Category Archives: Popular Culture

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, War Commentary

The Gray Lady

19 Comments

Continues to diminish the achievement of Apollo 11.

https://twitter.com/SonnyBunch/status/1151874382098128896

[Update a couple minutes later]

Related: Apollo Shrugs.

[Late-afternoon update]

Treacher: Yeah, well, the Soviets sent women and minorities into space first.

[Friday-morning update]

More thoughts from Karol Markowicz (who was born in the Soviet Union):

Sure, Communists tortured and executed dissidents, starved their own people by the millions and operated gulags — but have you heard about their amazing space feminism and space intersectionality?

“Cosmonaut diversity was key for the Soviet message to the rest of the globe,” the writer, Sophie Pinkham, wrote. Her piece reads like something from an old issue of the Soviet newspaper Pravda boasting of the achievements of the Soviet space program.

It’s not like this is anything new from the paper.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

Education, Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Kate McKinnon’s Impressions Of Democrat Candidates

46 Comments

These are actually pretty good, but it feeds a pet peeve: “…if you think we’re going to beat Donald Trump by just having all these plans, you’ve got another thing coming.”

That’s the transcript, and to my ear, it sounds accurate (in that it was what McKinnon actually said, and isn’t a bad transcript). Maybe she was saying that Williamson would have said that, but I suspect that it’s what she thinks the expression is.

No, sorry, people, it’s “…another think coming.” “Another thing coming” makes no sense at all. Note the word that starts the sentence.

The people who say that do it because they think that’s the proper expression, regardless of how little sense it makes, because when they’ve heard it, they munge the ending “k” of “think” with the beginning “c” of “coming” in their ears and therefore thingthink that people are saying “thing.”

Business, Culinary, Economics, Education, General Science, Health, Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Those “Impossible” Burgers

1 Comment

It may be a surprise to some, but not to me, that they are neither healthier for the eater or for the environment.

I’d like to eat actual lab-grown meat, but it has to be cost effective, and nutritionally equivalent to the stuff on the hoof (or claw).

[Update a couple minutes later]

In reading, as is often the case, part of the health claim derives from the false notion that eating “red meat,” and particularly saturated fat, is unhealthy. There is zero scientific evidence for either. So they’re basically proposing to replace something humans have been eating since the dawn of humanity with some lab-produced glop about which we are completely ignorant of its nutritional effects.