Don’t we all, sweetheart, don’t we all.
Here’s a musical number from perhaps the greatest Simpsons episode of all time. Enjoy.
Update: YouTube took it down, so here’s a fan-made replacement
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Category Archives: Science Fiction
Dark Nebula Rising
Definitely pic o’ the day quality, this image is a painting by Douglas Herring which I found via the Squidblog. Yes, it may have been painted ten years ago, but obviously it was lying dormant all this time, waiting until the stars aligned in the ancient pattern once again.
Look around you, people: can “Mercury’s in retrograde” explain all of this?
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an RIP roundup: Jean Baudrillard, Captain America, and Ernest Gallo
No word on what happened to Julio.
Pour one out to that fallen giant of the American wine industry, Ernest Gallo. The rapidly-cooling Gallo rode his genius for marketing to the top of the affordable yet un-poisonous American wine market, turning a small, family concern who sold mostly to fugitive, chainsmoking Basques in the California hills into a giant international corporation with the most modern of production techniques, churning out their trademark carafes of Chardonnay like Ford popped out Model T’s.
According to legend, Ernest and Julio Gallo started their first winery in 1933. Using a $5,000 (£2,500) loan from Ernest’s mother-in-law and Julio’s savings of $900.23, the two brothers rented a cement warehouse in their home town of Modesto, California, and began making wines. With the help of a recipe they found in some prohibition-era leaflets in the basement of Modesto library they made ordinary wines for the bargain price of 50 cents a gallon, half the going rate. In their first year in business, they made $30,000 and an empire was born.
And pause, for a moment, to contemplate the meaninglessness of the so-called death of the irritatingly dense and famously obscure French Intellectual Jean Baudrillard.
Jean Baudrillard’s death did not take place. “Dying is pointless,” he once wrote, “you have to know how to disappear.” The New Yorker reported a reading the French sociologist gave in a New York gallery in 2005. A man from the audience, with the recent death of Jacques Derrida in mind, mentioned obituaries, and asked Baudrillard: “What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you?” Baudrillard replied: “What I am, I don’t know. I am the simulacrum of myself.”
Baudrillard, whose simulacrum has departed at the age of 77, attracted widespread notoriety for predicting that the first Gulf war, of 1991, would not take place. During the war, he said it was not really taking place. After its conclusion, he announced that it had not taken place. This prompted some to characterise him as yet another continental philosopher who revelled in a disreputable contempt for truth and reality.
And finally, we have America’s answer to the French Intellectual: the costumed superhero. Remove your cowl, clutch your cape to your heart, and stand with me, united in grief, over the senseless slaughter of Captain America.
As a symbol of waning imperial power, it is unmistakeable. Captain America, the stars-and-stripes wearing, blond and blue-eyed “pinnacle of human physical perfection”, is dead. The Marvel comics superhero, aka Steve Rogers, is gunned down by a sniper in the latest instalment of the comic.
The death of the man who was rejected by the army because he was too scrawny, but went on to take a “super soldier serum” to turn him into the ultimate warrior, came as a blow to his creator, 93-year-old Joe Simon. “We really need him now,” Simon told the Associated Press on learning of the death of his creation.
What do you say; I’m wondering if they’ve checked alibis for the Justice League…
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nerdgasm: the making of Thunderbirds!
We all have our touchstones; the photograph of a child, a stone from the beach on which we fell in love, the first dollar we ever earned, a hard-won diploma, high school trophies wrapped in tissue paper and fond memories…
Here’s an ancient video Rosetta Stone from the previous century which purports to be the very first time the Thunderbirds were recorded on film. The premise that the ‘birds were merely puppets is, of course, the kind of elaborate conceit for which the French intellectuals of the mid-Twentieth Century were so well known. As we are all aware, the Thunderbirds were every bit as real as the constant threat of Communist invasion.
Who’s with me? Team Thunderbird: Operation GenX initiated! F.A.B.!!!
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the zoology of Japanese movie monsters
Here’s another great pass-along from DefrostIndoors, who surely should be making better use of her time than feeding increasingly bizarre and amusing fodder to the ol’ raincoaster blog. I mean, you’d think, right?
But she’s not and for that we give thanks.
So here, without another moment’s delay, is an interesting page dedicated to a study of the biology of Kaiju, Japanese movie monsters. Truly, unlocking Godzilla‘s energy-generation secrets could fill the Earth’s power needs in an ecosensitive and holistic way, wiping from the face of the planet the abomination that is open pit mining, eliminating the latent threat of nuclear waste, and preventing the emission of greenhouse gasses.
Yes, Godzilla Power is in accordance with the Kyoto Protocols.
Kaiju-biology (“kaiju” is japanese for “monster”) is simply the study of large monsters that seem to attack Japan with startling regularity. Although the first giant monster to attack Japan did so in 1954 (Godzilla), it was disintegrated by Dr. Serizawa’s Oxygen Destroyer weapon leaving no tissue samples to study. Since that time, however, the field of Kaiju-Biology has grown from being a bunch of nutty old professors making up crazy theories just to publish papers and justify their funding into a fully-fledged interdisciplinary science bringing together top researchers in biology, nuclear science, theoretical physics, and robotics. Advances in Kaiju-Biology not only have the immediate applicability of defending against Godzilla raids but also help lay the technological basis for many great Japanese gizmos! (now you know why Japan leads the world in electronics!)
It would be impossible to list all the great advances made in Kaiju-Biology over the last 10 years on this WWW page, but hopefully this will give you a flavor of this unique field of research. Employment opportunities in Kaiju-Biology are expected to continue their current increase into the near future so study hard and someday you may be Godzilla’s greatest enemy!
I dunno about you, but I’m on a job search. This is one field that has my name on it; what’s Japanese for “Frankenstein“?
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raincoaster 