Garry Trudeau has been on a roll lately—the BD story line has been affecting and sympathetic, and now and then, he comes out and slams unreason. There have been long stretches where it feels like he’s phoning it in, but not so much recently.
Maybe I shouldn’t bring this up, since the last couple of lectures in my physiology class have been a swift overview of brain organization and function, and my students probably think I have sounded exactly like Pinky and the Brain singing about neuroanatomy. Only less entertaining. And at a ridiculous hour of the morning.
(via Mind Hacks)
You wouldn’t believe how much hate mail I got from posting a little link to Mel Gibson’s Passion with a different soundtrack…but maybe Chris Clarke can take some of the heat now.
Atheists will not be mocked, and I expect much fury in response to this disrespectful joke.
Cool. The Definitive Frink. This is going to be so useful for the researching and the webulating and the hu-uumm-hey, glayvin.
(via Recursivity)
It’s an amusing clip from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra…I’m going to have to see that movie someday.
It’s just a photo set of pictures of quail, but I noticed that my right forefinger reflexively twitched at the photo of the Republican lawyer in the middle of them. There may be a neurological explanation for Cheney’s shotgun error, after all.
I saw the movie Underworld: Evolution last night. Stop looking at me like that—it was research. It has the word “evolution” in the title, doesn’t it? Besides, I have this idea to improve the promotion of science by having all of our spokespeople be dangerously nubile armed women with good cheekbones, full lips, and very sharp teeth. I figure the two things we’ve been lacking in our presentations to the public are lust and fear, and if we can just bring those into play, we’ll have an unbeatable combination.
As I learned at this movie, too, if you’ve got gorgeous women and slimy, ravening beasts confronting each other with big guns, nothing in the story has to make any sense at all. There was no plot: instead, there are a series of set-pieces strung together in which Our Heroine is placed in someplace dark, wet, and seedy with a supply of weapons and hapless allies/fang fodder to confront a suitably snouty or batty SFX playtoy. They aren’t even consistent in how these conflicts are resolved. Big bad immortal vampires get shot multiple times at point blank range with a shotgun, and shake it off with a snarl; but when Sir Derek Jacobi, following in the fine British tradition of slumming in some well-paying American trash, finds the movie so embarrassingly bad that he has to get out, the movie makers decide that the way to have his immortal character die is to poke him with something pointy, followed by a languorous death scene in which Jacobi completely turns off his ability to act. It was impressively flat, a cinematic vampire death scene that ranks right up there with Pee Wee Herman’s in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yet utterly different.
Somehow this murky, muddled mess of a movie got made, and got people (like, say, me!) to attend. There’s a lesson here.
I’m going to have to get a skin-tight vinyl body suit for my next presentation.
I’ll let you guess whether I’m trying to inspire lust or fear.
