The Smartest Person On The Internet

Watch this.

It has everything. Timely content. Low-tech production. Pieces of paper,
cut out with scissors. Logic. Sense. Perfection.

This guy has a whole YouTube channel. Go and absorb.

A New Level of Nerdity

A few months ago, I spur-of-the-momented and joined a Star Trek social network called trekspace.org. I’ve beamed in and out since then, usually just copying my Star Trek blog posts from Weather Station 1. All in all, though, I’ve paid it little attention.

I just checked back in after a few weeks and found I had an inbox full of messages. They were all from someone called Captain Solkar, and they are, without a doubt, the strangest communications I have ever received. They’re all over the map, but they seem to boil down to this guy wanting to see what everyone on the site actually looks like. The latest is this one:

• In view of circumstances and I am giving to a point but, as a pastor, it would not be right to be a hippocrit; therefore, I am asking my friends to not use avitars or pictures other than themselves. We are Trekkers who are not ashamed or embarrassed by who we are. Therefore, in one week from tonite, any friends who use disguises will be rejected from my page.
  You are all wonderful and many have been supportive. I for one if I am going to have a friend, i at least want to be able to say a kind description that does not sound like a cartoon – to which Trekkers are not farces but beautiful people – or a movie star whose real name might be Leonard Sly (Roy Rogers).
  Sincerely,

At this point, he signs his real name, which I am not going to put here, because I googled him, and he is some kind of “street pastor” who speaks Klingon, and you don’t want to know any more about that. He can’t spell, either, and you know that’s kind of a priority for me.

See, this is how geekery gets its bad rap. For every normal, adjusted person like myself, there are 10 of these guys. I likes me my Star Trek. I collect action figures, Hardy Boys books and comics. But there are a lot of people in my life who don’t know that – because I don’t walk around speaking Klingon, and I sure as hell don’t tell people on an anonymous website that they better reveal their real names and show me a photo, or else.

So I’m sending a message to the captain, letting him know that it’s okay if he deletes me from his mailing list. If using real names to talk about imaginary people in an imaginary universe on an imaginary TV show is a priority for him … well, there are a lot of folks like him out there.

Six Million Dollar Man: The Lost Series

Col. Steve Austin was one serious badass bionic spy. In his red jogging suit, with his slow-motion run and his lockjawed vocal delivery, Austin dominated the 1970s and proved that just because you’re half machine doesn’t mean you aren’t all man.

A decade after The Six Million Dollar Man went off the air, an attempt was made to revive the show, a “next generation” concept that, when you look back at it, was a lot like this new Knight Rider that’s on now.

The idea was launched as a 1987 TV movie called The Return Of The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. This is a strange film that I didn’t even know existed until a little while ago, and just saw this week. See, I was a large-scale Steve Austin kid (only Star Trek and Planet of the Apes ranked higher for me), but by the time Return came out I would have been more interested in guitars and girls than artificial parts and slow-motion running. Luckily, I am now in my 40s, I actually have artificial parts and the slow-motion thing I do could, technically, be called “staggering,” not running.

This is a weird, weird film. First of all, you get to see Col. Steve Austin retired and operating a fishing boat before Oscar Goldman ropes him back into spy work. You also meet Michael Austin, Steve’s long-lost son, who is now an Air Force cadet about to make an important jet flight (gee, wonder what happens). And you see Steve with a mullet and wearing a pink shirt under a blue Members Only jacket, which is really jarring and dates this movie more than the tan leisure suits ever did.

Lindsay Wagner, meanwhile, has a strange Markie Post hairdo and looks about 20 years older than she really was at the time. She really doesn’t do anything in this movie except walk around and have men ogle her. No, wait, she throws Steve through a window for no reason.

The action sequences are pretty good. At one point, Steve jumps over an apartment building and takes out a speeding getaway car with his feet, then rolls it around the street, all in slow motion. There are a lot of scenes of bionic people throwing stuntmen in bad wigs into things that look like they don’t hurt.

The bulk of the plot involves evil Martin Landau’s right-wing terror group, The Fortress, trying to get its hands on any and every bionic person to learn more about the technology. Michael Austin is in a jet crash and loses, and I am not making this up, his right arm, right eye and both legs … you can guess what happens next. But then the DeBarge music comes in and the movie sinks into shitness. At one point, Steve Austin is wearing acid-washed jeans. Not good.

The idea here was to launch Michael Austin as the new bionic man. Michael was played by a guy named Tom Schanley, who does a pretty decent job. He even looks like Lee Majors. Ironically, Lee Majors II plays the new Oscar Goldman character, Jim Castillian with two Ls, and he looks like his father if his father had been a nerd. The Michael Austin character was a serious upgrade: he could run at 300 miles per hour, shot a laser from his fake eye and was, all in all, tougher and more 80s than his father. You could tell because he flipped up the collar of his jean jacket.

The movie had all the fixins of a late-80s action series, but in the end, it just didn’t work. This would not stop the team; other attempts at relaunching came later, leading to something called Bionic Showdown , a pilot for a new series with Sandra Bullock as the new bionic woman. Sandra Bullock!

An attempt was made to relaunch The Bionic Woman last year, and we know how that turned out. And I have mentioned the ongoing plans to make a new Six Million Dollar Man movie here before. Watching this piece of cyber-turd makes me think it might be better to just leave this 70s icon alone and move on.

P.S. Click here to explore the mind of a guy I’d love to meet.

Party Time With Drunk Lindsay Lohan

Three guys are suing Lindsay Lohan because, they claim, she ‘kidnapped’ them and drove around in an SUV in a scary way. This comes the same day that fellow superstar/hottie/shitty driver Britney Spears beat a criminal charge because the jury deadlocked, the judge declared a mistrial and the prosecution said “forget it, let her go.” It pays to be famous, even when you’re stupid.

Here’s the Associated Press story on the Lohan case:

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — A wild ride that led to Lindsay Lohan’s arrest has sparked another lawsuit.
Court records show that three men who claim they were in a sport utility vehicle that Lohan commandeered in July 2007 sued the “Mean Girls” star last week. Their allegations include battery, false imprisonment and that the actress was negligent when she allegedly took over one of the men’s SUVs to chase her recently fired assistant.
That chase ended when the assistant’s mother called police because she was being followed and led Lohan toward a police station.
Officers suspected Lohan was drunk and arrested her. Lohan’s lawyer calls the lawsuit, first reported by TMZ, “absurd.” The men are seeking more than $25,000.

Okay, I’m firing up the Weather Station 1 time-machine/mind-reader to go back and look into the thoughts of these three champs. Yes, here we are. Do you want to see the five stages of their stupidity? Here we go, with a peek into the one-track mind of Los Angeles Party Time Dude No. 1:

1. “Dudes, that totally looks like Lindsay Lohan staggering around over there. Let’s check it out.”
2. “Dudes, it totally IS Lindsay Lohan, and she wants us to go with her for a ride in that bitchin’ SUV!”
3. “Dudes, one of us might totally get lucky with a movie star, yo. Maybe two of us. Maybe all of us! She may not be wearing panties, too, yo.”
4. “Dudes, this chick is a bad driver. I think I read that in the tabloids once, too. Man, I wish I wasn’t so stupid so’s I could remember things like … uh, what was I talking about?”
5. “Dudes, she’s not wearing panties and we’re going to crash! Hey, look, it’s the cops. Dudes, let’s go get us a lawyer!”

I doubt this lawsuit will go very far, but I plan to keep watching, because it’s really stupid, and I like stupid.