So how about that local sports team, eh?
I find that for all the junk I read and look at online, there are some pop culture blind spots I have that are quite large, indeed, and not just ones that don't fit my demographic (for example, who the latest autotuned hip-hop vocalist to reach the billboard top ten is this week). I discovered that Shaquille O'Neal was retiring after 19 years in the NBA. Those who know me know I'm not the biggest sports fan in the world, and it goes beyond my living in a city who hosts the KC Royals (as effective as the Chicago Cubs but without the lovable loser vibe) and the Chiefs (an NFL team with rabidly loyal fans but without a Super Bowl bid for quite some time). We also have a soccer team with the geek-friendly name "The Wizards," but since they started out as "The Wiz," it's rather hard not to think of the reason they altered their name to the long form, and no, it wasn't because people were confusing soccer with a broadway musical and/or movie (by the way, kids, that's Michael Jackson and his original nose as the scarecrow). Anyway, having grown up in the age of the 'Shaq Attack,' I had rather thought basketball wasn't his thing anymore after he started doing things like Kazaam and Steel, but I guess pro ball was a fallback career. My non-sports fandom can probably be blamed on three things: 1. I was a chubby and mostly unathletic kid. 2. I despised it when sports meant my Saturday morning cartoons were cut short. 3. I worked at KFAL/KKCA, two radio stations in one building with their booths opposite each other. When both carried sporting events requiring manual insertion of commercials, often at the same time, and I was the only one there, I often dented myself on the steel furniture trying to dash from one set of controls to the other. Number three made a few impressions about each sport we carried:
- Baseball: Commercial breaks came every time the teams swapped places on the field, which is great if you really needed a bathroom visit. For our station, we carried the St. Louis Cardinals. During my tour of radio duty, I was told that the stadium's broadcast booth had a beer tap in it, which is why you could hear the announcers starting to slur their words a bit as the games wore on.
- Basketball: You never knew when they'd toss the broadcast back to you for a word from Dales Farm Supply, but it was by far the shortest of all sporting events as the game was usually fairly close in length to the time allotted on the clock.
- Football: Long, long, long games with no clue when they'd tell you to start up the next block of PSAs and words from our sponsor. You got to the point when you realized you were spending most of your time listening to people standing around. We most often were broadcasting Mizzou Tigers football, and for years after (and it might still be this way) whatever gizmo they used to send it to their stations made this little 'pop-pop-pop' noise in the background, like it ran on a car engine with sticky lifters or something.
Then there was the crushing blow when I found out the XFL wasn't going to resemble anything like a Gwar concert with scorekeepers or the video/board game "Bloodbowl." I still respect our athletic citizens and their fans... except when I need to drive past the stadium and a game is letting out. :)
Okay, so here's a spoiler-free review of the Doctor Who episode, "The Almost People": Good overall, but. I could see the moral reveal coming a mile away, as the script spent far too much time setting up the quite obvious twist. It also made me think far less of a certain character, and that just wasn't cool (unlike bow ties). We do finally get to see what a certain running "what was that?" thread through the recent episodes is all about (kind of), but the biggest blow to viewers is probably nothing to do with the plot: It's that we only get one more episode before one of those mid-season breaks that lasts until September 3.
One thing does kind of bug me about the current run of Doctor Who, and it's a small thing: His DNA and its alleged value. I believe River Song said that Time Lord DNA is invaluable (I'm guessing it holds the secret to regeneration or something) and that there are those who would do anything to get their hands on it. If that's the case, there should be loads of samples among the many enemies of the Doctor, who have bloodied him on numerous occasions. There's a clone of his running around out there, not to mention (in theory) many instances where he was prominent in a given event where those with time travel tech (mostly the Daleks, I think) could go grab a blood stain, a severed hand, or whatever. This also assumes that trace DNA won't work. But anyway, I would have figured the Doctor would have left behind enough samples for culturing and doing... whatever with it in the past 900 years, right? I know, I'm demanding continuity of a show where rewriting the past (and indeed, the whole universe) is the continuity, but it just struck me as a strange concept.
I'm going to play catch-up in the comments section tomorrow, I promise. Today, I attended the funeral of my grandmother Phyllis, from my stepmother's side of the family, and I was among the pallbearers. This was something I hadn't ever done before, and I was honored to be asked. She'd led a rich life and a large company of well-wishers attended the service, which I think said more than those officiating could have. Her passing wasn't unexpected, but she'll be missed all the same.
I can't end on a note of melancholy like that, especially if it led right into the usual jocularity of the linkdump, so we'll focus instead on a major corporation that seems to have lost a bet with a genie or something: Sony got hacked yet again. This time it's the Sony Pictures division to have its servers raided and its customer data hung out to dry on torrent sites. I think the moral of this story is that even if you're a large, easily-annoyed technology company, if someone installs Linux on something you made, don't try and prosecute them. Hire them, instead; it's cheaper. Besides, it's only a matter of time before all those Aibo robot-dogs get some kind of 'kill all humans' virus uploaded to them from some script kiddie at this point. To take your mind off this yapping robot apocalypse, I offer the following:
- A new webcomic from yours truly debuts soon!
- I have to admit that the wife and I often stay through movie credits to search for unfortunate names. Dumb Names in Movie Credits now makes seeing said movies unnecessary.
- Rob Bricken of ToplessRobot has seen the Wonder Woman pilot, and (language warning) is far more unkind, yet harshly funny than the review I posted last entry.
- As if there's any further evidence needed about how Michael Bay writes his scripts, he demanded base jumping with wingsuits in 'Transformers 3' because he saw a segment about it on 60 Minutes and thought it looked cool.
- Could it be that the plot of the Bioshock game was predicted in an episode of 'Batman: The Animated Series?'
- And continuing with the DC follies (I'm so sorry for mentioning that show to make a poor jest), here's Hitler (who 'says' a naughty word or two, but only in subtitles) reacting to the news that DC is restarting many classic titles at #1.
- It's time for another visit to creepy urban landscapes to find 10 Gnomes in Liege.
- Or you could just blow things up in the aptly named Space Arcade.
- Two images for your viewing pleasure: First, the result of combining 'The Wire' with 'A Game of Thrones.' Then, there's this image which appears to be a bit of a riddle, but it's more of a prank on what you think you're reading.
- You might be considered a nerd if this is how you water your plants.
- It's been a while since I've posted an episode of David Mitchell's Soapbox, so here's Mr. Mitchell on the word 'LOL.'
- So you've got $5,000 burning a hole in your pocket and no time to build an alien death-machine? Lucky for you, you can now just order one.
- Some classic EA games are headed to Good Old Games dot com, including the one that nearly gave me carpal tunnel back in the day, "Magic Carpet."
- I think Cubist C'thulhu is even more SAN-reducing than the original.
- Here's a little animated bit of cute called Gumball Wars. It's almost a metaphor for what player-characters in D&D do when they think their magical item has unlimited charges.
- Hungry Sumo is a game where you hover your mouse pointer over your Sumo Wrestler(s) to make them grow large enough to tackle their opponents. Don't grow your Sumo when they're touching another wrestler or they'll pop.