Month: December 2023

The surface of… what?

Who even knew Jupiter *had* a surface?

I’m glad I snapped this cos I have a feeling Lawrence will soon get very tired of people pointing his error out to him and delete this. I did see him replying “typo” to a few of the commenters doing that, but, my brother in cosmology, a typo is when you go to write “Pluto” and it comes out as “Pulto” or something. When you go to write “Pluto” and it comes out as “Jupiter”, that’s… I don’t know what but I’m sure there’s a technical term for it, makes you look like a bit of a dickhead anyway…

Anyway, here’s the video he linked to:

Some prat responded to him by basically asking what purpose these photos serve and what do we learn from them. I mean… there’s a ton of stuff NASA learned from these pictures cos they’re professionals who know how to do that, but for the rest of us, isn’t it enough that the photos look amazing? That we can look at the surface of a (dwarf) planet whose very existence was only confirmed less than a century ago and that we can’t even see from here on Earth without considerable technological assistance? I find that head-spinning enough without considering the meteorology, geology, etc of the place; sometimes “beauty is truth” is indeed all ye need to know…

50 years of “Lavinia”!

So we were all excited by the 60th anniversary of some TV show or other recently, but today also marked the 50th anniversary of one of its most important casting changes:

Lis Sladen making her debut as Sarah Jane Smith (posing as her aunt to break into UNIT) in “The Time Warrior” on December 15, 1973. I always thought she got a pretty rum deal at the end of her time, just getting dropped off at the end of “Hand of Fear”, so I was pleased to see her getting a second chance on the revived show and with her own series. After all, if you were going to bring back a classic series companion, she was the obvious first choice.

Ask a silly question, fear a silly answer?

Were the Middle Ages really like a popular fantasy book and TV series whose creator was, per his own acknowledgement, inspired by the Middle Ages and events of that time, particularly the Wars of the Roses and the Capetian dynasty in France leading up to the Hundred Years War? Who can tell? I post this mostly because I’m puzzled by one thing… the ABC turns off comments on the majority of its posts on Facebook, cos if they don’t the posts will often get hammered by complete shitheads who still think the ABC is a progressive shill. And I’ve seen how nasty the ABC’s commenters can be before whoever moderates their FB page steps in and shuts things down… and they closed off comments on this post before anyone had in fact commented at all. I just don’t understand why. Were they worried about dickheads like me swarming the comments section saying “well yeah it kind of WAS like that back then…”?

“News”

So Alex Jones has not only been invited back to Twitter, he’s been invited to do a show on there… which I find a bit odd given that he’s already got Infowars on which to do that sort of thing, but I subjected myself to a couple of minutes of Jones’ video and apparently it’s just going to be like a headlines & highlights reel of each day’s Infowars tirade. Either way, so much for what Oolong said about people profiting off the deaths of children… but I do think this might attract the interest of the lawyers for those people Jones infamously owes a billion dollars to that he’s been making a point of failing to pay up…