Science, Art, and Coffee

Another good episode of Mr. Deity, with the trio giving a press conference on the eve of the Superbowl. In addition to the great one-liners, the news scroll at the bottom has some great stuff like: “297 die in plane crash. Mr. Deity: ‘Not my fault.’”

Yes, if the actual deity was this funny, I’d be a willing convert. But then again, Lucy(fer) is kind of hot.

So today I picked up some previously-viewed DVDs at Hollywood video: “Crank”, District 13″ and the much-Internet-hyped “Snakes on a Plane”. I watched the latter movie this evening, and it was definitely a lot of fun! Okay, sure, a lot of people perished, but seeing how many snake-related ways it happened was a large part of the entertainment value. It’s just the sort of Saturday night popcorn movie where you just turn off your brain and revel in the action.

Now I think I’ll go onto iTunes and buy the song that plays over the end credits called “Bring It”, by a group appropriately named Cobra Starship!

So have you seen that new global warming commercial that likens the concept to a runaway train barreling toward a little girl? Sickening scaremongering at its worst, I gotta say. So why is it the the crisis du jour? This article called “The History of the Global Warming Scare” has some interesting insights. Some excerpts:

The hypothesis of man-made global warming has existed since the 1880s. It was an obscure scientific hypothesis that burning fossil fuels would increase CO2 in the air to enhance the greenhouse effect and thus cause global warming. Before the 1980s this hypothesis was usually regarded as a curiosity because the nineteenth century calculations indicated that mean global temperature should have risen more than 1°C by 1940, and it had not. Then, in 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) became Prime Minister of the UK, and she elevated the hypothesis to the status of a major international policy issue.
[…]
On face value global warming is an environmental issue. Many environmentalists joined the bandwagon. Governments were offering money and the public were concerned at global warming. Any environmental issue which could be linked to global warming was said to be involved in the matter. But the environmentalist interest was aroused by the impact of the issue. Contrary to common belief, environmentalists did not raise awareness of global warming, they responded to it. Simply, environmentalist organisations were part of the general public and decided to use the issue when it became useful to them.
[…]
A rational assessment of appropriate policies would include cost/benefit analysis, but imagined risk is not rational. All the proposed responses to the imagined risk of man-made global warming would increase starvation and poverty while inhibiting economic development throughout the entire world. And CO2 emissions would not be reduced and may be increased. In practice, politicians are accepting the predictions of climate models as being predictions of the future, and they are acting to change that future. This is similar to the behaviour of people who believe horoscope predictions of future harm so they avoid situations where that harm could happen.

It seems to me, though, that even if the entire world were to quit emitting carbon dioxide all at once — cold turkey — any results wouldn’t be immediately evident, just like slamming the brakes on a speeding train won’t cause it to stop on a dime. So the little girl in the commercial would probably end up splattered on the front grille, either way!

So I found this interesting quote on the Internet, from a 1932 essay by Winston Churchill:

“Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

His vision didn’t quite come to pass, being as how in 1982 we didn’t have vat-grown chicken parts. But then again, in what year were Chicken McNuggets invented? Hmmm …

So I bought a bunch of songs off iTunes recently. One of them is “Heart Failed (In the Back of a Taxi)” by Saint Etienne. For some reason I prefer to hear that line as, “Heart failure in the back of a taxi.” I dunno, it just soudns funnier!

Another song I got is “Blood and Roses” by The Smithereens. When I hear the refrain, I’m thinking it’s: “I close my eyes and I see, Blood and Chocolate.” But no, I haven’t seen the movie.

So this molecular biologist guy just came up with caffeinated donuts and bagels. I’m not really sure it’s a good idea to do that to breakfast foods, being as how many people already eat such items alongside a cup of coffee. It’s like making coffee with caffeinated water (as seen on an episode of “The Drew Carey Show”).

But yeah, imagine having a breakfast that gave you triple your usual dose of caffeine. You’d be super-hyped up and jittery, doing cartwheels all over the office! Oh, and what if you had a Jolt cola or a Red Bull at lunch? Man, you wouldn’t be able to sleep for days! But hey, maybe that sort of thing would be useful for truck drivers and security guards, eh?

So I’ve been watching “American Idol”, only because there’s nothing else to watch on Tuesday and Wednesday until “Eureka” and “Lost” come back on the schedule. But it never fails to amuse, how many clueless untalented wannabes audition and then are shocked and bent out of shape when they don’t make the cut. I mean, do these people even know what they sound like? Perhaps not. And I’m sure many of them have some kind of mental quirk that prevents them from realizing that they suck. There’s actually a term for this condition: Unskilled and Unaware.

It’s pretty obvious that one needs to have some talent to make it to the Hollywood part of the show, yet seemingly random people off the street think they came come in, croak out a few notes, and get the golden ticket. Like, if you can’t sing half as well as the likes of Justin Timberlake or even Weird Al Yankovic, then you either try to improve, or just get out of it.

So I did this online IQ test, but having been scammed once already by an IQ test, I decided to see if this one was legit by simply selecting the last answer to each multiple-choice question. And this is what my score was:

Well golly geez, a 97 just for deliberately trying to fail! How about that, huh?

So I’m sure almost everyone has heard of the case in which a woman spills hot McDonald’s coffee on herself and wins almost $3 million. I had always assumed, like pretty much everyone else, that it was the woman’s own fault and that she shouldn’t have gotten a dime.

Well, a couple of years ago, I was taking this one computer class, and someone brought up the coffee case. Another guy then said that his uncle (or someone) was a judge (or something), and had told the dude what really happened: the coffee was so hot that it melted the adhesive that held the paper cup together, and that the cup fell apart in the woman’s lap. In light of that information, I guess now that some kind of judgement probably was justified.

This Wikipedia article has the full story about Liebeck vs. McDonald’s. But whatever the truth of the case, I’d say it’s a good idea not to have a hot cup of coffee anywhere near one’s groinal area!

So there’s new Jackson-Hewitt commercial out, featuring Ghost Rider! Same question: why does Johnny Blaze need a Money Now loan? What, Satan not paying him enough?