grrrriiiiiiiinnnnnnnnd, gradually getting louder, so I walked a bit down the driveway to get a look at WTF was going on.
Along comes this minivan, driven by a "fine irish lad", tailgate open, dragging a log behind it. About two feet in diameter, six feet long, chained to the back, just dragging it on the street behind the thing. I watched him go by at about 20 MPH, watched him come to a stop at the corner, then turn onto the main friggin' drag (pun intended) with this log attached.
Pretty sure that's illegal. I mean, the log didn't even have a license plate.
* * *
Pants-wetting about the lost secondary from a thermonuclear weapon. Here's the thing: you need a pretty good nuclear warhead to set off the secondary; the secondary is mostly U-238 and lithium, and without the radiation pulse of a nuclear bomb going off right next to it in a pretty precise configuration, what you have there is a sizable paperweight. Put a coat of latex paint on it and it's safe as houses, because U-238 is an alpha emitter and latex paint is adequate shielding against alpha radiation.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's buried under at least a hundred feet of dirt. It's not going anywhere and it won't hurt anyone.
* * *
Disney cancels its #2 comedy show, because fuck money. Show with slight conservative bent canceled because conservatism. So much for the argument that Hollywood doesn't have a political bias because they just want to maximize their profits.
I'm reminded of Joan of Arcadia, a show that was doing very well considering it was shown on Friday night--pulled because CBS claimed it wasn't making good ratings with its target demographic, though they never tried to move it to any other time slot. CBS actually canceled the show because it didn't show God, Christians, or religion in a negative light, and it was bloody obvious.
* * *
Awakened at indecently early hour by cat marching over me repeatedly. Sat here to finish a couple YouTube videos I started last night, and then heard one of my neighbors begin cutting his grass at about 6:40 AM. I think I know why--seems like he has to work odd shifts, and can only cut grass when he has time--but I've always tried to respect the "nothing loud before 8 AM" unwritten rule, and it's kind of surprising when someone doesn't (or can't).
Well, hell, you gotta cut the grass when you can, I guess. It rained like a friggin' monsoon on Wednesday night, and I know I've got to get after my grass, too--but I've cut mine in the last week and I don't think he has. Today's supposed to be decent weather, so I'll get that done.
Anyway, I prefer the sound of a lawn mower to the phimotic, savage thumping of a too-loud car stereo.
* * *
Mrs. Fungus heard a song on the radio the other night, a rap song, and she played it for me. The vocalist read his words in a bland tone, and to make it worse the chorus was pretty stupid and not even grammatically sensical:
Is you is"Is you got gas money" is butchering English to an extent I've never heard even from the least literate people around. "Does you got gas money" is about as bad as that gets, which is bad enough.
Or is you ain't
Got GAASSSSSS MONEYYYY
The chorus was, of course, meant to be an homage or a paean to "Is you is/or is you ain't/my baby", which makes a little more sense, at least in the context of early 20th century jive talk, and allowing for "poetic" license to fit a jazz tune.
Anyway, as terrible and risible as it is, of course Mrs. Fungus and I immediately seized on it, and started using it ourselves. Heh.
* * *
Watching Black Mirror over the past few days. Ep 2 of season 3, finally there was an episode where most of it was fun, the main character was likable, and so on. The end of the story crapped all over that. It should have ended differently.
For the most part the series is reasonably well-executed science fiction. The stories are usually internally consistent and they don't pull any horseshit. There have been a few cases where things didn't work right (according to my thinking).
One example is the world where everyone has to ride a stationary bike to earn money, and where they have to watch advertisements if they can't pay to ignore them. The economics didn't make sense; as the episode went on it was explained that the people are pedaling to generate power--but they don't eat enough to pedal bicycles all day, and people pedaling stationary bikes don't generate a hell of a lot of power, either.
Look: if your job requires you to engage in physical activity all day long, you eat like a horse. There's no way in hell the main character, Bing, could survive if all he had for lunch was an apple and a sports drink. I mean, unless that sports drink contains about 4,000 calories--and they couldn't all be carb calories because that would kill him pretty quickly. He'd have to have a substantial diet of protein and fat in order to have enough reserve calories to pump those pedals all day. (And if he's a vegetarian, he'd have to almost-but-not-quite-literally eat like a horse.)
And you have to pump pedals pretty furiously to power anything. A quick Googe search shows that an average person can sustain about 75 watts' worth of power output on a continuous basis. A "trained cyclist" can do 400 watts for somewhat more than an hour at a time, but I'd imagine that would require some pretty specific training and not everyone could hit that number anyway.
The people riding their stationary bicycles could power the video screens in front of them and the lights over their heads, and that's about it.
The stories are generally entertaining, but they don't hold up much past the end of the episode, and for the most part they are bleak.
Season 3 ep 1--for the first time ever I saw a dystopia that I absolutely could not survive in, at all. In the story, everyone rates everyone else, and the higher your score, the more perks are available to you. You say "hi" to someone in the street, you can rate them on the interaction, and they can rate you. And everyone lives and dies by their rating; it looks like if your rating goes to 0, you're removed from the system and incarcerated.
And everyone in that world is so phony and fake I was groaning in pain after five minutes of it. What a hellish landscape that world is. It turns the entire world into high school, for crying out loud. I'd end up in that jail cell in about five minutes, probably less.
...actually, just about every story in the series is a dystopia of one stripe or another.
* * *
That whole "fidget spinner" thing is stupid. But I suppose it helps people keep their compusive masturbation under control.