I thought I knew about all the mainline Mario games and their ports, but today I learned about Super Mario Bros. Special.


It's sort of a port of Mario 1 for the PC-8801 (an 8-bit computer made in Japan in the early '80s).



I guess it can stay in the dustbin next to Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement.

Steven Spielberg is making a new version of West Side Story!


I don't know how to feel about this. Was the original movie so good that it can't be improved on? No, of course not. Will Spielberg take the story in new directions that will take it away from the West Side Story identity? I'm afraid the answer will be yes.

You can only survive in a Bag of Holding for ten minutes before you suffocate!


So the D&D nerds have actually discussed what happens if you put living objects in a BOH, or pull one over your head, or whatever.



And they've decided that if you put a BOH inside another BOH you'll create a rift that will suck everything within ten feet into another dimension.

My parents were big fans of MASH, so of course I knew about the spinoff AfterMASH. The amazing thing that I learned today is that Rosalind Chao was one of the stars of it, and she married Klinger!

apparently laurie anderson wanted to make an opera based on the thomas pynchon novel gravity's rainbow?? :confused:

Mister Heartbreak

For some reason Picard has two versions of a Shakespeare omnibus in his ready room.



And he gave one of them to Data only to get it back.

amanda palmer covered a momus song.

So I'm a big fan of turn-of-the century alt rock, but today I learned that there's actually a distinct term for this: minivan rock. YouTube playlist.

i learned club penguin rewritten exists

The Cotard delusion is when someone believes they are dead, do not exist, or lost important internal organs:

Cotard delusion

So I'm watching the CinemaSins review of The Fugitive (one of the few R-rated movies that I've seen, mainly because I didn't know it was R-rated at the time), and this "Sykes" character looked familiar. It turns out I was right, it's the actor (Andreas Katsulas) who played Tomalak. The amazing thing is that he also played G'Kar on Babylon 5!



Granted, I haven't watched much B5, but G'Kar is quite a memorable character. I wonder why I never made the connection.

So I've seen those little gnomes with their hats covering their eyes before, but today I learned that the holiday variety have been deemed "Gonks."



I'm not a fan of them, at least in a holiday context. They're supposed to be simple fanciful creatures, not the sort of thing to be coded "Christmas-themed."



Furthermore, "gonks" already have a meaning: balls of fur with eyes and shoes.



There are more definitions of gonk than I thought. I don't think I've ever used the word before, but if I did I would use it as a synonym for "blockhead."

Brad Jones AKA The Cinema Snob turned 40 on the 20th!


I thought he was years older than me, not mere months.

apparently "kiss alien" brings up a funny response in space quest i

Why is the hook on the end of a tape measure always loose?


Today I found out. Consider my mind blown.

How Pokeballs work.


Like many others, I always assume that the things simply held Pokemon in a state of transporter suspension.



But no, the things are just for containment. All Pokemon have the ability to shrink themselves to fit inside.


I understand that the early manga and concept art implied shrunken Pokemon, and there have been times that Pokemon have summoned themselves. But this is still ridiculous.

They actually made a movie out of the webcomic Marry Me starring Jennifer Lopez!


From the Wikipedia summary they changed almost everything except the inciting incident of "guy holds up a 'Marry Me' sign at a concert and the singer accepts." So...was the name "Marry Me" that essential that they had to buy out a webcomic author?



So yeah, won't be watching the movie. I recommend the webcomic though.

finally learned what peter coffin is infamous for

There's been a vaccine for chicken pox for over twenty years!


As someone who suffered through it, this is a shock to me.

Duolingo has Klingon lessons.

I'm not sure if that bird is less or more scary speaking in Klingon.

For TV Tropes reasons I was wandering around Memory Alpha looking at guest stars who portrayed both human and alien characters. What did I discover? Phil Morris (Thopok ("Looking for Par'mach"), Third Remata'Klan ("Rocks and Shoals"), and John Kelley "One Small Step")) also played one of the Onlies in "Miri"!

Characters from the Land of Make Believe (Mister Rogers) cameoed on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego!


So if Mister Rogers coexist with Carmen Sandiego and Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo...that's one weird shared universe.

The Blackberry range of cellphones was named because the keys looked like the drupelets of a blackberry.



And the second amazing thing that I learned today is the word "drupelet", meaning a small fruit surrounding a seed, found in clusters.



Amazing thing #3 is that the technical difference between a blackberry and raspberry is that when you pick the berry off the stem the torus (the part of the stem that the drupelets surround) sticks with the plant leaving a hollow berry (raspberries) or breaks off with the berry (blackberries).


I had remembered that the term "drupe" was attached to peaches, but it was deep in my memory. Drupelets are smaller than drupes.



Amazing thing #4 is the technical definition of "berry", a fruit that doesn't have a stone or pit. We would consider this definition too broad, as it also includes stuff like grapes, tomatoes, and eggplants that we don't consider berries.

Frank Drake of The Drake Equation only died a few days ago!


The Drake Equation calculates the number of interstellar civilizations in the galaxy. The real version is


https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/me...e26ad869d9462d



When writing the pitch for Star Trek Gene didn't remember the real equation, so he created the completely nonsensical


https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/me...5055a47ff023f4


Whatever Gene's talents, mathematics wasn't one of them. Why raise things to the first power?

Weird Al picked Daniel Radcliffe to play him in the biopic because of Radcliffe's performance of "The Elements Song."



Tom Lehrer was an inspiration to later generations of humorous musicians, and he's still alive at 94.


I'm willing to give Radcliffe a chance, but he just doesn't seem wacky enough to play Yankovic.

Kai Winn was only in 14 episodes!


That was a shock to me. Furthermore, she wasn't in a single Season 4 episode.

I didn't know that Year Without A Santa Claus was originally a poem. Well, it was, and one time Boris Karloff narrated it.


It's also amazing how much of the poem Rankin and Bass managed to fit into the special. And to answer your first question, the Miser Brothers weren't in the poem.

As a Rankin-Bass fan I was shocked to learn that Bass only died this year! (Rankin died in 2014).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshower

A lot of cultures have a lot of inventive ways to refer to a sunny rainfall.

Glynis Johns is not only alive but she turned 100 yesterday!

You will of course remember her as Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins.

TOS costume designer William Ware Theiss invented the "Cochrane Delta" Starfleet emblem!

Amazing. If you had asked me before I would've guessed that Matt Jeffries invented it.

Ron Dante is still alive!

Who's Ron Dante? He's the songwriter and lead singer for The Archies!

YouTube playlist


When it comes to Archies music far too many people focus on "Sugar, Sugar" and ignore the rest. Well, there are a lot of songs in there that are worth remembering, at least to me.

That being said, here are some "Sugar, Sugar" covers:

The Workout Mix. Dubstep and techno combine to make a version of the song that certainly demands your attention if nothing else.

The Sixties Mix. Interesting idea, but the sound mixing is terrible. The drums and clapping are too loud.

The Riverdale Cast. It must be heard to be disbelieved.

Ron Dante performing it last summer.

So in 1990 there was this TV movie called "Return to Riverdale". And in it the actor playing Jughead tries doing a hip-hop version.

Jim Henson performed "Mahna Mahna" on the Ed Sullivan Show!


I've also never seen Bip Bippadotta (no seriously, that's his name) wink before.


It's nothing special, The Muppet Show version is better.



I also never realized that a completely different Bip Bippadotta puppet was used for the Sesame Street version.



I also learned that Sandra Bullock performed the song with the Snowths on Muppets Tonight.