Random Recall: Poison!

When I was thinking about the saying, 'the dose makes the poison,' I ended up remembering a show I didn't pay close attention to, but I was around for the Twilight Zone Twist at the end. I was pretty sure it was a more mundane episode of The Twilight Zone, but I couldn't find it on a list of episode summaries.

A married couple are taking care of an elderly mother (I think it might have been the wife's mother, but I'm not sure), but for money-related reasons like life insurance or expensive medical bills, they decide to kill her, and settle on poisoning her tea for the method. It takes far longer than they expected for her to die, so they increase the dose. After she does finally die, the family doctor makes a comment about her heart condition, and how she needed treatment by a certain drug, commenting on its reputation as a deadly poison, yet for someone with her condition, it's life-saving medicine at the right dose. Naturally, the drug in question was what they were giving her, unintentionally medicating her and extending her life instead of shortening it.

Random Recall: The Magician

Just had this pop into my head today: When I was a kid, there was a Saturday morning cartoon I got interested in from the previews called The Magician. That interest quickly waned after watching the first episode.

Premise: It's Twenty Minutes Into the Future. The hero is a stage magician who ends up using his trade to fight crime.

Sounds like an awesome idea to me. I was expecting the formula to be something along the lines of him performing some elaborate trick to catch the criminals, and at the end, he would explain how he MacGuyvered it together. I love magic tricks and explanations of how they're done, both from the deception angle as well as some of the technical ones. Even more now that I'm a full-on skeptic.

But it was not to be: He used a collection of standard gadgets and a lot of unexplained stuff. For example, in one scene he just vanished from one location and reappeared closer to the crime in progress, with no preparation. How? Did he simply decide to show off some optical camo by vanishing and running? Did he have some trick set up beforehand to zip over on some mechanical apparatus?

If you wanted him to do stuff like that, just go ahead and call him Dr. Strange and drop the whole stage magic angle. Say it's real magic. Then I would know up front what level of suspension of disbelief you want.

Random Recall: My First Big Anti-IDiot Rant

Back when I was in eighth grade, I ended up reading a Creationist rant written by a wildlife artist in the local newspaper. I didn't have access to handy resources like the Index to Creationist Claims or Pharyngula. I only had my knowledge of 7th grade biology, what I watched on the pre-decay Discovery Channel, and common sense.

He claimed that a ball-and-socket joint couldn't change because changing one without the other would prevent it from working. Cue facepalm. I knew, at least in humans, much of our bones aren't bone during our growth: The "ball" at least, is relatively soft cartilage. If it was oversized, it could probably be worn down to fit better. Additionally, I suspected there could be a gene that covers both, not knowing much about evo-devo. Of course, it wasn't lost on me that if he was right, it could just as easily be used to argue that human growth is impossible. But since human growth is happening all the time, it casts doubt on his hypothesis.

He also made the argument from irreducible complexity, using an airplane as a metaphor. I argued that life is probably more like a cake recipe: A cake recipe that's missing ingredients or cooking steps may not be palatable, but it's still edible. I don't remember what precisely it was about the argument, but I argued that if DNA was as intolerant of change as he seemed to imply, it would rule out reproduction, since just about every time someone or something is conceived, it's a novel combination of genes. After finding out how much "junk" we have, and how little uniqueness we have compared to the overall genome, I don't think it's quite the same. Either way, DNA is pretty tolerant of changes.

He also dipped into the Great Chain of Being straw man, asking why fish aren't evolving into humans. 1. (Humorously posed by my dad) How does he know they aren't? 2. (Serious) They aren't under selective pressure for humanity, so we shouldn't expect them to. He explicitly stated that "linearity is integral to evolution." It's not. It's only linear because we're applying hindsight to it. Evolution can take many paths. The randomness of mutations and chance occurrences can make things turn out differently. There's no program leading to brainy bipeds. That's for sci-fi.

Of course, because Creationism is a dead pseudoscience, this sort of nonsense is still repeated today.

Random Recall #10

Since I had Tron on the brain, thanks to an awesome trailer, I ended up remembering another instance of primitive computer graphics: Horror movie I believe. Guy goes into an arcade after it's closed to play one of the games. It has a joystick and an attached gun. The console explodes, releasing a couple wire frame enemies and the game's announcer's voice. He realizes he's holding the now detached laser gun and finds it works for real. Given that the enemies also work for real, he decides to ditch the place and run. As punishment for that action, the game's Big Bad, in the form of a wire frame face, decides to show up and eat him.

So, any ideas?

Random Recall #9: Monkeys!

Kid's cartoon back in the 80's. The cast consisted of some monkeys with evil counterparts with blue-purple fur. I vaguely remember two episodes: 1) One of the reluctant mooks of the villain got disguised as one of the good monkeys, and gets attached, eventually doing a Heel Face Turn and joining the cast as one of the regular brown-furred monkeys. 2) One-shot villain comes in and gains magical control over some of the cast, turning them into angular, blocky statues or something and ordered them to steal stuff. I suspect the latter was a dream I had about the series way back when.

Random Recall #8

Did a bit of videogame browsing while the realty people were showing off the house. And I suddenly remembered a crappy episode of SeaQuest DSV (I don't remember enough of the series to know if it was uniformly crappy or not): The twisted Aesop: Videogames are bad, m'kay:

The crew gets sent to a future where kids grew up playing "Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 Online With Real Mecha" and as a result society collapses because kids grow up only seeing each other as potential opponents, apparently because no one ever thought of co-op games or social networks.

Groan.

Random Recall #7: Fundie Edition

God is for Suckers featured a post on burning churches, and I was suddenly reminded of an old movie I saw in High School in some film appreciation class. I can't remember the title. It was black and white, and about an evangelist couple.

They end up getting inspired into doing big traveling revivals in circus tents. Revivals get bigger and bigger to a point that a fire marshal ends up giving them warnings that if a fire breaks out, people won't be able to escape. They manage to avoid shutting the events down, despite those problems. Think part of it entails holding the revivals outside city limits.

The lead woman ends up inventing faith healing. They face criticism from a newspaper writer who essentially says the people who go end up wailing and vowing to change, but don't follow through, so they're just selling false highs. The climax happens when they stop by a big city and get confronted by the mayor, the local fire marshal, and said newspaper critic. They "win" by interrogating the critic about whether or not he believes Jesus was divine, and once out of the room, congratulating themselves on how badly they owned him because he stumbled, stuttered, and didn't answer.

Anyway, the show goes on, fire breaks out, kills the male lead and presumably many attendees, just like the fire marshals had been warning. Female lead vows to carry on with more shows, and somehow, we're supposed to think the whole thing is inspiring. Or at least that's what I thought the filmmakers were going for.

Anyway, I think this movie played a big part in convincing me that charisma does not go with religion.

Random Recall #6

Really crappy 80's movie I saw on TV, this time. I can't remember the name, but I remember the premise.

So, got some CIA group that gets young geniuses to make spy gizmos. Teenage girl invents some process to disrupt electric currents in a manner that pretty much lets her remotely control any sort of electronic device. They get her to disguise the unit as a TV remote because there's nothing suspicious about an agent carrying around a television remote, rather than, say, a pocket calculator.

Anyway, turns out the spy group's rogue and wants to use the device for eeeee-ville, so the girl escapes with the prototype. She ends up teaming up with a pair of mimbo (male bimbo) truck driving brothers who have to get the girl to the real government agency while still making good time on a delivery. Anyway, she gets to safety with their help, and they notice they accidentally fouled up the "foul-up clock" that's counting down how much time they have to make their delivery they'll get fired for if they miss. So, she lets them have the remote and gives them the code for changing red lights green. Problem is that they didn't hear the last digit as they drive away, endangering people as they run reds trying to find the number by process of elimination. I don't remember if they make it.

Anyone ever see that?

Random Recall #5

Once, when I was a kid, my brother and I saw a Punisher action figure that was smiling. We got some laughs.

Random Recall #4: Simpsons Hated Solar?

This weekend, I saw a solar panel and had a flashback to early episodes of the Simpsons, when they said some disparaging things about solar power. It's been a while since I watched those episodes, so I can't be sure what sort of humor they were going for. Specific examples:

Thanksgiving episode (I think) where Homer thanks God for nuclear power, "The safest, most efficient source of energy on Earth... except for solar, which is just a pipe dream."

So, what were they going for? Homer's bitter towards solar because it'll displace nuclear? Solar's so unpromising even an idiot like Homer knows it? I lean towards the former, but it's not really funny.

Monorail episode: "Hey, why don't we just cut off the power?" "We can't. It's solar powered!" "Solar. When will people learn?"

So, making fun of energy propagandists who have to strain to come up with contrived scenarios to argue against solar? At least this one caused a snerk.

Random Recall #3

This time, it's a Saturday morning cartoon from the 80's I can't remember. Sci-fi genre. Only character I remember specifically was the human lead who I think was transplanted into the alien-heavy space station high school. He wore a red varsity jacket. Had a drug aesop episode involving some skull caps or something that would zap people happy as a fantastic substitute drug. Also remember some scene involving a "tractor beam" that literally shaped into a tractor.

I think it was on ABC or NBC.

Random Recall #2

Less movie geek, more fundie stuff: Earlier today, I remembered a news story several years back about a Jewish kid who was forbidden to feed his little keychain virtual pet thing on the Sabbath, so it'd die every week.

Random Recall

You know when you end up remembering some sliver of some show or videogame but can't remember what it came from? Well, here's some of that.

Sci-fi show. Leaning towards it being some low budget movie. Saw it sometime in the mid to late 80's. Villains controlled some people with mind control headbands with the gizmo in some silver triangular thing on the front. Hero used a broken one to sneak around with his free will. Scene I vaguely recall involves him freeing some friends and getting weapons.

Trying to remember the name of an old PC game played in MS-DOS or some similar primitive state. Pretty much a medieval conquest game. Resources to manage: Sheep, grain, cows. If you got enough cows, your villages could survive on dairy alone. Tip I received was to just eat all your sheep early, since you could never count on the merchant being around when you had wool to sell. This would allow you to build up the two more useful categories a few seasons faster.

One delayed bit of thanks goes to the Agony Booth for placing Puma Man.