Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Actor and singer Dean Martin, early in his career, was part of a comedy duo with Jerry Lewis, where he played the straight man to the more antic Lewis. Later he hosted a live variety TV show. Bob Newhart was a great comedian, known for his hesitant manner and his deadpan delivery. On one occasion, he was a guest on Martin’s show and they did a sketch together. Legend has it that Martin never rehearsed for his show but simply read his lines from the off-screen cue cards, sometimes seeing them for the first time while on live TV.
On this occasion, he clearly did not anticipate how funny Newhart could be and you can see the result.
It’s been a while since the Pearls Before Swine strip had one of those puns with a convoluted set up that you know is coming from the first panel.
UPDATE: I realized that some people may not be old enough to know the song being referred to so here is a music video of the Village People doing their hit.
This cartoon illustrates a problem I would have if I ever got one of those voice-activated virtual assistants.
It would go completely against the grain for me to issue commands to anyone and yet it would feel a little silly to be polite to a machine. In the end, I would likely be polite just so as not to develop bad habits.
The one-note nature of Ron DeSantis’s campaign is becoming increasingly apparent.
We can probably expect him to ban certain fish in Florida as well.
This comic illustrates a common misconception, that there is a side of the Moon that is in permanent darkness.
(WuMo)
In reality, as the Moon orbits the Earth, any hemisphere (‘side’) experiences equal amounts of sunlight and darkness, just like the Earth. What is true is that due to tidal forces caused by the Earth, the Moon is ‘locked’ with the Earth so that only one side faces the Earth at all times. As a result, it experiences cycles of two weeks of sunlight and two weeks of darkness as it orbits the Earth.
So while there is no dark side, there is such a thing as the ‘far side’ of the Moon that we cannot see from the Earth. The USSR space probe Luna 3 was the first to photograph the far side in 1959.
I am not sure when the notion that the Moon has a permanent dark side originated. Historically, the ‘dark side of the Moon’ was used colloquially (and correctly) to mean ‘hidden’ or ‘unseen’ but at some point became popularly associated with ‘unlit’. That idea may have gained popularity from the massive success of the 1973 Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon, although this was an allusion to lunacy and has nothing to do with astronomy.
My one caveat is that the cartoon suggests that such people are working class white men when there are many middle and upper class men and women among them.
Of course, cartoonists have limited space to make their point and so some selectivity and lack of nuance is inevitable.
Suppose you are a police officer and you and a fellow officer are called to a nursing home that specializes in residents with higher care needs including dementia because staff reported that a resident had taken a steak knife from the kitchen. When you get there you see a diminutive 95-year old woman coming slowly towards you using a walker and carrying a knife. How do you deal with the situation?
My guess is that you do not take out your Taser and zap her. And yet that is what one officer did. As a result, the woman fell and hit her head on the ground and is now in hospital in a critical condition.
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