It's Breathable

It is said that when asked to define the Golden Age of Science Fiction somebody said, “Twelve.” That’s how old I was when the original Star Trek show made its debut, and I loved everything about it. (Even the Cuban-heeled boots, perfect for space exploration.) Now it mostly looks sort of embarrassing. Even Man from U.N.C.L.E. has aged better. But it won’t die. There have been around a dozen different Star Trek TV series and about the same number of movies. I think they should to stop now, having exhausted every possible shape you can adhere to an actor’s forehead.

Let me clarify.

While reading about Nikodem Poplawski (as one does) I came across the hilariously-named Jagiellonian University which sidetracked me because I have the attention span of a goldfish in a bowlful of benzedrine. Anyway, Poplawski has this hypothesis that the flip side of a black hole is a big bang that creates a whole new universe which in due time expands and produces black holes of its own and that our own universe is the spawn of a black hole in another universe and so on ad infinitum. What if it turns out to really be turtles all the way down?

I am easily tickled

Jagiellonian University is what I’m writing about because the word Jagiellonian looks so dang funny to me although certainly not to Polish people nor actually to any educated person whose sense of humor has evolved beyond the 7th grade level. It (Jagiellonian University) was founded in 1364 by King Casimir III the Great, 600 years before the Beatles made their American television debut on the Ed Sullivan show. That means that by the time John, Paul, George, and Ringo showed up in our living rooms, Jagiellonian University was already one of the world’s oldest continuously operating institutions of higher learning.

Four wheels better

You sometimes hear people say, “It’s 2025 already, where the heck is my flying car?” But flying cars have always been a terrible idea. Look here. In commercials they always are showing a new car speeding unimpeded down a smooth stretch of scenic highway or ravaging some previously pristine chunk of wilderness when really it’s going to be sitting in traffic or parked at Costco. So. Picture us all in the sky on the way to our same stupid jobs. Plus, a disabled jalopy tends to roll to a stop as opposed to crashing through the roof of somebody’s house.

Next week back to funny. I promise.

Try not to panic. Take a few slow deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth. There. Feeling better? Of course not. Oxygen isn’t the problem, at least not yet. The problem is the price of eggs, cultural genocide, and the rise to power of a cohort of soulless hyenas whose life strategy is to suck up and kick down, to support the rich against the poor and the strong against the weak. My gut impulse is to escape. I saw an article headlined “Why do women live longer than men?” and my first thought was “male privilege.”

Maybe you too

Vladimir Putin was born in Leningrad and worked his way up through the KGB, training at the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Institute and rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Steve Bannon came from Norfolk, Virginia, went to Virginia Tech, Georgetown, and Harvard, got divorced three times. He’s a convicted conman. Elon Musk went to something called the Waterkloof House Preparatory School, which I have to grudgingly admit is pretty cool. I mean, Waterkloof. He grew up rich and currently is the world’s wealthiest human. So. What do I have in common with these three guys? Contempt for Donald Trump.

This may not apply to you.

If, however, you have a friend who needs to write on a weekly basis 100 words that are maybe a little bit diverting or silly or peculiar and they come to you asking for your input about where to get new ideas for their little essays you could do worse than to advise them to make it a regular habit to read about advances in science which not only will make them a better informed citizen of the world but will expose them to sentences such as “Moroccan fly maggot uses fake face on its butt to infiltrate termite colony.”

Ripped from the headlines!

I know there are a lot of things demanding your attention. Maybe you missed this science headline: “66 million-year-old fish vomit discovered in Denmark.” (In nearby Sweden they call that Surströmming.) So many questions. Did someone come rushing into the lab hollering “Guys! This fish vomit is 66 million years old!” and did someone else react by saying “Holy crap! That’s the oldest fish vomit ever! Yay!” Who did they call first? Is there currently somebody in some other lab looking sadly at their sample of what is now the world’s second-oldest fish vomit? And finally, who knew fish puked?

Pop Will Eat Itself

You might have hoped that Walk Hard had effectively killed the entire celebrity musician genre, but this year something called A Complete Unknown is up for multiple Oscars. Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan and no less an authority than the BBC says he “creates a thoroughly convincing avatar of Dylan." I say that only time will tell if his performance has the staying power of Tyrone Power’s star turn in The Eddy Duchin Story, but if this whole acting thing doesn’t work out for the young man he can always join the circuit that features Elvis imitators and Beatles tributes.

Be Kind. Rewind.

Remember the VHS boxes lined up at Blockbuster during the golden age of crappy action pictures and the image always included 1) a gun, 2) a square-jawed hero, 3) an explosion in the background, and 4) a scantily-clad starlet? Not a big fan of movies like that, but I have some leftover names if they ever need to make some more: Proximal Cause. Convection. The Dog Walker. Metric Conversion. Arbor Day. Ambient Temperature. Permanent Marker. Also, why back when they were shot on film did we call them movies but now that they’re mostly shot digitally we call them films?

fit to print

The New York Times had an article about what was the best peanut butter. There are a lot of reasons why a person might want to read the New York Times and while those reasons undoubtedly vary from reader to reader I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the percentage of New York Times readers who turn first to the old grey lady when seeking guidance in choosing their peanut butter is a very small number. A number, I would wager, approaching zero. This too: Breakfast pastry used to be cheaper. Nowadays, dollars to donuts is pretty much even money.

The late Dave Maleckar

Well, okay, the reason I’m late is I had some errands this morning and I had no prewritten verbiage to post and I’ve not yet sunk to the level of serving up “best-of” rants from the previous decades although as a legacy blog I would certainly be entitled to do so like Family Circus or Hi and Lois which to call them comics is to completely disregard the root meaning of the word and actually why were they ever included in the funny pages although so was Rex Morgan MD, which admittedly was at least as funny as Beetle Bailey.

Not my circus

How much fun a barrel of monkeys would actually be would depend on how tightly they were packed and how long they’d been in there. Would this barrel be jam packed? Chock full? How much fun would it be to open a barrel of angry ravenous monkeys? No fun. I don’t even want to think about it. Also, under what system of measurement is the barrel anybody’s standard unit for a quantity of monkeys? Because I happen to know that crabs are measured by the bushel and while they too are eukaryotic bilaterally symmetrical critters, they’re nobody’s simile for hilarity.