Oh, the 80s hair!

I may be the only one of simianpower's friends brave (or dumb) enough to watch Dark Shadows with him.

There's bad acting, worse acting, and awful 80s hair and clothing. It's not just the women either- there's some poofy man-hair going on as well. And the writing isn't that great; many of the characters do things that make absolutely no logical sense.

But, this show is a goldmine for snarkage of the MST3K variety. It's so bad it's good!

(OK, not really....)

Bad science reporting

Headlines like this one really piss me off. They just give creationists and the like ammunition when editors write sensationalist headlines like "New Fossil Ape May Shatter Human Evolution Theory!"

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/070822-fossil-ape.html

What the new discovery does is revise part of the timeline of human evolution, but it's not like the new discovery invalidates human evolution theory as a whole or anything. What it actually does is provide another missing link that changes the timeline of where they thought pre-humans split off from other primates. But that doesn't make a very sensational headline.

Shame on Nat'l Geographic, which I usually enjoy.

So much to explore!

One of the things I really enjoy about reading both fiction and non-fiction is when something in a book makes me want to go research or read up more on something that's mentioned in the book.

For instance, my current book on CD makes reference to 'cashew liquer,' and I was thinking, "How can they make liquor out of nuts?" And then I remember something about cashews not being true nuts but rather the seed (?) of a fruit, so it's probably the fruit that gets made into liquor in the Caribbean.

Other items that have come up from my recent reading that I've wanted to explore or learn more about include:

Alex de Toqueville's "Democracy in America"
Insect (specifically ant) behavior
Zombie lore & Baron Samehdi
The novels of Dawn Powell
The "Cod Wars" between England and Iceland

I should jot these down somewhere when they occur to me, because I know there were more items for the list that I'm forgetting...