For reasons that are no longer apparent to me, I was looking up the Tales from the Crypt show that ran on HBO in the 90s. I’m hoping that some of you, like myself, have fond memories of watching this show, more notable for twist endings than being particularly scary (although I’ll confess that I remember an episode or two that created a sense of creepiness that lingers to this day). As always, Wikipedia is the best resource for everything, and their coverage of the show comes complete with an episode list that conveys better than anything just how cool the show was. Anyone remember the episode where the old millionaire is buying (piecemeal) the body of a young stud? Did you realize that Ahnold directed it? Remember that one where the criminal is handcuffed to the dead body of a state trooper in the middle of the desert? Did you know, back then, that Kyle MachLachlan played the criminal? Or that he later directed the episode where a husban suspects his wife of having an affair with a priest? (The husband is Adam West, by the way.) Another gem that I only discovered when looking up the show is an episode where Ed Begley, Jr., plays a travelling salesman struggling to escape alive from a hillbilly family played by Tim Curry (yes, all three family members are Tim Curry). You can watch it online here (I’d embed the video but it’s in four parts, so you’d need to click through anyway). It’s not terribly scary, but it is mildly disturbing, somewhat amusing, and actually a great performance by Curry on all three counts – just about everything that made the show worth watching when I was young.
Why hasn’t anyone shown me this clip of Mos Def on Bill Maher’s show last year? Mighty Mos clearly has some strange ideas (Bin Laden wasn’t behind the September 11 attacks? No one walked on the moon? OJ was innocent? Hard to tell if he’s joking anymore), but his take is interesting, and it’s definitely fun to watch him blowing Maher’s mind. Meanwhile, when did Bill Maher become one of those “Oh noes, the Islamofascists are coming for us” dudes?
The clip also includes a performance from Dr. Cornel West which constitutes a watershed moment in the history of YouTube*.
Two bits of awesome from the internet, either of which you may already have seen. The first is really old; in fact, I’m upset that no one told me earlier that there’s a music video featuring the entire male cast of The Karate Kid. (Except, of course, for Pat “Mr. Miagi” Morita; his role is filled in admirably by Mr. Belding.) The song is pretty mediocre, but the conceit is perfect.
Second, I absolutely demand that you go and watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It is (so far) thirty minutes of pure awesome. Awesome put together by Joss Whedon during the writers’ strike, and staring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. In Whedon’s words:
Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.
Go there, and don’t come back until you’ve gotten to the end of Act II and you know what the hammer is. It’s only available until Sunday, so go quickly.
Yesterday, PZ Myers linked to a Vanity Fair article for which Christopher Hitchens had himself waterboarded. Hitch wanted to decide for himself whether or not it’s torture. In short:
I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
That’s pretty interesting, and I considered posting it at the time. But, lacking anything to add, I passed. Then today Scott Kaufman brought back the reaction from the wingnut frontier, and it included bits like this:
The enemy believes that we are weak, & Hitchens & his ilk are to blame. It will come to a point, & soon me thinks, when real force will be required. And then it shall come to pass that the unpleasant realities of preemption need to be replaced with the even more unpleasant realities of vengeance […] & the Hitchens of the world will cease to be relevant.
They think we’re weak, and Hitchens is to blame? You mean, this Hitchens: “I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer”? How hard-assed do they want our rhetoric to be? Perhaps from now on, whenever you write about terrorists, you should pretend to be that the masked dude from the Saw franchise or Arnold’s character from Predator. Then you’ll have the right levels of machismo and sadism to sound like a patriot.
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll addresses the Wired article on the “end of theory.” He makes a similar argument to mine, only he does it much better. For instance, I didn’t have this excellent one-line demolition of the whole argument: “Theory is understanding, and understanding our world is what science is all about.”
Highly recommended for examples involving Brahe, Kepler, Newton and the Large Hadron Collider.