Spirit of the Sunday Special

This week, I decided to try to do my usual Sunday mishmash of cool stuff from the Internet BEFORE I am stuffed full of fine food from ABC Country Kitchen, and thus be able to go straight from restaurant to hanging out with my dear friend and internationally recognized source of awesome Felicity without having to stop off back here in the Cave for writingness in between.

But don’t worry, chillun’, I solemnly swear that advanced preparation and general lack of excuse will not make this edition, or any future edition, of the Sunday Special any more coherent, well thought out, or dignified.

I would never let you people down like that!

First up, Harry Hanrahan has done it again! He’s put together 100 more of the greatest movie insults of all time and edited them into one sweet smooth profanity-laden fucking package.

Here it is, in all its bitchy glory :

Not quite as good as the original, but then again, the original was supposedly the 100 greatest movie insults of all time, so it only stands to reason that a second edition of same would represent insults 100 through 200 in terms of all time greatness and hence not be quite as wonderful.

That’s just logic!

Hanrahan (damn, I love that name… so dynamic!) did pick up a few I thought were missing from the first list, like the classic “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son” line from Animal House. That is, sincerely, one of my all time favorite movie lines, delivery with superb crispness and dismissiveness, and I am quite pleased to see it make an appearance this time around.

But adding the one classic Full Metal Jacket quote you hadn’t used yet, HH? Obvious. Ditto with more Caddyshack. Either include them all in the first one, or don’t bother.

Rawr. Hiss. Feeling catty today.

Oh, and Larry Miller saying “Now listen to me, you fat tub of goo” makes the list entirely because of Larry’s exquisite delivery. On paper, that’s a far from brilliant line, but he has a voice that is just made for verbal anger and it’s a pleasure to hear him use it.

Oh, and what movie is that “big wooden cross” line from? It seems familiar but I can’t place it.

Moving on, we have freaky shit from science.

First off, in case the natural disasters plaguing the world are simply not epic enough for you and have whetted your appetite for something far larger than Biblical, there’s something ginormous exploding in the middle of the galaxy.

And of course, the astronomers could not be happier. They have the whole Burst Alert Network set up so that when things like this happen, one radio telescope site can tell all the others about it, and they can all train their scopes on it before it fades away.

Imagine their joy, then, when this particular event not only did not immediately fade, but repeated itself, growing brighter and dimmer in the gamma ray band over and over again, and at such a huge intensity that it is easy to observe, but hard to explain.

So it’s two things astronomers love : something interesting to observe, and a mystery. Just what the hell is going on at the Core? Something big, that’s for freaking sure. They think, right now, that maybe it is a black hole, given the current theory that the Core is Black Hole Central.

Having a science fiction mindset, however, I can’t help but wonder just how many advanced, wise, and wonderful civilizations full of trillions of sentients are being wiped out while we dance around in glee at the really cool science we’re doing, and whether some day alien astronomers will be rejoicing at the chance to observe the death of life on Earth.

But I’m fucked up like that.

Uncomfortably closer to home, we have a 1300 meter diameter asteroid that is going to pass real close to Earth this November.

Again, the scientists are happy, because they have never had the chance to observe something so big from so close, so they are going to be observing the impurities off this object and we are going to learn, as a species, a whole lot more about this kind of Space Stuff.

And normally, I try not to get too worried about this sort of thing. Near-misses with asteroids are just a face of life for this big ball of dirt we call home, and the odds are severely against them hitting us. And well, if one was coming, there’s fuck all we can do about it anyhow.

But with all the earthquakes and other disasters lately, I can’t help thinking “Right. Meteor strike. That would top things off quite nicely. I would not be surprised. ”

But then again…. I’m…. well, you know.

6 thoughts on “Spirit of the Sunday Special

  1. Also, it’s always bothered me that there’s a giant black hole at the centre of the galaxy. What if it eats the galaxy?

    The gamma burst detection program is what kicks off the Gregory Benford novel Eater, about an evil, sentient black hole. [shiver]

    • A WHAT? Holy shit, that sounds like the scariest thing ever!

      I kind of want to read that now. 🙂

  2. The PopSci article says that asteroid 2005 YU55 has a diameter of 1300 feet, not 1300 meters. I wonder if it comes with its own Little Prince?

    • Woops, my bad. Kind of a different ball of wax by a factor of roughly three. 🙂

      Wow, wouldn’t that be awesome, though? If we turn all our observational might on this thing and there’s the Little Prince waving at us on live TV? 🙂 Or a Little Green Man giving us the finger?

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