I spend what I feel is an enormous amount of time pondering vaccination and the anti-vaccination movement. Maybe this time simple seems enormous because it’s a subject that has almost no direct bearing on me. I have no children, nor do I interact with any children with any regularity. I am not in medicine, nor do I desire to be (though the Red Cross is giving me track marks from all the blood I give them). I guess it’s my general interest in Why People Do Stupid that keeps my ear to the vaccination-ground (not to mention my nose to the vaccination-grindstone and my eye on the vaccination-ball. Do cliches become new again if you use enough of them? Can you lap around?).
Anyway, for those of you in the dark because you, like me, aren’t parents nor pediatricians, here’s the skinny: vaccines are given to adorable babies so they don’t die. Some people believe that, while the not-dead babies are still adorable post-vax (vax is vaccination-nerd slang for you, free of charge), they’re not exactly as autism-free as they were. That is, more clearly: vaccines apparently cause autism. This is patently untrue, of course. But no one is quite sure what does cause vaccines, and since we’re talking about children and scared parents, we’re talking emotions. And when the fight is Science+Facts v. Emotions+SickBabies, well, you can guess who wins.
Above is Joe Albietz, a pediatrician in Denver, CO, making the case for vaccines. His numbers are simple, few, and deliberately affecting. There are already too many easily-cured diseases out there killing people, we don’t need to bring back the old ones.
A few years ago, my younger brother and I were watching some program about the end of the world on Sci-Fi (which is now SyFy, apparently?), and space-as-cool-jazz man Neil de Grasse-Tyson said into the camera that an asteroid is going to pass so close to the Earth that it will be closer than most of the satellites we’ve got up there. It will be less than 1/12th the distance of the Earth to the Moon. It’s gonna be tight.
Then, this miserable death rock is going to slingshot ’round the sun and come back at us and there is a chance that, then, WHAM! It’ll smack right into us. Planetary bruising.
Well, thankfully, it’s looking less likely, says the Bad Astronomer:
How does this work? The orbit of an asteroid is calculated using measurements of its position in the sky over time. There is a tiny uncertainty in those positions for many reasons: atmospheric distortion blurring the asteroid image being one of if not the biggest. The way to minimize that is to get lots of images so that the errors average out, but even then the orbit calculated has uncertainties. And the longer into the future you project the orbit, the worse it gets. In the case of Apophis, astronomer Dave Tholen used hundreds of new images of Apophis to refine the orbit and get the better statistics for its impact risk.
Crisis averted, everyone! I’m a hero. No need to panic.
The bride-t0-be and I saw Zombieland on Thursday night in a just-advanced screening (thanks, Aint it Cool!). The movie, which is getting plenty of attention and giving plenty of advertisement, is excellent in a funny and violent and ludicrous way. It’s also receiving comparisons to Shaun of the Dead, since both movies are zombie comedies with a touch of romance. Shaun of the Dead is also one of the better zombie movies ever produced, and for its part, Zombieland is the best effort to date in the realm of Fast Zombies (as portrayed in 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake).
Despite these obvious comparison points–all zombie movies are always compared to Romero, and now, presumably, all funny zombie movies that are successful will be compared to Shaun of the Dead–the movie I found myself most thinking about as the credits scrolled is one I remember being called The Legend of Hidden Lake, but since I cannot find that title on IMDB, I can only assume I’m misremembering this film, The Legend of Evil Lake, which seems as though it has a roughly similar plot.
Legend of Evil Lake is a Korean movie about ancient warriors and magic and power-lust. What struck me most about it, however, was that each action scene in the movie managed to reveal elements of the character. The way each character fought revealed their emotions and motivations and who they were. Zombieland is similar in this regard. Its narrator, Columbus, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is nervous and awkward, and keeps alive by following an ever-expanding list of survival rules that he keeps in a small notebook with him at all times. He runs before he shoots. Woody Harrelson’s Tallahassee, meanwhile, is sadistic in his zombie killing. The zombies have taken everything away from him, and he, crazed, will take some back. The world is now a videogame for Tallahassee.
Don’t see the movie for that, though. See it for big trucks and guns and bloody clowns and the quick fire jokes. The fact that the action isn’t just empty noise is merely a bonus.
Thus, you can’t fuck someone in the ass with a dildo, according to the current edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, and Webster’s New World Dictionary. The whore in Portnoy’s Complaint “who fucks the curtain with her bare twat” can’t do that, according to American Heritage, Webster’s New World, Random House, or Encarta. Lesbians can’t fuck each other at all, according to Webster’s New World and Encarta (though if they use a strap-on, Encarta becomes OK with it). Fucking a woman’s breasts is only possible according to Merriam-Webster. Finger-fucking and fist-fucking are impossible according to Webster’s New World, Random House, and American Heritage; Merriam allows it, but only if it’s vaginal and not anal. Only the OED, whose entry for the word I edited, defines fuck to encompass sexual acts beyond “sexual intercourse.”
Sheidlower’s book, The F-Word, has a new edition out and is apparently fucking amazing.
