Cowicide at 20: (I'm sure the pigeon shit ending and the music confused the hell out of the sheep, LOL.)

I see what you did there.

You're a clever boy aren't you? Yes you are. A clever, clever little boy. Oh yes you is, oh yes you is.

Who's a clever boy? Who's a clever boy? Yes, it's you! Yes you are!

Well every culture seems to have its weird ingrained ideas that are obviously, patently absurd on their face to anyone from outside the culture, but persist anyway in the face of direct and obvious evidence to the contrary. Koro is a good one for Africa.

The Koreans, one of the most technically advanced cultures in the world right now, seem to have a pathological terror of electric fans.

The American examples are left as an exercise for the reader, but I've come up with several that have manifested themselves in my lifetime, so no need to go back to the witch trials.

Well it's sure no McGillicutty and Green.

That was a brilliant Kids in the Hall sketch with Kevin McDonald as the comedic half of a vaudeville duo and Dave Foley as his painfully literal straight man.

McG: So Mr. Green, I hear you manage a baseball team.

Grn: No. No, I'm a vaudevillian.

Most brilliant riff on Who's on First ever, especially when Foley suddenly stops in the middle and goes, "Oh, I see what your problem is!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfXFOllCE7s

no,no, "Outland" IS "High Noon"

Not without Grace Kelly, it ain't...

#2: "It is clear that you cannot prosecute somebody for violating a "secret" law that is passed in private, never published, and never made known to the public."

Sadly, that is actually no longer clear.

See, I GET that Heinz would be irked about that, and that some people still have painful memories of the Nazi era. But at the same time, come on, that's funny. So I don't know. Where does the line get drawn? And does it depend largely on how far away from the situation you are?

I am neither connected to Heinz, or from a family devastated by the Nazis, and (disclaimer) I once spent a fair amount of time ALMOST convincing a friend of mine that there was a canned pasta called ABCs & IUDs that featured, in addition to the letters, little pasta coils and Dalkon shields. (The "T"s could go either way...)

You know what? Fuck Tibet. Fuck China, fuck the whole thing.

If the Olympics were being held in Candyland, where everyone is happy and fulfilled and there are free butterscotch fountains for everyone, the Olympics would still be evil. They're not some dream of human athletic greatness that transcends our differences. They're nothing but a massive plague on the land that shows up every couple years like locusts, sucks massive amounts of wealth out of a city to give to the rich, and leaves destruction in its wake.

You want to see the Olympics distilled down to their essence: here it is.

As gorgeous as these are, I'd love to see the contemporary marketing reports indicating how many impulse sales of steel they generated among shopping housewives, how many extra tons of steel existing customers bought because of them over and above what they needed, and how many businesses decided after seeing these to use steel for something they were originally going to make out of, say, copper, or adobe.

It's kind of like how I really want to buy an airplane from Boeing after those TV spots they've been running on CNN lately. Sadly, none of the stores in my local mall seem to stock them.

(Yes, marketing generally mystifies me.)

Wait, that's a fake overdub? So Clapton's better than that?? Damn!!

I don't think it's so much that people of the era had a death wish. I think it's more that they were conditioned to accept that people would occasionally just die some kind of sudden and horrible mechanical death. They pretty much all worked in fields full of astonishingly hazardous agricultural machinery or in pre-OSHA factories and steel mills, coal mines, etc.

It's kind of like the way people who grew up in agricultural settings tend to be much less queasy and sensitive about animal deaths than are refined, modern urbanites. (And kind of the way we aren't scared to death whenever we see a car even though they kill more than a million of us worldwide every year.)

Their toys were pretty badass too...

While meaning no disrespect to the creators at all, I have to note after a look through the sample gallery that, yeah, pretty much only white people would go for something like this... :-)

My wife's family is from Akron. I'm convinced it's actually the hellmouth. There's crime and weirdness everywhere, but Akron always seems to take it one step beyond.

Everywhere has jealous husbands who kill their wives' lovers. Only in Akron would he chase the victim through the restaurant where he worked, wearing a ninja outfit, scalp him in the alley behind the restaurant, and get caught with the scalp hanging from his rear view mirror.

Everywhere has people who rob convenience stores. Only in Akron would someone rob a convenience store with a cup of gas and a lighter as their weapon, go on to do this many more times successfully, and then finally get caught by raising a gas station attendant's suspicions by showing up with a mason jar and trying to buy a quarter's worth of gas.

Just today, a woman was denied parole in the murder of her cousin, who she lured to a house on the request of a friend who proceeded to kill him over a shared attraction to a stripper, then behead him, drive the corpse to West Virginia and set it on fire.

It's just that kind of town.

Last I heard of this gun it was supposed to be melted down by police in Washington D.C. Back in the 90s the owner (not sure if it's the same owner or not) had brought it with them to Washington planning to show it to some high government type they were there to visit. I want to say Tom Foley, who was Speaker of the House at the time.

Anyway, they managed to get it seized, either by the Capitol Police or by D.C. Police (you'll note my memories on this are rather vague) and, in accordance with D.C.'s notoriously tough gun laws, any weapon they seize has to be destroyed. At the time, I recall there being a brouhaha about it because of the historical significance of the gun. If this is the same gun, I guess they must have managed to save it.

Probably why he was played by Dave Foley. He was the one human astronaut.

Heh! Had to look that up on IMDB as I've never seen From the Earth to the Moon. Thanks for pointing it out.

But to be sure, regardless, WALKED ON THE MOON!!

What surprises me most reading this piece and then wandering into some other stuff about the Apollo 12 mission is what a clumsy goof Alan Bean was! (Well, by lunar astronaut standards anyway.)

Not only did he forget to pack several rolls of exposed film when they were coming home and thus left them on the moon he also apparently borked their TV transmissions by pointing their camera into the sun while trying to set it up, and frying it. (Hmm, perhaps he had something to hide...)

On the other hand, he did save the entire mission when he was the only one who could figure out how to force the backup telemetry systems to take over from the supposedly still working main systems after their data became garbled. If he hadn't pulled that off, they'd have had to abort. So I guess he'd just used up his hero quotient for that flight and had to screw up a couple things for karmic balance.