Tales Of Whatever

Another thrilling installment in my meandering and inconstant series of blog entries about whatever the heck it is that has caught my interest today.

In other words, it’s 10 PM, I need to write something, and I am feeling lazy. So rather than delve into the needless morass of my anger and disappointment at the results of the Canadian election, I decided to leave that off for another day and just pal around a little bit.

There will be plenty of time for me to heap abuse upon the pointy head of Stephen Harper and all his ill-spawned and feculent kin some other time.

First up : Seth Meyers treats us to an extra long (and hence, extra painful) Weekend Update at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Initiating full comedy bitch mode.

Wow, that was painful. Watching that guy absolutely butcher the delivery of jokes he probably wrote himself, jokes that would probably be quite excellent material if he, for instance, was a competent comedian, instead get strangled to death in public view before the world by ill-timed pauses, clumsy pronunciation, focus drift, and a plethora of other comedy crimes. For someone of my own peculiar and specific sensitivities, it’s like being at a violin recital where a very earnest and likeable and clearly nervous performer massacres a very pretty piece of music.

I often wonder if Seth Meyers the head writer of Saturday Night Live ever watches Seth Meyers the Weekend Update anchor on playback and says “No, no you idiot….. you ruined it! That is totally not how I wrote it…. you’re murdering my babies, you hack!”

I kinda hope he does. (Sorry, Seth. You seem like an amazing guy and incredibly cool, but comedy is a precision art form and you are on the most famous comedy show in the world and you’re fucking it up. Art can be a bitch, and so can I. )

And the thing is, you don’t seem to be getting any better. I guess you, too, are part of the culture of mediocrity on SNL, where everyone knows, deep down, that no matter how badly they suck, the show will never be canceled, and so really, why try very hard? After all, if you haven’t been fired, you must be doing a good enough job, right? And hey, the fans don’t know anything, they will be angry at you for not being their favorite cast no matter what you do, so why listen to them?

And the thing is, we all keep clinging to SNL, because hey, it’s bound to get good again sooner or later, right? Sure, it might take a long time, but we will wait, because when it’s good, it’s really good.

And I think you know that too. And every time something decent comes along like Lazy Sunday, the Digital Short that made Andy Samberg famous and briefly kindled the hope that there would be at least one thing each episode that didn’t suck, you burn it out with repetition and overplay and make us wish we had never liked the damn thing in the first place.

It’s not just fannish fussiness and nostalgia talking. You really do suck. You suck and you do not even seem to care. And that sucks even more than the show.

Stopping myself now because I could really go on and on about this forever, there is one bit of science news that I just could not wait till Friday to share.

Scientists at CERN have created a quantity of antimatter that lasted for a staggering 1000 seconds, or 16 minutes and 40 seconds.

No longer solely in the realm of science fiction, antimatter is a substance previously only created for the tiny fraction of time (170 milliseconds) it takes to verify you actually made antimatter, not nearly long enough to study it or do anything cool.

With this new technique, antimatter has finally left the realm of “theoretical particle” and graduated into real, verifiable, testable phenomenon, although one we have to create artificially here in the realm of matter.

Obviously, the problem with creating antimatter and having it hang around long enough to make friends and impress the neighbours is that if a particle of matter hits a particle of antimatter, both are instantly converted into energy, and you have nothing to study any more.

And it is incredibly difficult to get rid of all of the matter in a controlled area. When you realize that literally the tiniest amount of matter possible will wreck the whole thing, you begin to truly grasp what an epic achievement this latest development from CERN truly is.

Next stop : WARP NACELLES!

3 thoughts on “Tales Of Whatever

  1. [Re.: Seth Myers] That was way better than I was expecting, after the build-up (or -down) you gave it. The only part that bothered me was the irrelevant digression into making fun of NBC. I suppose it tangentially relates to the event, in that NBC employs press correspondents, but still.

    The funniest thing was Donald Trump emitting hate beams at Seth Myers. Obviously no one has said these things directly to him before.

    [Re.: science] LOL @ “Next step: WARP NACELLES!” Getting rid of matter: in last month’s Opuntia Dale wrote about the flurry of excitement in the 1960s over polywater. Back then the technology just did not exist to sterilize the apparatus so that only the crystals and the water were present, so they could never be sure if polywater’s amazing properties were for real. Ultimately it failed to yield useful results, so it was abandoned, like cold fusion. Cool word, though.

  2. My reaction to Seth’s routine seems, shall we say, unique, so I am guessing I was more reacting to frustrations with him and SNL in general.

    Polywater sounds like a drink for parrots. 😛

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