educational film

A flesh wound hurts less than a stubbed toe and once wrapped in a strip of petticoat offers no impediment to subsequent exertions. Bad guys know how to bonk you on the head with a pistol butt so as to render you unconscious for a time – when you wake up, just rub the sore spot a little and you’ll be okay. Tough guys never look back at explosions. Cabbies know every apartment building in town by name. You’ll need between 70 and 120 minutes to solve the one big challenge in your life. After that, everything will be just fine.

Thumbs up!

Since you’re reading this, the odds are we’re members of the same species. Walk proud, fellow human. Weak and whiny and easily damaged though we may be, our mighty brains can invent ways around our physical deficiencies with innovative technologies that confer the functional equivalents of attributes like flight, sharp pointy teeth, and in the case of some cool-ass sneakers, bioluminescence. Sure, primitive tool use has been observed in cephalopods, primates, and corvids, but it is nowhere near as sophisticated as our own. They will, for instance, often use visegrips or channelocks where a socket wrench would be more appropriate.

Monster

You find yourself zippered into a snug rubber suit. There’s a rubber head over your own actual head and you can hardly see a thing. Everything sounds muffled and strange. And you’re so uncomfortable – the suit is so tight the sweat can’t even get out of your pores and there are all these hot lights pointed directly at you and a man is yelling at you to pick up the young woman in the nightgown but you can barely move or breath and why would you want to carry her around anyway? Do you feel a swell of murderous rage?

mph X 4.7

Our initiative to get the world’s speedometers converted to angstroms per nanosecond is moving along at a snail’s pace. Actually, expressing a snail’s pace in Å/ns yields a number smaller than one, which is inelegant. So, what’s shorter that an angstrom? Well, the Planck length. It would take 6.25E+24 of those little buggers to add up to one angstrom. Wikipedia says that if a 0.1 mm dot was magnified to the size of the observable universe, one Planck length would be about 0.1 mm. So, quite small. Does thinking about that make you slightly queasy? I know it does me.

Europe Between The Oceans

According to this one book I’m reading, when the first humans got to Crete about 10,000 years ago, their first order of business was to kill and eat the indigenous dwarf hippopotamuses, which they did with such persistence and enthusiasm that to this very day the complete absence of dwarf hippopotamuses is one of the notable features of the island. An inquisitive visitor might ask, “Have you any dwarf hippopotamuses?” to which a local guide might reply, “No, we killed and ate them long ago.” “What?” (Eyebrows shoot up in disbelief) “All of them?” Then, shamefaced: “Yes. Every last one.”

Wahoo.

Finally, the Cleveland baseball team is going to be renamed. Some of us still remember how back in the early ‘70s Russell Means suggested that maybe “Indians” wasn’t such a great name. The thought experiment he presented was to imagine the club was called the “Cleveland Negroes,” a comparison that was apt, fair, and funny. And look! A scant five decades later, results! So there’s hope for those of us who want to advance social justice. (And get rid of the designated hitter. Because the pitcher’s at-bat is an excellent time to go to the john or buy a hotdog. )

Brain Kibble

If you give a man a fish, you have fed him for a day. If you give him a poison fish, you have fed him for a lifetime. Just a few hours devoted to trial and error can save literally minutes of reading the instructions. There are two kinds of people in the world, those who agree that there are two kinds of people in the world and those who do not. Despite what cartoonists would have you believe, there’s nothing particularly funny about being stranded on a desert island. It’s hard to get people to talk about their aphasia.