Let's roll some dice, watch some movies, or generally just geek out. New posts at 6:30 pm ET but only if I have something to say. Menu at the top. gsllc@chirp.enworld.org on Mastodon and @gsllc on Twitter.
Last week, I learned about Pluto Time care of VSauce. This is the time of day at which the brightness of the Sun is the brightest it ever appears on Pluto, and that equates to around sunrise and sunset. While the Sun is about 1000x dimmer on Pluto than on Earth, the Sun still brightens Pluto at noon (Pluto time) about 300x more than our Moon brightens Earth.
Last week, I shared a random memory of a Tonight Show interview. Today is an interview from Joan Rivers’ Late Show. The link should take you to the relevant part, which is at 5:35. Here, Dave discusses the split with Van Halen and the fallout from it.
Side note: The fact that Rivers took this gig created a personal rift with Johnny Carson.
What I remember about this is that Van Halen — Eddie in particular — was deeply critical of Dave in the press, and Dave always took the high ground. For a while anyway. A couple months after this interview, I heard a snippet from another interview on the radio. Paraphrasing to the best of my recollection (which, based on these posts, is pretty good), Dave’s response to Van Halen was, “Well, I’m out here forging the future, and Van Halen is still living in the pasture.”
Still, I took Dave’s side in the mess because he didn’t fight back until Van Halen pushed him over the edge. Of course, I don’t know any of these guys, so I never really cared about their personal battles. I just knew that they were both producing music I loved, so the breakup worked out great for me.
As a reminder, one of only 14 concerts I’ve ever seen was Hagar and Roth’s joint tour.
Everyone insists they have a good memory, but our brains form fake memories all the time. I’ve used YouTube to test my memory quite often and found that my long-term memory is pretty accurate. The weird thing about my memory is that I sometimes remember things as a mirror image of the way they were. That is, if I remember footage from a TV show where person A is on the left and person B is on the right, their positions are swapped. However, I remember incredible detail about everything else in the footage. Here was a random memory that popped into my head when my cousin shared some footage from Saturday Night Fever. It’s an interview on the Tonight Show with Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta promoting the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive.
And part II.
I remembered almost every minute detail of this interview, and because it’s the Tonight Show, I didn’t reverse the image in my head. The host is always on the right side of the screen, and it’s impossible for a healthy brain to forget that.
Unfortunately, my short-term memory is beginning to suffer, and I sometimes have trouble getting words out when speaking. I also have some difficulty forming new memories. As Kareem Said said on Oz, “Life is balance.” I guess I had this coming, but you can imagine how frustrating that is for someone who historically forgets nothing. While I could stand to lose a lot of childhood and young-adulthood memories, I hope the cognitive decline remains slow.
Tomorrow, I’m discussing memory, so for Caturday, here’s a video on feline memory.
By the way, with all my talk about cats, I don’t own one. However, I bought a house this year, so my tax withholdings were wrong. I’m getting about $2,300 back between federal and state. Hence, I’m buying some cat stuff and getting a cat. Maybe I’ll get two. My understanding is that if they have a playmate when they’re young, they learn the limits of violent behavior. Of course, I’ve always enjoyed “fighting” with the cats I’ve owned, so that’s not too much of a concern.
I have a really annoying habit. Actually, I have several, but this one annoys me. I have to finish what I start. In the context of this post, it means that, once I’ve set my mind to binging the entire run of a television show, I can’t stop until I’m finished no matter how bad the show is. That’s what happened with Scorpion.
Scorpion aired on CBS from 2014-2017, and now you can watch it on demand on Paramount Plus. It centered on a team of underachieving, supra-geniuses who finally get their big break when the Department of Homeland Security designates them a contractor. It started off well enough, and the ratings were some of the best CBS enjoyed during its run. One executive referred to it as “our Big Bang Theory, but as a drama.” However, by season four, the ratings were terrible, and despite a cult following and a tense cliffhanger to end season four, the show was cancelled.
Good riddance.
The show was wildly unrealistic. As anyone with a physics degree, a first career in software engineering, and a current career as an attorney can tell you, most shows are. I have no problem with that. You have to enter into any television show or movie with a certain suspension of disbelief, and I’m happy to do so for the sake of drama. After all, despite not being a comics reader, I’m a huge fan of the MCU and DCEU. What could be less realistic?
I called a fair game today.
But this show dives into many different branches of science, and it gets them all terribly wrong. Moreover, while each episode presents a preexisting peril to be solved, while addressing the peril, the Scorpion team members always make things worse, and usually in the most ridiculous or unrealistic of ways. It’s terrible writing that eventually grates on the viewer. Sharks don’t act that way. Computers don’t act that way. Gravity doesn’t act that way. How is it that you’re always getting your jacket caught right before you have to make a getaway? You’ve been on a deserted island for three weeks; how are you all so clean, and why is Cabe still wearing a suit and tie?
As the charm of the show tends to wane, there’s little left to keep the viewer interested. But I have to say, if there were a season five, I’d have watched it.
Sundays now are lazy days for me. I either post something silly or other people’s work. Usually both. Today, I’m pointing out that we all know the Hippocratic oath. But did you know . . . ?
That’s right. He’s just a damn hippo-box hybrid. This calls the entire medical profession into question. Okay, boys! It’s back to bloodletting and leaches! Now go buy Wrong Hands a coffee.
I had a random memory pop in my head last week. During the early part of its run, my favorite show was the Six Million Dollar Man (1973-1978). Lee Majors played the titular Steve Austin. I also loved its spinoff, The Bionic Woman (1976-1978). The origin of the latter was a sad and frustrating one. The bionics screwed with Jaime Sommers’s body and seemingly killed her. The premise of the show was that she was somehow saved but lost all memory of her romantic relationship with Steve Austin.
Like most of society, I lost interest in the shows as I grew up, but when they announced an upcoming made-for-TV movie bringing back the characters, I was moderately intrigued. It was a huge part of my childhood that wasn’t that far removed from (what was then) the present day. I don’t remember watching the first one, The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (1987), but I do remember seeing the second one, Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (1989) with an unknown Sandra Bullock playing the next generation of bionic human.
Proof!
What stood out in my memory of that show was that Jaime Sommers’s memories had returned, and at the end of the second movie, she interrupted his proposal of marriage to propose to him. Even though I remember not liking the movie, I remember being happy with the resolution. Why? I don’t know. They’re make-believe characters, and they’re not part of a series I was currently watching, so their relationship meant nothing the second the final credits rolled. But humans are weird like that, and their failure to connect even upon her resurrection for the Bionic Woman was disappointing.
There was a third movie, Bionic Ever After?, but I’m sure I never saw it. By 1994, I had more important things to do.
As of this writing, Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner are still going strong at 83 and 73 years old respectively.
My annoyance with the legal department at Wizards of the Coast led me to create a new law of the internet. You all know Godwin’s Law:
As an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1.
Put another way, if an internet argument goes long enough, someone’s going to call someone else a Nazi. Then, there’s Poe’s Law:
Without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
In other words, you can’t tell the difference between an idiot and a comedian unless they’re a comedian and they ruin their joke by explaining it. Well, Poe’s Law inspired the text of my own law, which unsurprisingly I call Bodine’s Law:
Without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, an arrogant author’s exploitation of another’s ignorance can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere, ignorant/incompetent expression of the views being expressed.
In other words, arrogant authors, thinking their dishonesty will never be exposed, tend to take advantage of the ignorance of others by knowingly making ignorant or incompetent statements, but if you understand the topic, you won’t know if the authors are actually ignorant themselves. The arrogant authors generally rely on an argument from authority, but not necessarily, so I think this rule is useful to keep in mind.
Google chrome is my browser of choice, and it has several plug-ins that allow you to control the playback speed of certain streaming services, which are Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and Hulu for me. Netflix requires no such plug-in because it has the feature built into its platform. Apple TV is my only platform that doesn’t have an associated Chrome plug-in, though I get the impression that, like Netflix, its proprietary streaming software includes it. I wouldn’t know because I’m a PC guy. MACs are for people that to use computers without knowing how to use computers.
PC users are so cool.
Enough insults. My observation is that the speed at which TV shows and movies are presented is too slow for me. I often use 1.25x speed when watching a show even if I’m not in a hurry to get through it (though sometimes I bump it to 1.5x). My mind wanders if I watch them at normal speeds, and there are some shows that I would never have finished if it weren’t for being able to watch them at a higher speed. Maybe I have undiagnosed ADD. I don’t know. I’m not going to diagnose myself.
I don’t have this problem with my Paramount+ shows, which right now are Star Trek: Lower Decks and the new Beavis and Butthead. I have no idea if there’s a plug-in for Paramount+ because I have yet to need one. I also haven’t had the need to use the plug-in for Disney+. I’ve watched all the MCU and Star Wars series that have come out and not once noticed a problem with their pace. Maybe those shows are just better written. Or maybe I’m weird (maybe?!), and these plug-ins exist because people’s time to watch shows are limited.
Play What You Want 