Around the Web Another Friday, and I find myself wracked with agony over that one problem which seems to be interminably afflicting our society, bad astronomy. Just thinking about all of the misunderstanding of moon phases, disinformation on planetary orbits, and just plain lies told about our own sun makes me quiver in righteous indignation. Luckily, we have a hero come to the rescue, in Phil Plait and his Bad Astronomy page, documenting and correcting instances of bad astronomy. You may remember last week that I gave a link to a page which covered insultingly stupid movie physics, well Dr. Plait discusses in-depth all of the bad astronomy in movies on his site. Come on Hollywood, if you're making a movie about astronauts going to Mars, you'd think it would be easy to hire an astronomer to look over the script and some dailies to make sure there wouldn't be any ridiculous science in the movie, but that just makes way too much sense I s'pose.
Were you like me? When you were a kid, and your parents got the Sunday paper, did you grab the comics, and then when you were done with the comics, you would grab the Parade magazine section to read the Dave Barry column, and then you would flip to the Ask Marilyn column, where Marilyn vos Savant, who supposedly has the highest IQ in the world, would answer brain-teasers sent in by reader? Did you do that? Come on, don't say it was just me. Well anyway, if you did do that, you probably marvelled like I did at how Ms. vos Savant seemed to effortlessly reason her way through every intellectual puzzle imaginable, but it turns out that even the highest IQ person in the world can be wrong sometimes. Check out this website to see the questions Marilyn got wrong, and what the right answer is.
Those of us who have read James Joyce's Ulysses like to brag about what an experience reading the book is, how it broadened our understanding of the novel form, how it is an achievement never before and never to be again equaled, of how it is mischievous in its complexity and unabashed in its simpleness... but come on, most of us who actually made it through the whole book just barely managed to do so in a mist of confusion and boredom just so we could write a halfway informed essay for the contemporary literature class we don't even know how we got talked into taking. For those out there who have fallen victim to the purveyors of what is known as the modern novel, you should take a gander at this fun, vitriol-filled roller coaster ride of an article by Dale Peck.
So, what are your favorite Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy? Here are three of mine:
Sometimes when I feel like killing someone, I do a little trick to calm myself down. I'll go over to the person's house and ring the doorbell. When the person comes to the door, I'm gone, but you know what I've left on the porch? A jack-o-lantern with a knife stuck in the side of it's head with a note that says "You." After that I usually feel a lot better, and no harm done.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone
Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink beer, they may be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, "Is it better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver?"
Go here for more Deep Thoughts.
Finally, I talked yesterday about my beloved childhood memories of reading the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators book series. Unfortunately, beer and old age have done their work on my ability to remember those days, so I couldn't quite remember the names of the three investigators yesterday. Well, here I found this site which is a loving tribute to the books. The boys names, by the way, are Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews. Now won't you please join me in sitting back and drinking much beer and recalling those halycon days of youth, whilst looking through a dictionary to find out what "halycon" means.
11:20:03 PM 
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