Today’s sampler platter

I was going to call today’s entry something involving “potpourri”, but then I thought “Who care about potpourri? It comes in weird little sachets and invariably contains at least one thing that makes me sneeze. It’s supposed to keep your drawers smelling fresh, but I will leave that up to my fabric softener. You know what I like? Sampler platters. I love getting a whole big platter of various tasty fried things and other appies to try. I am going to call today’s entry a sampler. Take that, Evelyn and Crabtree!”

I have a long standing feud with the ladies at E&C. They know what they did.

On today’s platter, in the upper right quadrant, you will find this rather savoury bit of superbly cooked and highly piquant slab of deep fried crispy-skin schadenfreude : A whole half hour documentary about just what a heartless evil job destroying bastard Mitt Romney and his Bain Capital cronies have been in the past.

I know it’s a big helping, but you don’t have to finish it all in one sitting. Watch the first ten minutes or so, and you will get the drift. The rest is more of the same.

I officially hate that son of a bitch now. He does not simply represent the One Percent, he represents the absolute worst of them. Born to privilege, made billions completely destroying lives, businesses, and jobs, and probably doesn’t have the slightest idea why anyone would have a problem with that. After all, everything he did was legal and incredibly profitable, ergo, it was fine. And it’s not like he and his cronies ever had to even look at the people whose families they destroyed. They did it all from some posh Manhattan office.

What makes this documentary a treat, though, is that it will make for very good ammunition for Barack Obama when the right win machine, despite what their base actually wants, goes ahead and makes Mitt their candidate anyhow.

Making the case that Mitt is a horrible person will be quite easy, and while his right wing opponents might feel a little squeamish about attacking him about his Bain (should be spelled Bane) activities because they are actually on record as being for unfettered greed in capitalism, the Democrats will have no such qualms.

But enough of that challenging cuisine with the sophisticated adult taste. In the upper right quadrant of the platter, you will find everyone’s favorite Internet dish : funny cat pictures.

And for just this week, it comes with bonus GBLT content!

This is my GAY CAT STRUT BITCHES!

What is it with me and calling people bitches like that, anyhow? I seem to have a fascination with it. I have this desire to burst in a group of nerds and shout “Roll for initiative, bitches!” and see if anyone lunges for their dice bag.

I have a weird inner life, even by my own standards.

Anyhow, isn’t Pride Cat great? I am trying to figure out just what that pose suggests. I first thought “INVISIBLE DIVING BOARD” but the pose is not quite right for diving. It more suggests something highly dramatic, like opera, or figure skating. “INVISIBLE OPERA HOUSE”? Nah.

Moving to the lower left quadrant of our platter, we find another Internet staple, the tried and true taste of very silly animated GIFs. To wit :

I bet she had to think of a wonderful thing first.

Imagine the fun this gal must have had making this silly little clip. For those of you unfamiliar with camera magic, the way you make something like this is quite simple. You record yourself jumping in the air and making that flapping bird pose in four different locations on your bed, and then you edit together only those frames which have you at the right height and motion, and voila, you have what appears to be a person in her adorable pajamas flapping about her bed like she’s a chicken.

What I particularly enjoy is how the bedsheets seem to be pushed down by the force of her flight. Of course, they are really just pushed down by the force of her kerboinging on her bed, just like your parents always told you not to do. But it really sells the silly effect.

I love that kind of thing.

And now, at long last, our gaze turns to the lower right quadrant of the platter, where you will find this highly exciting and stimulating science news story en croute : turns out, every star has, on average, at least one planet orbiting it.

Is that not kewl? This means there are scads and scads more planets than was previously thought, and of course, the more planets, the more likelihood that one of them has another intelligent life form.

Or heck, just life in general. We are not in a position to be picky. Just finding some alien slime mold would be a million thrills at this point. But what we really want, of course, is another sentience.

Needless to say, Drake’s Equation has never looked so good. There might well be millions of other races out there for us to meet.

If you take a look at Drake’s Equation…..

A truly magnificent work of definitive, scientific guessing. Click to enlarge.

… you will see that what has changed is the Fp variable, the fraction of stars that have planets. When that goes up, so does N, the likelihood of there being intelligent life within radio distance of Earth.

Wow, I almost sound like I know what I am talking about, don’t I? Well, it’s just basic algebra, adding probabilities and so on. Don’t get intimidated by the subscript, it’s just there to identify each variable when there are only so many letters of the alphabet and mathematicians refuse to use two without making the second one hide below the line.

Anyhow, I am super stoked at this development. It is great news for us in the “Go Aliens Go!” group.

Of course, we really have no idea what the rest of the variables represent. What fraction of planets have life on them? What fraction of those will have intelligent life? Who knows? We can only make speculate wildly.

But still, the odds of finding more sentient life forms out there has gone up, and that’s enough for me.

Talk to us soon, Space Brothers! Preferably over the Internet, in our email inboxes.

That would seem friendly enough, right?

4 thoughts on “Today’s sampler platter

  1. That Portal 3D thing sounds like that early episode of Futurama where Fry finds out that in the future, they advertise in your dreams, and everyone else just accepts that as normal.

    The last dream I had, I was some sort of camouflage-wearing soldier in charge of a team of American paramilitary types, like a weekend-warrior version of the BPRD, and we were going through doorways that led to stairs that led to alternate time periods, thirty years apart. When I say “alternate,” I mean it in the true sense of the word: alternating back and forth between two options.

    One time period was thirty years ago, the early eighties, and was a deserted campsite where something terrible had happened, like a dark magic ritual. We were all pretty nervous about attracting the attention of whatever dark entities might still be around, all except for the FNG, some loudmouth idiot from the sticks.

    The other time period was the present day, the same campsite, but nothing had changed, only that the ritual hadn’t been recent, so it was less dangerous to be there.

    Every campsite had a door back to the way you came and door through to the next realm. Behind every door was a narrow hallway, dimly lit with a single yellow light bulb, with a gray set of stairs connecting that door with the next door. And the campgrounds alternated between 1982 and 2012, so if you were in the 1982 campground, then went forward, you’d get to the 2012 campground. Forward again, you’d end up at the 1982 campground.

    But not the same 2012 of 1982. These were all slightly different universes and I was counting on someone else to be keeping track of which one we came from and how many it had been, so we’d know when we’d come back to our home universe.

    The campground was simple. The remnants of a fire (still recent in 1982, cold by 2012), some tents, some odds and ends. In one of the 1982s there was a sad-looking cat hanging around the camp, looking lost and hurt. I wanted to take it with us. The FNG wanted to put it in a cat-carrier and leave it there and see if it was still there when we got to 2012. I got mad at him because this would mean it would starve and be a skeleton in the present.

    At one point we were certain we had stirred something up in a 1982 camp, and we had to run like hell back down all the staircases, and back through all the camps, one after the other. I think we finally lost the thing, whatever it was.

    There was also a fat, dark-gray, short-haired cat on one of the stairways, while we were running for our lives. I didn’t make the connection in my dream, but I hope it was the sad lost cat from before, after finding its way home and being fed and groomed.

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