Day 991: The Subjective Science Of Getting Friendly With Your Water

originally published September 17, 2014 Good morning, water. You look lovely today. The way you have meticulously extracted the energizing essence of those crumbly brown nuggets of Sumatra in my coffee maker really brings out the glimmer in your droplets. Look, I’m a married man, but if I wasn’t, I would totally be gettin’ up […]

Day 990: The Wonderful Wizard Of Political Allegory

originally published September 16, 2014 When digging one’s mental spoon into the lumpy broth of film studies, there are three things one must remember: A disturbing number of gender-based analyses will reveal that most cinematic conflict is based upon the male fear of castration. With a little imagination, you can build a political or social […]

Day 989: The Medicinal Repast Of History’s Maddest Mad-Man

originally published September 15, 2014 There’s a tiny voice inside my head, that interminable squawk of the ever-shrinking crimson-lensed optimist, who wants to believe that Dr. Theodor Morell was doing his best to assassinate Adolph Hitler from the inside out. Morell was the Fuhrer’s personal physician, and as the world began to warp around the […]

Day 988: That’s No Moon…

originally published September 14, 2014 With only a dozen days remaining of my self-imposed sentence in this asylum of perpetual prose, I am scootching toward the realization that there are some topics I will never get to. The hidden subtext within the dialogue of each Misfits of Science episode will remain unexplored, and I’m afraid […]

Day 987: Wolfgang Mozart’s Love Of Poop

originally published September 13, 2014 The deeper I claw through the muck-pit of history, the more perverse and bizarre clumps of trivia get crammed beneath my fingernails. And just when I think I’ve scraped the scabby floorboards of curiosity, I stumble across the intensive breadth of study that academics have placed on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s […]

Day 986: James Randi & The Magic Of Truth

originally published September 12, 2014 One of the television landmarks of my childhood involved magicians/dissectors-of-bullshit Penn & Teller, performing the classic splice-the-assistant trick. They then performed the trick once more on a transparent stage with transparent props in order to reveal the gadgetry and choreography that had effectively deceived us. My mother loathed the bit; […]

Day 985: The Greatest Show In The Wild Old West

originally published September 11, 2014 It was the kind of sun-whipped summer day that tended to cook the old west like a Thanksgiving turkey. The Central Pacific Railroad had just rolled into town, and a tall man with a face like sawed oak and fiery red hair leaned casually against a corral fence, watching the […]

Day 984: Love For Freedom – The Biddle Boys Break Out

originally published September 10, 2014 Forever conjoined in the tomato sneer of fate, love and sacrifice provide the familiar minor-key chime beneath so many tragic tales. Our past is riddled with them, bleeding their florid twists onto the otherwise sterile emotional landscape of a history which is otherwise defined by dates and wars and steel-grey […]

Day 983: Pistols At Dawn On Bloody Island

originally published September 9, 2014 Allow us a moment to reflect upon our broken culture and praise the glorious days of yore – the days of righteous morality, of a productive and contributory collective ethos, and of… duelling. Stupid friggin’ duelling. Of all the ridiculous traditions that we hauled on our societal backs from the […]

Day 982: Opening 40

originally published September 8, 2014 As some of you may have heard (I have griped about this rather frequently lately), the cold, icy grip of 40 is looming around my next corner, poised to wrestle my youth to the ground before September’s end, pummeling it with its grey-haired, middle-aged fists. But I’m okay with that. […]