Day: October 23, 2013

Any great devourer of science fiction will tell you that science fiction isn’t about the future. It’s about the present in which it was created — and, really, either solving that present or diagnosing its ills.

So, if you live long enough, then it stands to reason that you must find new sources of science fiction or suffer reading and watching the same aging stuff that no longer applies to your present. And now that current technology is developing faster, time ravages predictions and fantasy within our own lifetimes, no matter how many times Lucas tried to cosmetically “rejuvenate” Star Wars to make it look as new as it did in the late-’70s, early ’80s.

And that’s why it saddens me that I will probably never use these upcoming new technologies, even though they are exactly what I wanted and asked for. (Sorry about all those letters, Gene Roddenberry’s lawyers.)  Continue reading Take it from Snee: Seemed like a great idea at the time

It was only a matter of time before priests starting using Pope Francis’ chill Franciscan “I’m a child of God, you’re a child of God” brand of Catholicism against him. And now it’s led to the Vatican’s first cricket team.

The pope, like the rest of the world, doesn’t even like cricket. But that didn’t deter Father Theodore Mascarenhas, an Indian official at the Vatican’s Council for Culture who once played as an off-spin bowler, and John McCarthy, Australia’s ambassador to the Vatican.

But Mascarenhas […] said: ‘I am sure that cricket will be another thing that he accepts as part of his openness.’

And if Vatican I enthusiasts weren’t thrilled with Frank’s easing up on the gays, then they’re really going to have a conniption fit now: they won’t be translating cricketing terms and playing positions into Latin. From McCarthy:

‘English is the language of cricket and will remain the language of cricket.’

Do you now see what happens when you get loosey-goosey with doctrine, Your Holiness? Now you’ll never get those spoiled rich kids off of your lawn. (Mostly because those games take forever.)

There is only one positive note to this story: the team will face off against the Church of England, so let’s hope that these guys cricket up all over their Protestant asses. (We really do not understand this sport.)

Fire hazards aplenty came alive on Saturday night as over 30 thousand pumpkins were set on fire. Aflame, we say!

The little town of Keene, nestled in New Hampshire, took a record away from Boston (take that ya Massholes), simultaneously lighting 30, 581 pumpkins. The given reason is to break the record previously held by Boston and to get the town into the Guiness Book of World Records, but SG suspects something else. A purpose a bit more sinister.

While we could always just link this to forest hippies, how do we know this wasn’t part of some occult plot to breathe life to a legion of pumpkin soldiers? How do we not know that the organizer of the event didn’t have his son accidentally run over by city folk? And how did an article about over 30 thousand pumpkins not once mention pumpkin pie? Dark tidings, indeed.

It’s fall, the season where people do things in hopes that you donate money to their worthy cause. Right now, football players are wearing pink (even though they’re not really donating money to breast cancer research), and next month, dudes will be growing mustaches for some dude form of cancer.

But they have nothing on Ohio. In Cleveland, land of enchantment and wonder, 21 people set themselves on fire to set a Guinness World Record and raise money for charity. They were also wearing those flame suits that stuntmen wear, so it’s kind of cheating.They were put out after 32 seconds, and raised money for the city foodbank and nonprofit that helps out the poor in South Africa.

More than 1,500 people took a break from watching houses in their neighborhoods burn to watch actual people on fire.