play on the "big board." The board was a bank of video monitors around which an outline would flash about six or seven times a second. All the monitors themselves changed about once every two seconds. Each monitor typically had a range of possible contents, but each spot on the board tended to have the same kind of award. One spot was small cash, one physical prizes, and one in particular was a large sum of money (up to five grand) plus an extra spin. Most of the spaces also has "Whammies," little cartoon guys who were the source of all pain in this game.
During the board rounds, each player would use the spins he earned answering questions to "stop" the board, by pressing a button atop his podium. Whatever monitor was lit when the board was stopped, and whatever were its contents, would be earned by that player, and tis monetary value would be added to his total. If the monitor contained a Whammy, he would lose all his earned cash up to that point in the game. A player getting four Whammies during the game would drop out of play. Spins earned by a player could either be taken or "passed" to the next player. Passed spins had to be taken, but if a player with passed spins got a Whammy result on one of them, all his remaining passed spins would be converted into "earned" spins. The money-plus-extra-spin spaces always granted an "earned" spin.
I saw a good number of game shows back then (I was around 12 I think), and I always wondered how the people who ran these things could afford to give away so much stuff. I knew about advertising, and reasoned that they must logically earn more money that way than they gave out. But would it be possible for a truly skilled player to break such a system?
I didn't think much about game design back then. Now I see that whoever designed the games used in those shows probably had to submit a report to the producers telling the maximum cash outlay, and the average, if not more. On The Price Is Right (in its pre-Millionare incarnation), for example, you wouldn't have the big-money pricing games every show, or more than one or two of them (such as Plinko) in a given episode, and most of the games (especially Plinko) had an unavoidable random component. Win Ben Stein's Money had very low cash outlays, really, no more than $5,000 an episode. I have no special knowledge of the game show design process, but I would imagine a game with a higher luck component will generally have larger prizes.
Press Your Luck's flaws were that the game had relatively large prizes for the time ($5,000 possible on a single spin), and that the board only appeared to be random. Now that you have enough background, click the link above for a rather nifty little true story....
Link
(From my bookmark list, probably originally from Metafilter.)
I remember watching that show every once in a while. It was the one with those poorly-animated cartoon "Whammies." We (me and my mother) grooved on it at the time, but yeah, it seems rather dumb now. (Though slightly less dumb than the update currently showing on the Game Show Network.)
The basic idea was this: three players answered general knowledge questions to earn "spins," which they would use in two different rounds of play on the "big board." The board was a bank of video monitors around which an outline would flash about six or seven times a second. All the monitors themselves changed about once every two seconds. Each monitor typically had a range of possible contents, but each spot on the board tended to have the same kind of award. One spot was small cash, one physical prizes, and one in particular was a large sum of money (up to five grand) plus an extra spin. Most of the spaces also has "Whammies," little cartoon guys who were the source of all pain in this game.
During the board rounds, each player would use the spins he earned answering questions to "stop" the board, by pressing a button atop his podium. Whatever monitor was lit when the board was stopped, and whatever were its contents, would be earned by that player, and tis monetary value would be added to his total. If the monitor contained a Whammy, he would lose all his earned cash up to that point in the game. A player getting four Whammies during the game would drop out of play. Spins earned by a player could either be taken or "passed" to the next player. Passed spins had to be taken, but if a player with passed spins got a Whammy result on one of them, all his remaining passed spins would be converted into "earned" spins. The money-plus-extra-spin spaces always granted an "earned" spin.
I saw a good number of game shows back then (I was around 12 I think), and I always wondered how the people who ran these things could afford to give away so much stuff. I knew about advertising, and reasoned that they must logically earn more money that way than they gave out. But would it be possible for a truly skilled player to break such a system?
I didn't think much about game design back then. Now I see that whoever designed the games used in those shows probably had to submit a report to the producers telling the maximum cash outlay, and the average, if not more. On The Price Is Right (in its pre-Millionare incarnation), for example, you wouldn't have the big-money pricing games every show, or more than one or two of them (such as Plinko) in a given episode, and most of the games (especially Plinko) had an unavoidable random component. Win Ben Stein's Money had very low cash outlays, really, no more than $5,000 an episode. I have no special knowledge of the game show design process, but I would imagine a game with a higher luck component will generally have larger prizes.
Press Your Luck's flaws were that the game had relatively large prizes for the time ($5,000 possible on a single spin), and that the board only appeared to be random. Now that you have enough background, click the link above for a rather nifty little true story....
Monday, December 01, 2003
Michael Jackson Aging
Michael Jackson Aging
Found on Metafilter, here's a picture projecting what Michael Jackson would look like had he not had plastic surgery.
I feel kind of sad for the hypothetical guy in the picture. He looks like a cool guy. Maybe a non-traditional student here at our university, or a mechanic at the garage where I get my car fixed, or maybe its owner. An author, an insurance adjuster, president of GloboChem? Who would do what Michael Jackson has done to his face, in exchange for umpteen frablillion bucks, if it was a sure thing? What about a 50% chance? 2%?
Yeah, I know, the answer is, most people. I want to thank you for putting me back in my snail shell.
P.S. It seems to me like I'm using my blog sometimes to give myself a voice on Metafilter topics, as a workaround to their long-standing no-new-posters policy, and yeah, I'm perfectly happy with that. I really think it sucks that the "New User" link says "no new users while we retool," which has been up there for a long, long time. Apparently it used to be that financial contributors could get around that, but now it seems, no, not even then. If I knew of a good alternative I'd be there like a shot.
Michael Jackson Aging
Found on Metafilter, here's a picture projecting what Michael Jackson would look like had he not had plastic surgery.
I feel kind of sad for the hypothetical guy in the picture. He looks like a cool guy. Maybe a non-traditional student here at our university, or a mechanic at the garage where I get my car fixed, or maybe its owner. An author, an insurance adjuster, president of GloboChem? Who would do what Michael Jackson has done to his face, in exchange for umpteen frablillion bucks, if it was a sure thing? What about a 50% chance? 2%?
Yeah, I know, the answer is, most people. I want to thank you for putting me back in my snail shell.
P.S. It seems to me like I'm using my blog sometimes to give myself a voice on Metafilter topics, as a workaround to their long-standing no-new-posters policy, and yeah, I'm perfectly happy with that. I really think it sucks that the "New User" link says "no new users while we retool," which has been up there for a long, long time. Apparently it used to be that financial contributors could get around that, but now it seems, no, not even then. If I knew of a good alternative I'd be there like a shot.
