Things you didn't know until very recently...

There is no Interstate 50 or Interstate 60 because they would've been too close to U.S. Highway 50 and U.S. Highway 60

The Book of Life is gonna get a sequel sometime in 2018!

YES.

The pro athlete anthem protests have spread to baseball - Oakland A's catcher Bruce Maxwell knelt during the anthem in yesterday's game against the Texas Rangers.

The German word for "birth control" is "Antibabypille".

Great. Now we cant even watch sports without getting some political message.

If they're already playing the anthem at the beginning of games, you've always had a political message in your sports.

What's going on in sportsland?

Since last year, some athletes in various sports (starting in American football) have sat or kneeled during the national anthem (instead of standing up like everyone else) to protest against the norms and practices in the police force that have led to so many incidents where white police officers have shot unarmed black people for (usually) no reason, other than that they (apparently) wanted to kill someone that day and knew they could get away with it.

Not all of the incidents are that clear-cut, obviously, but some are, and it does appear to be systemic.

Protesting during the national anthem is very visible, and some have taken it as an offense against the current or former workers of the armed forces and/or police. Of course, connecting a protest against a specific phenomenon or attitude to an unrelated, highly regarded national institution is a very common tactic for authorities and authoritarians to try to discredit any protest the moment it touches on any symbol that the powers that be consider invulnerable to criticism or protest.

Our own stand-up player Colin Kaepernick has started the protest, which inspired his colleagues and others to follow suit. It even seeped into baseball! An 8-year-old even kneeled during a little league football game a week or so ago. Then this past Saturday, our new president Mr. Frumpy Doofy Ugly Cheeto Dorito decided to call the players out for not honoring the American flag during a speech at another of his rallies, which only added fuel to the fire. Players like Le Bron James now fear that he'll aim to divide sports fans, much like how he already did with 2016 voters.

L has a Self-Demonstrating Article.

Today is National One-Hit Wonder Day.

I listened to a Pete Seeger album the other day and learned that version of "Big Rock Candy Mountain" I'm most familiar with is a heavily bowdlerized one: The original is from the point of view of a hobo and includes references to "streams of alcohol" and "cigarette trees" instead of "streams of lemonade" and "peppermint trees". And even that is tamed down a little bit from the way it was originally written (click on the "history" subheading on that other wiki article).

Because he's not an instrumentalist, when Jello Biafra wrote a song for the Dead Kennedys, he would sing whatever riff he had in mind into a tape recorder and the band would work out an arrangement from that. When I learned this, I started developing this whole Fridge Brilliance theory about Nomeansno doing an a capella cover of "Forward To Death" actually being a reference to this... Then realized that, if that was their intention, they picked one of the few DK originals Jello had no involvement in writing ^note It was written by 6025, the guitarist who left before the first album was recorded.

That old lady who's a regular customer at my store and constantly calls me "sunshine" just calls everyone that. I never realized this because usually I see her in the houseware department and I'm usually the only person on the floor there. She had a question for my manager, and to differentiate him from me she was calling him "Manager Sunshine".

edited 25th Sep '17 9:38:49 PM by MikeK

Hitler never knew how to drive.

The guy who voices Louie in the new Ducktales series is the same actor who is Panda in We Bare Bears.

The Avatar sequels have finally started production.

And everyone couldn't care less

I'm sure they'll make a lot of money, but I do wish Cameron was doing something else. He's my favourite director, and I think he's especially good when he's branching out from action to take in aspects of other genres (horror in Terminator, espionage and comedy in True Lies, romance in Titanic, etc). Avatar was a pretty basic sci-fi action film, and not even his best in that genre (Terminator 2 and Aliens are much better). I think he's wasting his talent making sequels to a mediocre film.

It's weird that everyone thought it was amazeballs 7 years ago but now nobody talks about it

My recollection is that everyone I knew thought it was mediocre. (Well, I tell a lie - my cousin thought it was the best film he'd ever seen, but he tends to think that about at least a couple of films every year.) I don't think the critics were particularly impressed by it, either - at least from what I remember reading, the usual line was that it was a plot we've seen a billion times before, and besides, the whole movie was about promoting the return of 3D. Of course, I could be wrong about this and talking about a consensus that came years later, but I doubt that I would've read reviews of the film years after it came out. (I've only seen it once after I saw it in the theater.)

It has multiple perfect scores on Metacritic.

I see that it's also got over 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. That's very good. Of course, the movie did break records in the box office, so obviously the general public liked it.

CN is making a Teen Titans Go movie for 2018. Not a TELEVISION movie. A BIG SCREEN movie!!!

Well, I know what I'm going to be doing then.

Burning down every theater that dares to show that garbage.

Avatar is pretty unique in that it made absolute bank in the box office, everyone saw it, people generally liked it, it was praised for its visuals, and it left next to zero impact on the pop culture collective consciousness.